How I got my girls.

Around January 2004 my son was settling into first grade and things were pretty calm around the house. I took my wife out to some Italian place for her birthday.

I had an idea rolling around in my mind, the way ideas normally do. I got a couple of glasses of pinot noir in my gullet, and said to my wife, "I've got something to ask you"

I don't normally speak this way, but I figured what I had was important enough to preface it with something other than "hey guess what..."

I said "do you still want a daughter?" "Because if you do, lets go get one before we get too old."

Needless to say, she almost swallowed her chicken Marsala down the wrong pipe.

She asked if I was serious, I thought what the hell?, I was up for a challenge. and said "yep"

The next day, we called the Texas human services people and told them what we wanted to do. They told us that since we last adopted 6 years earlier things had changed and we would have to be re-certified.

When we drove down to get the paperwork, the social worker that had hooked us up with our son had been promoted to head of the department. She went ahead and waived the requirement for new classes and just had us go to a one day seminar.

The seminar was filled with people trying to get on the foster care gravy train. Each foster family gets 20 to 25 bucks a day for each kid they take, up to six kids. More money is allotted for emergency placements. This adds up to almost 6k a month when you include WIC, other stipends and reimbursements.

We got through our class even though they treated us like dog shit, because we were unwilling to foster. I'm sorry miss foster cow feeding from the displaced urchin trough, I am unwilling to care for and get attached to a child just to have him or her sent back to a crack addicted prostitute mother who left her 2 year old child at a bus stop while she screwed for drugs.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good foster families out there that do it out of love. However, all I could see that day were people who wanted 6 grand a month for sitting at home while the foster kids went to school.

My wife and I filled out the forms and paperwork, got the house ready for inspection, got re-fingerprinted and waited. We stated that we would consider a sibling group of up to three and we we could handle most problems relating to neglect.

About 4 months went by with no call so we called our friend at the department and asked her what the fuck. They supposedly have oodles of kids out there waiting for homes. This lady bless her heart had given us priority, but the inept social worker assigned to us had lost our file and never followed up.

Immediately, we were called in to look at a case file for two sisters both 4 years old.

The files on these girls were literally 4 feet tall. Some poor schmuck at the human services department had to go through each page, photocopy it and black out the personal info of the shit family who chose drugs over their children.

We had to read and sign each page. This took about 4 hours.

We were then allowed to go meet the girls and see what we thought.

We went across town to a new neighborhood and met the foster family. They seemed nice enough. They had three of their own kids and 5 foster kids.

The girls were cute and happy to meet us. I noticed that they were tiny for their age, they were both 4 years old born 9 and 1/2 months apart. They were exactly the same size and weighed 26 pounds each.

They looked pale and malnourished, I could see that the older one had lost her front teeth due to bottle rot and the younger one had silver caps over almost all of hers. Their hair had been cut off due to parasites and had barely grown to ear length, I assumed they had just been removed from their biological mother. The oldest couldn't talk, partially due to the neglect and partially due to the dental problems. The youngest translated for her sister, Very weird.

Turns out they had been in foster care for an entire year.

There was something seriously wrong with this picture.

After a visit or two, we were allowed to take them out to eat. We took them to McDonald's and let them play in the plastic tubes. My son took to them immediately.

The girls wolfed down their chicken nuggets and fries like they had never eaten before, hugged us and begged us not to make them go back to "Jackie's" (their foster mom.)

This was disturbing and heart wrenching, but we had to follow the rules and we reluctantly took them back.

We visited daily for about a week until we were allowed to have them over to spend the night at our home.

My wife had redone the spare bedroom, it didn't take much because it was already set up as a girls room with dolls and various girl stuff, (that's how I knew she wanted daughters).

The girls about shit themselves when they saw their room. Filled with toys, new clothes and furniture.

It was really tough taking them back to Jackie's after that. We called the social worker and pleaded with her to speed up the process. Turns out she was being bullied by the foster mom not to let our girls go until they had replacement kids for their home.

Fucking assholes. These greedy pricks did not give one rats ass about these kids, they didn't talk to them, feed them properly, teach them or take them to their assigned speech pathologist.

They cashed the checks and forced their 12 year old foster child "Ellen" to take care of the two four year olds. I found this out after they slipped and called the 12 year old "mom".

Finally, the day came and we were to take the girls home for good. The foster parents were supposed to drop them off for the final goodbye, When they arrived they brought the girls, two dirty torn up dolls and a garbage sack of miscellaneous tube socks that didn't even belong to them. Over the course of a year these girls were not given one toy, one dress or even a pair of shoes.

These fucking shit fuckers could not get out of our house fast enough. They looked like they had fire ant's biting their hemmoroids the way they squirmed.They knew they were busted when we asked where all of their toys were.

I asked whereabouts of the dolls and toys we had given them. The piece of shit foster mom said,"Oh the girls gave that stuff to us" I about went through the roof. But I held my tongue until the hand off was complete.

I tried to tell the social worker about all the shit we saw, but she was such a worthless passive do-nothing and we couldn't get her to take any action. We went up the ladder and were basically told as long as the foster family gives food and a bed the system was too overloaded to make waves.

But at least we were through the rough part, or so we thought.....

Stay tuned for the next installment.