The 7th Level of Hell - Part II

So, while all the pocket Doppler and heartbeat stuff was going on, all the discussion about names and caffeine, I kept one eye on the door. My sister-in-law’s two foster children (the ones she was pressing us to adopt) were visiting the sole relative still permitted to be alone with them, and they were expected home any time.

I caught my sister-in-law alone and questioned her about the situation with the children and their possible adoption. She told me that the children’s social worker was leaning on her to adopt the children, but that, as much as she loved the kids and it would break her heart to see them go, she couldn’t take on the responsibility for raising them. Their mother had suggested my sister-in-law just adopt them, then give them back to her later. My sister-in-law was not about to do that.

“So they’re not going back to their mother, then?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Five days before she was supposed to get them back, she was pulled over, high on meth with a gun in the glove box.”

I wanted to be sick. We were taught in our classes to keep our opinions about the biological parents to ourselves; they didn’t tell us that we couldn’t have opinions, though, and I certainly had one. I was furious with this silly little girl for blowing her life and the lives of her children. I wondered what kind of mother had a gun in the car with two small children around, and what the hell was she doing carrying a weapon anyway? Most of all, I wondered what kind of higher power gave two beautiful children to this woman, but denied me. Was there no justice in this world?

These children really needed a safe, stable home and maybe, just maybe, we could provide that. No matter what insecurities I had about my abilities to raise children, I knew I would be a better mother to these children than the one they were given.
Even after my stepdaughter whispered that there was “something wrong with the little boy”, even after Jose’s niece confirmed that their mother “was clean when she was pregnant with the little girl, but not with the boy,” and even when my mother-in-law warned Jose to “have nothing to do with that family,” I still thought, well just maybe. I rationalized that foster children don’t come perfect, that there are issues to solve and healing to be done. All these people who’d had children of their own so easily didn’t understand that.

It was later in the evening when the children’s grandfather showed up. He invited himself in and plunked himself down to watch TV. He kept up a running commentary on the boxing match, but he was so drunk I needed subtitles to understand him. I sat and listened to his absolute stupidity, his racist comments, and his insulting behavior. Suddenly, all the reasons why adopting my sister-in-law’s godchildren became all the reasons we shouldn’t.

My sister-in-law’s connection to the family seemed like it would help the children’s transition; if we adopted them, they would already know their aunt well. I thought it would help make visits with their mother easier if someone else they knew was there. But I realized then, that this familiarity would remove the important privacy we would normally be granted as foster parents. The biological parents (there is a father, currently in jail) would have a direct connection to us—the same biological parents who got high on meth, carried guns, and assumed that when they were ready they could just take their children back, only it wouldn’t be from my sister-in-law, it would be from us and we wouldn’t let them go either. At the risk of being dramatic, I had no desire to be a small headline on page four of the LA Times California section. I knew that we couldn’t adopt these children and it broke my heart to think they would end up in the home of strangers.

As the evening was coming to a merciful end, my sister-in-law asked to borrow my stepdaughter’s pocket Doppler. She headed out the front door and I didn’t need to ask where she was going. Her daughter confirmed my suspicions that she was going across the street to see the children’s mother. She had taken the pocket Doppler with her because the girl was pregnant again—this time with twins.