I don\u2019t know about anyone else, but I\u2019m tired as hell of all Covid all the time. We know it\u2019s serious for people with underlying conditions, and we\u2019re taking necessary precautions, but we also know someone who had Covid as early as Christmas and didn\u2019t even know it. He also didn\u2019t infect any of the other family members who gathered to celebrate the holiday at the time he was ill. In other words, we aren\u2019t all going to die!<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Athena.jpg?resize=240%2C267&ssl=1\")
Instead, I thought that this morning I\u2019d send along a bit of good news. If you\u2019ve glanced at that little piece of sunshine smiling out at you from behind the cover of Sins of the Fathers, you may be wondering if she\u2019s one of my grandchildren. Nope, but she\u2019s a special little kid, and this morning I have permission to tell her story. And for those of you who have always wondered where get my ideas? Stay tuned.<\/p>\n
Three and a half years ago, when Bill and I came back from a sojourn in Arizona, our then seventy-one year old personal trainer, Dan, showed up on our doorstep with an infant in an infant carrier in one hand and a diaper bag in the other. Does this sound like deja vu? If you\u2019ve read Sins of the Fathers, it should, because it\u2019s pretty much word for word what\u2019s in that opening scene when Alan Dale shows up on Beau\u2019s doorstep with a newborn baby in hand.<\/p>\n
During our workout session, Dan told us that his drug-addicted daughter had given birth to a drug addicted baby, stayed around long enough to name her Athena, and then bailed from the hospital leaving her newborn behind. Dan spent weeks in the hospital nursery, rocking the baby as she went through the agonies of drug withdrawal. Then, unwilling to send her into the \u201csystem,\u201d he managed to have himself appointed to be her temporary legal guardian and took her home. BY HIMSELF!!!!<\/p>\n
Dan is divorced and lives alone. When we saw him a month or two later, he was a shadow of his former self but the baby was just fine. His face was gaunt. His clothes hung off him. There were dark circles under his eyes. Two weeks into the process, barely getting three hours of sleep a night, he told Athena\u2019s aunty, Jessi\u2014the biological father\u2019s sister\u2014that he didn\u2019t know how he was going to make it. A day or so later, Jessi, a twenty year-old living in Eastern Washington near her parents, stepped up to the plate by calling to say, \u201cI\u2019ll take her.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are plenty of twenty year-olds out there these days who couldn\u2019t handle taking in a puppy, much less a baby, but that was the beginning of Dan\u2019s now almost four year-long quest to make suitable arrangements for Athena, first in terms of a legal guardianship and finally an adoption.<\/p>\n
First off, calling the foster care nightmare a \u201csystem” is giving it way too much credit. It\u2019s a chaotic mess. The easy answer for too many social workers is to return the child to the parents even if they happen to be drug-using addicts living in their cars! Dan\u2019s response to that was: \u201cNo way in hell!\u201d Over and over.<\/p>\n
There was one scheduled court appearance after another which neither parent actually bothered to attend. As the case dragged along, it’s been complicated by the fact that the biological parents aren\u2019t actually husband and wife. The mother is still married to someone else, a guy who\u2019s been locked up in the slammer with no visitors since long before Athena was conceived. The realities of simple biology aside, as far as the social workers were concerned, he was the presumptive father and needed to sign off on his \u201cparental rights\u201d\u2014something he had zero interest in doing!<\/p>\n
And all this time, Dan, with the tenacity of a bulldog, has tried his best to make an unworkable system work. Fortunately, he\u2019s kept a paper trail of all his interactions with the social workers who were great at stalling but not so great at anything else.<\/p>\n
When a hearing two weeks ago was canceled because the social worker didn\u2019t show, Dan sent his paper trail\u2014including details concerning the non-father\u2019s prison status\u2014up the chain of command, and finally something happened. The result? Somebody finally noticed there was a problem with the \u201csystem.” At yesterday\u2019s hearing the judge ordered that Athena\u2019s adoption can proceed on a closed basis with NO CHANCE OF PARENTAL REUNIFICATION!<\/p>\n
Dan told us this morning that he feels as though a hundred pound weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Today Athena is at Lake Couer d\u2019alene with her mommy and her new dachshund puppy, Woody.<\/p>\n
Obviously, if you\u2019ve read Sins of the Fathers, you know that although the real Athena’s situation may have provided the inspiration for the book, the two stories diverge in many ways. Still the two Athenas, one real and one make believe, have something very important in common. In terms of grandfathers, with Dan in one of their lives and with Beau and Alan Dale in the other\u2019s, they are BOTH very lucky little girls.<\/p>\n
And in each case, the good guys won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t know about anyone else, but I\u2019m tired as hell of all Covid all the time. We know it\u2019s serious for people with underlying conditions, and we\u2019re taking necessary precautions, but we also know someone who had Covid as early as Christmas and didn\u2019t even know it. He also didn\u2019t infect any of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-yI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2154,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/2154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}