An anon I received (and immediately deleted) threatened to call CPS on me. I think there must be a genuine misunderstanding of what CPS does if someone is threatening to call them due to parenting challenges.
We work closely with the ongoing unit through our health and human services department. CPS is housed in the same building as ongoing. They pretty much all know our business. I don’t keep secrets from professionals. I have called CPS on myself a couple of times over the years due to various things that have happened in our home (like when Baby went into the road a couple of years ago while he was still in foster care). Believe it or not, I do not play myself up as some sort of perfect foster parent or parent in general. If anything, we lay all of our cards out on the table because that’s the right thing to do. Is it embarrassing? Absolutely! Is everyone all up in our business? Yes!
Baby is well fed and clothed. We personally drive him an hour (one way) to his weekly trauma-based OT appointment and participate in it with him. We participate in weekly in-home family therapy. We are meeting on a consultation basis with a solid therapist trained in attachment, and are on a waiting list to do play therapy (that will be months of waiting before we get in). I applied for another program to help with mental health. DH and I traveled weekly for four weeks this summer to complete the extensive neuropsych testing that Baby needed. We are also working with a psychiatrist who we have near weekly phone contact with in addition to the office visits.
We are doing everything we know how to do and are still failing. Again, I am in no way asserting we are awesome parents who are meeting his needs. I am asserting that we are struggling and trying to make it all work. However, this is not a secret to the professionals we work with. Even NB’s ongoing worker is looped in.
I am also saying that it is a near round-the-clock, all hands on deck, all the time job to care for him. There is no down time. We are on from the minute he wakes up until the minute he goes to bed, and after he goes to bed we have to monitor him and are up (on average) 2x/night to care for him.
Again, you can place the blame on the parents here, but our in-home therapist communicated to us that the number one predictor of success in these situations is education. She believes that due to our collective education (DH and I both hold masters degrees), and our willingness to seek out services and follow through on them, we will ultimately be successful with Baby. However, that does not negate that it is absolutely miserable and exhausting. The grind is every moment with no break. People cannot believe that kids can be so challenging, but research absolutely bears out that some kids are so negatively impacted by trauma that they ARE this challenging. It’s factually true and no amount of shaming and blaming the adoptive home can take that away. The research on the impact of drug addiction in utero is still ongoing. So, again, you can blame me, but I won’t own that. I’ll own my part in his attachment story, but that’s it. I will not own his exposure to drugs during pregnancy, his attachment issues due to a NICU stay and the involvement of his biological parents, and I will not own the fact that some people refuse to believe that a three year old can reek real havoc on an otherwise fairly functioning family. I am educated enough to know what I’m responsible for, and what I am not. Notice that I am not blaming the child. It’s not his fault either.
