I have a dry erase board hanging by my desk. Down in the right corner I have my most-important-yet-not-committed-to-memory phone numbers of girlfriends and our vet. In the lefthand corner is the mailing address for our local D*C*F*S, and the direct line numbers of two social workers we’ve worked with in the past few months. There’s a college football schedule for our team. (Less than three months till kickoff!) I’ve also jotted down reminders of the TV shows I want to watch, the birthdays of people we love, and when our pup and kitties get their monthly medicines.
And then there are the names: Mark, Jason, Chris – each with dates beside them. These are the beautiful children whose parents we’d love to be, and the dates that their cases go back to court.
We’re coming up on the first one of those this week – for little Mark. He was two days from moving into our home and we had to make the difficult decision to walk away from him. I’ve talked before about the situation, in as much detail as I can post on this blog. We knew going into it that he’d be a legal risk placement – that his birth family was working on getting him back. O and I vowed not to let our hearts be swept away by this child. That lasted all of about 15 minutes and we were both thoroughly hooked.
Mark fit so perfectly into our life. He seemed so happy with us and was very appropriately bonded and loving by the end of the time we spent together. Our decision to walk away was made very quickly - the result of being blindsided by something we couldn’t have anticipated. When you reach out to four knowledgeable people whom you respect and they all tell you to walk away, and when that advice mirrors your own gut instincts, you are left with very few choices.
We think of Mark every day and miss him so much but we don’t regret the choice that we made.
I was finally able to talk to Mark’s SW yesterday. I really like her – just as much as I like our SW, which is saying a lot. Mark’s birth family’s next court date is this week, and SW said she would not be at all surprised if Mark is sent home, at least on a trial basis. If you know what we do about this birth family, the idea that they would be given yet another opportunity to raise this precious child after screwing up time after time after time – well, it would make you sick.
But that may very well happen and I can tell you right now, if Mark was in our home and we were even MORE bonded to him, and MORE in love with him than we already were . . . well, I think both O and I would be absolute basket cases at this point. My stomach is turning flips just writing about the possibility of him going “home” – it would be exponentially worse if he were here. I cannot imagine.
In the past couple of months, we’ve been left to wonder why we got so close to Mark being placed with us if it was all just going to fall apart so quickly and so dramatically like it did. I haven’t been able to land on an answer, but maybe, just maybe it was to save us from an even worse heartache. Perhaps our pain and sadness then was simply saving us from even more pain and sadness now.
We made it clear to the SW that if this case does, in fact, go to TPR, we want to adopt Mark. From everything she’s said, I believe we will be strongly considered. But for now all we have is a tiny bit of hope along with a stack of photos, some really lovely memories, and a smudged name and date written down on a dry erase board.
Doesn’t seem like much, does it?
It’s not, but we’re hanging onto it with all we’ve got.
