The Bailey Brag

With a large cup of coffee in hand I am diving head first into day 3 of working on my autobiography. One of our requirements to foster parent is writing an autobiography of ourselves. This to me is the biggest mountain I have to climb throughout this entire process. Check, please! I would easily take 10 more weeks of classes to avoid this task. And why on earth I am even rushing to get it completed I don’t know because getting Jason to sit down and devote time to his own will take me no less than a year. We are just so close. We were handed our certificates a little more than a week ago for completing PATH = Parents as Tender Healers. It was a nice 10 week course chock full of discipline talks (mostly about what we are NOT allowed to perform) and sexual abuse in children and separation and loss…you name it, we discussed it. Very, very sad tales and all very true. All we lack is a med administration/First Aid class this Monday followed by a CPR course next Monday. I already know this to be true, but they must be in grave need of foster parents at the present moment because the emails between our course instructor and our FPSW (Foster Parent Support Worker) have already been flying to get our home study scheduled. This cannot take place until we have finished PATH, which we have, and we also must provide proof of the Med & CPR courses but they are going forward with scheduling our home study anyway in an effort to speed things along. For the last 10 or so weeks we have spent no less than three hours a week with 8 other couples. Out of the nine of us, only two of us were there to become foster parents. The rest were there for kinship purposes meaning they already have custody of children of family members in their home and the state requires they go through all the same training as a couple wanting to foster parent. So for all the hard work and hours put in by the two instructors to teach this class and certify all these folks, all they are really gaining to benefit are two homes for children and only as many spaces in each of our homes to fullfil the 6 child max per house. This is only 3 open spots for us, 2 open spots for the other family (they have 4 children already). The kinship families are not looking to foster, they already have children in their home that they didn’t ask for and most are grudgingly doing it because they feel they don’t have a choice and do not have a heart to foster parent even though they now have all the necessary training. This saddens me that this ratio exists and this is only one class. There is a class which takes place nearly every night of the week at other locations and what if only 2 out of 9 of those were becoming open homes for needy children. I have heard the statistic many times throughout this process about how there are at all times in our state alone several hundred children needing to be placed in foster care but there aren’t enough homes. Hence my push to get my autobiography complete. I have not come close to finishing all the other necessary paperwork to complete our four inch binder such as providing necessary vaccination records for all our pets in the home and financial forms to prove we are financially stable and not desiring to “foster for the money”. Really, who could make a living off of what the state pays you anyway? About $20 a day? Seriously. I welcome that money to help buy formula as I dread that cost. We thank God we did not have to buy formula for any of our boys with the exception of only a few months for River before he turned 1. What an expense. The rest of the necessary paperwork I could compile in a days time. It’s all here….somewhere. So why am I blogging instead of working on my autobiography? Well….I love to write but SO needed a break. I don’t like to spill my emotions and this is forcing to me while puting it all on paper at the same time. I don’t like the idea of having all this on paper, either. I am trying not to write very tangentally and always focusing on staying on subject but they really do ask questions that make you want to pour your heart out. Example:

3. Description of your family

Father –

• Describe your father in his role as a parent:

1.   What is his age, his health at present, and his present occupation?
2. Which qualities stand out?
3. Was he available to you as a child?
4. What was his personality like?
5. Has that personality changed?
6. What about emotionally?

• Describe your relationship with your father.
• How did he most often discipline you? How did you react? Has this affected your goals regarding discipline?
• How did he handle sex education?
• Describe ad evaluate your father in his role as a husband.
• What do you remember most about him while you were growing up?
• If anything could be changed about your relationship with your father, what would it be?
• What challenges did your family face?
• How does he feel about fostering or adoption?

Wow. And that is just all about my father and those questions only take up half of one of the six pages of questions provided. Man. If you are reading this and you really know me and you mildly know my father, then you know how hard all of this is for me. How does he feel about fostering? Well, who knows. He never shares his true feelings about anything, he never has. His “love language” is – “Pester the crap out of your kids and always say and do the opposite of what you know to be the right thing to do and that will tell them that you love them or that you are sorry without actually having to say those three little words”…all he has said to me about us fostering has been “How come you want more kids, don’t you have enough mouths to feed? Ain’t you got enough bills to pay? Ain’t you got enough kids to take care of already?” It’s alright, dad. I know that YOU know we are doing the right thing….finding a need and offering help…you just can’t mutter the right words. So, obviously, I am not being completely truthful in my autobiography because DCS would not take those comments spoken by my dad to mean what I know they mean. I can read through them…I have had 32 years to practice that. And I wouldn’t want to mislead DCS and make them think we are not “fit” enough parents to bring someone else’s baby who was likely born addicted to crack into our home. Oh the irony of it all.