We had planned to meet the Foster Family this weekend. We feel that Raina is ready; as much as a child could be ready for this emotional event. We had a skype session last week and Raina loved seeing everyone (the FC, FC's two children, FC's Grand daughter and another child being fostered). She has previously spoken to the FC on the telephone a couple of weeks after coming to live with us. They are still massively significant in Raina's life and she has spent the last year of her life with them. She talks about them frequently and we talk about some funny times when we were all together during introductions. Generally the tone is upbeat. Occasionally, we can feel her sadness and help her name the feeling she is having; "Raina is feeling sad because she misses ........"
We have been reading around adoption and the different schools of thought about when a child is ready for direct contact with people from their past. This served only to leave us more unsure so we searched our new parental instinct for answers about about Raina; our child - the individual child; rather than a child from a text book or manual. We feel she needs to see them to know on a basic level that they are OK. In a way telephone contact and Skype did go some way to doing this but not enough. We feel that it could help her to realise the permanency of her forever family. We hope that by seeing us all together she will see that fundamentally they 'approved' of us and of her leaving and that we didn't just take her from them. We don't anticipate an easy time afterwards. In fact, we expect an initial backlash; we know it will happen but that it will pass in time and that we will need to be patient and on hand to try and help Raina name her feelings (we have experienced similar 'fall-out' after the telephone call <3 days of fall out> and skype <1.5 days fall out>).
Today we have felt the handbrake being applied to our journey. We told our SW about our plans and she told us in no uncertain terms that this should not happen. We have a fairly open relationship with our SW and tell her most things; we are naturally like this and always have been with with her (perhaps naively so?) As we also mentioned the Skype session and immediately felt like we were at school being told off by the teacher. She consulted with Raina's SW and then rang us to confirm. Ruth called Raina's SW herself to discuss further and SW reinforced what our SW was saying. We were told that there should be no contact until the adoption order is granted. At the last LAC review, we were told that we should wait for contact with the Fosters until Raina was "really settled" and were led to believe that this would be a decision we would have the autonomy to make; as her primary carers. That's what it says on the notes from the meeting...."really settled". So now we wonder when that will be and who will be te judge of this: us or the Social Workers? This serves as a reminder that until the Adoption Order is granted we can't really make parenting decisions around things like this for our daughter. A cynic might suggest that we are being held to 'ransom' to some extent.......the SW's want us to file the Adoption Order ASAP. Perhaps, they are counting on us wanting to apply at the first opportunity after today.
So, for now, the reunion is on hold.
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