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Saturday, March 29, 2008

Custom songs makes for light-hearted gifts

A long while back I heard about a site called Songs to Wear Pants To. In cleaning out a bunch of old business cards, I came across the site name and thought I’d see if the site was still there, and it is!

Andrew is a songwriter who creates custom songs based on whatever criteria you provide, no matter how odd. All you need is a little pancreas? No problem. Crazy candy theme? His pleasure. Polka loca? Of coursa. Celtic techno burrito? Why sure-o. The site even has its own theme song. I have to hand it to Andrew for the longevity of the site, the way he’s found to make money doing something he loves, and for finding a way to stay good-humoured about the weird and whacky requests he gets for songs.

Considering that my family is entering “birthday season” - a few of us have birthdays between late November and end of January, then just about everyone else’s birthday is clumped together between end of March and beginning of June; something like 18 birthdays - this may be the gift that everyone gets this year!

Monday, February 11, 2008

Schlepping naches

Over the holidays I didn’t post much, and realize I haven’t shared some of the things I’m most proud of. One of my big pride moments is when my braniac grandson sent me a copy of his acceptance letter to a prestigious boarding school, Brentwood College. He has wanted to be in an environment that challenges him and where he’s among other students who are similarly motivated. And now he has that opportunity, after having done fabulously on his entrance exam. That’s motivated him more to bring him his first truly wonderful report card, which made me ask if he was working harder now, to which he replied, “Not really, I just have a reason to get good grades now.” Thank you, Harry Potter, for reviving the idea of boarding school!

Of course, we’ll are going to miss him terribly. It’s a long road from when he first came to live with me when he was 1, to when he was adopted by his fabulous dads, and ended up with, as he would always say, 11 grandmas, 3 dads, 2 sisters, and 1 mom. Of course, his dads find his acceptance a bittersweet moment - they didn’t adopt him to send him off to a boarding school - but he really wants to go, and I’m sure he’s going to thrive there. He’ll soak up the academic environment like a sponge, and we’ll all compete for his time when he gets time off from his rigorous six day-a-week, practically year-round program.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Berry picking season is here again

Part of the family ritual has become berry picking. It started when my grandson was very young, and I wanted him to know where food came from - not growing on the shelves of a supermarket. Somehow going to pick cucumbers (like my sister and I were forced to do all summer as kids) wasn’t going to motivate him to connect with nature, but I thought berry picking might. As each of the grandkids got old enough to walk, they got added to the trip. I’ve taken other people’s children, too, and for some of them, it was the first time they were allowed to their feet muddy in their whole lives. Imagine.

This year, I went with two of the older grandkids, and a first time for a two-year-old and her mom and dad. We went to the strawberry patch at W&A Farms in Richmond - it may have pouring rain in Vancouver and Burnaby, but had dried up (kind of) in Richmond - and we had the entire u-pick patch to ourselves. The older kids got to some turning point at around the age of 8, and they go into complete production mode when they hit the berry patch. I had to remind them that I had only brought $15 with me, so they should stop picking when they filled their plastic buckets. (They would have gladly picked double that!) The little one probably ate as many as she picked, but that was thankfully about 10 strawberries in all. She was more fascinated by the mud puddles surrounding the fields, and splashed around in her muddy buddy while mom and dad picked enough to make a good batch of jam.

That afternoon, I froze strawberries, made some sherbet, and made a batch of rather syrupy jam using Splenda. And soon, it will be time for raspberries, and I can take one of the other grandkids out berry-picking. Maybe I can get her moms go come out and make an event of it.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Dance recitals and high school graduations

Tis the time of year when all the semesters of hard work pay off, and this weekend was the culmination. Yesterday was Asia’s dance recital - I think she danced in something like five shows this weekend, though we only got to one of the shows - and today was Ben’s high school graduation. I’ve probably talked about Asia’s dance recitals before, and while I delight in her passion for dance (though worry about her lack of passion for the practice portion of the program), it doesn’t take any mindbending to go from me to granddaughter to dance lessons.

What was a huge mindbender for me was inheriting a grandson who just turned 18, by way of becoming Ashley’s foster brother a couple of years back. Ben is a lovely guy, polite and well-mannered, full of wonder about the world, and so on. But if you know anything about my pacifist, left-leaning background, you can understand that it’s taken me a bit of mindbending to adjust my thinking to be able to appreciate Ben’s cadet training. For example, like this summer, when he goes off on his pilot scholarship to learn to fly a plane. I mean, Emma was just giving him driving lessons a couple of months ago! Or when we pick them up to go for ice cream, and he’s dressed in fatigues because he has just enough time to have ice cream before he has to get back for his sharpshooter lesson. Or when he goes away to boot camp for the summer.

I’m sure this is part of what I need to do in this life as part of my personal growth. Every time I get too comfortable in my social comfort zone, a new person or situation comes into my life that makes me have to stretch my boundaries and rethink my prejudices and tolerances. And aside from enjoying Ben’s quick wit and pleasant company, I appreciate him making me open my mind a little more. And aside from being nervous about someone so young learning to fly, I’m hoping he’ll turn to civil aviation at some point - hey, those family points should come in handy, right, Ben?

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Peter Grogono gets President’s Award for Teaching Excellence

Peter Grogono, Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science (and cherished friend of mine) at Montreal’s Concordia University (and my alma mater), has just received the first President’s Award for Teaching Excellence. A well-deserved honour, to be sure! To indicate what a fine specimen of teacher he is, I believe that even a word-nerd like me could have been taught to love numbers had Peter been responsible for teaching me math during the impressionable years.

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!

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?

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The mess called Ministry of Children and Family Development of BC

There is a messy situation going on right now, around the bungling of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, and then - when they realized their procedural bungling - how they are ready to sacrifice the well-being of two children because they have rules to follow. And while they know their voice is powerful and could influence the outcome by making taking a stand that is in the best interest of the child, they are, instead, taking a stand that is in the best interest of the Ministry.

Of course, they’re claiming that the rule is in the best interest of the child, but when you actually talk to the folks at the Director level about their reasoning, you get “juicer” answers. (Juicers are what, in the HR industry they call companies that treat people like widgets. These companies are intereted in production, so they hire people, squeeze everything they can out of them, and then toss them out and get new ones, to keep the production line moving.) The Director of Child Welfare, for example, told me that the Ministry has a “policy” (I put this in quotation marks because a policy is supposed to be a guidelines that has exceptions made when the policy doesn’t fit, but she kept talking about it s a hard and fast rule) that all children are better off in the care of a biological parent. One her reasons is that “otherwise, you’d have all these kids stuck in foster care.” Ah yes, if the production line stops, it would cost the Ministry a lot of money. So we have to move these widgets out of the system to a parent. If we call it “in the best interest of the child”, we can save the province lots of money.

Never mind that in some cases, the child will be heartbroken to be ripped away from the only family it has known. Never mind that the child risks developing attachment disorder - and later taxing the social system as home becomes various juvenile detention centers, and later on, the adult penal system. Never mind that the families left behind (in some cases, having been promised that the placement was foster-to-adopt, where they’ve become firmly attached to the the child) are heartbroken, and the Ministry has also broken the hearts of the children that they may have even previously placed in that very home.

No, the Ministry has widgets to move along, to get out of the system, and when they’ve goofed up - say, when they’ve sent a two-day-old child home with a family and basically said, “here’s your son, take him home” and then when he’s almost a year old, the Ministry comes back and says, “oops, there’s a problem” and “well, we never really said he was yours” and “don’t go getting a lawyer, now, because it will piss us off and we’ll take the kid away from you” and at the line staff level (where no one ever, ever, ever takes the blame for anything), they say, “we go home and cry at night, this is such a travesty but there’s nothing we can do” and “this is beyond unethical and it’s so awful but this happens sometimes” and such inane, condescending platitudes that it makes me wonder how taxpayers can support such a corrupt system and let them get away with it.

It shocks me that people who can’t tell the difference between rules and guidelines, between client interest and system cover-your-ass thinking can rise to director level. It disgusts me that social work supervisors use intimidation tactics to keep a client population (adoptive and foster parents) in line. It appalls me that they blatantly manipulate the people they are supposed to serve, and tell outright lies when it suits their purposes. (In the eleven years I’ve been dealing with the Ministry, I’ve caught them out so many times, this allegation is not lightly made.) What’s more is their unwillingness to break ranks and fix themselves - they cover for one another’s incompetencies, and the good ones, who have the brains and willingness to try to make a difference end up leaving to become consultants, or blacklisted and having to find work in another province, or having a breakdown and going on stress leave. A strong few leave and become Ministry combatants - such as lawyers who take on the Ministry and all their insanity.

Everywhere I go, I hear stories about the Ministry, and not one of them good. Walking the hall in my office building, a CEO from down the hall asks how I’ve been, and I say I’m frustrated because of “an entanglement with the Ministry” and his reply is, “They seem to screw up a lot, don’t they?” A technology VP associate of mine, as it turns out, has his own entanglement with the Ministry, and he relays that he and his [also professional] wife are getting “sleazy” vibes from Ministry staff. The stories compound - everywhere I turn, the Ministry has involved themselves, and the way they’re handling things is an embarrassment to the province and to the most vulnerable citizens of the province.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Social worker arrogance in British Columbia

Was just told that three years ago, when my granddaughters had been moved into the adoption stream, where they were adopted by a fabulous couple who have made us part of their extended family, the girls’ profiles had a note added to them in the “Special Needs” section. This is the section where you list the burdens that prospective parents should know about, such as Autism, ADHD, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and so on. Evidently, the social workers had labelled the girls as having “grandmothers.”

So ... advocates or burdens? I suppose that advocating for our children’s well-being impedes social workers from operate their little fiefdomswith impunity, and as such, we are burdens to them. What saddens me is that so few children have such advocates.