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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Another grandchild in the works

I’m going to be a grandma! I’m going to be a grandma! Don’t know if I’m actually allowed to say who is pregnant, but anyone who knows the family configuration will soon be able to figure it out. Congratulations to the lovely couple and to the little-big sister! This grandmother gig is really quite wonderful.

It doesn’t diminish the sadness of missing the little guy from our lives - I had a good cry over him last night - but I won’t cut a tragic figure, pining over something I can’t change and ignore the lovely little lives around me.

Monday, March 26, 2007

An occasion to kvell

Next week, I’m going to hear one of my grandsons participate in a public speaking competition. In a world where “fear of death” comes in second to “fear of public speaking”, this young man shows no fear in this arena. I had to chuckle, because when I told him that I, too, had done public speaking, but in high school, he said, “Oh, so that’s where I get it from” as if it were hereditary. (Hmmm, maybe I could impress upon him that at age 12, I became a neat freak?) So hats off to a bright, courageous, and articulate 11-year-old!

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood is a book I picked up last year and read during a business trip. I remember that a couple of women came up to me to say that they’d just finished it and recommended it as a good read. I agree. I think my fascination with memoirs set in other countries, on other continents, has to do with an overexposure to North American coming-of-age narratives. It’s good to know what was happening in the rest of the world while I was growing up in my little corner of a Canadian province. Of course, the narrative reflects the sentiments of the day - the good and bad, the strong and feeble, the racist and ... what is the word for “not racist” or at least “understanding race dynamics” - and putting them into a context that gives us a look into the complexities of existence as a white farmer in an African country in the late 20th century. Read an interview with author, Alexandra Fuller, by an interviewer from Powell’s Books.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Celebrating Holi

I was fortunate enough to be invited by the Shree Mahalakshmi Temple - they are part of the MultiFaith Action Society, as is our synagogue - to represent Ahavat Olam at a Holi celebration at the Michael J. Fox Library in Burnaby. Some twenty years ago, when I did community radio, I was introduced to this holiday, and ever since, wanted to be part of an occasion that celebrated colours. At this event, there was no throwing of colours, so I was slightly disappointed about that, but there were wonderful dance performances that demonstrated various aspects of the holiday and culture. And as a representative of the synagogue, I was honoured with a gift of flowers and a beautiful shawl, and a book about Holi and Hinduism which, it turns out, has many similariaties with Judiasm.

Though my social comfort level is generally awkward when I’m left on my own in a room full of strangers, I enjoyed myself immensely, and in that “small world” kind of way, ended up talking with two women, only to discover that we had friends in common, kind of - one of the women’s sons works with a friend of ours. These small things make us come away a little less feeling like a stranger in a crowd. I may just return next year, with a friend or two in tow.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

And life goes on

Well, it’s over - the child has been taken away to live in a trailer park in rural Alberta, leaving a wake of devastation behind. I keep telling myself it’s not as bad as it sounds for the child - at least, I’m clinging to that hope. [Tangent: A friend and I had a long talk about adult responsibilities and choices of lifestyle, and I kept coming back to my position that children should not be treated as possessions; they are people, and they have emotional needs, and they should not be moved between the ages of 1 and 3. You want the child? Come back when he can talk and you can explain things to him. Moving children between 1 and 3 is otherwise job security for the juvenile detention system twelve to sixteen years out.]

Anyhow, once I’d wrapped my mind around the actual law and accepted the fact that the case would be lost, my focus snapped to how to make the transition as palatable for the child as possible. Doing so began my entry into a Kafkaesque existence for a couple of weeks, and I still find myself replaying scenes as I drive or cook or work, trying to make sense of the entire series of events.

The sad part was that by the end of the saga, it felt like the impact on the children had taken second (or third or maybe tenth) place to the adult drama going on. It was a little like watching a car wreck happen in slow motion - you watch the interpersonal dynamics happen, and you scrunch up your face as you watch the inevitable crash, helpless to change the course of events. And here are two predictions I wouldn’t have bet on at any odds: (1) that by the end of the saga, the weeks on end of neglecting our home and businesses to try to support people we’d come to consider close family would end in us being villified and my wife being slagged, not only behind her back but even to her face, for the efforts we decided we couldn’t sacrifice, and (2) that the single call of thanks we got, at the end, for being the voice of reason during the whole ordeal was from one of the social workers, who I came to respect for her stalwartness in the face of some pretty incomprehensible events. By all accounts, neither the child nor the sibling was adequately prepared for their separations, and I’m suspect that while the blame game will be popular for quite a while, the responsibility game won’t be cracked open quite so frequently.

I fully expect to get villified all over again for calling it as I see it and not taking sides unconditionally (even when that act would call for me to abandon my principles in the interest of blind-faith solidarity), but I’ve always called a spade a spade and I’m too old to be a hypocrite now. So the child is gone - I didn’t get to say goodbye because of some unfortunately-timed business travel), and we’re scrambling to catch up with a house that looks like a tornado hit, and way overdue business tasks. At least it keeps our minds occupied.

Friday, March 09, 2007

So small a gesture, so large an impact

Was at a meeting last night, and my rabbi handed me a baggie with some Purim goodies - a belated treat bag - this year, I barely noticed that the holiday had come and gone. I burst into tears at the unexpected kind gesture.

Another day, another social worker

Really, I don’t know how some of these social workers get to stay on in their jobs for so many decades. Their idea of a “transition plan” for a child, about to be taken away from the only family he’s known, is to get a schedule of his daily activities and arrange an visit so the birth parent and his live-in girlfriend - in reality, they’re like adoptive parents, because they’re taking a kid who has never known them into their home - to show them how the child has been living. That will be the contrast between “before” (detached home, stay-at-home mom, lots of attention, enriched environment) and “after” (trailer park, competing for attention with girlfriend’s “real” baby, dad and gf doing kid duty in shifts to coincide with work down at the plant). Yep, and the social’s idea of the visit is that the new girlfriend “gets to watch the baby being bathed, and then the next visit, she can bathe the baby herself.” HEL-friggin-LO!!! The girlfriend has a year-old kid herself, and she doesn’t know how to bathe it? Or is the social worker just too daft to realize that she’s spouting rubbish?

I suspect it’s the latter. After all, the same social worker has spouted off on other flights of fancy over the past 16 months. Like “what should the birth mom be called by the child when he gets older?” And then wasting everyone’s time and patience making up little nonsensical honorifics. The birth mom doesn’t see the four kids she has now, and the odd time they refer to her, they call her by her first name. So why would this kid do anything different? Why waste her time on such frivolities? Anyhow, I digress.

Another day, another meeting. More tears. It was incredibly painful. It was even more painful after the meeting, having to think about the harsh realities of: OK, this child is going to wake up one morning next week in a strange house, with strange people, strange smells, strange sounds. He’s going to want to go to the people from whom he derives comfort, and they won’t be there. And he won’t know why, and he won’t know how to make it happen. And he won’t be able to communicate his frustration about that to anyone. So how do you make it as comfortable as possible for him? How do you make that happen? (Did the social workers address that? Nope. I was the one at the meeting who said, Look, let’s stop talking about the naive, superficial stuff like bathing the baby. Who cares about that. Let’s talk about the important stuff, like emotional support. Has anyone offered the other couple information and support around attachment disorder? Do they even realize that a couple of years from now, this little guy could end up showing certain symptoms and need therapy? Has anyone prepared them? Who knows? They claimed they “mentioned” it, but the Ministry has lied so many times that we’ve ceased to believe them.) So I’m thinking about which toys he’ll absolutely need to take, which stuffed animals he’s really attached to, which musical toys will comfort him and why. And praying to God that the recipient family realizes the importance of this, and doesn’t decide to throw the stuffies in the washing machine, or toss out the toys, or whatever people might decide to do for whatever reasons they may have.

And my granddaughter. My lovely, precious granddaughter, who is getting emotionally tossed about on a rough sea of emotional upheaval. I do so feel for her through all of this. I have to stop - it’s too hard to write any more.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Broken system yields broken children

OK, so the lawyer had bad news, really bad news, but I finally understood the legalities behind the bad news, in a way that none of the social workers could seem to explain it to me. [Aside: I was given information about how the legal proceedings would go, by various director-level officials from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, and all of it was wrong. The lawyer brushed it aside, saying that they don’t get the law, they always botch up the message in the transmission, and they do this all the time, so just don’t listen to anything they say about the law. Doing a check against my personal experience: she’s right.]

Given that children’s attachments are critical to healthy development, then it would make sense that preserving healthy attachments would be of the utmost importance to a child’s emotional growth. (If you look at the symptoms of attachment disorder , it’s no bloody wonder that our penal institutions are filled with kids who had shaky starts.) So there’s lots of evidence to show that children should stay with their “psychological” parents, not necessarily their biological parents. Taking a pre-verbal child and moving them, particularly when they can’t comprehend why this is happening, is definitely not in the best interest of the child.

So why isn’t the decision between a loving foster home, where a child has been since day 1, and a birth parent who comes forward when the child is a year old, based on the child’s best interest, but on the DNA factor? Well, generally, it would make sense to have a 1:1 comparison of environments to determine “best interest of the child.” But the entire foster system would collapse if you did that, because the idea is that parents are supposed to be able to give up their children voluntarily while they fix themselves during a rough spot, and know that they can get their kids back. But if you let kids stay with who they get attached to, the foster parents could apply to the courts, and in many cases, they would win because the children had become attached. So to keep the system intact, the courts decided that “for the greater good”, foster parents could never apply for custody or adoption of a child.

While this makes sense from a system point of view - you want to keep a system where parents won’t hide their children instead of putting them in care when necessary - it focuses on the system and the adults, but not on the children themselves. The only people who end up without a voice are the children themselves. So while the system stays intact, the children coming out of the system are coming out are scarred from having been there. This is a huge intractable problem that definitely needs fixing, and not in the usual “let’s have an inquiry” way, but in a Cognitive Edge way that really turns the problem inside out and looks at it through a completely different lense.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Padded behinds and cotton wool brains

OK, so last week’s meeting with the social workers was a bit of a farce, although I’m sure it didn’t seem so on their end. They wanted to communicate their position, and the wronged party wanted their position heard, and I could see the transmissions going back and forth [from communication theory: the communication is only complete when the transmission has been heard and confirmed - one-way transmission should not be confused with communication] but not actually making the loop.

They seemed way too concerned that they were being tape-recorded. Hell, I think that THEY should be the ones doing the tape-recording. You know, those messages you get when you call a customer service desk: This call may be monitored for quality control purposes. I think that the Ministry should be required by law to record ALL their conversations with clients. Not to protect the social workers, but to protect the clients. And for that very reason, that’s why they would never do it. They were very clear that there are privacy issues - which, in the Ministry’s case, doubles for issues known in the vernacular as CYA. So that’s how the meeting started.

The Ministry’s position, in a nutshell: Here is how the court proceedings will go, and you’re going to lose. It’s a tough spot, and we’re sorry you’re in it, but the court will rule that the child is going with his birth dad and we can’t do anything about that, so face facts and let’s get down to scheduling for when the child is taken away from you because it is happening.

The mom’s position, in a nutshell: You created the problem, you fix it. My family - me, my spouse, this little guy, and my other child - shouldn’t be victimized because of your agency’s incompetencies for the past 16 months. I don’t care about your procedures, just fix it. My heart is breaking here because I can foresee the emotional damage to all parties involved, and I can’t stand that you’re sitting across the table, emotionless and worried about your forms and bureaucratic nonsense while your own agency’s actions caused this in the first place.

[Aside: I noticed that in response to a statement I made about possible family breakdown in response to this botched-up situation and potential lawsuit, the social workers made notes, which I think said something like “offer counselling” or similar (it was hard to read surreptitiously upside down) as if they think that some little checklist can fix the mess they made. It might assuage their guilt, but I doubt it will do much else except let them go back to their office and sigh a breath of relief that they can move on and ruin someone else’s life.]

At one point, the social workers asked for a schedule, which I thought quite laughable. The mom couldn’t seem to make the point that the request was a bit absurd, so I took a shot at getting through to the social workers. I said something to the effect of: We can draw up a schedule, sure. But let’s be honest - it’s only so that you can tick off “done” on your little checklist. Because the child is going to a home that’s a 14-hour drive away, into a home with another child in the same age range, where the parents will be caring for the kids in shifts while working shift work which is, in effect, single parenting. I’ve been there, done that. I had two little grandchildren - and I am super organized - and the schedule that worked so well for me with one completely went out the window with two. The schedule will last for three days, tops, and then it will be all the parent-at-home can do to keep up with the two of them. So I can draw something up that shows the child has music play from 10-12, and lunch at 12, and nap from 12:30-2:00, but honestly, the kid is going to have the jolt of his life to fit into whatever routine will work, given one adult and two toddlers, so who are you deluding, other than yourselves, when you ask for a schedule? Seriously, do these people have children of their own (that weren’t nannied through infancy)? Do they have any connection to the real world? 

Saturday, March 03, 2007

I’m not a gambler but when it comes to social worker

OK, here’s a hypothetical back story: The Ministry hands you and your spouse a kid to take home, lends you a car seat, and says, “here’s your son.” They promise you that everything is hunky dory and in a couple of months, adoption papers will be processed, no problem because you’re poster children for what the Ministry stands for, yada yada, and then everything explodes a year later, and now the Ministry is backpedalling faster than Lance Armstrong and your life (and your kids’ lives) are going to hell in a handbasket, courtesy of the infamous Ministry of Children and Family Development.

And then one day, the Child Protection branch of the Ministry says they need to visit.

Wouldn’t that raise the hair on the back of your neck? I am so wondering what their motive could possibly be.

Now, I’m not a betting woman but here is my suspicion - I’ll make my wager - anyone want to raise me a 16-month-old? (OK, really bad joke - just because the Ministry moves kids around like poker chips, I shouldn’t be emulating them.)

My bet is that the will come in and find some reason - even if they have to manufacture it - to remove the child and place him elsewhere. Likely it will not be a concrete reaon that could be proved wrong, because then someone could prove them wrong. It will be one of the nonsense reasons that I’ve seen them pull out of their butts when they want to do something but can’t find a way to justify it. (I can even think of a manufactured reason, but I wouldn’t want to give anyone ammunition.)

And then they will move the child out. Why? The big reason will be that if the child is picked up by the “duh, geez, lez go git that there kid I sperm donored” birth parents from the current parents’ house, there is the possibility of the media there to show the child being ripped away from his loving family, and people will see the effect that the Ministry is really having on the child and those around him. But, if they take the child away quietly and place him elsewhere, they can hand him over, quietly and anonymously, to the other party without anybody watching. There will be no news bites and no scandal on the news. And that’s the Ministry’s big concern: optics! So ... who’s in the betting pool?