[Suzy]

Our adoption will be final soon and we are looking forward to our first Christmas with our children but I'm going through some stressful times right now and having a hard time dealing with it.

We've recently had a very traumatic experience with our state's child welfare organization. Our children's previous foster home is under an investigation that was finally begun after a year of us pursuing the issue. The stories about what happened there are bad, bad enough that we can't go about our daily lives knowing that other children could face the same things our children faced. But now I question whether we did the right thing or whether we've just place our children in a position to be further damaged by the system. If the investigation had begun immediately and they were interviewed then I think it would have been okay, but now they are to be interviewed a year later after much work for them to feel safe in our home and attach to us as their parents.

The short version is that the investigator that initially called us thought we were the ones being investigated and refused to back down even once our agency got involved on our behalf. It was a loooooong couple of days, spent completely on the phone, during which we were threatened and informed that we were not the children's parents and weren't entitled to voice our opinion about whether interviews would be detrimental to them. (okay, so no surprise that a system worker isn't sensitive to adoptive parents, but is it really necessary to rip your heart out and spit on it when you are within a month of finalization?) The final result was that this person was eliminated from the investigation after I reached someone at the very top of the child welfare system. Although it is a relief, the experience was so traumatic that I'm having a hard time picking myself up and going forward. My hubby and I had planned on continuing to do foster care in the future, but now I just don't know. I find myself not able to trust anyone in the system. Not trusting that they will do their job competently, not trusting that anyone cares about the welfare of my children or the impact of the system on children in general, not trusting that someone can interview my children without doing serious damage to the progress that they have made since they have been with us. I guess I'm scared. I don't know what to expect from these people anymore. I don’t know what to expect from my children after an interview where they’ve had everything stirred up again. I've tried to convince myself that I'm being irrational, that what I'm feeling is not based on reality, but the scary thing is that my fears are based on reality. We were threatened, albeit indirectly, with having our children removed because we refused to accept the investigator's behavior as professional and chose to voice our grievances to that person’s superiors. If I’m not making sense, its because I still cannot make sense of any of it myself. I just plain cannot reach a point where I can figure out what these people were thinking when this all happened.

I've talked to our agency therapist and felt somewhat better but... I suppose I'm just looking for some empathy from others who know how vulnerable we as adoptive parents are. All I want to do right now is celebrate the adoption and the holidays, this is just not the time in our lives or the children's lives for this to be happening. And as I say that I remember that my signature has Ecclesiastes 3: 1-9 and begins "There is a time for everything..." How ironic is that?