Support Group I

After the bios didn't show up for the visit I thought for sure everything in the case was going to change. Them not showing up was one thing but them not calling well, that was just against all rules that had been placed before them. I thought Betty Rose would give me a call to explain what had happened to the bios that day. She would call and give me all the excuses they had for not showing up to their one visit a week, but she never did. Instead we went the entire week without a phone call from her or an email. I was completely disappointed in her lack of communication. During her last home visit she finally expressed concern about "reunification" and then they didn't' show up for visit, she had to have some opinion on all of this! I know I had tons of things to say about it.

So without a phone call or an email we just went on with our week as usual. My husband and I started going to a support group meeting that week with people that were in the same position we were. At least that is what we thought we were going to.

These meetings were set up to help Legal Risk families by providing a support system of people that were in the same situation. These meetings also helped with building education hours that we were expected to complete each year by social services to renew our foster care certification. We started going to the class in hopes that someone would share something with us that gave us hope in our case. It didn't matter that it helped us recertify because by the time our yearly certification was up Julian would be ours. But for the time being we needed a support system that understood how hard it was to live like this. We needed people that got the frustrations we had with the system and how hard it was to deal with parenthood on top of dealing with social services.

We were excited at the thought of meeting others like us. I loved the idea of being able to call up a girlfriend that totally got what I was going through because she had been dealing with the same thing. So I had high hopes for this meeting.

As we drove over to the meeting my husband and I talked about our expectations. What we hoped to get out of this group and how we hoped it would help. The group meetings were arranged by social services, so we went to the same building we had done all of our training to become certified at. We even went back to the same room we sat in during all of those classes. As we walked in the room the aroma of peperoni pizza swept through me. I was so hungry but because of nerves I hadn't eaten yet. My stomach growled as we were stopped at the door so that we each could write our name on a name tag. As my husband wrote his name I glanced in the room and noticed that all the long rectangular tables that had been pushed into a circle so we could all face one another. I got even more nervous.

I am not good at being vulnerable with people. And when it came to Julian, I was very protective. So I wasn't sure what we were going to have to share with strangers or how I would do with opening up to people. I just knew that I craved having someone in my life that truly understood what I was going through. I just wanted anyone to get it. The closest person to understanding my feelings was my husband and even he didn't get the full magnitude of what I went through everyday because he was at work during most of it. He understood my frustrations but he didn't live it the same way I did everyday. I just knew there had to be another mother in this room that understood my heart.

As my husband and I slapped our name tags over our hearts we looked for a place to sit down. We ended up at the front of the room. We were the only two that sat there. Everyone else had managed to fill in the rest of the circle and we sat alone at the front of the room. We laid down our things to mark that our seats were taken and we headed toward the table that had the pizza. I couldn't wait to eat.