So Many People To Meet

In the beginning the amount of people I met was unsettling. There were so many people involved in our lives in a short period of time. I felt like I was being introduced to a new person daily and that their job was to watch me or my husband with this child. I felt like we had to answer to many supervisors, and it made me uncomfortable because I didn't know who all these people were and what they did. In our training classes they had only talked about the child having a social worker and a guardian ad litem (the child lawyer). They never said that my husband and I would have our own social worker as well and then there was the lady I met the day I brought Julian home. The one that had thrown her card at me but didn't tell me her title or what she would be doing, I really had no idea where she fit in. I was in a state of confusion about how all these people were involved and how the chain of command went in this process but I just kept taking cards and hoped it would all come together soon.

My husband and I had met our social worker, Belinda, right after we were approved by social services to adopt. She was the first one to come to our home for a safety inspection. I liked her immediately. She seemed to have our best interest at heart from the first time we met her. She was very strait forward with everything she knew about the system and what the plans were for us....and had a very calming presence about her. One of the first things she shared with us was her story of adopting one of her children thru a local county. She explained to us that the process could be very long and hard but then she reassured us by saying she couldn't see how any judge would send Julian back to his biological family when he had sustained these injuries and there was still no known cause to explain them. I trusted her immediately. Her eyes were full of truth and her words were not hiding anything. She was a mother and a mother that had been down the road I was going. She spent about an hour just getting to know us as a couple. At the time we hadn't been given Julian's case to look at yet but she was preparing us that day for anything that may come up.

After getting to know us she completed the safety inspection required by the county. She looked in every room of our home to insure we met the requirements. Julian had to have his own room, she had to look at the crib to make sure it was safe, we had to have plastic plugs in the outlets in every room. She looked to make sure all chemicals were locked under sinks with baby locks and in the laundry room we were required to put a cabinet above the washer and dryer to hold any laundry soap and bleach. We had to have a fenced in back yard and a fire route in case of an emergency. These were all things any parent should think of but in all reality most parents don't because they aren't required to pass any test to prove themselves worthy of parenthood. However, we were required to prove ourselves so at the time she could have told us that our house was the wrong color for parenthood and we would have repainted it just to insure we got to bring a baby home.

When Belinda left that day she had been in our home for two hours. She told us the next time she would see us was when agreed to bring a child home and she would come out and check on us but that if we had any questions or concerns we could call her any time and she would help us out.

After meeting Belinda I couldn't wait to meet Julian's social worker. I knew her name was Betty Rose but I still hadn't seen her face. She had been on vacation the week we met Julian and she was still out the first week we brought him home so it wasn't until we had him a full week that we met her. I scheduled her first visit for a day I knew my husband was off of work so he could meet her as well. She had been on the case since Julian was taken from his biological parents which made us anxious to meet her because we wanted any information we could get about the case from her. We had written down lots of questions about the case and Julian's biological parents....we wanted to talk about who they were as people and how previous visits had gone.....we wanted information about court dates and what happens at them....we wanted to know exactly what we were up against and how she saw this case going. Her opinion was the one that mattered most in this case because she was the one talking to the judge about what was happening in Julian's world...and since we were now the biggest part of Julian's world we wanted her to see how much we loved him.

When she arrived at the house that day our opinions about this case were changed forever. And for the first time since we found out about Julian we questioned if we made the right decision by taking him home.