Tuesday, April 26, 2011
A life with home visits? STILL?
So, here is an interesting thing you should know! If you have ever become involved with DFPS you have a "friend" for life. Here we are, 13 months and 3 home visits later after Skyler moved out. Apparently, in order to exist in his life in any capacity we have to prove ourselves, not through frequent and meaningful interactions and unending family therapy, but through a series of invasive and pointless opportunities to clean out house from top to bottom and make it look like we have things like milk, and not things like beer in our fridge! The home visit, which used to be the dreaded "what in the world is he going to say about us this time" visit, has turned into the "no, it's cool, we don't have jobs, and we do think it's totally reasonable for you to tell us we can't have a swimming pool, visit. Seriously. No pool, in case our adoptive son, who lives 400 miles away happens to fall in it and drown. Also, he has to have a mattress cover on his bed, in case his pee can travel through wildfires and walls and county lines. Yup, the kid who lives elsewhere doesn't live in what is officially the most child proofed house ever, for 1 hour each year. Good thing though....If he ever did visit you wouldn't want the 12 year old drowning in our 3.5 foot pool, or opening any cabinets. The "visit" is in 30 minutes. Funny enough, the exact time I should be picking my son up from school, who does live here, even the rest of the year when we have pools and beers and open cabinets. He has been bullied at school and on the bus, which he has to take today, because of the home visit to ensure that the child living 400 miles away has a safe place to not come home to. Welcome to bureaucracy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Wow. Really. I'm sure the money used to pay the person visiting your home today might be better used for them to inspect a home which actually has a child living in it. Or perhaps to just do one more check on the child who has recently been returned to their parents who miraculously earned their parenting priviledges back (most likely by the skin of their teeth). More frequent checks of those houses may reveal that the children aren't taken care of as well as they should be, or that they are and those who protected them can breathe a sigh of relief that a child is safe in this world. I don't want to hear that DFPS is underfunded and understaffed. While I'm sure this is more than true, why waste valuable resources? Good could be done elsewhere by simply omitting this specific visit until the child's homecoming (even for a few hours, days, etc) is imminent. Wow.
ReplyDeleteOh Julie, that SUCKS! It sucks that kids are stuck in that, and it sucks that good people with a lot of love in their hearts have to jump through hoops to adopt children who need love. And that the biological kids of those people with all that love have to suffer because of it. The whole thing is just...crappy. I'm sorry :(
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part of that whole blog is that I think it is 3 sentences. Run on much, Juliesowordy?
ReplyDeletethe system is so flawed, I do know. It is a CYA system that wastes time and money and is rarely sensible or logical. All of this, and somewhere, probably very close to you, a child is really being abused and neglected and no one will ever know because they are busy doing CYA visits.
ReplyDelete