Now She Wants Him for Christmas

Where Do I Draw the Line?

Let me explain a little to you about what my 3-year-old means to me. I tried for years to have a baby and couldn't. I was one of those rare statistics who would never have my own children. Then I started doing foster care, and hoping to adopt one day. Well, in foster care, you can't hope for a baby. You almost never get to have a newborn, or near newborn, and keep them long enough to adopt. They usually go home. The ones you'll be able to adopt will be older than 5 years old 90% of the time.

I was resigned to this. I was OK with this. I'd learned to handle my own inability, and I'd learned that you can love a child just as much when you first meet them at age 2 or 4 or 15 as you do when you bond with them at birth. When the social worker called me that fateful morning, September 3rd, 2003, and asked if I'd take a newborn baby born addicted to meth, I was pretty excited. They NEVER called me with newborns. Of course I'd take him. She told us he had an older brother who lived with his grandmother (who was not this child's grandmother), and that it looked like they were going to terminate the mom's rights because she'd never done anything to get the older brother back. Wow. Now, of course, no promises. These cases take twists and turns and take you down roads you didn't even know existed, and almost never turn out like everyone expected them to.

This was one of those cases. Two years, to the day, later, mom got both boys back. She'd had another baby by now, but had given that one up for adoption. During this time, we'd worked with her a lot, so we have a good relationship with her, and she promised to never take him from our lives. And she didn't. In fact, two weeks after she got custody and the state vacated the case, he was back at our house. He was there for a "visit". Well, the visits were getting longer and longer, and his time home with mom and brother shorter and shorter. Brother wasn't even there most of the time, he was sent to his other grandmother to live. It was becoming more and more apparent that mom couldn't really handle being a mom. She was more like an aunt. Then she had her fourth baby, and decided to raise this one with it's father. But that only lasted a few months. And on my baby's 3rd birthday, she asked me to adopt him.

She has a hard time handling day to day life and staying sober, and finally realized she couldn't do all that and raise three children...or even one child. So she's giving them all up. I'm trying to get the funds together to get my home study updated so I can get the ball rolling on adopting my baby. It's slow going, I can't quite do it yet. So right now he lives with me, but there's no legal arrangement, and mom still has all legal rights and custody. It hasn't been too bad yet, and I have no problem keeping this open and letting her spend some time with him. But now I have a problem. In all his three years, mom has NEVER spent Christmas with him. She's had the opportunity for the last two years, but didn't want to. She called the other day and TOLD us she was taking him from the 22nd to the 25th out of town to spend Christmas with her mom. WHAT? I can't do anything. I don't have any legal rights yet. I tried to win the lottery a few months ago so I could get this adoption done, but that fell through. She doesn't understand that we have always been his family, and always will be, and he's already looking forward to seeing all his cousins and aunts and uncles, and now he won't get to see them. There's nothing I can do about it. Please pray for my baby.

Merry Christmas to everyone!! Don't forget to donate, it's never too late!!