Ugh. We are in a sort of living hell of NOW NOW NOW. We have to get our (too small!) house ready for new babyX3 ASAP. I have to W.O.R.K., and have a couple of huge things in the hopper that I am failing to feel in control and on top of. Because once X3 is in the home, we will not be leaving for A. LONG. TIME. we have been trying to get out of town these last couple already planned times. And, FTW, our foster care license has to be renewed before June (why? we were licensed in July! BUT FOR SOME REASON IT IS BEFORE JUNE, LIKE RIGHT NOW), which means we need 13 hours of classes RIGHT F-ING NOW when we have NO TIME and all the classes are CRAP WE DO NOT CARE ABOUT! It’s a mix-and-match of anything that you can get on the schedule that gets us to where we are going. 
And, for the cherry on top, we have to take two classes EVERY SINGLE YEAR that are just…honestly trash.
I am smart and self-motivated and I hated these least-common-denominator classes the first time through, and I would read and research and learn SO MUCH including finding my OWN classes to attend if I could that have specific relationship to the children I am actually fostering…but no. They must be the state-classes. And they are. so. painful. But the real issue is…the FASD classes are a literal information dump of nonsense and useless that serve literally no purpose except to “scare straight” a bunch of people who are NOT ACTUALLY HAVING BABIES!
So…FASD – Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Why yes, it’s a spectrum now! Everything is a spectrum now! “On the spectrum”? WHICH ONE? In foster care you can be “on the spectrum” or “a population” and it could mean literally anything!
Next, FASD is permanent, physical, brain and other body damage. But! There is no medical diagnosis! You cannot ever take a test and know if you have it or not. Instead, it’s a grouping of symptoms, plus “you were exposed to alcohol”. Except, the grouping of symptoms looks exactly like all the symptoms of all the diagnoses that children in foster are always going to have… PTSD, ODD, general developmental delays, rage/temper, and attachment disorders. So, if you go to doctors that treat THOSE disorders, they will diagnose your little with those things! But if you go to a FASD specialist they will tell you all those other specialists misdiagnose FASD, and THEY will diagnose FASD! And, if you do this wrong, you will spend forever getting the wrong treatment! AND, the best outcome for FASD requires diagnoses by the age of…6! Yes, 6! BUT! Also, even if you bring your little in, they cannot be sure (because, remember, no tests) for years – so you should get your littles assessed every two years JUST IN CASE every fucking thing you are doing to treat the 10,00000000 symptoms and behaviors you are already dealing with has been wrong all along…
Also, we have kidlets we are dealing with. They have NO signs of any FASD. We could focus our education in areas that are RELEVANT to what we are doing here – but no. We must do this FASD thing.
Also, FYI, there is literally nothing that can be done for FASD so….in some ways…why do we even care? Let’s treat the symptoms and behaviors we are dealing with and NO spend so much energy giving apparently useless diagnoses… The class is also always full of a great grouping of entirely NOT HELPFUL personal anecdotes. Such as “one of my FASD clients has a 6 figure job as a _____”. Without any discussion of HOW this individual’s FASD has effected her life – ’cause it sounds like that person is pretty much doing ok… Or, the family next to us who has decided they are done with the very difficult FAS-diagnosed foster child they have had for THE LAST 11 YEARS. That’s right, they are giving her back (to who?!) after 11 years. I am so certain they are not doing it lightly, but it sure is a painful horror story to those of us about to boldly adopt children with plenty of “behaviors” that fall on the “spectrum” of possible signs of FASD. My favorite was about a family that had an FASD diagnosis removed from their child and replaced with PTSD and others, and the teacher talked about it like she was appalled…guess what? I would totes do that exact thing! Hey, let’s get a diagnosis that gets us good services rather than one that gets everyone a judging stigmatizing look?! And they treat the same symptoms? Fuck yeah! Ok, I probably will not, but also I really get it – and this teacher just gave me no reason at all to think this was a bad idea.
Which leads to the last horrible side-effect of this (required annually!) training…after every class like this I am CERTAIN that the children in my care have every single thing that everyone has talked about, and the complete “nothing to be done, no hope, no solutions” that goes with FASD leads to emotional meltdown, and my poor partner, who has already devoted hours of his life to this trash class gets to spend the next few hours calming me back down and backing me off (1) quitting this shit forever; and (2) signing us up for every analyst in town; and (3) writing lengthy and detailed correspondence to every individual involved in foster care system about the absolutely complete awfulness of the training requirements and specifically the FASD requirement (now required by statute!). FYI, they gave us swag. Fidget-spinners, and baby onesies that say 049 (zero drinks for nine months). A message that is probably TOO LATE if you are already in the position of being able to use a onesie!