Foster Care and Wheelchair Moms: Fighting for my right to help

“You’ve been approved . . . but . . . ” my caseworker said, hesitantly, during our phone call two weeks ago.

“there’s something I need to tell you.”

I held my breath and waited for the impact of her words, fully expecting another sucker punch from the debacle that had been our foster care approval process.

Last year has not been an easy year for our household. We experienced the rollercoaster of a failed adoption, the chaos of foster care training and home evaluation prep work amid custody conciliation with Hayla’s biological parents and new jobs. By the middle of November, we had been fingerprinted, background checked, home studied, and waiting for all the pieces to be put together for our final approval. Our caseworker told us we’d be on the list for incoming children by the holidays.

So we waited. And ate Turkey. Opened Christmas presents. Emailed for status updates. Opened presents. Counted down to 2017. Drank sparkling cider with Hayla while the ball dropped over Time Square.

In the end, it took our household an additional two months to get approved, because the department supervisor wasn’t comfortable with placing children in our desired age range (0-5) in our house.

Because of me being in a wheelchair.

Still determined to reach our end goal, I swallowed the bitter pill and told myself that it was to be expected. This man had no experience with wheelchair users wanting to be foster parents. He had no real knowledge about my mobility and my ability to care for children. His hesitation was something I could understand. So, I put a smile on my face and sent over contact information for two different doctors and called the supervisor directly, willing to discuss the situation with him in hopes that I could answer any concerns he had. After all, I’m a fully cognitive adult who is more than capable of troubleshooting a situation, right?

Apparently not. My attempt to talk to the supervisor fell on deaf ears, and again, we were stuck waiting, at the mercy of my doctor’s recommendation.

And after another month of waiting, to no avail, for a response from my Muscular Dystrophy specialist, the agency resorted to trying to contact my PCP.

Two steps forward, three steps back.

I have been using a wheelchair for over a decade, and living with this disease for all my life. I have crawled up stairs and fallen in crowds of stranger staring. I am used to struggle and awkward conversations about why my legs don’t work. But for the first time in my life, I found myself asking “how is this not discrimination?”

To become a foster parent through our local county’s children and youth agency, every applicant must have a physical form filled out by their doctor. Which I did, just like every other able-bodied person. I sat in the exam room, in my wheelchair, while my doctor signed the papers. It’s not like I’m hiding my disability from him.

If a signature on a physical form is enough for a foster parent who can walk, why is it not enough for a parent in a wheelchair?

I exhaled and waited for our caseworker to finish telling us the news.

“the supervisor did speak to your doctor’s nurse and they said they have no reservations about you being a foster parent . . . but your preferred age was listed as 5-years-old and up.”

My heart sank. And then I was furious. AFTER ALL THE HOOPS YOU MADE US JUMP THROUGH, we’re still not approved for the age range we wanted? In my mind, all thoughts kept coming back to this one thing: I was being discriminated against because I’m in a wheelchair.

I was in the middle of writing out a very angry email to the supervisor and the director of the entire agency when I decided I needed all the information if I was going to throw down the gauntlet and accuse this person of discrimination. I called my doctor’s office and asked the nurse to read my chart to find out exactly what they had told the supervisor. If I had been cleared by a medical professional, who did this man think he was to say otherwise?

Turns out, having no idea on the specifics of my disability, my doctor’s nurse gave a generalized statement of my health with no actual information about my mobility.

I hung up the phone with the nurse and deleted the email. As much as it hurt to admit it, the supervisor hadn’t done anything wrong. He simply just lacked the experience of working with a wheelchair mom wanting to be a foster parent, and without being able to get better information from my medical professionals, did the best he could to make a judgement call. Sure, it isn’t a judgement call that thrills me, but it is one that I understand.

I am not done fighting for our household and for the chance to bring babies into this family, even for a short amount of time. I have a doctor’s appointment coming up in a few months with my specialist and I plan on talking to him about helping the situation.

But for now, I will celebrate that we’re officially approved. I will remember that the whole point of starting this was to help kids, even if it’s a different age than we had initially hoped for. And I will fight for these babies, whether they are 11 months or 11 years old, because there are so many who need people willing to fight for them.

And if I wasn’t sure of it before we became foster parents, getting our first placement call three hours after being added to the list certainly made it clear.