I Can Haz Baby

We are stillllllll going.  Because, that’s what you do, right? When you sign up to parent?  Of course usually you don’t jump in the deep end with bricks on your feet during your first swim lesson.  Have I mentioned it’s just A LOT right now?

My job is not a “job”.  I never get to leave it behind.  I work way too much, with WAAAAYYY too much emotional investment in my job.  I am answerable to the harshest mistresss (me) and my colleagues, and my clients, and the court’s timelines, and there is no time off, unless you are literally hospitalized – and then only sometimes.  I’ve worked 36 straight hours, while on vacation in Europe, the Caribbean, and Canada, and from under a table at a science fiction convention.  I’m writing this blog from a hotel on an overnight work trip.  My colleagues have taken work calls in an ambulance after a heart attack and have written submissions while hospitalized.  And I am NOT a “type A” personality.  I’m just stubborn with an overwhelming fear of failure.  So all that spare capacity – that energy that you use to deal with dumb shit, or pain, or minor frustrations with your spouse, or not getting enough sleep – has already been all used up on my job.

And now, we are bringing a new little girl that is a huge ball of chaos, intensity, and frustration, into our home and it just feels impossible; even just trying to give her constant positive love is like a full-contact emotional sport.  It is exhausting and there is a moment when it becomes nearly impossible to say “I love you so much” when what I WANT to say is “Why the hell can’t you just do the thing I say to do, and NOT do the thing I say NOT to do? WHY?! YOU UNDERSTAND WORDS!”

There is just nothing left of me and I am so terrified that I cannot be what this girl needs – and that, in my darkest most honest moments, I really don’t WANT TO.  Do we ever REALLY want to take the absolute fucking hardest path? Wouldn’t it be nice if JUST ONCE it was something easy and nice?  I don’t WANT to never have personal time again, to never go out with adults again, I don’t WANT to spend every night not sleeping with my partner, I don’t WANT to work extra hours at night when I’m already short on sleep (because our kids just refuse to sleep) because I have to go to more foster care license training, family therapy, intensive day-treatment, and IEP meetings.  I don’t WANT to never be able to travel again and to lose the last vestiges of the me that had fun and excitement and adventure.

But of course I DO want to do it – because I don’t HAVE to do this, I’ve chosen it.  And, I AM doing it – we are already all-in – we told this little girl she is coming to live with us and that she will never again have to move in with a new family or wonder what her future holds again.  You don’t say that shit unless you already committed.

There are so many things that are not terrible.  She does SO MUCH BETTER with us than she does at her current foster home – which of course makes us feel even more stressed out and guilty because it’s still about three weeks until she is permanently with us (OMG it’s less than three weeks until this is permanent and happening!).  She is clearly not a sociopath, she loves our animals and desperately WANTS to be loved and close – she just has no idea how to have any sort of healthy relationship.  She seems to respond much better to men than women, which is going to be a constant source of stress for ME, but also, my male partner is the one who is going to be home with her full time so it’s maybe a perfect situation for her and certainly better than the reverse.  We have a great therapist that gives me hope every time I meet with her.  I cannot overstate how amazing my family and friends are, including listening to me think and feel horrible things and not being judgmental and instead being as supportive as humanly possible.  It’s just … A LOT.

We are in the process of wooing BabyX3, who is no fool and knows that shit is going down, even though none of us have told her.  The process is exhausting for us, but I cannot even imagine what is going on in her brain.

On our end, we have managed to get her room together, which means getting all of our stuff OUT of the room (formerly partner’s office, now 4 yr old bedroom) and minimilist stuff into room – enough to be welcoming and to give comfort and fun but leave very little to be destroyed in fits of rage.  It’s a complicated balancing act!

On X3’s end, no one has really told her anything, but she knows that she is going to have to leave the house she is in, and she knows we are probably her next stop.  We have already had at least one victory; today when given an option of library and dinner at Perkins vs. shopping for flower seeds and then going to McDonald’s she chose…LIBRARY! YASS! This was our third library trip, our first (very minor) meltdown, and the latest in the evolution of her attempt to make sense of her life and who we are and what we will be to her.  FYI we ARE going to tell her shortly, we just wanted to get started on WHO we are before we said “oh, and here is the rest of your life”.  But, she knows.  The list of questions/comments we have fielded in our last two outings have included:

• -” I want a present.  For my birthday.”  (me: when is your birthday?) “I don’t know.  I don’t have any birthday.”
• – “I want my VISIT MOM” (bio-mom)
• – “Is my mom in jail?”
• – “Is my mom going to jail?”
• – “Does he [partner] beat you?”
• – “He [partner] isn’t going to shoot?”
• – “He [partner] doesn’t have a gun?”
• – “So he [partner] is nice?”

My poor partner, by the end of the last two outings he has been breathing carefully and holding it together. I am beyond stressed out by the multiple daily updates from current foster mom regarding “behaviors”…but I am weirdly calmed by the questions – it means we can address things head-on rather than dealing with secret volcanic eruptions of hidden trauma.

X3 will hit our house head-on next week, for our first real time without the exciting distraction of being “out” for eating and treats and adventures. I hope the pets are up for their task of being charming!

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!

Well, there is not only movement, there is SO MUCH FORWARD MOVEMENT it’s honestly overwhelming.

We have now received the judge’s decision, and … baby is 98% likely to be ours! There is never 100% until those papers are actually signed…but barring completely unforeseen events we will be adopting baby at some point (again – timing is a question of many, many, many, factors).

AND… also her big sister! Which is a mixed bag of terror and joy and all the emotions. INSTANT SO MUCH FAMILY!

TAKE THAT FOUR YEARS OF MISCARRIAGES! WE ARE CAUGHT THE F UP!

We spent time with BabyX3 officially for the first time yesterday and had an outing to McDonald’s.  Judge all you want, people who are not in the position of trying to win the trust of a 4 yr old who has been moved through at least 4 moves that you know of.  She may not remember my name after meeting me 10 times plus being told 7 times yesterday, but she sure as hell knows the name of McDonald’s AND what she likes to order there, AND that they have a play-place.

Everything about the outing was sad, and hopeful, and scary, and complicated, and good, and hard. I am convinced that any time this tiny peanut gets in a car she has NO IDEA if she will ever go “home” again.  No one can learn, or grow, or develop, or make any healthy attachments under those circumstances.  We made a reasonable and not bad at all amount of initial progress on our outing.  On the way, she did not speak at all, except to answer my question about what she likes to eat for breakfast as “cookies”.  She was shy and quiet, and played in the play place.  After eating I asked her if she wanted to go play or read a book I had brought. She was ALL IN on book.  I had been warned she does not know colors from shapes from numbers, so I brought a baby color book, and we spent the whole time saying “one red car”, “two pink flowers”.  And we will continue doing this for a good, long, while!  She then went and played some more, and then came back and wanted to read again! So we did.

When we left, instead of walking limply next to me she was skipping and bouncing.  When baby started crying, she held toys up to make baby happy. She giggled and laughed about baby the whole ride home.  When we got to her house she asked if her baby sister was going to live there.  We explained her baby sister lives with us, and invited her to come to our house to play with her in the future – she indicated interest in this activity.

We know that after we left she indicated happiness with our outing.  She also lorded it over the other kids in her home in a pretty negative manner…oh, but wait… She is in a home with NINE kids.  NINE. NINE. Before I went to the home I had a LOT of judgment in me…after being in the home and briefly interacting with the older teenage kids, I was impressed by its warmth and happiness.  But my future kidlet is a giant black hole of need for attention, love, and stability, and there is just no way that environment can give it to her. We know there will be a honeymoon stage (like all neglected kids, she knows to to act in a way that is most likely to obtain affection and care) and we know that will be followed by a time of nearly indescribeable anger and acting out (like most neglected kids she has a whole bag of diagnoses that appear to be the absolute result of [lack of] nurture with no indication of an innate inability to thrive).  We know the form of her acting out, the triggers for her rage, the psychological bases and the many, many, questions about the future.  We have such open eyes it’s giving me heart palpitations…

There are moments where I think about how easy it would be to say “no, we will just keep this perfect baby, thanks”.  Literally NO ONE has pushed us to take BabyX3 – in fact, early on they tried to talk us out of it – now that there is no one else, they really are hopeful we will take her, but they cannot exactly force us.  But really? Leave behind this child who is blameless in her circumstances because there is a much easier path for us?  And say what to BabyX2 when she grows up? “uh, yeah, you have an older sister, but…it just seemed pretty hard…”  And be a person with means, opportunity, and ability who just left this eminently lovable child adrift?

Yeah, I don’t think so.

We are now in panic mode – not specifically about new kidlet (not really a baby, although they are all babies to us), but the MECHANICS of it all.  We have obtained one quote for basement renovation and will have a second this week.  We need to remove everything from her room AND the basement and store it, get a room together for her, have our basement renovated (seriously, our house as-is is TOO SMALL for a working from home artist/webdesigner dad and two kidlets with different sleep issues therefore in need of two separate sleeping spaces- and buying a new house was contemplated but discarded because we have actually PAID OFF our house and we cannot take on another debt while keeping a parent at home to fill the black hole and create constancy and safety, security, surety.)  We have to find time for IEP meetings, my usual ridiculous work obligations, getting the house and room ready, spending time with new kidlet on longer and longer visits for comfort, OH and my partner is taking a two-month out-of-home work contract so cobbling together two months of child care for BabyX2 AND realizing SOMEONE ELSE is going to be caring for my babe most hours of the day EVERY DAY for two months and then (hopefully) immediately adding new kidlet to our household…AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

My baby is six whole months old!

BabyX2 loves puppy, kitty, me, my partner, cousin-Connor, bouncing, babbling, flying, being gently tossed two inches into a pillow in the love-sac, being sung to, and sitting up by herself.  She does not roll over, because she don’t give a fuck what you think her goals should be – she wants to sit UP not roll onto her stupid stomach where she cannot even do anything.  When faced with something she REALLY WANTS while on her tummy she can pop her booty in the air and get on all fours and …then scoot backwards – but this mostly leads to frustration for obvious reasons.

She is more in to the experience of being read to now, and vibrates with joy when the book is BIG and BRIGHT, both favorites!  The book Go, Go, Planes, bought on a complete whim because it was so bright (seriously, 50% of day at Thrift Store is the best) despite being about planes (who cares?!) and having no people, story, or even information, is a huge favorite!

Baby is not that into sleeping, and we have (mostly!) decided we don’t care.  We could get more sleep if we sleep trained, we know! But, we are prioritizing baby-bonding.  This baby will get every single attaching advantage we are capable of giving her – and this one is just fine (while there are two of us, that is…).  And, JUST LAST NIGHT, she woke up, cried… AND WENT BACK TO SLEEP.  I admit I did consider crying with joy.  It’s not like it’s GREAT to be sleep deprived. It’s just, for our particular lives, a reasonable trade.

Since we’ve had her, Baby has gone from 20th percentile to 50th percentile, and she is right on target for everything!  She only spits up like 20 times a day, a HUGE improvement!  Baby is now 17 whole pounds, and her butt is finally big enough for our cloth diapers!  And, fortuitously, some amazing geek’s diapers just ended up at my favorite thrift store on 50% off day and whoever was doing the pricing does not know their value, so now I have 7 more diapers for a dollar each AND my baby gets to have what appears to be hand-painted Tardis-butt!

For the cloth diaper I’ve been making a pretty simple recipe of butt-wipes, with water, olive oil, witch hazel, and Dr. Bronner’s pure castille soap. Easy, fast, and green! My partner bought these plastic wipe things on Amazon and I laughed hysterically when we got them…and they turned out to be GREAT! As long as I off-set when I fill it I can pull them out one at a time through the top hole just like the store bought wipes!

Baby is eating more foods all the time! She is DOWN WITH sweet potatoes. Contrary to the baby recipe book, the blank nothing flavor of zucchini was NOT a hit with all…she will eat peas. Rice cereal is eh.  Oat cereal is pretty decent.  FUCK YEAH PEARS.  Also, I wish all MY food was served to me in adorable happy-face everything.  Thank you again, person who gave me the baby-bullet!

The foster-process is doing you a disservice because this baby is amazing and is so. doggone. cute.

WE ARE WAITING.

We have a date for what could be a final decision that our baby leaves us forever, or that baby’s placement with us will be extended for future reconsideration, or that baby’s bio parents rights have been terminated and we are one step closer to maybe making baby our permanent family. It could be for baby and siblings, it could be for just siblings. All the time, trial, and uncertainty, just for an outcome that can be even more uncertainty.

I had guessed a general time frame for a decision and that was nerve-wracking. But now we have a date for at least the first decision and it’s like counting down to your favorite holiday…or the exact opposite of your favorite holiday.  I have a giant calendar in my head, I cross off days, and sometimes hours. I’m not great at math, but I’m surprisingly accurate at hours right now.

Questions that have no emotional answer; would I rather have a decision that baby stays for 6 more months and then still goes home or that she goes home now?  It’s the worst game of “what if”? EVER! And I’m super good at what if!! Obviously, I would take 6 more months (or 6 more minutes, or 6 more seconds) with babyX2 over letting go immediately no matter what the long-term outcome even though I tend to have a pretty solid “get the pain over NOW ” philosophy.

I just… cannot believe the judge will do the clearly wrong thing. And I know he won’t do the right thing. I am generally fine with cognitive dissonance but this is just a stomach ache asking to be drowned in whiskey.

It definitely feels like the calm acceptance and letting go part of fostering works best for people who have either large families already and have room for love and care but without the desperate selfishness of people specifically looking to adopt, or with people who are older and past the “this is my last chance to start at the beginning” phase.  In another form of cognitive dissonance, foster care wants parents that strongly support reunification, that can let go, but that are also also always willing to adopt the child if that’s the direction life takes them…what an insane demand on us.  What an insane choice we made in walking this road.

Single parenting is NO JOKE, ya’ll.  I recently completed my second stint of single parenting, and I am, across the board, opposed to it and overwhelmed by the thought of people who choose that life (including my own mother).

My first stint was a few weeks ago, and I was playing the role of a working mother with no set day care. My amazing people totally helped, but also had their own lives. Every day was a patchwork of work while baby naps, bring baby to sitter, work, get baby, try to do chores with baby, put baby down, work at night. And, of course, my baby doesn’t sleep well, so with one person you are simply exhausted.  There was no time where I felt entirely good about the love and attention I was giving baby and no moments where I felt like my work was top quality and receiving the attention it deserved – there was certainly no moment where I felt like I had even five minutes to focus on myself and letting go of outside needs and pressures.  I felt like there was nothing I could control and no way to succeed.   I was pretty close to melt-down mode by the time my partner came home.

This time I worked some, but casually, and really got to play the role of stay-at-home single mother for the four days.  Wow.  Was that BORING.  There is only so much time you can spend staring adoringly into your baby’s eyes before you are both irritated and bored (that time is approximately…8 minutes).  We did stuff outside the house every day, often twice a day, and it was still isolating and exhausting, and if I was a stay at home parent I would belong to every club, gym, activity center, group, and society on earth, because NO WAY would I survive that experience otherwise (something I always knew, but 4 years of stressful work and baby-desperation had made me think I might LOVE a stay-at-home life).  This experience was much easier than the working mom experience for sure; by the time my partner got home I was not in emotional crisis of failure, I was just pretty tired and SO HAPPY to have him home!

Parenting is absolutely a choice (and NO ONE should ever be pressured into it, you better WANT this shit!), but let’s acknowledge it’s a freaking exhausting choice and even a two-parent household is often barely making it work.  Many many joint parents are run down, exhausted, and overwhelmed especially in our over-scheduled, over-worked, cult-of-busy, society – and especially if your baby (like ours!) does not sleep well.  I’ve now created the definitive ranking of relatively standard parenting units:

Working single parent: oooh fuuuuuuuuuuuck noooo

At-home single parent: ahhh fuuuuuck

Two working parents: fuuuuck

One working one at home parents:  well, fuck.

Two stay at home parents: fuckity!

It is my considered opinion that the most reasonable parenting unit for one household containing small children (under school age) is FOUR.  Yes, FOUR. That is how many people it would take to reasonably provide child care and love, time away with partner, time to pursue work and/or hobbies, and sleep.

We don’t have four people.  What we DO have, is the most amazing friends and family on this earth, helping take care of BabyX2, being family-friendly in our outings, sending words of support, and, most recently, sending me gorgeous pink ART that lifts my tired spirits!!

People keep having babies! And it’s SO GREAT for them, and I truly cannot wait to welcome each new loved one!  But I have considered just walking around screaming at the top of my lungs, “I HAVE DONE EVERY FUCKING THING IN MY ENTIRE LIFE EXACTLY RIGHT AND IT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR”. 

I overcame poverty and abuse, I got the education, I didn’t get accidentally pregnant at an inappropriate or just life-altering age, I never got arrested, I’ve never even had a fucking overdraft charge in my checking account, I took time to travel and socially develop, I went BACK to school, I got the house, and the marriage, and the therapy to actually make the marriage and parenting work, I didn’t quit a job I hate and I even transformed it into a job I DO NOT hate and get some personal satisfaction out of so we can be financially secure and have a parent able to stay home with the baby, and I even started trying while it should still have been NO BIG FUCKING DEAL, and it’s just NOT FAIR!

But I know it’s not about me or even just me that is struggling. I know so many people who have lost pregnancies in just the last year – in my age range, but also at like…27.  Talk about doing everything at the right time, that’s PEAK fucking fertile years.  And I see people in the hospital with two pound premature babies, and people on round X of in vitro after losing multiple priors, and people living in the NICU, and it’s NOT fair and it IS so so so common, and the pain is mostly silent most of the time (because…vaginas?  I really cannot think why else…)  And that knowledge of being part of a sad and frustrated mass does something to ease the rage, but nothing to lessen the sadness.  While crying onto my partner last week after realizing my super-irritating opposing counsel was also pregnant, and trying, again, to consider every option I tearfully said, “I need a baby that is real and they can’t take away”.  I do not know for sure that if BabyX2 was actually MINE TO KEEP whether it would mitigate these feelings of sadness and loss and failure for the actual infertility. It would least be joy – like she is! – and would remove the current additional daily stresser of uncertainty and dread of loss.

Since I cannot do a damn thing about other people having babies, or me NOT having them, or the decision on our baby not being done yet, I’ve been trying  to channel my sadness into a deeper understanding of how much I CANNOT understand about the “model-minority” experience.  How fucking irritating it must be to strive always and endlessly, and to still know the police might just kill you, and to know that however much your white friends are listening, and paying attention, and caring, they just cannot KNOW what that is. I tend to believe, in my heart, the “be twice as good and you can get there” theory of life which has mostly worked for me – but it’s also just not true and so much of life is just deeply, entirely, UNFAIR.  I’m not great at understanding a lot of things I have not personally experienced so  I could take this personal experience as life telling me off for previous lack of empathy. But also, overall I’m pretty cool being done with learning experiences.

We are waiting.  I’m not super-big on waiting ever, and I am super not into waiting right now.  Especially not about this baby that I love basically more than anything ever in the history of everything (not hyperbole).  I do a pretty-good chicken-little impression, so I am REALLY GOOD at worrying (1) that the judge is just going to send these kids home, despite the very real and immediate reasons these children were removed, and the fact that it would basically mean the entire intervention process was worthless – literally EVERYTHING NOW is exactly the same as when the children were first removed, almost two years ago…(2) if the judge does the right thing, he will only do it for the older children, not my baby, because she hasn’t been in the system long enough – hey, you failed at these two and now they have a history of trauma and multiple home moves, but here take this perfect baby and see if you can do the same to her!, (3) if the judge does the right thing for all the kids, then someone is going to pop out of the woodwork to claim babyX…like a grandparent, who hasn’t been bothered for the last two years, and isn’t going to take the older kids, but hey, here’s a perfect baby and someone else already got it through the exhausting newborn stage, perfect!

I talk to other foster parents with children who do not have a good reunification in sight, and they feel the same.  It seems the universal foster parent feelings are (1) watching our foster kids with their biological parents is one of the most painful things on this earth for a large variety of reasons; (2) terror for the future for these children; and (3) not a lot of hope or faith in “the system” (something we entirely share with the bio-parents but opposite!). And I AM “the system” – I HAVE to believe!  But from everything we have heard, this judge is not likely to make the decision we want – even though it should be right under the law, and has been recommended by the guardian, and literally nothing has been done to make positive changes to create a safe life for these children at their biological home – in fact, affirmative statements have been made that the bio-parent will continue doing specific behavior regardless of the court’s decision! AMAZING!  And yet…no one can even say it’s more likely than not.  It’s just…waiting.

Shit is all over the place.  There is so much we are stressed about, hoping for, living through, sad about, waiting for, dreaming of.  But along the way, you take the wins that are offered.

This week I made my billable hours requirement, and made up for last week’s missed time while my partner was out of town, did a legal task I’ve never done before, got my hair cut and dyed, settled a big stressful case, and was home to rock my baby to sleep every night. Tonight I ate nachos and I’m watching a movie with my partner like adults. Damn right, it was a good week.