Just Sitting and Waiting!

I haven't posted any news about my own foster daughter recently, so I thought I would go ahead and catch up on that today.

Our foster daughter, A., is beginning to get more and more nervous and agitated as the date for her mom's final fitness hearing draws closer. This happens everytime one of these hearing get close, but this one is particularly bad because we all expect birth mom's rights to be terminated this time. She just hasn't been able to change the particular aspects about herself and her life that resulted in her kids being taken away in the first place, so everyone is fairly certain about the outcome of the hearing. A. came into our bedroom around 10:00 p.m. the other night, tears running down her face and you could tell she looked like she felt her life was a nightmare. Well, it really has been! Any child who has been taken from their birth parent(s) must feel varying degrees of anquish over the separation. A.'s birth mom emotionally loves all of her children, but she has not been able to care for them and keep them safe. At least A. has started to show signs that she understands why her mom behaves the way that she does. Birth mom is simply a product of her own abusive background which she has never been able to overcome. It is not her fault that she was messed up as a child. However, even people who are "messed up" as children have the responsibility as adults to do whatever they can to "get it together". Especially if they go ahead and make the decision to have a baby, and then another, and then another, and then another. That is where my sypmathy begins to fail me a bit. At some point, it is time for this adult to grow up, get whatever help she may need, and be a decent parent to her kids, or else let them go so that the kids at least have a chance at a normal life with someone else who WILL take care of them properly and love them as their own child.

I get so frustrated when A.'s birth mom continues to act as though she is doing all that the foster care agency has counseled her to do, when in reality she is doing all the wrong things that she has been told NOT to do. This has been hardest on her oldest child, who happens to be our foster daughter. I fight feelings of extreme dislike for A.'s birth mom, trying to keep an amount of compassion within myself, because I know she had a horrible childhood herself. But like I said, she had the choice as an adult to get the help she needed in order to be a functional, loving, nurturing parent to her kids, and she has really blown it.

So, at the moment, we are sitting and waiting for the date of the hearing. It isn't for several more weeks yet. In the meantime, birth mom is facing criminal charges on something that A. does not even know anything about yet. The trial for that case is very soon and I can't even imagine what A. will feel when she learns of this situation. My heart hurts for her; I can't imagine what her heart feels like.

It won't be long before me and my husband will be faced with the final decision of whether or not we want to adopt A. We do want to, but we are also realistic with our knowledge that A. is most likely going to be an extremely challenging teenager. She did not grow up with any boundaries or rules and that has been very hard on her at our house. We argue every week over the fact that all of her friends have cell phones and that she feels she should be allowed to have one. Cell phone? These are 10, 11 and 12 year old kids!!!! What in the world do kids need with cell phones? Giving these kids unlimited access to each other is not a good choice for anybody. And in the case of a foster child, who do you think she will be calling from that cell phone? Yep! Her mom!! Forget it. I don't even want to think about her having one when she is older, but I know we will have to face that when it comes.

So, that is where we are at today. I can't wait until everything has been finalized and we can get on with our lives in a more normal way. Or, will it ever be normal again? I suspicion that we will probably never know life in quite the same way we did before we brought A. into our home. Well, I'm not sure that is all bad - but it certainly is not all good either!