ISP Meetings

Most ISP meetings I've been involved in have been very informal. As in sitting in the cat hair and crumb infested floor of my living room informal. Once we had one mailed to the house and it said the ISP was done via telephone, but it wasn't. With one of our teenagers, we had a more formal ISP meeting held in an office at CPS. That meeting made me nervous. More nervous than the ones held after a hearing in an empty court room. But at all of them it's just me, the social worker, the kid if she is of an older age, and sometimes the birth parent if they are actively involved. You're supposed to have the therapists, doctors, family members, etc but that has yet to happen with any of our kids.

Sometimes what I say is documented, sometimes it is flat out ignored. You know when I say the child needs to work on this and that, needs this service, that documentation, and has x,y, and z strengths. Sometimes it's as if I'm speaking jibberish. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to show up at all. If the worker comes to the meeting with the paperwork already filled out, with no intention of addressing other people's recommendations, or worse yet hasn't even read the child's file, then what's the damn point in having the ISP meeting in the first place?

With Bella, we had one ISP ten days before she went home and there was no paperwork involved. We simply signed our names to a blank piece of paper. What's the point in that? Who does it help? What purpose does it serve overall in the case?

I have two ISP's this week. One makes me so nervous that I'm eating M&Ms by the pound. I'm afraid of loosing BabyBoy, not to relatives because that ship has sailed, but to a more CPS acceptable family. Meaning a two-parent, church-going, patriarchy-affirming family. Or at least one with both parents on the same page in regards to adoption. I've raised him from birth with the knowledge that he would be adoptable if no relatives stepped forward. He calls me Mama. He adores The Daughter and she adores her baby brother. I promised the birth parents that it would be me who adopted BabyBoy, and I meant it, otherwise they would have fought TPR even longer. To take him away now would be devastating and life altering to many people involved. But the case now has a new worker, an adoption worker, who comes with ideals of her own, judgments of her own, and it is ultimately she who gets to make decisions. She holds all the power. Gosh please let me find a job and fast. Please let this worker be understanding and compassionate. Please, please let BabyBoy be mine legally.