![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
State of the Nation 2018
In which I am not actually going to discuss the state of the nation, because that would be depressing beyond words and might lead to me spitting nails at the world in general, so perhaps this post would be better titled 'the state of my life in 2018', but that doesn't sound as good.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I made a resolve to be better at blogging here but have so far failed miserably, so as the end of the year is fast approaching I thought I'd try to put together a round-up of my year, for my own sake as much as anything else. I haven't talked about a lot of this stuff online as it was happening, but I think I need to get it out and recorded coherently, for my own reference. Feel free to read or ignore as the mood strikes you
2018 has been a challenging year in many ways, with lots going on in various areas of my life.
Let's start with work. It's been an interesting year for my team. An interesting several years for my team, in fact, with staff and workload changes that have been ongoing for the last two years or so. The biggest change this year came about when my closest friend in the team decided to hand in her notice after returning from maternity leave just over a year ago. My boss and her line manager, in their wisdom, decided to use this gap in the team to solve some of their own workload problems by introducing a new layer of line management, creating a new team manager position instead of replacing the lower grade admin officer role. This new team manager role was set two grades up from us in the admin team, so it was clear from the start that it was not seen as a development opportunity for anyone within the team. In fact, I was specifically told that I was not eligible to apply because I have no line management experience, despite satisfying every other criterion, including having effectively functioned as my manager's right-hand-person for several years already. I have always been the all-rounder of the team, familiar with all areas of our work, and have spent years cultivating strong relationships with various other teams and departments, all of which would be immensely valuable in the role. But no. Not a development opportunity. Not eligible to apply.
I might not have minded if they'd actually hired someone decent for the job, but the bloke they've brought in…well, he's pleasant enough, I suppose. But he's never worked in the public sector before, so has found that a hugely difficult adjustment, and having worked with him for six months now, I am 100% certain he blagged his way into the role and doesn't actually have anything like the management experience he claims. He has made a lot of, quite frankly, rookie mistakes, alienating the team early on in ways he has yet to fully recover from.
Six months down the line, this is the most un-managed I have felt since I started here, almost ten years ago. Also the most disconnected from the rest of the team I've felt in as many years. We no longer have team meetings to touch base with one another – we barely even have one-to-ones to discuss our own workload with the boss, set goals, assign priorities, monitor objectives, etc. New Boss doesn't take the slightest bit of interest in what I do, in fact I'm not convinced he has any actual idea what I do, while the creation of his role has cut me off from whole areas of work I have always up till now been a part of – instead of his job replacing the areas of work my former colleague was involved with, it has ended up effectively absorbing part of my role, leaving me with the scraps of both. As a result, my area of work is beginning to become quite narrow and isolated from the rest of the team, which has been a bit of a sharp and shocking turnaround from the position I was in six months ago, as the all-rounder who did a bit of everything. He keeps doing administrative tasks he should be delegating, and does them badly because he hasn't checked the correct process and never bothers to ask or discuss. He is awful at communication, really awful.
My last one-to-one is case in point there, in fact. It was in November and we hadn't met since August. First of all, he sprung it on me because he'd forgotten to actually send the appointment, so I had no idea he thought he'd scheduled this meeting. Then to make up for springing the meeting on me, he decided to take me down the road to a coffee shop instead of one of our meeting rooms, but failed to properly explain this – I ended up having to leave a freshly made cup of tea behind, and then in the coffee shop when I asked for a cup of tea, he misheard and ordered me a cappuccino. So then I felt really awkward and felt I had to try to drink it just to be polite. And I really, really hate coffee. And then it turned out to be a completely useless meeting anyway, totally unproductive!
One of his major objectives was to set up a new E&D committee, which he has done…but in a very half-hearted way, as if he's not really all that bothered (in fairness, most things that he does seem to be half-hearted) – and honestly, in what world is a straight white man the right person to appoint to run an E&D group anyway? He's English, which wouldn't matter except that he has already exhibited prejudice against the Welsh language on multiple occasions just within my earshot – when as chair of the E&D group, protecting and promoting the Welsh language is explicitly one of his duties. And, you know, as chair of the E&D committee, you are either committed to E&D or you are not, you don't get to pick and choose which of the protected characteristics you are willing to support!
It is always a risk, hiring people from industry to come and work at the uni – they usually go one of two ways. They either quickly burn out and leave, or surrender and become one of us. I'm not convinced this bloke is going to last. He's just so…wishy-washy, and really whingy about everything. And my tolerance for trying to train and manage him is severely limited, because he is two grades above me and I was not permitted to apply for his role as a development opportunity, so why should I do any part of his job for him on my lesser salary? It just makes me feel like a mug, because I held this team together for two years while we were critically short-staffed, I was juggling three jobs for large swathes of time during those two years, and now it feels like I've taken a huge step backward instead of being allowed to develop further.
And that was a lot of ranting about my new boss! Sorry, folks. So work is pretty frustrating at the moment. I have taken refuge in aggressively pursuing training – currently halfway through a Springboard Women's Development Programme, which is fairly interesting, although so far involves a lot more naval-gazing than I normally indulge in.
Within the family, there has been a hell of a lot going on this year, much of which I can't really talk about in detail, for various reasons. Even to summarise means delving into a lot of complex 'backstory', as a reminder for old friends and primer for those who haven't known me as long.
Long story short, I have three siblings. I am number two, with an older sister D and younger brother S, and my parents later adopted a much younger sister C, after initially providing respite foster care facilitated through Barnardos. C was damaged both by her mother's drug taking during pregnancy and by early life trauma (her alcoholic father punched her in the face repeatedly when she was just a few weeks old). Early on it was known that she had a cleft palate and glue ear, learning disability and associated speech & language disorder, and she was later diagnosed as autistic phenotype. So she has had a difficult life, with one thing and another. At 18 she fell pregnant by a boy she'd been in an on-off relationship with for four years – at first all the signs were positive, they really looked like they were going to make it…but after a difficult pregnancy and frankly horrific childbirth experience, everything kind of fell apart, including the relationship. The baby's father is a complete waste of space and these days rarely even bothers to ask how his daughter is from week to week, never mind stir himself to actually visit her.
C was never formally diagnosed with post-natal depression, in the main because whenever she actually saw a health professional she would deliberately paint on a positive face and say whatever she thought they wanted to hear, rather than admit the truth, but that is almost certainly what she has been suffering from these past three years. She has always been intensely vulnerable to bad influences, attracts them like iron filings to a magnet – in this condition she has been more vulnerable than ever.
I won't go into the nitty gritty of the last three years and the things that have happened. Suffice it to say that things got very bad there for a while, and my mum and dad, despite being in their late 60s, ended up having to take over as primary carers for my niece. After the health visitor made repeated reports of child abandonment (not because the baby wasn't being looked after, but because her parents weren't the ones doing the parenting), leading to social service involvement that did more harm than good, my parents went out and hired a solicitor and went to court to obtain a child arrangement order that grants them legal guardianship. Security for all concerned, or so we thought.
That was last year. C seemed to pull out of her downward spiral at that point, relieved of the obligations of parenthood, and the situation stabilised. Then in July she went into a depressive spiral and threatened to kill herself with a knife, she had the two-year-old in the room with her at the time and was clinging to her crying, saying she wanted to say goodbye. So my mum panicked that she actually might harm herself, or the baby by accident, and called the police. But by the time they bothered to attend, hours later, everything had been resolved already – C was calm again and the baby was in bed fast asleep. The officers who attended said they were obliged to make a report to social services, but doubted they would take any action.
Hoo boy were they wrong. The case landed on the desk of a total jobsworth, who received a report of a vulnerable young adult with mental health problems threatening to take her own life, and decided that the appropriate way of dealing with this was to tell our parents to throw her out of the house onto the streets on pain of having her daughter taken into care and placed for adoption – and no, she was not going to offer any actual support of any kind for said suicidally depressed and intensely vulnerable young adult, she couldn't care less about that. Not her problem. She had decided to treat the incident as domestic abuse, despite the fact that the only person C actually threatened with the knife was herself, and she kept holding the threat of taking the baby away over the family's heads to force compliance with whatever demands she made. She didn't care that the stress of being so completely separated from her mother in this way created an abandonment complex that little LM still struggles with now, months down the line. She didn't care that being made homeless could easily have pushed C over the edge and cost her life. She didn't care that the measures she imposed made an already difficult situation worse instead of better for all concerned and placed great strain on the entire family. She cared only that she get a plan in place that would allow her to close the case as quickly as possible, with minimal effort expended on her behalf.
In the middle of all this, my cousin died very suddenly after a short battle with cancer, and C wasn't allowed to be in her own home to grieve with the rest of the family.
It was a very, very difficult time – this is only the bare bones outline.
On the positive side, C was taken in by the father and stepmother of one of her old school friends, and is still living with them now – it isn't ideal, but it's a roof over her head. After refusing for three years to admit the extent of her depression, the crisis gave her the sharp shock she needed to actually go to a doctor and ask for help. She is now on medication, which is slowly stabilising her mood. Having been completely disaffected from education at an early age, she has signed up for college – voluntarily placing herself in a strange environment with large groups of people she doesn't know! That's huge for her – and successfully completed her first term, passing her examinations. She has become very close to her old school friend's stepsister, who is quite frankly the most sensible friend she has ever had in her life and has become a very positive influence. All small but significant steps in the right direction.
However, although the social worker initially said we would be working toward C moving back home, she then turned around and signed the case off without taking any steps whatsoever toward making that actually happen, outright told us it wasn't to happen, end of story. Like I said, minimal effort. She had no interest whatsoever in working with the family to find a positive way forward that would be of actual benefit to all concerned. No long-term planning and no support. She just wanted to get the case closed as quickly as possible, so went for the simplest and most brutal option possible and called it job done.
So we are left in this really awkward position where C isn't allowed to be in the family home unless I (or some other third party) am also there as the designated safety person, and for C to spend a night at home in her own bed, I have to have little LM to stay with me, because they are only allowed supervised contact, which can't be overnight. We can choose to break that rule if we want, but having been forced to sign up to it, if anything goes wrong, we lose LM, simple as that. So outside of contact sessions, we have established a pattern wherein C stays away during the week and goes home at weekends, with three-year-old LM therefore staying with me every weekend (and occasional week nights, if C needs to be at home for any reason).
We were already doing occasional sleepovers, but the regular commitment of this arrangement is a pretty big change in my life! I even had LM with me on her birthday eve, so C could be at home to decorate the house for her.
How things will work out in the future is anyone's guess, but that's where we are right now.
It's not all bad. The Little'Un is great fun to hang out with. Last Saturday she chased me all over the house wearing a pirate hat and waving a cutlass, shouting, "In point of fact, I will chop off your head!" ('In point of fact' is her phrase of the moment. She got it from a CBeebies programme called Pablo, about a little boy with autism. LM really, really loves mining her favourite TV shows and movies for interesting new words and phrases. She got 'balderdash' from Peter Rabbit!). Then, tiring of playing pirate, she handed me the cutlass, placed the hat on my head, and cried out in a dramatic voice:
LM: No! I will never marry you!
Me: Hang on. What game are we playing now?
LM (beseechingly): Father, I choose Prince Ali!
Me: Ohhhhhh, we're role playing Aladdin. Got it. Wait, I'm Jafar in this scenario?
She's three now but is the size of a five year old, still very much a baby in some ways, but startlingly articulate for her age. She has always loved words, the bigger the better (dinosaur names were a particular delight to her, this summer just gone, she is better at remembering, pronouncing and identifying them than I am), and has been role-playing and inventing games based on memorable scenes from her favourite cartoons since she was just 16 months old. Kid has a bright future in fandom ahead of her!
She starts part-time nursery after Christmas – missed the September intake by less than two weeks, as a result of which there were no places available in the first choice school for the January intake, which means she has to actually walk past the school she should be going to in order to get to the one she managed to get into, which is twice the distance. Absolutely crazy.
Right, so that's the home crowd. The other thing that's going on in the family right now is my older sister D and her husband R, who are currently going through an adoption application. They had applied once before, 12 years ago when they were living in Kent. A paramedic and a special needs teacher would make ideal parents, you might think, but they were turned down at a late stage – ostensibly on health grounds, but personally, I think they were just too white, overweight and middle class for the London commuter belt. It was absolutely devastating for them.
A few years later, they ended up fostering Ray's four nephews and nieces on two separate occasions, caring for them for the better part of a year, all told – and those kids were in desperate shape at the time. Their mother S was (and is) bipolar with paranoid delusions, which wouldn't have been such a problem if she weren't also evil incarnate. She caused endless misery for D after her marriage to R just because she was jealous that her brother-in-law was building a family of his own instead of being on tap to bail his brother and her out whenever they felt in need of extra cash. One time, she faked a suicide attempt and told her very young children (then aged 5 to 14) that she was killing herself because she hated them. When her marriage broke down, she walked out on her four children without a backward glance – aside from the odd outbreak of violence and abuse. The kids regularly used to phone D&R in terror because "Mummy's trying to break the door down again." Her ex, R's brother A, had a nervous breakdown, and the kids ended up with D&R because it was that or let them be taken into care. They had to drop everything and drive from Kent to Cornwall at a moment's notice to collect the kids. All four were in bad shape – the littlest of all especially, he was six years old and doubly incontinent from sheer stress and trauma. It took months to get them stabilised and onto an even keel…and then D&R took them home to Cornwall to see their dad for Christmas, and S promptly swooped in and snatched them back, making false allegations against D&R in an attempt to press her claim. Her accusations were ultimately dismissed, but she succeeded in her aim of removing her children from their custody – yet within two weeks had dumped them back on her emotionally vulnerable ex again, because she didn't actually want them for herself, she just didn't want my sister to have them. Didn't want my sister to take her place as the mother figure she had no interest in actually being.
I am re-telling this story, eight years later, because it is relevant again now. D&R moved to Yorkshire about 18 months ago and decided the time was right to apply to adopt once again. After everything that had happened, it took huge courage to open themselves up to potential hurt again, but they want a family of their own, and Yorkshire is crying out for adoptive parents, so they decided to try. Now, I actually think my sister's health is in worse shape now than it was 12 years ago, but this time they passed the medical and will be going to second panel on 7 January.
I am absolutely terrified on their behalf. They've been through so much already. And we learned this week, after they had a meeting with their social worker, that the false allegations made by R's evil former sister-in-law could prove to be a sticking point again here – even now, that woman is still casting a shadow over my sister's life.
Their social worker and his supervisor are both confident despite this, and have recommended approval by panel. In compiling his report, the social worker spoke to a huge number of people – family, friends, neighbours, colleagues – and couldn't find a single person with a bad word to say about them, including R's nephews and nieces. But until that panel actually meets and makes a decision, there's just no predicting what will happen. All their hopes and dreams could come crashing down around them again, just like happened before.
So I'm really, really nervous. Panel meets on 7 January – the final decision could take a week or more after that. Another month of waiting and hoping.
If they pass panel (please, God) they go through to the matching stage – and their social worker is already looking for possible matches for them, partly because he is so confident, and partly because they are just that desperate for adoptive families for all these hard-to-place kids they have in the county.
Some friends of mine adopted here in Cardiff, just over two years ago. It was the textbook perfect process and the textbook perfect adoption, it really was. They were given a toddler boy and his baby half-sister who had been with the same foster carer almost from birth, just 14 months between them. The kids look so much like my friend and her husband you'd swear they were their own biological children, and thanks to their early removal from the mother and long placement with the same foster carer are confident, well-adjusted children who settled into their new home pretty much immediately and have never looked back.
It is almost certain that D&R will not get such stable, well-adjusted children. There are a lot of hard-to-place children in Yorkshire, and Deb's history as a highly specialised special needs teacher makes her an ideal carer for such troubled youngsters. We already know (although we really shouldn't) that they've been asked to consider a family of three who all have foetal alcohol syndrome and are effectively in the last chance saloon – if a suitable family can't be found to take them soon, they will be separated, with the oldest child considered unadoptable at the tender age of six and dumped into long-term care, so that her younger siblings can be offered as a unit without her.
So will the adoption application be approved? Will they agree to take this family of three, or will they end up with some other needy child altogether? Only time will tell!
It is all very stressful and worrying.
What else has happened this year? Hmm. I expanded my herbaceous borders back in the spring and was really pleased with how that worked out. Also in the spring, I injured my knee, which was really annoying – mostly healed now, but still the occasional twinge as a reminder. I've barely seen my other half at all, thanks to the ridiculous shifting shift pattern he is on and can't seem to escape from. I completed and published exactly one (1) story, which is more than I managed last year –
I do have other writing projects on the go, always do, just that most of them are primarily games designed for my own amusement rather than anything likely to see the light of day, ever. The fic I'm playing with at the moment is very much in that vein – a game I'm playing for my own amusement, with a prospective audience of approximately nil should I ever complete and wish to publish it, since it is basically a spin-off of one fandom merged with a modern AU of another fandom entirely, and is therefore essentially its own thing, as close to original fic as I am ever likely to get yet still very much fanfiction. And as this weird hybrid creature, hamstrung by being written by me, it is obviously never going to set the world on fire and will likely never come close to completion anyway – but I am having fun with it regardless! Which is pretty much the whole point of fanfic, no?
Also this year, my lovely cousin died, and that was devastating. Still is. Then LM's other grandmother died just a few weeks later, which was a shame for her family, of course, but despite being a pleasant enough person in general, she was a neglectful mother and disinterested grandmother, so her passing made next to no impression on LM. And my other half's father died this year as well, which sad to say came as something of a release in the end, he'd become so paranoid and aggressive in his dementia – but was a bitter blow to the other half regardless.
So that's been my year. A lot of stress and worry, and a spot of gardening.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I made a resolve to be better at blogging here but have so far failed miserably, so as the end of the year is fast approaching I thought I'd try to put together a round-up of my year, for my own sake as much as anything else. I haven't talked about a lot of this stuff online as it was happening, but I think I need to get it out and recorded coherently, for my own reference. Feel free to read or ignore as the mood strikes you
2018 has been a challenging year in many ways, with lots going on in various areas of my life.
Let's start with work. It's been an interesting year for my team. An interesting several years for my team, in fact, with staff and workload changes that have been ongoing for the last two years or so. The biggest change this year came about when my closest friend in the team decided to hand in her notice after returning from maternity leave just over a year ago. My boss and her line manager, in their wisdom, decided to use this gap in the team to solve some of their own workload problems by introducing a new layer of line management, creating a new team manager position instead of replacing the lower grade admin officer role. This new team manager role was set two grades up from us in the admin team, so it was clear from the start that it was not seen as a development opportunity for anyone within the team. In fact, I was specifically told that I was not eligible to apply because I have no line management experience, despite satisfying every other criterion, including having effectively functioned as my manager's right-hand-person for several years already. I have always been the all-rounder of the team, familiar with all areas of our work, and have spent years cultivating strong relationships with various other teams and departments, all of which would be immensely valuable in the role. But no. Not a development opportunity. Not eligible to apply.
I might not have minded if they'd actually hired someone decent for the job, but the bloke they've brought in…well, he's pleasant enough, I suppose. But he's never worked in the public sector before, so has found that a hugely difficult adjustment, and having worked with him for six months now, I am 100% certain he blagged his way into the role and doesn't actually have anything like the management experience he claims. He has made a lot of, quite frankly, rookie mistakes, alienating the team early on in ways he has yet to fully recover from.
Six months down the line, this is the most un-managed I have felt since I started here, almost ten years ago. Also the most disconnected from the rest of the team I've felt in as many years. We no longer have team meetings to touch base with one another – we barely even have one-to-ones to discuss our own workload with the boss, set goals, assign priorities, monitor objectives, etc. New Boss doesn't take the slightest bit of interest in what I do, in fact I'm not convinced he has any actual idea what I do, while the creation of his role has cut me off from whole areas of work I have always up till now been a part of – instead of his job replacing the areas of work my former colleague was involved with, it has ended up effectively absorbing part of my role, leaving me with the scraps of both. As a result, my area of work is beginning to become quite narrow and isolated from the rest of the team, which has been a bit of a sharp and shocking turnaround from the position I was in six months ago, as the all-rounder who did a bit of everything. He keeps doing administrative tasks he should be delegating, and does them badly because he hasn't checked the correct process and never bothers to ask or discuss. He is awful at communication, really awful.
My last one-to-one is case in point there, in fact. It was in November and we hadn't met since August. First of all, he sprung it on me because he'd forgotten to actually send the appointment, so I had no idea he thought he'd scheduled this meeting. Then to make up for springing the meeting on me, he decided to take me down the road to a coffee shop instead of one of our meeting rooms, but failed to properly explain this – I ended up having to leave a freshly made cup of tea behind, and then in the coffee shop when I asked for a cup of tea, he misheard and ordered me a cappuccino. So then I felt really awkward and felt I had to try to drink it just to be polite. And I really, really hate coffee. And then it turned out to be a completely useless meeting anyway, totally unproductive!
One of his major objectives was to set up a new E&D committee, which he has done…but in a very half-hearted way, as if he's not really all that bothered (in fairness, most things that he does seem to be half-hearted) – and honestly, in what world is a straight white man the right person to appoint to run an E&D group anyway? He's English, which wouldn't matter except that he has already exhibited prejudice against the Welsh language on multiple occasions just within my earshot – when as chair of the E&D group, protecting and promoting the Welsh language is explicitly one of his duties. And, you know, as chair of the E&D committee, you are either committed to E&D or you are not, you don't get to pick and choose which of the protected characteristics you are willing to support!
It is always a risk, hiring people from industry to come and work at the uni – they usually go one of two ways. They either quickly burn out and leave, or surrender and become one of us. I'm not convinced this bloke is going to last. He's just so…wishy-washy, and really whingy about everything. And my tolerance for trying to train and manage him is severely limited, because he is two grades above me and I was not permitted to apply for his role as a development opportunity, so why should I do any part of his job for him on my lesser salary? It just makes me feel like a mug, because I held this team together for two years while we were critically short-staffed, I was juggling three jobs for large swathes of time during those two years, and now it feels like I've taken a huge step backward instead of being allowed to develop further.
And that was a lot of ranting about my new boss! Sorry, folks. So work is pretty frustrating at the moment. I have taken refuge in aggressively pursuing training – currently halfway through a Springboard Women's Development Programme, which is fairly interesting, although so far involves a lot more naval-gazing than I normally indulge in.
Within the family, there has been a hell of a lot going on this year, much of which I can't really talk about in detail, for various reasons. Even to summarise means delving into a lot of complex 'backstory', as a reminder for old friends and primer for those who haven't known me as long.
Long story short, I have three siblings. I am number two, with an older sister D and younger brother S, and my parents later adopted a much younger sister C, after initially providing respite foster care facilitated through Barnardos. C was damaged both by her mother's drug taking during pregnancy and by early life trauma (her alcoholic father punched her in the face repeatedly when she was just a few weeks old). Early on it was known that she had a cleft palate and glue ear, learning disability and associated speech & language disorder, and she was later diagnosed as autistic phenotype. So she has had a difficult life, with one thing and another. At 18 she fell pregnant by a boy she'd been in an on-off relationship with for four years – at first all the signs were positive, they really looked like they were going to make it…but after a difficult pregnancy and frankly horrific childbirth experience, everything kind of fell apart, including the relationship. The baby's father is a complete waste of space and these days rarely even bothers to ask how his daughter is from week to week, never mind stir himself to actually visit her.
C was never formally diagnosed with post-natal depression, in the main because whenever she actually saw a health professional she would deliberately paint on a positive face and say whatever she thought they wanted to hear, rather than admit the truth, but that is almost certainly what she has been suffering from these past three years. She has always been intensely vulnerable to bad influences, attracts them like iron filings to a magnet – in this condition she has been more vulnerable than ever.
I won't go into the nitty gritty of the last three years and the things that have happened. Suffice it to say that things got very bad there for a while, and my mum and dad, despite being in their late 60s, ended up having to take over as primary carers for my niece. After the health visitor made repeated reports of child abandonment (not because the baby wasn't being looked after, but because her parents weren't the ones doing the parenting), leading to social service involvement that did more harm than good, my parents went out and hired a solicitor and went to court to obtain a child arrangement order that grants them legal guardianship. Security for all concerned, or so we thought.
That was last year. C seemed to pull out of her downward spiral at that point, relieved of the obligations of parenthood, and the situation stabilised. Then in July she went into a depressive spiral and threatened to kill herself with a knife, she had the two-year-old in the room with her at the time and was clinging to her crying, saying she wanted to say goodbye. So my mum panicked that she actually might harm herself, or the baby by accident, and called the police. But by the time they bothered to attend, hours later, everything had been resolved already – C was calm again and the baby was in bed fast asleep. The officers who attended said they were obliged to make a report to social services, but doubted they would take any action.
Hoo boy were they wrong. The case landed on the desk of a total jobsworth, who received a report of a vulnerable young adult with mental health problems threatening to take her own life, and decided that the appropriate way of dealing with this was to tell our parents to throw her out of the house onto the streets on pain of having her daughter taken into care and placed for adoption – and no, she was not going to offer any actual support of any kind for said suicidally depressed and intensely vulnerable young adult, she couldn't care less about that. Not her problem. She had decided to treat the incident as domestic abuse, despite the fact that the only person C actually threatened with the knife was herself, and she kept holding the threat of taking the baby away over the family's heads to force compliance with whatever demands she made. She didn't care that the stress of being so completely separated from her mother in this way created an abandonment complex that little LM still struggles with now, months down the line. She didn't care that being made homeless could easily have pushed C over the edge and cost her life. She didn't care that the measures she imposed made an already difficult situation worse instead of better for all concerned and placed great strain on the entire family. She cared only that she get a plan in place that would allow her to close the case as quickly as possible, with minimal effort expended on her behalf.
In the middle of all this, my cousin died very suddenly after a short battle with cancer, and C wasn't allowed to be in her own home to grieve with the rest of the family.
It was a very, very difficult time – this is only the bare bones outline.
On the positive side, C was taken in by the father and stepmother of one of her old school friends, and is still living with them now – it isn't ideal, but it's a roof over her head. After refusing for three years to admit the extent of her depression, the crisis gave her the sharp shock she needed to actually go to a doctor and ask for help. She is now on medication, which is slowly stabilising her mood. Having been completely disaffected from education at an early age, she has signed up for college – voluntarily placing herself in a strange environment with large groups of people she doesn't know! That's huge for her – and successfully completed her first term, passing her examinations. She has become very close to her old school friend's stepsister, who is quite frankly the most sensible friend she has ever had in her life and has become a very positive influence. All small but significant steps in the right direction.
However, although the social worker initially said we would be working toward C moving back home, she then turned around and signed the case off without taking any steps whatsoever toward making that actually happen, outright told us it wasn't to happen, end of story. Like I said, minimal effort. She had no interest whatsoever in working with the family to find a positive way forward that would be of actual benefit to all concerned. No long-term planning and no support. She just wanted to get the case closed as quickly as possible, so went for the simplest and most brutal option possible and called it job done.
So we are left in this really awkward position where C isn't allowed to be in the family home unless I (or some other third party) am also there as the designated safety person, and for C to spend a night at home in her own bed, I have to have little LM to stay with me, because they are only allowed supervised contact, which can't be overnight. We can choose to break that rule if we want, but having been forced to sign up to it, if anything goes wrong, we lose LM, simple as that. So outside of contact sessions, we have established a pattern wherein C stays away during the week and goes home at weekends, with three-year-old LM therefore staying with me every weekend (and occasional week nights, if C needs to be at home for any reason).
We were already doing occasional sleepovers, but the regular commitment of this arrangement is a pretty big change in my life! I even had LM with me on her birthday eve, so C could be at home to decorate the house for her.
How things will work out in the future is anyone's guess, but that's where we are right now.
It's not all bad. The Little'Un is great fun to hang out with. Last Saturday she chased me all over the house wearing a pirate hat and waving a cutlass, shouting, "In point of fact, I will chop off your head!" ('In point of fact' is her phrase of the moment. She got it from a CBeebies programme called Pablo, about a little boy with autism. LM really, really loves mining her favourite TV shows and movies for interesting new words and phrases. She got 'balderdash' from Peter Rabbit!). Then, tiring of playing pirate, she handed me the cutlass, placed the hat on my head, and cried out in a dramatic voice:
LM: No! I will never marry you!
Me: Hang on. What game are we playing now?
LM (beseechingly): Father, I choose Prince Ali!
Me: Ohhhhhh, we're role playing Aladdin. Got it. Wait, I'm Jafar in this scenario?
She's three now but is the size of a five year old, still very much a baby in some ways, but startlingly articulate for her age. She has always loved words, the bigger the better (dinosaur names were a particular delight to her, this summer just gone, she is better at remembering, pronouncing and identifying them than I am), and has been role-playing and inventing games based on memorable scenes from her favourite cartoons since she was just 16 months old. Kid has a bright future in fandom ahead of her!
She starts part-time nursery after Christmas – missed the September intake by less than two weeks, as a result of which there were no places available in the first choice school for the January intake, which means she has to actually walk past the school she should be going to in order to get to the one she managed to get into, which is twice the distance. Absolutely crazy.
Right, so that's the home crowd. The other thing that's going on in the family right now is my older sister D and her husband R, who are currently going through an adoption application. They had applied once before, 12 years ago when they were living in Kent. A paramedic and a special needs teacher would make ideal parents, you might think, but they were turned down at a late stage – ostensibly on health grounds, but personally, I think they were just too white, overweight and middle class for the London commuter belt. It was absolutely devastating for them.
A few years later, they ended up fostering Ray's four nephews and nieces on two separate occasions, caring for them for the better part of a year, all told – and those kids were in desperate shape at the time. Their mother S was (and is) bipolar with paranoid delusions, which wouldn't have been such a problem if she weren't also evil incarnate. She caused endless misery for D after her marriage to R just because she was jealous that her brother-in-law was building a family of his own instead of being on tap to bail his brother and her out whenever they felt in need of extra cash. One time, she faked a suicide attempt and told her very young children (then aged 5 to 14) that she was killing herself because she hated them. When her marriage broke down, she walked out on her four children without a backward glance – aside from the odd outbreak of violence and abuse. The kids regularly used to phone D&R in terror because "Mummy's trying to break the door down again." Her ex, R's brother A, had a nervous breakdown, and the kids ended up with D&R because it was that or let them be taken into care. They had to drop everything and drive from Kent to Cornwall at a moment's notice to collect the kids. All four were in bad shape – the littlest of all especially, he was six years old and doubly incontinent from sheer stress and trauma. It took months to get them stabilised and onto an even keel…and then D&R took them home to Cornwall to see their dad for Christmas, and S promptly swooped in and snatched them back, making false allegations against D&R in an attempt to press her claim. Her accusations were ultimately dismissed, but she succeeded in her aim of removing her children from their custody – yet within two weeks had dumped them back on her emotionally vulnerable ex again, because she didn't actually want them for herself, she just didn't want my sister to have them. Didn't want my sister to take her place as the mother figure she had no interest in actually being.
I am re-telling this story, eight years later, because it is relevant again now. D&R moved to Yorkshire about 18 months ago and decided the time was right to apply to adopt once again. After everything that had happened, it took huge courage to open themselves up to potential hurt again, but they want a family of their own, and Yorkshire is crying out for adoptive parents, so they decided to try. Now, I actually think my sister's health is in worse shape now than it was 12 years ago, but this time they passed the medical and will be going to second panel on 7 January.
I am absolutely terrified on their behalf. They've been through so much already. And we learned this week, after they had a meeting with their social worker, that the false allegations made by R's evil former sister-in-law could prove to be a sticking point again here – even now, that woman is still casting a shadow over my sister's life.
Their social worker and his supervisor are both confident despite this, and have recommended approval by panel. In compiling his report, the social worker spoke to a huge number of people – family, friends, neighbours, colleagues – and couldn't find a single person with a bad word to say about them, including R's nephews and nieces. But until that panel actually meets and makes a decision, there's just no predicting what will happen. All their hopes and dreams could come crashing down around them again, just like happened before.
So I'm really, really nervous. Panel meets on 7 January – the final decision could take a week or more after that. Another month of waiting and hoping.
If they pass panel (please, God) they go through to the matching stage – and their social worker is already looking for possible matches for them, partly because he is so confident, and partly because they are just that desperate for adoptive families for all these hard-to-place kids they have in the county.
Some friends of mine adopted here in Cardiff, just over two years ago. It was the textbook perfect process and the textbook perfect adoption, it really was. They were given a toddler boy and his baby half-sister who had been with the same foster carer almost from birth, just 14 months between them. The kids look so much like my friend and her husband you'd swear they were their own biological children, and thanks to their early removal from the mother and long placement with the same foster carer are confident, well-adjusted children who settled into their new home pretty much immediately and have never looked back.
It is almost certain that D&R will not get such stable, well-adjusted children. There are a lot of hard-to-place children in Yorkshire, and Deb's history as a highly specialised special needs teacher makes her an ideal carer for such troubled youngsters. We already know (although we really shouldn't) that they've been asked to consider a family of three who all have foetal alcohol syndrome and are effectively in the last chance saloon – if a suitable family can't be found to take them soon, they will be separated, with the oldest child considered unadoptable at the tender age of six and dumped into long-term care, so that her younger siblings can be offered as a unit without her.
So will the adoption application be approved? Will they agree to take this family of three, or will they end up with some other needy child altogether? Only time will tell!
It is all very stressful and worrying.
What else has happened this year? Hmm. I expanded my herbaceous borders back in the spring and was really pleased with how that worked out. Also in the spring, I injured my knee, which was really annoying – mostly healed now, but still the occasional twinge as a reminder. I've barely seen my other half at all, thanks to the ridiculous shifting shift pattern he is on and can't seem to escape from. I completed and published exactly one (1) story, which is more than I managed last year –
I do have other writing projects on the go, always do, just that most of them are primarily games designed for my own amusement rather than anything likely to see the light of day, ever. The fic I'm playing with at the moment is very much in that vein – a game I'm playing for my own amusement, with a prospective audience of approximately nil should I ever complete and wish to publish it, since it is basically a spin-off of one fandom merged with a modern AU of another fandom entirely, and is therefore essentially its own thing, as close to original fic as I am ever likely to get yet still very much fanfiction. And as this weird hybrid creature, hamstrung by being written by me, it is obviously never going to set the world on fire and will likely never come close to completion anyway – but I am having fun with it regardless! Which is pretty much the whole point of fanfic, no?
Also this year, my lovely cousin died, and that was devastating. Still is. Then LM's other grandmother died just a few weeks later, which was a shame for her family, of course, but despite being a pleasant enough person in general, she was a neglectful mother and disinterested grandmother, so her passing made next to no impression on LM. And my other half's father died this year as well, which sad to say came as something of a release in the end, he'd become so paranoid and aggressive in his dementia – but was a bitter blow to the other half regardless.
So that's been my year. A lot of stress and worry, and a spot of gardening.
no subject
My back problems resulted in me having a couple of falls and fractured a bone in my foot ... 6 weeks in hospital.
Having a purple patch at the moment and embracing this. Confidence is good medicine.
You are so strong. I admire you.
We soldier on, embrace the good days, learn from the bad.
Merry Christmas and a better New Year for all.
no subject
no subject
Memories.
Miss the CI5 boys.
no subject
no subject
I have no regrets leaving that one.
no subject
The job situation sounds deeply frustrating too. It seems utterly unreasonable that they wouldn't let you apply for the position and that your boss is so crap. Ugh! Totally unsatisfactory and unfair.
I remember the whole situation with the Cornwall cousins as it was going on... I can't belief that awful woman is still blighting your sister's life!
At least the cats aren't causing any problems ;)
no subject
You have such a good memory to remember what happened with the Cornwall crowd all those years ago!
Please apologise to Lena for me for misspelling her name on your Christmas card - I know someone else who actually is Lina and my brain conflated the two!
no subject
Lena does not mind at all! Thank you for the card -- arrived today, it's lovely. :)
no subject
no subject
no subject
I very much hope that 2019 is better for you all!
no subject
no subject
no subject
Hugs, and I hope next year is much, much better