As it happened, the other family did back out. It's just us now.
We had a presentation where more information was given to us. Many of our questions were answered. All of this information is hard to process, so excuse these choppy paragraphs.
He's a vivacious and energetic five-year-old boy. He loves playing with cars and trains. He likes to help around the house and he gets along great with all adults and with other kids. On pre-K academic tests, he's in the high range. He has a wonderful smile. My blog nickname for him is going to be "Sunny", for his sunny smile.
He was removed for neglect and has been in the same foster placement for several years. He calls his foster parents "Mom" and "Dad" and is very attached to them. He's had visits with his biomom, and he calls her by her first name. I don't know what he would call us. Maybe "Mommy" and "Daddy"? I don't want to confuse him by taking anyone else's title, but first names don't seem quite right either.
He's been diagnosed with ADHD and possibly bipolar. He's on a mood-stabilizing drug right now. I'm horrified by the particular drug, which is very strong, has at least one nasty side effect and has not been approved for small children. The first thing after placement would be to see if the doctor can take him off that. I'm not anti-med and it's very likely that he will need at least one ADHD drug on an ongoing basis, but if at all possible, I want to get him off the drug he's on now.
According to his therapist, he often engages in power struggles. He has a strong sense that the world should be fair. He can be redirected and understands consequences. He has a great memory but a short attention span. He has an IEP for behavior in the classroom, mostly concerning defiance towards authority, impulsivity and hyperactivity. He doesn't do well on the school bus and hates to sit down and be quiet. He doesn't sleep well, and he wets the bed, two things likely having to do with approaching anxiety about what will happen to him. He knows he's being adopted, even though he doesn't fully understand what it means. He has mood swings and tantrums lasting up to an hour... not aggressive, but with heel-kicking and screaming.
The workers were happy that we were very open to continuing contact, both with the foster parents and his biomom. There's an older half-brother on his father's side that he's never met. His father is in and out of jail. He's not dangerous on the level of the "Schillinger"-dad in Maerlowe's story, but without going into too much detail, he's not a safe person to have contact with. With the mother, there would be information sent through the caseworker (no addresses revealed). For the foster parents, we'd hope to have a lot of contact, plus yearly visits. The social workers said they often had to deal with situations where the adoptive parents were not as open to contact in the beginning. I said, "there's no point in being jealous". This is something our agency has always stressed: keeping positive contact alive.
Sunny's mother is white and his father is black. His foster family is white and they live in an upper-class, primarily white neighborhood. The social workers said that they liked the fact that our family and neighborhood is very diverse. He won't have to grow up being the only black kid, or alternately, being the only kid who doesn't look or sound as black as the other kids. When he starts to have questions and concerns about his identity (which will be just around the corner) we'll try to help him answer them in positive ways.
We didn't need time to discuss it privately... we went ahead and said yes.
The next step is a lot of paperwork. Then there'll be a visitation period. The workers want to do this fairly quickly. Dragging it out over a long period would only increase his anxiety.
I'm always thinking about the worst-case scenario, so I'm still worried that things could fall through in the stages to come. Is it time to give myself permission to feel like a mom? I don't know. "Sunny," who used to be a still, ghostlike figure, is gradually assuming emotional shape and form and color, and is about 80% opaque now, but still translucent.
Since I'm anonymous, I'm free to be very open on this blog. But I also need to establish what I'm not going to reveal:
- the state where Sunny is from
- intimate details of the stories of bio relatives
- medication names
- school details
- first or last names of anyone
- proper names in general
If I happen to know you, and you mention any of this in passing in comments, I'll have to delete the comment. Apologies in advance, and I'll send you an email too.
My husband seems completely unperturbed by this turn of events. It's odd. But he was already more in tune with the reality of this placement happening. He said he just knew it was going to happen. He's busy now thinking of names to give to grandparents, grandmothers and step-grandfathers.
We can start getting the room ready now. We're going to get a playset for the backyard.
This is so exciting!
We're going out tonight to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant to celebrate.
Foster Care System Perspectives
Two issues here:
Is critiquing dominant culture, as a white person, really the same as a white person’s self-critique of white culture? In my opinion they overlap but are really not the same at all. Critiques of dominant culture can include non-white cultural hegemony and imperialism.
In my mind, self-critique is a broad spectrum that includes positive analysis of strength at one end, neutral analysis in the middle and self-hating at the far other end. From what I’ve read of Chomsky he’s not self-hating at all.
I think true self-hating white people (who hate their whiteness) are rare, but they are extremely unbalanced and possibly dangerous to themselves and others. They’re like Wapanese to the nth degree… people who hate whiteness so much they want to erase themselves and be some other race, and of course they can’t. The healthier way is to be critical of whiteness but not denigrate yourself over it, and have a positive identity overall.
I think there are a fair amount of white people who take this healthy approach and talk about it and communicate it. But like my example of Tim Wise, I wish they would get a lot more mainstream mass media attention than they currently do.