Speaking of Screaming...

One May night a woman was wandering around in a San Meradino graveyard clutching an eight-month old baby. The woman already had several children in the foster care system. When they had been taken away she had not attempted to work a program or show up for court sessions or for visits. She would not sign relinquishment papers. Now it was happening all over again. She had previously been arrested for possession of narcotics and opium pipes, and when the police picked her up in the graveyard she was babbling incoherently. Her child’s name was Gabriela.

How do you say no to a story like that? Mary called me at work and before she was even done telling the story I said yes. Let’s take her. Gabriela, or Ella, as we liked to call her was cute, had bright, jet-black eyes and was practically bald. She was a “tiny little thing.” I hate that phrase, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw her. We despaired making it through the first night with her in the house. Ella had rough and tumble coping skills (re: parent harassment skills).

Small but mighty, she never seemed afraid. She screamed at night, but that was because she didn’t want to go to bed. We had read that if you want to sleep through the night with a bed screamer that the cure takes about four days. You have to let them do some crying at night until they get used to going to bed on their own.

This is harder than it sounds. Baby crying has a chilling, insidious, hypnotic effect. It demands obedience, but sometimes you have to be strong and fight it. She cried herself to sleep while I paced and pretended not to notice. After about twenty minutes of hard work: screeching, bawling and moaning she was asleep. She survived, and so did we.

Speaking of screaming, babies have limited social skills, but when they learn a trick, and it works, they remember it and live by it. Ella had those intense eyes and a driven look behind them and wasn’t afraid to yelp. Screaming was more her style than crying. She also had a wonderful smile.

Ella started showing more and more personality. She loved the swing, the pouch and playing peek-a-boo. Her first real word was boo. Mary would sometimes bring her to my school at lunch and she always grinned when she saw me. She had the ability to turn my lousy mood into a good mood.

Our granddaughter, Elizabeth, learned quickly that Ella was a threat. Elizabeth’s dad, Adam, noticed Ella right away. He wanted another baby and was panicked that his wife, Jessica, would have another difficult birth like she had with Elizabeth—Elizabeth who had survived the placental cord around her neck and had seen beyond the grave. “That’s a pretty baby,” Adam said as soon as he met Ella. He went home and told his wife about the new little girl. They began visiting more often with increasing frequency.

Mary has a way of being evangelistic. Shortly after we did the FAP (Foster Adoptive Parents) training to become foster parents Adam and Jessica went through the training too. Not content to just dabble in altruism and change the basic sordid, selfish principles of the universe, Mary had talked her hapless relatives into the same insanity. That meant that they could take care of Ella. Adam acted quickly and had himself named as Ella’s Continuing Care provider. That meant she could legally spend the night at their house. This was crucial from a legal standpoint. Adam was scheming.

Gabriela began spending a couple of days a week at their house. Elizabeth was engaged in a love/hate relationship with her. She was jealous, of course, and she could muster up quite the look of resentment when she saw her, but it didn’t last long.

One day Elizabeth walked up to her mom and, out of the blue, said, “I have a best friend.”

“Who’s your best friend?” her mom asked.

“Ella.”

Adam and Jessica filed for de facto parent status for Gabriela and were granted their request.

You would think that might make the adoption workers at CPS happy. No, it didn’t. We’d stepped on their toes and invaded their turf. There is always a waiting list of parents who want to adopt infants and the adoption workers in charge objected to anyone who tried to jump ahead in line.

Then, came the letter writing war. The adoption workers wrote a letter to God’s representative on earth, the juvenile court judge. It boiled down to something like this:

We, the good people at Social Services, believe Adam and Jessica were deceitful and trying to move ahead of others who have been waiting longer to adopt. They do take good care of Gabriela, however.

Mary and I wrote a letter on her son’s behalf. We gushed about Jessica and Adam’s work as respite care providers and how their daughter wanted Ella to be her sister and her best friend. I can be schmaltzy when I have to be.

It simmered, boiled over and took what seemed like forever, but the judge finally made a decision and granted the magical, near-royal status to Adam and Jessica. A light came forth from heaven and shone on Adam and Jessica as they were granted the honor of becoming the concurrent planning family! Their hopes and dreams had come true. So had ours.

Concurrent planning family is a term used by social services agencies when they have a potential adoptive family lined up and the mother is not legally out of the picture. (Not yet, but by gum—it’s looming on the horizon). Gabriela’s mother was in the “doing God knows what” category—she hadn’t had a visit, wasn’t trying to work towards reunification and was no longer part of her child’s life. You might think that the courts would immediately sever the legal ties between mother and daughter. Nope! They didn’t even wrap things up in less than the magical six months date.

According to official policy an infant is supposed to stay in the foster care system for six months maximum! That’s it! Time’s up! If the parent hasn’t gotten their act together by the magic date of six months, then by gum, they lose their parental rights and for the good of the child they get placed in a fost-adopt home and start their lives anew while they are young enough to be left relatively unscarred by the experience. It took eight months to get a TPR (Termination of Parental Rights). In their defense judges don’t want to get overturned on appeal so they bend over backwards to show that they gave the parents a fair opportunity.

After the legal smoke had cleared, we officially transferred her to the care of Adam and Jessica. (About a year later the adoption was finalized. You go into a time warp whenever you deal with custody battles).

She stayed in the family and we never had to say goodbye.