Going to bed angry

Our intake social worker came over that first weekend (on Sunday afternoon I think) to bring us more screen material. I sort of broke down to her. She was fairly unmoved by the difficulties I related, saying that she hadn't known anything about tantrums or the like, and telling me that it was normal for kids to act out in a new foster home. She said that we would hear from our actual worker the following week and was out the door.

We finally got a call from our worker on Wednesday or Thursday, nearly a week after we took custody. She came in and one of her first questions was, " On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being find a new home for these boys ASAP and 10 being I want to adopt them and keep them forever, where were we at?" I about lost it. I told her firmly that such a question was extremely unfair to ask after the events of the past week, we were completely dropped without any thought or care, these kids are hard and everyone is downplaying the difficulties and everyone is worried about the goddamn window screens instead of the fact that I can't do anything with these kids.

She said that we should have called on-call guy when things got bad and that he would have helped us out, come over and checked in. She said he should have called to see how we were doing. We told her we had called, when Thing 1 hurt himself, but we didn't know we were allowed to call for non-injury issues. We described the way in which our taking custody went down and the fact that on-call guy barely acknowledged us in his hurry out the door. (Later, she asked him about us. He claims that he had no idea that we were brand new foster parents and that the boys were a new placement or he would have checked up on us. No one told him...uh, right).

She, too, claimed that there was no history of the tantrums and severe outbursts or the running off that we had experiences so I began getting paranoid that I was somehow causing this behavior or that it was newly manifested. Or worse, that I was overreacting to their behavior. I went to bed really angry that night.