Within 24 hours Beth had Kyle completely wrapped around her little finger. He went from dead-set against the idea to so “charmed” he was undermining my efforts to get her straightened out! Beth called him “Bob” and “Santa Claus.” He went around the house moaning that she didn’t like him and didn’t know his name. Of course, one of Beth’s many control battles in her first home was language… she barely spoke to her first adoptive family. Within a month in our family she was talking in long sentences…sounding just like Carol Channing!


We had Beth evaluated by Liz Randolph. She assessed Beth at the emotional age of 21 months (the age of her first adoptive family’s on-target birth child.) In our temporary housing situation I cannot readily lay my hands on that paper, but I remember it assessed Beth as one very disturbed child. I know my husband was wondering if we had just signed up for another long, expensive journey…


We attempted to finalize Beth’s adoption by channeling it through our state social services. We knew it was a HUGE risk to do so, but we hoped to get her identified as a special-needs child and perhaps acquire a subsidy for her. Again, we knew the chances of being successful at this were slim to none, but we had spent unbelievable amounts of money thus far on disturbed kids. This idea was even more compromised by the fact that social services didn’t like me at all because I advocated for families and talked about attachment, of all things…


We hired an attorney to walk us through the paperwork. When he started dealing with social services, he asked me what on earth I had done to these people, as they hated me so much! Our local social services department called the guardian ad litem for Beth and harassed him constantly to visit their office and read the huge file documenting my unsuitability for parenting Beth. He finally did, just to shut them up. He stated they were on a witch hunt, as everything in my file was 4-5 years old and related to Amy and Tommy, and nothing had ever been substantiated.


Undeterred, social services approached the Assistant District Attorney and demanded he file charges against us directly. He contacted our attorney and said if we could get a homestudy completed in a week, he would have the grounds to ignore social services. So, we paid extra money and spent the Thanksgiving holiday with a social worker… she wrote a glowing homestudy for us!

To be continued...