A letter arrived in the mail today. It was unexpected. It had a return address I’ve seen many times before and when it’s expected, it just feels like a piece of information for me to take in. A court date. A form to fill out. A report from a previous court hearing.
Today it was different.
When you aren’t expecting a letter from court, it feels like a threat. No news is good news and this feels especially true during some moments of the foster care journey. So my heart sank. My fingers shook. My mind raced with potential scenarios during the brief moment from the time I saw that return address and the moment I understood what this letter was for.
Our upcoming court date was changing. It was being pushed back by a few days. There was nothing to be worried about.
But we are in this weird land of adoption purgatory. Not quite the heaven of permanency. Not quite the hell of a long and complicated foster care case. It’s a place of waiting and worrying and just never feeling quite settled.
Everyone on our foster daughter’s team expects her case to go to permanency with us. It’s just a matter of paperwork. There are documents for us to sign. Documentation that needs to be collected. A homestudy needs to be completed and a court date needs to be requested. We are right in the middle of that process and while her team may feel certain of her permanency in our family, we know in foster care nothing is permanent until the judge says so.
When I saw that return address I thought about relatives that could be questioning her placement with us (although because we are the parents of her sisters, we should always be the preferred placement if a parent isn’t an option). I thought about any potential reasons her team would have to change their mind about our family. I worried about clerical errors or unexpected hoops to jump through or accusations or just ANYTHING that would jeopardize her future with us– the only family she’s ever known.
We have lived the reality of foster care for over a decade now. We know the drill. We understand that foster care is intended to be temporary and we’ve learned how to love while leaving space for supporting the biological family and reunification. But the moment comes in some cases when the goal changes. You have become the best case scenario for this child to have stability and permanency and family. But just because the goal changes doesn’t mean the uncertainty is over. It’s just taken on more weight.
We are calling our little almost-daughter by the new name she will get at adoption (with the blessing of her team). She is included in our family pictures. She has only known us as her mom and dad and strongly prefers us to any other humans on the planet. And all of this feels risky and presumptuous. Like announcing a pregnancy in the first trimester. We expect she will be part of our family, but it just isn’t true yet. Not all the way true.
We have seen adoptions progress quickly once parental rights have been handled. Our previous adoptions have been a few short months (60 days?) from the time the state creates a legal orphan and when that child legally becomes a part of their new family. That is not the way it is right now in our state. Adoptions are slow for reasons that have nothing to do with the best interests of the child. This isn’t about waiting for parents to make decisions, but about waiting on workers to have time to complete the necessary paperwork. It’s easy to feel like there’s no cost to this wait. The end is a foregone conclusion.
Except that it isn’t.
We will continue to live with a fear that it all could change. We will have to get the permission of the state to take her on vacation with us. We won’t be able to share pictures of her first time in the ocean or her first foods or the first time she crawls. She will continue to be a legal orphan not for lack of a family, but for lack of completed documentation. It’s frustrating.
Good caseworkers get all my love and respect. It is a ridiculously hard job they’re doing. Their days are dominated by putting out fires and my precious little bonded, attached, loved, spoiled, almost-daughter is not on fire. So we will wait. What else can we do? She is worth the wait.