After we were released from jail was when the REAL fight began. During our stay in jail my husband, who as I mentioned earlier proudly served in the US Air Force, was discharged. Since we lived on base we were now homeless. Determined to fight for Jessy we hit the ground running and started to paper Las Vegas with resumes. My husband was very determined to make it in the construction industry and I, well I was just trying to find anyone who would hire me since now, thank you very much CPS, I was a felon. The doors were shut in our face left and right. No one would hire us. We didn’t even get ONE interview.
As I said before, our daughter was only in foster care for 3 weeks. My mother-in-law got custody of her then and Jessy was allowed to go and live with her and has ever since. So when we decided Las Vegas was not going to give us the time of day we decided to move to Elko NV a nearyby town where my in-laws lived with our daughter. We got lucky. A couple of weeks in Elko and we both landed jobs. We now work and live at a storage facility as the on-site managers. We are very blessed. Our apartment here is much nicer than anywhere else we have lived. One of the first things we did was prepare a room for Jessy to come home to. We painted the walls lavender and decorated it with Tinker Bell wall appliques. It sits empty waiting on the slim chance that she will some day live in it.
At first we were allowed to visit with Jessy whenever my in-laws were willing to supervise and they would frequently invite us over for dinner. Then for no apparent reason our case worker decided that we should have “scheduled” visitation with Jessica and limited us to 1 1/2 hours on Friday and 1 1/2 hours on Sunday. No explanation was given nor was there any just cause that I can see for this decree except to wieled their ultimate power over us to ake sure we knew who was in control. We resisted at first and saw that it was getting us no where so we resigned ourselves to the new arrangement.
We then attacked our case plan with wild abandon. We did everything asked of us and even more. While we remain adamant that we never neglected our children and most CERTAINLY never abused them we do understand that we have our issues that we need to work on. Nothing on our case plan really could HURT us. I mean who in this world today CAN’T use some counseling? And since there has never been a perfect parent on this earth we figured that the parenting classes wouldn’t be a waste of time. We are always looking to improve ourselves.
We were facing insurmountable odds, but my husband and I had each other and our love for our daughter and that was enough to keep fighting. And fight we have done. Our case worker has praised us on multiple occasions for our “amazing progress” as she calls it. We, in the 5 months we’ve been outof jail, have almost completedour 4 page case plan. Which, trust me, has been no small feat. It has taken a near obsession-like commitment. But it is a challange we readilly accept beacuse, to us, there is nothing in this world more important than or daughter.
Never the less, at our one year case review do you think we got any credit at all for the “amazing progress” we’ve made? NOPE! In regards to our progress our case worker simply said “Dustin and Jill are case plan compliant” . That’s it! In regards to our supervised visits with Jessica our worker stated ” The visits are appropriate.” I would have thought that our case worker simply does not have a way with words except for that when remarking on her visits to our in-laws home with Jessy she went into great detail about what Jessica said and did and what was going on. Talk about bias. And then, to make matters worse, it was as if she could not be satisfied with having NOTHING bad to sayso she added ” on an unscheduled visit this worker stopped by the home of Dustin and Jill at 10 AM on Thursday as it was their day off. Jill was in her pajamas and looked unkempt and like she had not showered very recently.This case worker feels this may be a symptom of depression. ” WOW, ok, first of all IT WAS MY DAY OFF! It was 10 AM on my day off and the door bell woke me up. I got out of bed and answered my door. I did not know that I was expected to wear a dress and my pearls at all times in case she was to stop by. If I had of delayed answering the door to get dressed she would have assumed that I was trying to quickly clean up a mess. Second of all, being in my pjs at 10 am is not a symptom of depression it is a symptom of JUST WAKING UP!!! And no. I hadn’t showered in 24 hours because as I have previously stated , I HAD JUST WOKEN UP! Leave it to these people to paint the worst possible picture of a very innocent situation. They are trying to fit me into a mold of what they want me to be rather than presenting the facts. They minimized the good things and over emphasized the not-so-bad to make them seem like very bad things. Talk about an uphill battle!
fightingforjessy