Our First Meeting With the Birth Mother

by Fatherofeight | More from this Blogger

09 Dec 2006 12:05 AM

This is the story of the first visit with our boys' birth mother. We were pretty nervous. We had no idea what to expect, plus we were getting our first chance to meet our new baby's three older brothers.

We met two of the boys, ages four and eighteen months, in the lobby. The older one looked scared and the younger was shell-shocked. We already had an inkling that we would eventually adopt all of them.

We were then escorted to the "playroom." It was a fairly small room with no toys and some old office furniture. It was definitely not suitable for children to be on the floor. We met the other child who was two and a half. We asked him what he was eating and he said "fwench fwies".

We then met Lola. Let me say that I had extensive experience dealing with street people. Lola looked really bad. Her complexion was very gray and she looked like she was too old to get pregnant. She was 26 at the time. She was also unbalanced, obviously intoxicated or high.

She told us that the boys did not call her their mother because they had never been in her care. She had no rapport with the children. The state social worker, who was supposed to supervise the meeting, went to her office and stayed there unless we summoned her.

The youngest child, who had looked shell-shocked in the lobby, laid on the floor screaming and repeatedly banging his head on the floor. We did not know what to do; it was obviously not a good situation. I finally went to the state worker and she said that he was acting out and not to worry about it.

Lola got on the floor and played with the children for a while. The meeting was supposed to last one hour but Lola needed to go smoke after about 45 minutes. When she did not come back, we were allowed to leave.

What we gathered from the meeting was that the birth mother was a complete mess. Only the oldest boy knew the mother and he thought that she was an acquaintance of the people he was living with. Unfortunately, we would get to know the birth mother much better over the next 18 months.

I would warn anyone preparing for their first family visit to be ready mentally for anything. I had been involved with the church in prison and ghetto ministry for years. I thought that I had seen it all and I was shocked. Be ready when it is your turn to do something like this.

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