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.