Much Ado About Nothing

This is definitely not the post I wanted to write tonight. I'm sad and angry. And what's worse, our girls have experienced the neglect of our system in the past few days. That really makes this mama bear want to roar. Here's the short synopsis of the past few days: as ordered by the judge, the girls had an unsupervised visit with the biological grandmother (gm) on Thursday. It was several hours shorter than it should have been because gm simply left and said she "was done". M (age 4) cried the rest of the afternoon. Then Saturday rolled around and gm was supposed to keep them overnight. She picked them up from their foster mom and left. She was back 2 hours later. Pulled up to their house with both girls in the car with their car seats unbuckled AND with their biological mother (the BM as I fondly call her) in the car!!!! Now, not only is it crazy that she brought them back early and they were unsafe in the car, this woman has sworn up and down that she has no relationship with the BM and that the girls would not be around her if she adopted them! Not to mention the fact that there is a restraining order in effect against the BM stating she is not to be within 100 yard of the girls without court supervision. GM had no explanation for why she decided not to keep them all night.  This time, not only did M cry all evening, but she started having potty accidents, which she has not had in weeks.

The silver lining in all of the mess with the weekend visit was supposed to be that when GM went to court this morning to give an update about the visitations and ask for permanent custody of the girls, the social worker and the girls' attorney would be armed with the reports from their foster mom. She has essentially sealed her fate by breaking 2 laws in the course of one visit. There's little question that a judge will look at that and dismiss her as a fit parent. Here's the kicker, though. Because this all happened over the weekend, foster mom had to rely on the fact that the social worker's and attorney's are supposed to check their e-mail and voice mails before court. Neither of them did. So, now, we don't know if grandma even showed up for court and if so, what she told the judge. I could go for days on our ridiculous system and how these girls are getting shuffled around like pets, at best. But, I don't have it in me to rant.

Please, please pray with us that our girls will not EVER have to go back to this woman's house. Please pray that their social worker and attorney will take this latest evidence to the judge ASAP. And, please pray that the judge will see this woman for what she really is and close the case. They need to be done. They need to be home. No one deserves to be bounced around like that, especially not our M and A.