Guilty thoughts

I'll update later with how it went, telling the kids, but overall it was a really good, therapeutic weekend.

Today was Part 2 of the psych eval. The doc convinced Bio Mom to let Jacob have the medicine that his pediatrician tried to prescribe months ago. This time she agreed, and signed the paperwork.

He also agreed with the pediatrician that there's more going on here than ADHD. He said there's some sort of anxiety disorder, and maybe other things -- but he's so young and so overwhelmed with impulses that it's hard to tell. But, he said, in his brief talk with Jacob he had to redirect him more than 30 times.

What he did not address was the times when redirection doesn't work, and Jacob goes into a violent rage.

Is that because he doesn't believe it happens? Does he think it won't happen once Jacob is on this new medication? Did we give up on him too soon?

He told Bio Mom that Jacob might seem like "an entirely different boy" after the new medication takes effect. We start it tonight.

This decision was so, so hard, and seeing the kids grieve has been so hard. And now I'm wondering...Sure, I can tell myself the following:
1. She still hasn't set up the counseling that the doc says Jacob needs, and which is court-ordered, and which she said she would set up weeks ago.
2. She could withdraw approval for this medication at any time, just like she did last time.
3. It might not address the rages at all, which the pediatrician said are not a symptom of ADHD.

But a part of me feels like a terrible failure for giving up. And the new family seems great at handling stuff like this, yes, but there are things the new foster mom says at times that worry me. Will he really be loved and cherished there?

Did we do the right thing?

Certainly I can say foster care in general was not the right thing for us. We are clearly not the right people for it. We care. We get attached. We advocate for the kids.

And also, we were clearly not the right people for these kids...the 4-hour medical appointments, once or twice a WEEK, were killing our ability to work. And the utter lack of communication was driving us batty. Only by directly asking a caseworker today, two days before the next mom visit, did we learn they'd changed the time of the visit again. This time they've decided it should be at 2:45 p.m. (It was previously at 4 p.m., except that they randomly change it.) I explained that Sophia's camp has a field trip, and won't be back til 3 p.m., and thus the earliest we can get the kids to the location they've chosen is 3:45 p.m.


I don't know how other foster parents who work full-time do it. But we can't.

And we can't raise children without loving them, and driving ourselves crazy beating our heads against the wall of bureaucracy.

So this wasn't for us, but we wanted to give the children our all anyway.

I just hope this decision is right.