For 14 months we provided a home for Miss B. We picked her up from
the hospital and dealt with a crazy system for 14 months until the DHS
worker arrived unannounced to take her to her biological father, without
giving us a chance to say goodbye.
After months of trying to
process those 14 months, and the grief that accompanied the whole
experience, I have decided to write about all of it. I will not give out
specific names of any of the people involved.
Also, I am choosing
to focus very little on the biological family in order to respect their
privacy. Instead I am processing how a system that is supposed to be
about "child welfare" handled her case so poorly. I will be writing this
in parts, so this is Part 2, and Part 1 can be found
here.
In order to maintain confidentiality, I will refer to Miss B as "Butterfly"
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By October 2013, Butterfly was 6 months old. Visits were still filled with distress and crying and it wasn't getting better. The therapist-candidate sent an email that after "staffing" it she decided it would work best if my mom was in part of the visit so there was overlap to help minimize Butterfly's stress and crying.
Also, in October 2013 an accelerated court hearing was scheduled. At that hearing, the judge ordered that the parents start getting unsupervised visits with the children. I questioned the baby's attorney on this since the mother was not producing clean drug tests and had made little progress on the treatment plan. I could not fathom why the judge was ordering unsupervised visits under the circumstances.
But we had no idea what actually happened in the accelerated hearing, because all of the foster parents were asked to leave the courtroom. Later we were told that the tribal worker made a lot of nasty accusations against all of the foster parents, but us especially. She told the judge that we spoiled the baby and never let her cry. The judge was suspicious that we did not have her in daycare, and the tribal worker implied that the baby cried in visits because she had not had trauma in her life. In other words she was just too sensitive and it was our fault.
An even bigger surprise came as Thanksgiving approached--we were told that the judge was ordering all the children to go to the father's house for several days over Thanksgiving. The tribal worker wanted them to go from Wed-Mon. I thought I was going to faint. Butterfly was only doing two one-hour supervised visits/week and was barely coping with that. The father knew nothing about her daily life or habits.
By this time a psychologist became involved in the case. We had also worked with her in Daniel's case and she had been pivotal in his case for good. She had a reputation as one of THE infant mental health experts in our area, and we were excited that she was going to be a part of Butterfly's case. She visited along with the DHS caseworker at our home twice briefly, and met with the therapist candidate. To my knowledge she never observed live parent/child interaction.
After her visits at our home, she never responded to phone calls or emails, and we learned later that her involvement in the case was primarily getting info from the candidate and the DHS worker and then giving her opinion based off of their info.
But, her involvement put the brakes on unsupervised visits, as well as cancelling the Thanksgiving overnight on Butterfly's behalf. The alternative that was presented to the judge was that Butterfly would increase to 3-4 weekly visits with the parents starting in January.
By this time we had a regular email/FB/phone/text relationship with the other foster families of Butterfly's older siblings. We would talk about our experiences, vent, share encouragement and prayers. I felt close to them since we had shared experiences with these siblings.
In mid-December 2013 there was another review hearing. We were not expecting big changes for Butterfly, but the other foster parents were expecting that their children would be returning to the father. Much to everyone's surprise, their therapist at the same agency raised some concerns with some of the behaviors of the children following visitation and the judge made no major changes with any of the children. The other foster parents were relieved and we all had a peaceful Christmas.
In January 2014 Butterfly, now 9 months old, began visitation 3 times/week--twice per week with the therapist candidate and once/week at the DHS building with the whole family. We drove her to these visits every week and rarely cancelled, even though it was stressful and alot of gas $$ !
I asked the therapist candidate if I could meet with her after a visit in early January. When I arrived she told me it had been Butterfly's worst visit since the last fall. She acted bewildered as to why it was so bad. We talked and I shared some of my concerns with her. I asked her why she only took little video clips when Butterfly was NOT crying in visits and why she didn't video EVERYTHING, including the visits where she was clearly distressed (like that day.) She didn't have an answer except to say that it would be too hard to video the whole visit because the court might subpoena it. (Later I wondered if her short video clips were what she used with the DHS worker and the psychologist to convince them that all was well?)
She told me that her only focus was what happened in the room during the visit and nothing beyond that. So essentially it did not matter what we told her about Butterfly's difficulties with sleeping and her excessive clingingess following the visit. She told me her estimated timeline for when unsupervised and overnight visits would start, and reminded me that she was working for reunification. She took every opportunity throughout these months to remind us that she was helping the bonding process because her goal was reunification.
Also, in January we met with the baby's attorney and the Assistant District Attorney who had the case in juvenile court. We expressed to them our feelings about how visits were going and that we wanted a qualified therapist involved with Butterfly, one who would listen. We also mentioned that because Butterfly had prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol we wanted to have her evaluated in OKC at a place which specialized in children who had prenatal exposure. I thought that early intervention gives a child the best possible opportunities to overcome any hurdles that may come up. We also entertained that possibility that Butterfly's sleep difficulties and extreme stress in visits could be due to prenatal exposure. Both women thought that was a great idea.
In January one of Butterfly's siblings had to leave her foster home due to the foster mother's health issues. Rather than move her to another foster home that the foster family suggested, the DHS worker moved the little girl to the biological father. This was done with no court order or approval. It turns out that the preschooler was there for about 6 weeks with no oversight. Later the DHS worker was reprimanded in court. There was also a referral called in to DHS regarding some other siblings and things that occurred during overnight visits. The DHS worker screened the referrals out.
By this time we were working with a psychological clinician from Soonerstart. She visited Butterfly in our home weekly. She listened, observed, and tried to talk with all parties. She had us bring Butterfly to her office in order to observe her in a different setting with strangers, and she attempted to observe Butterfly at the therapeutic agency. However, the agency would not let her observe through a window and instead told her she had to be IN the visit, which then changed the dynamics of the visit since Butterfly knew her well and liked her.
February 2014 there was another hearing. At this hearing everyone knew that the judge was going to order trial reunification to begin for the children except for Butterfly. She did. She ordered that trial reunification begin for all the siblings, happening at intervals. The oldest girl was already at the father's home, so two of the children would go next and then the other would go in March. If for some reason anything prevented trial reunification from occurring, the tribal worker wanted the kids moved out of the foster homes and into a relative's home. This relative had already had the children previously, and taken them to the shelter after 2 months of trying to care for the kids. But this same relative got approval from the court to take the children again if trial reunification with the father failed.
Our home was the only ICWA compliant home because I am tribal so that was not an issue, however the tribal worker took this opportunity to again rip into us and she told the court that all of Butterfly's sensitivities were our fault.
At this hearing the therapist-candidate submitted a report that the visits were going well and she had no concerns. This was after her telling me in January that it was the worst visit since fall. We were still documenting and our documentation did not match the therapist-candidate's documentation. The candidate also reported that she was going to organize a meeting with all the people involved with Butterfly to decided on how to help Butterfly overcome her distress in and following visitation, however the people surprisingly excluded from the meeting were us, her foster family--the ones who knew the baby best. The judge was surprised that we were not going to be included in the meeting and said that we should be able to attend.
In February 2014 the meeting was scheduled and those invited included the DHS worker, the Soonerstart clinician, the therapist candidate and her supervisor, both parents, the psychologist, Butterfly's pediatrician, and the tribal worker. However the pediatrician, psychologist, and tribal worker did not go. The pediatrician sent a letter instead.
The DHS worker called us the night before and told us that it was planned that all of the "professionals" would meet first, and then we and the parents would be called in for the last half of the meeting. She said if there was anything we wanted her to cover in the first part of the meeting to email it to her that night.
I emailed her an outline of my concerns but she never printed or saw it before the meeting.
So that Wednesday morning we arrived and were ushered to a waiting room while the professionals discussed the case. When we were called in, we found out that they had already determined the plan and we were just supposed to agree with it, no questions asked. Since we had been asking for months for a separate therapist just for Butterfly, they decided that my mom would bring in Butterfly an extra hour before the parent visit and the therapist candidate would be Butterfly's therapist. She would do Theraplay with Butterfly and coach my mom in that.
At this meeting, the DHS worker said that she had no idea of the judge's timeline for reunification and as far as she knew, the next permanency hearing was in August which was 6 months away. The Soonerstart clinician suggested that we review how things were going after 30 days and see if there were any changes that needed to be made for Butterfly's well-being.
When my mom tried to bring up the concerns that she had hoped to discuss at the meeting, which included the discrepancies between my mom's court report and the therapist candidate's court report, the DHS worker got testy and said things were settled, we were moving forward and not looking back.
After discussing it at home, we decided that the plan as it was presented was only adding extra hours and not really accomplishing anything. Later we received an email that said that the therapist could not actually bill all of those hours to Soonercare, so the DHS worker was going to have to oversee one of the visits.
Rather than saying no to the plan altogether, we came up with an alternative. We would stay with 3 visits per week, with the therapist overseeing two, the DHS worker overseeing one, and having Butterfly see a very experienced psychologist on our time.
Both the DHS worker and her supervisor rejected that plan, saying that they absolutely did not want the psychologist we suggested involved, and that involving him would only slow down reunification.
