Why the twins were abruptly removed from their temporary foster home

(Continuing from yesterday) A day after we were told the twins were going to be put up for adoption and wouldn’t be coming to our home, I got a call that they were going to be immediately moved to our home. They needed a immediate placement and despite the GAL (guardian ad litem) telling everyone she would never allow these children to come to our home, we were the only option.

That very day, dd5’s kindergarten teacher reported a story that dd told (or maybe it reached the offices of social services that day).

What was the story that necessitated their immediate removal?

Dd5 said that ds5 was scared, the foster father took him to a place with a low ceiling, his hands were tied, and then ds untied them and ran away.

When the social worker repeated this over to me, I responded it sounded strange, but there was no description of anything abusive, and it could have been something innocent. I didn’t know the foster parents yet, but since dd was known to misunderstand situations and was documented to lie regularly, it didn’t seem fair to their temporary foster parents that they weren’t given a chance to explain the situation.

In cases like this, I was told, first the child is removed, and then they investigate.

I got the call Tuesday night, and the signing of the court order didn’t happen until late Sunday morning. (Friday is a day off and Sunday is a work day in Israel). We had only thirty minutes notice before we needed to leave to meet the children. I was warned not to say a word about the accusation to the foster parents.

The foster parents were told nothing about us coming until an hour before we arrived; only at that point they were told that we were coming to meet the kids and would take them the next day (I hadn’t agreed to that yet).

The foster parents had been house parents in a childrens’ village for twenty years (in Israel, children at risk are placed in home-like dormitory settings, with parents for each smallish group of children), and then moved into doing emergency foster care. The hallway of their home has pictures of the many, many children they cared for (over 200), many of whom stayed in touch with over the years as they built their own families. They paid for the weddings of ten of them with their own money.

The twins were their ninth and tenth placements, and at one point when the social worker left the room, the foster mother said to me, “I don’t understand what they’re doing. It’s not supposed to be like this; there’s supposed to be a more gradual transition for the children from one home to another.” Of course she was right, and that would have been much better for everyone emotionally, but they didn’t want to give the foster parents any inkling that something was wrong so they kept them in the dark until the last moment.

Emergency foster care is intended to be a short term placement, so that social workers can find a suitable long term home for the children. As such, there’s supposed to be a limit of six months. When we came to get them, the children had been there for over nine months. The husband had received a suspected cancer diagnosis and they had been begging social services to find a home for the children because she needed to be available to support her husband through this medical crisis.

Even though we had agreed to take them ten weeks before, the GAL insisted on a countrywide search being made to find another family who was more to her liking (they didn’t find anyone). So regardless of the extreme inconvenience to the foster parents and the children, they weren’t moved to our home sooner.

Not until dd’s story, when suddenly, the children were pulled out with almost no warning.

Two days after the twins came to our home, our social worker came to our home and I shared misrepresentations of situations and accusations that dd had already made – like when when I showed her the drawer with her clothes, she stuck her hand inside as I had already begun closing it, and her hand got caught a little. She said I “hit her with the closet”. Or the first morning when my son was making breakfast and she insisted she knew how to use a knife so he let her use it. She cut herself, then accused him of cutting her.

I told the social worker that it made me very uneasy that dd had a documented history of misinterpreting situations, and that we could be accused of something we didn’t do, or even something good we did could be twisted as harmful. I expressed my discomfort with how the past foster parents were treated and noted that was very alarming for me.

She reassured me that was them, and that it wouldn’t happen to us. It didn’t reassure me.

During my two meetings in their home (about an hour each time), I experienced them as stable and genuinely good people. If this could happen to them, people with their history, Israelis who know the language well, have strong boundaries and can advocate for themselves, I felt worried it could happen to anyone.

Two weeks after the children came to our home, I took them to a center where they reported their experience for documentation purposes. I wasn’t allowed in the room with them. Ds didn’t say anything, and dd reported the story she had previously told. They praised her and told her how brave she was.

The social worker who had accompanied them in the previous home walked us out to the car, together with their new social worker. As the children got into the car, the first one said to the second with intensity, “I wish I could just see that place (that dd described) and know where it was.”

I wondered to myself how based on so little they had already decided the foster parents were guilty. I didn’t have any emotional attachment to the foster parents, but I was very uncomfortable with what I was seeing. It seemed wrong and unfair, to see their reputation trashed and over twenty years of caring for children at risk suddenly irrelevant.

A number of times over the year I thought of calling their foster mother to update her on how they were doing, but it was such an incredibly intense period that a long time went by without me calling. I had lost all of my contacts soon after the twins came when my phone fell in water and when I finally had headspace to call, a year had gone by. I did an internet search to find her, reached an adult son, told him who I was and why I wanted to be in touch, and he gave me her contact information.

She was so emotional when I called. She said she had reached out to me a couple of times but I didn’t answer (if my contacts hadn’t been lost I would have known it was her and answered). She thought I had been told not to speak to her anymore, just like no one else responded to her calls after the children left. No one would talk to them. There was a police investigation, they explained the specifics of the situation, and the case was closed for lack of evidence. Nonetheless, social services remained completely unresponsive to them, and closed their foster care license.

During our talk, she brought up the police investigation (she didn’t know that I knew anything about the accusations, and I didn’t tell her), and told me the story.

Some homes in Israel have attic storage area accessible via pull down stairs. This family kept the seasonal clothing there, and her husband was about to take some bags up when ds got very afraid of being left behind. Her husband put ds on his back to carry him, then picked up the bags again. But ds (who has always been extremely fearful and anxious) clutched his neck and began choking him.

He explained to ds he had to put the bags upstairs, but seeing ds’s anxiety, came up with a solution. He put ds on his back again, and loosely tied his hands together in front of his (the man’s) chest, so that ds wouldn’t choke him. He took the bags upstairs, came down with ds still on his back, took off the rope and ds ran off to play. He thought he had done something nice for ds. He had no idea this incident would precipitate an investigation culminating with the loss of their foster care license.

(One time a married son was visiting when ds found a piece of rope and requested for my older son to tie his wrists with the rope as a game, so ds obliged. When I saw that, I got very upset – I told ds we could be investigaged if ds ever tells someone his hands were tied, because the context won’t matter.)

Though the previous foster mother had already been thinking they wouldn’t continue due to their age and her husband’s health situation, she told me it was devastating after so many years of giving to be treated like this, to end it all on such a horrible note.

She very emotionally thanked me for calling her, and said “You don’t know what you’ve done for me, the closure you’ve given me,” and gave me repeated blessings for the kindness I had done for her in calling.

She told me she didn’t blame dd for what she said, that she knew dd didn’t intend any harm. She commented that dd had always been very jealous of the time her husband played with ds when she wasn’t actively involved, and it had probably been hard for her to see her brother being involved in something that didn’t include her. I had seen that repeatedly in my own experience with the twins, and continue to see that same response 3.5 years later.

I don’t know what the truth is. Maybe they were really were abusers who managed to hide their true selves for twenty years of intense oversight and it only came out in the end. But after three and a half years of unpleasant experiences with social services and constantly looking over my shoulder, apprehensive that anything the children say, can and will be slanted against me and used as proof of my incompetence and negligence, I’ve come to my a different conclusion.

Since the twins have come I’ve experienced years of constant low grade anxiety, being accused of things I didn’t do, or things that had a small basis in truth but were twisted in a negative way, always having to explain and justify what I did or didn’t do. It’s emotionally taxing.

Oh – they were a secular couple, but after many years of marriage, the husband became religious and was (still is) charedi when the children came to them. Based on the hostility from the GAL we’ve experienced from before day 1 due to our religious affiliation (this isn’t conjecture – this is what all of the professionals involved with our case have told us), it’s highly likely that was a significant factor in why dd’s story was turned into a police investigation instead of just asking for an explanation.

Avivah