What's with these jerk adoptive mothers?

[Maggie Mae]

Jie jie's appointment was last week. I want details because I'm nosy, but I also want her to start respecting her daughter's privacy. 

 

[lawlifelgbt]

So this mom makes me angry. I don't want to adopt but lately I have been thinking more about fostering LGBT youth; a high percentage of kids in that system aren't straight/cis. But, even now I'm concerned that a foster child might feel slighted when we have bio kids. I am worried about even perceived favoritism. While this woman is doling out tons of very rea, hurtful favoritism.

[alexandracabot]

I hope the appointment on the 22nd went well and Jie Jie is okay. Not telling her over the phone because it's "complex" really worries me, like their real reason is that it's very serious. 

 

[Aine]

The way she is talking about the kids and life in general seems more positive? I'm skeptical but also thinking maybe having her words reflected back on here made her rethink how she was phrasing things and how much she was sharing.

The kids look happier in those photos and it's good to see she's getting them involved in some community activities like gymnastics and the church youth group. I also like seeing them do fun family things like sledding and the zoo.

I really hope things with Jie Jie aren't as complex and serious as they sound.

Also, does anyone have any idea how she manages financially, especially with health insurance for those girls? I was under the impression she was self-employed but she must have a pretty good insurance plan to get orthotics fitted for all four kids as well as all these specialist appointments.

[Eater of Worlds]

On 12/6/2015 at 7:18 AM, Sera's Arrow said:

 

6 hours ago, Aine said:

The way she is talking about the kids and life in general seems more positive? I'm skeptical but also thinking maybe having her words reflected back on here made her rethink how she was phrasing things and how much she was sharing.

The kids look happier in those photos and it's good to see she's getting them involved in some community activities like gymnastics and the church youth group. I also like seeing them do fun family things like sledding and the zoo.

I really hope things with Jie Jie aren't as complex and serious as they sound.

Also, does anyone have any idea how she manages financially, especially with health insurance for those girls? I was under the impression she was self-employed but she must have a pretty good insurance plan to get orthotics fitted for all four kids as well as all these specialist appointments.

  

The system wouldn't let me get rid of the first quote.  Anyway, the kids got their orthotics at a Shriner's place.  Which means she didn't have to pay.

 

I also think she's going to move Sissy to a group home as soon as she hits 18.

[apandaaries]

49 minutes ago, Eater of Worlds said:

The system wouldn't let me get rid of the first quote.  Anyway, the kids got their orthotics at a Shriner's place.  Which means she didn't have to pay.

I also think she's going to move Sissy to a group home as soon as she hits 18.

If she's fairly low income (likely, given her in-home day care and sewing pattern sales), the girls will qualify easily for a lot of subsidized care (thanks, Obama!).  She's not in a very wealthy area, so I imagine that people around her can provide information about whom to contact for additional care.  I don't have many positive feelings toward her, but I do appreciate that the girls have regular contact with medical providers.  

Agree that Sissy will likely be shipped off somewhere else once it's a bit more age appropriate, damn it.  She has way too many negative feelings that she expresses too easily about that poor girl.

[Mercer]

3 hours ago, Eater of Worlds said:

I also think she's going to move Sissy to a group home as soon as she hits 18.

As long as she picks a good group home, I don't see that as a bad thing. Sissy will probably get more understanding, attention, and peer interaction in a group home than she does now.

[Aine]

17 minutes ago, Mercer said:

As long as she picks a good group home, I don't see that as a bad thing. Sissy will probably get more understanding, attention, and peer interaction in a group home than she does now.

Not the group home I'm currently working in...Deep South and rural US. It's been a learning curve for me. I don't think there is a good one near me.

[Koala]

On 3/28/2016 at 9:03 PM, Eater of Worlds said:

I also think she's going to move Sissy to a group home as soon as she hits 18.

**WARNING** I am totally ignorant about group homes and how they work.  I could talk to you for hours about nursing homes, but group homes, I got nothing.

*IF* she could find a good group home, it would probably be preferable to the dynamic she has going with that woman she's living with (can't remember her name/refuse to label her a mother).  Based on everything she's written, she toxic for them.  I can't fathom they would ever thrive under her "care".  That includes Apple, because I think favoritism is bad for the favored child too.  I also think if Apple is anything less that she is expected to be, she will quickly go the way of her sisters.

Another thought- The girls are always dressed in very Gymboree like clothes.  Nothing age appropriate for teenagers.  I wonder if that is an attempt to feed the story that they are delayed?  Perhaps their problems (if they have any) aren't as significant as they are made out to be.  Perhaps the language barrier was the larger part of the problem.  Perhaps Sissy doesn't need a group home, because she'd be able to live on her own if she had some support.  Just a thought....may be totally off base, but I wouldn't put it past Fencingmama or whatever she calls herself.  

[DaisyD]

That woman is SEVERLY obsessed with Gymboree. I doubt there's anything more to it than that. She spent years buying Gymboree clothes for her future child. Then she ended up with teenagers, so she put them in clothes like the baby clothes she likes.

[Koala]

I will admit- I loved Gymboree clothes when my daughter was little.  Got it all on sale or using Gym Bucks, because it would have never occurred to me to pay that much for children's clothes.  That said, she stopped thinking they were cute at about 7-8, and you know what?  I got over it.  Now (at 11) she pretty much lives in Minecraft t-shirts and jeans, and that's fine too.  I just looked at this seasons current line, and while I think it's adorable, she would laugh outright if I suggested any of it.

Forcing teenagers to dress like 7 year olds is just ridiculous.  They should have their own individual styles, and she should support that.  I don't know....it's like they are characters in a play for her.  They either fit the role she wants them to play, or she treats them like crap (see: cutting off all of Blossom's hair when she didn't keep it neat enough. Now that I mention it, the picture she posted showing how unkempt it was?  It looked fine to me).  

[Mercer]

4 hours ago, Koala said:

**WARNING** I am totally ignorant about group homes and how they work.  I could talk to you for hours about nursing homes, but group homes, I got nothing.

*IF* she could find a good group home, it would probably be preferable to the dynamic she has going with that woman she's living with (can't remember her name/refuse to label her a mother).  Based on everything she's written, she toxic for them.  I can't fathom they would ever thrive under her "care".  That includes Apple, because I think favoritism is bad for the favored child too.  I also think if Apple is anything less that she is expected to be, she will quickly go the way of her sisters.

I work at a group home and I agree with you 100%. There's good and bad in any field and group homes are no exception, but if she got into a good one she'd be getting a lot more attention, individually tailored learning, and peer interaction than she gets now.

[desertvixen]

@Koala, agree with you on the Gymboree.  We still get some stuff from there that my daughter thinks is cute (9) but it's dwindling quickly.

[blessalessi]

5 hours ago, Koala said:

Perhaps Sissy doesn't need a group home, because she'd be able to live on her own if she had some support.  Just a thought....may be totally off base, but I wouldn't put it past Fencingmama or whatever she calls herself.  

I totally agree that group homes can often be a good option for people with learning disabilities and that, for Sissy, any non-toxic arrangement would be preferable to staying with Kim.

The quote above though is the thing about Kim that I feel most angry about. Who knows, and who will ever know now, what Sissy might have been capable of if she had not been "institutionalised" by Kim?? The longer she is there, the harder it will become to differentiate between intellectual disability and environmental neglect and it will be a crapshoot as to whether the home to which she is eventually dispatched will have the resources to help her develp to her full potential.

Kim gives me the creeps in the same way as Kathy Bates's character in Damage.

Eta: Misery, not Damage.  

[blessalessi]

To be clear, I don't see her as a wild multiple murderer (!) but the way she has tried to "shape" Sissy and Blossom into her fantasy idea of what children "should" be like, is reminiscent to me of the way Annie Wilkes in the film put Paul into makeshift splints that set his broken legs at a strange angle. Those girls are broken and they deserve so much more.

[anachronistic]

1 hour ago, blessalessi said:

I totally agree that group homes can often be a good option for people with learning disabilities and that, for Sissy, any non-toxic arrangement would be preferable to staying with Kim.

 

I just want to clarify that you must be from the UK, right, blessalessi?  Because in the US, a learning disability, by definition, means that you have average to above average intelligence.  Where you say, 'learning disabilities' we say 'intellectual disability' or 'developmental disability'.  Learning disabilities can certainly occur in the ID/DD population, but it is a label used for dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc.  

[blessalessi]

I am from the UK and I realised after I posted that I had used two different terms even within one post! And language is constantly changing so please don't count me as an authority even on UK terms, anyway.

Here, in my area, we would mostly use "specific learning difficulty" for a discrete issue like dyslexia.  Learning disability is what I most frequently hear used for people with broader or even global difficulties. Developmental delay is used more often in the context of younger children who are still being monitored for whether or not they hit their expected milestones in infancy and early childhood.

With Kim's kids, I don't think we can "know" for certain very much at all about their profile of ability.  They don't seem ever to have been subject to a period of continuous  assessment using valid and reliable measures. No-one can be sure exactly why they were relinquished to the orphanage in the first place and what, if any,  developmental delays were evident in infancy. By all accounts the institutions they were brought up in were of a decent standard compared to others in the same area, but we can't know for sure what their educational and emotional care was like, or how they have processed their initial separation from their mothers, and then their uprooting from China at quite an advanced age. Blossom, of course, was also "rehomed" along the way.

Since they have been in Kim's custody, the girks have been pulled around different health practitioners, with the switch being made each time Kim fell out with the last lot. One or two of them have at least  briefly attended school, but mostly they have been "homeschooled" during the downtime from helping with the daycare business, with Kim's teaching supplemented by the on/off relationship with the Fireman.

You couldn't make it up!!!

All the things we "know" are contradictory.  Sissy is, on the one hand, so delayed that she will need lifelong care to help her get through the day. On the other hand, she is a manipulative schemer who by day sneaks onto the internet and uses a social networking site to converse in written ?Mandarin to former orphanage friends, and who by night sneaks around the house planning her escape looking for her passport and birth certificate.  

My confident, internationally-recognised armchair diagnosis is that Kimmie is full of bullshit.

About the girls, I would not like to guess.

[DaisyD]

If I could like that eleventy!, I would. 

[iheartchacos]

I don't know if I believe all her stories.

[alexandracabot]

58 minutes ago, iheartchacos said:

I don't know if I believe all her stories.

Are you thinking specifically about the latest post, about Jie Jie? 

 

[ViolaSebastian]

Quote

Her severe physical disabilities complicate things further because she doesn't have the intellectual ability to care for her needs and make medical decisions for herself.

Hearing this made me feel terrible for Jie Jie when I think about all the posts about how she stubbornly refused to take care of herself, stock up on supplies, etc. It wasn't that she wouldn't do it, she couldn't do it--but she sure got scolded on the blog all the same.

[iheartchacos]

Are you thinking specifically about the latest post, about Jie Jie? 

 

I can't even say. I just find it highly suspect that all these girls have such serious medical needs. Maybe I'm just jaded by all the trolls...but I just find it all hard to believe.

[Antimony]

42 minutes ago, iheartchacos said:

I can't even say. I just find it highly suspect that all these girls have such serious medical needs. Maybe I'm just jaded by all the trolls...but I just find it all hard to believe.

I kind of sort of agree. I think it's possible they all have serious medical needs but the way she describes them seems seriously suspicious. Entire pages of genetic changes? Of course she does -- but then K goes on to wax poetic about the ones Jie Jie doesn't even show because they're recessive! 

She also describes them as "genetic disabilities" which is strange to me. 

And, I think, as many of us suspect, any syndrome or diagnosis these girls do have is has much more severe syndromes in K's household than they would display in a household with proper attention, love, etc. I also think that somebody who spoke their language and dialect fluently being there regularly would help. Sissy, at least, must have some Chinese proficiency to sneak on to QQ and I suspect the other girls do too (despite K's instance that they've lost it. She posted that somewhere.)

I also think it is strange that K's anger is at the people in Chinese who "hid and lied" about the girls' conditions. Surely, K would realize that if she spent this much time and money tracking down specialist after specialist, blood test after blood test, and going to different doctors that maybe its' just possible that the orphanages didn't know, or didn't know the full extent of it. It would be one thing to be mad at the world that these girls were put in this situations, that institutions (on the whole spectrum from neglectful to well-meaning) don't have the resources to provide care and diagnoses or whatever but K has decided this was a purposeful way to trick her into adopting these children and now she's bitter about it. That's what I think anyway. 

[DaisyD]

She has no interest in loving any of those kids except Apple. They were a means to an end, and now they're more trouble to her than they're worth. She now gets whatever mileage she can out of the sympathy card.

[Rubaiyat]

I can't believe I'm going to say this in this thread but....adopting older children is freaking HARD.  It's one of those things that can't possible be appreciated from the outside, and that cannot be completely prepared for in advance.  Our family is getting a crash course in that as I type, and let's just say that, if this doesn't kill us, we'll probably end up with power to bend both space and time.  (what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, right?  RIGHT?!?)

It's also incredibly bitter to feel (or realize) that you've been set the fuck up.  Whether or not that's happening here, I have no idea.  I can tell you that it absolutely does happen, and can leave anyone reeling, questioning whether you can meet the newly discovered needs, and wondering if you've just ruined not only your life, but the lives of everyone around you.  It's bad y'all, and the struggle is real. 

Having said all that, writing a snarky, bitter, intractable blog about how you're the greatest mother ever with all these messed-up kids that totally aren't your fault because you have all the parenting skillz! isn't the way to go.  Focusing on what you don't/can't have, or what others did "wrong" is only going to make your life harder, trust me.  What someone else did or didn't do is never going to tell you what you need to know now: can you parent these children, love them, and give them what they need?  I can't tell anyone else how to answer that question.  I can say that I do understand where K is coming from, which makes her behavior all the more repugnant.  I can't even imagine how the girls must be feeling.  

Stop whining and figure your shit out so you can figure their shit out!!  

 

P.S. Serious props to @Antimony in the previous post whom, I believe, hit the nail right on the head.