M's mother had her final visit. Beforehand, the supervisor confessed she'd never done a "goodbye visit" before and was a little apprehensive of how things would go. Well, in addition to wondering if the parents would actually show up this time....
They showed up. And it was....odd. The supervisor said it was just like any other visit, except for a couple comments made by M's mother that showed she understood what the surrender meant. (Specifically, a comment was made about "I know I'm not her mother anymore"...Just typing that breaks my heart.) She sent us some expired baby food.
We're still waiting on DNA results for the supposed father. They are long overdue, but the county's Powers That Be have decided that DNA testing will all be done "in-house" from now on, so they didn't renew their contracts with any of the providers that used to do the processing for them. But they haven't trained the staff on how to actually do it in-house, so there is only one office that is processing all the DNA requests for the entire county for any governmental reason. (That is, it does parent-child DNA matches for foster care, but also for custody disputes and child support cases and anything else that a court might be involved in.) Guess what? They're a little backed up. Sigh. (Why is it so hard for a government agency to make sure the tools for a new procedure are in place before cutting off the option of using the old procedure? It's called a "transition strategy.")
So, mom is legally out of the picture and on record as saying that she would like M to stay with us.
Dad is still in a holding pattern.
M is nearly 6 months old and we still don't know for sure who her daddy is.
Welcome to foster care.
No comments:
Post a Comment