From Fostering to Grandparenting- Navigating the Complex Paths of Love, Loss, and Resilience

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Step into the deeply emotional and compelling story of a family who chose to open their hearts and home to a 13 year old girl diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Join us as we explore the harrowing and heartwarming experiences of raising a foster daughter who became pregnant, the challenges faced, and the intricate path that led them to becoming caregivers for her baby girl, whom they now regard as their granddaughter. In this episode, we'll uncover the initial decision to become foster parents and their motivation behind it, the turbulent six months with their foster daughter and the difficult decisions that followed the heart wrenching journey through her pregnancy and their evolving relationship, their fight to adopt their granddaughter amidst a slow and cumbersome foster care system, how they've balanced their roles as caregivers with their careers, and the unique challenges faced by their own biological children.

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Listen in as this grandmother, who chooses to remain anonymous at this time, shares her candid opinions about the social services system, reflects on what they might have done differently, and discuss what can be done to better support children like their foster daughter and granddaughter.

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This is an episode you won't want to miss. It's a testament to resilience, love, and the unbreakable bonds of family.

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Welcome to grandparents raising grandchildren nurturing through adversity in this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of grandparents raising grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of legal, financial, and emotional support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings, and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma, and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care.

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Well discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future, all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you.

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Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored.

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Every one of our stories is unique, yet we often find pieces we can deeply relate to.

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Sharing these personal struggles, the legal battles and the fears we don't usually talk about can be incredibly daunting, but it also creates a stronger community and reminds us that we are not alone.

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Our stories are a powerful tool for building resilience and connection, especially for those brave enough to share them. The next story you will hear is from a grandmother who chooses to remain anonymous, but her story is one we can all learn from and one I needed to hear. I'm speaking with a mother of three, biological children.

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She's also the mother of one foster child and the grandmother of one grandchild, which she is currently raising.

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You decided to become a foster parent about ten years ago, is that right? That's correct, yes.

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And you took in a 13 year old girl who had been abandoned at behavioral health, who had been diagnosed as bipolar and who had been separated from her parents for five years when you became her foster parents? Yes, that's correct. She had been living in boarding schools and primarily those that specialized in caring for children that had been adopted and had serious behavioral health issues so that they weren't able to live in their adoptive homes. When you adopted her, you had just had the first of your three children? I had three biological children, and we actually became foster parents. So she was our first foster placement.

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Unfortunately, we never got to adopt her because we had to disrupt the placement. She was removed from your home six months after you determined that she was dangerous to herself in the. To others. Right.

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So we fostered her and had her for about six months.

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It was at the six month point after she had had another behavioral health stay that she. She was sleep deprived and was what we thought was a psychotic episode. But becoming dangerous and getting involved with people online that were dangerous. We had really hoped to find a way to maybe get her into residential treatment and continue our relationship so she could eventually come back to us. But unfortunately, we weren't able to get approval for that level of treatment. But you continued to have some connection with her during that time?

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We did. It was difficult for the first month or so after she left us, things were kind of tense, and we were encouraged not to reach out to her because we no longer had a right to speak with her since she was no longer in our home. But she eventually reached out to us again, and so we kind of reconnected, although, I mean, that was a little bit hit or miss because after a couple months, she disappeared, and she was on the missing and exploited children list. So we didn't hear from her for several months. And then eventually we did hear from her again. And she, at that point, had been placed in detention and spent about a year in detention. Was that all before she became pregnant? That was all before she became pregnant. This was at the time she was maybe a freshman in high school, and she eventually was released from detention. She did well for a couple years in a group home, and we were able to reestablish a relationship with her and returned to having visits. She would come for the weekends. We went to the background checked again. We, at that time decided not to renew our foster license, so it's not something we were doing with other kids any longer, but we had wanted to stay connected to her, and she was doing really well.

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Covid kind of threw a wrench in the works and that she was very isolated in her group home, and that was really emotionally very hard on her. But she did manage to work through it and graduated high school. But the same month that she graduated high school, she also became pregnant. It still must have been a very stressful experience for your family. It was very stressful because had she been our biological child, or if we had gotten to the point of adoption, we would have been able to make better health decisions for her. We could have controlled the treatment, controlled the medications. We believe that we could have stabilized her so that she could have remained in our home. But it's hard to get all of those services approved through dcFs. They're very limited in the providers that they have, and I think there's a hesitancy to label kids with diagnoses because it makes it difficult to place them.

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But I really do believe that we would have done better had we been able to keep her in our home and make health decisions for her. It was very traumatic for the kids. They were very attached, especially my daughter that she shared a room with. They were very attached. It was, I guess, just really, really difficult on everybody, and it had a rippling effect through all of my children, causing depression in one. And for my daughter, I think it just took a good year or two for her to get to the point where she could trust us again. In her mind, she felt like she should have had input in that decision and very betrayed. Yeah. At that point, had your daughter been diagnosed with epilepsy? Yes, she had developed epilepsy while our foster daughter was in our home.

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So it was all kind of running together. I had my foster daughter removed because we didn't get the support we needed, and we couldn't keep her in the condition she was in. My oldest became severely clinically depressed, and my daughter developed epilepsy. And my youngest went on to. He was in a special school because he's somewhat on the spectrum, and he has learning disabilities. So it was just serious challenges with all four of the kids all at one time.

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It's amazing that you had to deal with that with your own children and then cope with all that was going with your foster child, which says a lot for your commitment to do everything that you could to a child that you had chosen to bring into your home. That's quite commendable.

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How was it that you became caregivers for the grandchild that you are caring for now?

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Our foster daughter, once she got pregnant, she was moved to a group home for young mothers, and they were very kind of liberal with the rules about allowing the girls to go out, and they only had had to check in once every 24 hours. So she just kind of went and hung out at a lot of different friends places. And she met up with a guy that was not the biological father, but she decided she wanted to move in with him, and so she kind of was living with him at the same time. She was living in the group home and going back and forth between the two. We tried to be supportive. We met him, thought he.

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He had a background. He had some issues. But as long as he treated her okay, we tried to be accepting. So we maintained, you know, our visitation throughout the pregnancy. We had a baby shower and welcomed him to the baby shower. And after the baby was born, it seems like things started to kind of not go so well. He became really controlling.

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She spoke to us less and less.

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He started to become isolated. I believe he was isolating her. And she had made the decision during the pregnancy that she didn't want to take medication, her mental health meds, and went off of those. I did ask her, you know, after a few weeks after the baby was born, well, do you intend to go back on your medication?

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And that resulted in her not speaking to me for two months.

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But from there again, we reconnected, and we invited her out to our home, and it was a really nice visit.

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We were in the process of doing that again, and she told us that things were going badly, that he was becoming abusive. She was returning to her group home. There were a couple of exchanges like that, back and forth where she would go back to him, and then she would text and say, oh, he might try to call you or reach out to you. Just ignore him. I'm not with him. So it was this back and forth and back and forth and about. When our granddaughter was eight months old, we finally got the emergency call with my foster daughter.

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She was being placed in an ambulance, and she called, crying and begging for us to come pick up the baby at the police station. She was afraid that this gentleman would get his hands on her. And so I went and I drove to the police station, which was about an hour half away from us at that point. And, of course, DCFS had also been called. And so I was waiting there for a few hours for a DCFS caseworker to come and interview me and quickly background check all of us and do a quick home inspection before we were able to take her into our care. But at that point, apparently, this was not the first time DCFS was involved with the two of them. And so, yes, they said that she was our granddaughter, needed to be in protective custody, and they agreed that we could take her home.

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And what's your opinion about the way in which social services handled both the girl that you fostered and the granddaughter which you're now raising? What are the pros and cons that you experienced? I feel like with my foster daughter, I just. It was difficult, the way that she entered the system, being abandoned in a behavioral health facility, because they didn't have really any records of her. They didn't have any information, and her parents really wanted to terminate, the adoptive parents wanted to terminate their parental rights. It was what they consider a lockout.

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And so it was difficult because I don't think she got the medical care that she really needed to get. And although she was with a specialized agency that should have been equipped to deal with the mental health issues, the process of getting treatment and medication approved just, it wasn't helpful at all. And I think that we saw so many things. We had all these observations, and we had experience with mental health issues in my oldest, and so we really felt like we knew what we were talking about and what she needed, and we were really dismissed.

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So we didn't feel, as foster parents, we didn't feel valued at all. Our opinion didn't seem to matter. We had gone through Nami training, through the National alliance for the mentally ill, and we went through the parent parental training, and it was a really good program, and we really did feel well equipped to help her. And they just seemed to.

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It didn't matter. Nothing we had to say mattered.

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So I feel her case after that was just not handled well. You know, to go missing, to end up in detention and then to end up in a group home, that was a good group home, but for whatever reason, she didn't thrive there, and she ended up in another group home with very limited, very few rules, and she seemed to just be in a downward spiral from there. I think she is worse off today, far worse off than when she entered the system at age 13. And you and your husband are both employed and educated. You're in human resources, your husband is in project management. There would be, it sounds like you had the information that you needed to make some educated decisions, but you felt like that was not that you weren't listened to? No, not at all. We weren't listened to at all? No. That's too bad.

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Hindsight. I know hindsight is 2020. What would you have done differently if you could have?

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Oh, I would not have done anything differently. Regarding?

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I didn't really say, take her out of my home. I said, we want her to stay, but if she's going to stay in our home, she needs more treatment. These 48 or 72 hours stays where you just turn the kids right back around. And that. That's not enough. She needs different medication. She needs sleep medication.

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She, you know, and I just kind of put my foot down. I said, either you do this or we can't keep her because I can't control her. I can't keep her safe, and I can't keep the other children in the home safe. So I would not have changed that decision. The only decision I might have changed is fostering in the first place, because I think the system is just.

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I think there are more failures than successes, and the damage to foster families is not even anywhere on anyone's radar. So when you have a child removed, um, when you have just a change in placements, even if it's planned or reunification, any of those things or any of the trauma or just the stuff that leaks on to the birth children in the home, there aren't really any resources to help them navigate. And. And when that relationship ends, you just kind of drown in your own sadness and depression and. And, you know, foster children may have a difficult time attaching to you and your kids, but that's not true of your own children. They don't have attachment issues, so they become very attached. Would you say it's different in different states, or would you say that that's your feeling across the board about working with foster organizations?

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I would say. I think that's the way it is across the board. Our particular state is not good in terms of the amount of time children spend in foster care. They spend too much time in foster care.

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I think the red tape is worse here. I know that the network of health providers, that there are issues here with the children really have limited access for specialized care.

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My foster daughter also had an eating disorder that she was never able to get treatment for because there were no beds available, and so she became pregnant, and at that point, they weren't going to continue to look for treatment for an eating disorder, stay. So there just seemed to be, in so many ways, just ill equipped to manage the needs of the kids.

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And how do you feel this has affected your granddaughter.

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What are you experiencing as her parents?

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Well, I think the impact to her, when we first got her, she was very kind of rigid and not really engaging. She seemed more interested in her surroundings than people.

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She didn't cry for us. She would wake up in her crib and just sit up and look around and look for things to do in the crib. I mean, so she, she, there was just like a disconnect, like a social disconnect. She didn't expect to have any response, didn't look for it, didn't expect it. And she's, today, she's after, she's been with us 21, 22 months. So it's very different today. She's been with us almost, what, I don't know, 60, 65% of her life. So she's, you know, very happy and communicates well, speaks well because it's basically her and four adults and very spoiled little thing. But there's still, you know, there's still some behavioral issues surrounding visits.

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They're not serious, but visits there, she seems to be, acts out a little bit right before the visit because she kind of knows just the routine and me getting the diaper bag ready and, you know, all those things. And when she, when I'm driving her home, you know, she'll throw things in the car and throw fits and be demanding, and that kind of continues for the rest of the day. So I see that. And it's really hard to, to judge. She seems to enjoy the visits while she's there, so I think they're important and, you know, I'm glad we're doing them. I just, I just don't know what the overall goal is really going to be because I don't see the mothers really changing her lifestyle so that her daughter can return to her.

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I just don't see it.

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Well, it sounds like she's made a lot of improvements since she's been with you, and she seems to be a happy child from the photos that I've seen.

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Yeah, I think so. I think she likes her daycare. She's happy here. She has her own room and her own toys. You know, she has, she has a grandma and pop pop and, you know, she has her aunt and her uncle that live here that spoil her and lots of pets and chickens and goats.

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And she loves being outside.

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So it's very hard to look at her as happy and trusting as she is because she knows when she asks for something, she's going to get it more than likely, if it's within reason, it's just really hard to picture her back home because I know that when she was at home, she wasn't getting fed regularly. The diapering wasn't consistent.

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She spent a lot of time either locked into a car seat, you know, latched into the car seat, strapped down in a stroller or in a crib because mom was often out and about and, you know, or doing drugs in the home. And they're just, you know, she obviously wasn't in a position to parent.

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So, you know, our granddaughter was probably in a safer place just being confined to the crib or the car seat. But when we first brought her home, she just did this kind of frantic moving and crawling around and just absorbing so much. And it was hard to tell, is it because the home is so new or because she hasn't had that opportunity? And I think it's probably she did not have that opportunity to safely, you know, cruise around a house like. Like an eight month old would do. Yeah. Yeah.

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Well, thanks for sharing your story. I really do appreciate it. I know there are others that are listening that feel the same. It's important that we have an opportunity to share our stories, and some of us need to, obviously, remain anonymous because of the legal situations that we're in and the relationships with other members of the family and the child's family. So I do appreciate your candidacy and your sharing. Okay, well, thank you so much.

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Thanks so much for joining us today for another episode of grandparents raising grandchildren. Nurturing through adversity. I encourage you to share your challenges and your successes with us. Your story is undoubtedly one someone else needs to hear.

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You can submit your stories to the links provided in the podcast information. Your contributions will enrich upcoming conversations, creating a more supportive community in which we can learn and grow together. If you enjoyed this show, please share it with a friend that needs to hear. And if you love the show and you're listening on a broadcasting platform like Apple or Spotify, just scroll down in your app and please leave us a review in our next episode. We're excited to welcome Katherine Cleveland, a seasoned, licensed mental health counselor with a doctorate in counseling education. Catherine has dedicated her career to promoting mental health and well being, especially for grandparents raising grandchildren. Join us as she delves into the wisdom of her latest book, the four Pillars of Boundary setting, and shares invaluable strategies for navigating complex family dynamics. We'll be exploring the key pillars that form the foundation for effective boundary setting, how grandparents can manage interpersonal family complexities while being role models, empowering children facing challenging family situations through effective boundary setting. Kathryn will also guide us through the emotional intricacies and practical applications of maintaining healthy boundaries, touching on personal values, mutual respect, consequence, incorporation, and the hurdles of self sabotage. Don't miss this episode filled with actionable insights, real world examples, and transformative advice for building resilience and fostering deeper connections in your family. Tune in to gain the tools you need to thrive as a caregiver and inspire the young lives you are nurturing. Thank you for tuning in to grandparents, raising grandchildren. Nurturing through adversity remember, you are not alone.

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Together we can find strength and hope in the face of adversity. Peace be with you, and I pray that you find some time this week to listen to your inner wisdom amongst the noise and the pandemonium of this world.