There were two issues we went to court for on June 24th. One of those was terminating Tam’s (bio mom) visits with Jeremiah. The other was to hopefully cut Jeremiah’s visits with his bio parents in half.
As for Tam and her visits, they will continue. All workers involved agree that Tam will never be able to parent Jeremiah. The extent to which she will be involved in visits is explained below.
We went to court hoping that Jeremiah’s visits with his bio parents would be cut in half. That means they would go from twice a week with both parents at each visit to once a week.
We were quite surprised when the decision was made (due to our CASA worker I had mentioned in another post) to not only cut the visits down to one time per week, but to have bio mom come on one week and bio dad on the other. They decided to separate the parents.
One of the workers made the comment that recently Tam was the only positive aspect of the visits. When Jeremiah was spending time with both parents in the visits, the Visit Supervisor has said that it’s like being in the room with three kids. One child being Jeremiah, one being Tam, the playmate (this is the only reason they mentioned that Tam is the only positive aspect of the visits), and the other being a bully who pouts in the corner. This bully is referring to the bio dad, T. She said that if Tam is interacting with Jeremiah on the floor, T (bio dad) will try to tell her what she is doing wrong, and persist in separating the two of them. When the Supervisor steps in and tells him to leave them alone, he goes to the corner of the room and pouts.
When the recommendation was made for the new direction of visits, many of the Workers knew that it would quickly fall apart. First, they knew that Jeremiah might have exacerbated reactions when he attends visits with T (bio dad) only. They were right. They also had the feeling that Tam would not call and confirm the day before, as it is always T who confirms (which is required to continue with the visit). This also came to fruition.
You can look at a more recent post to see how Jeremiah is doing without so many visits.
lovin' adoptin' & autism 