Heartbreaking Visit

This isn't a current photo but rather an old one of Tomorrow just getting ready to cry at the end of a photo session back in October, and it is one of only three pix I have of her in which she is unhappy. (The other two are of her in the body cast and the Pavlik harness and I will probably never post them here).

That is how she looked whenever I picked her up from her first visit in three weeks tonight; only she had tears streaming down her face and she was crying, nearly hyperventilating and shaking.

She was crying *sooo hard*, and the first thing her mom said was, "she has been so fussy tonight!" Fussy, really? We call that "really, really upset" in our house. We might even label it as "inconsolable". I was almost hysterical on the inside, wondering why nobody had called me, but I managed to keep my cool. I took her from the birth mom and she immediately stopped crying and laid her head on my shoulder. Then she was trying to catch her breath from sobbing so hard and long, and it was so terribly sad that I felt like crying myself. The Case Aide said that all the girls are so rambunctious at the visits and she tries to keep an eye on everyone and everything and won't nap (nevermind that she had taken a two hour nap right before the visit)...bio mom asked if she is teething (why is that the catch-all explanation for all crying that doesn't stop when something is shoved in her mouth?)...so I said (but didn't mean), "She is probably just tired."

Still, I think I saw the pain in her birth mother's eyes when I took Tomorrow from her and she stopped crying right away. So I said something about how she is at the age when babies get so attached to people that they don't go to others as easily, and I told them that she doesn't jump into her Case Manager's arms anymore either and she used to do so (she sees Codi weekly, too, so I thought it was a good comparison). Then her bio mom made the comment that this is why she needs to see her more often-- and she hadn't seen her for two weeks, so I had to agree with her. Then a weird thing happened: the Case Aide seemed to get defensive and told us that she had been on injury leave the first week and couldn't help it, and that the next week's visit fell on MLK day. But we had both offered to make up both visits another evening. The Case Aides just don't seem to have the time in their schedules (or aren't willing to make the effort to move their schedules around).

I think it is wrong, for all involved, for court-ordered family visits to be missed and not made up for more than one week. I think it is awful for her to have to go three weeks not seeing her mom and sisters and then being left with them. Yet I have to ask myself, am I at fault for not foreseeing that this would happen? After all, I'm essentially her mother. And I know that as she gets more and more attached to us, the flipside of that is that she will not be as attached to others. Sadly, the closer we grow, the less she will probably want to be held by her birth mother.

I don't know what to do. Do I offer to sit in on the next visit? Or just wait in the lobby in case I am needed for soothing? All I know is that I need to call someone tomorrow, and tell them something. Tonight just wasn't right. I haven't heard Tomorrow cry like that since she was being cut out of her body cast, and I can't imagine that happening every single week from now 'til whenever.

Meanwhile, I can't put her down tonight. I don't want to and anyway, she won't let me.