Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus, in your golden, fleece diapers, with your curled-up, fat, balled-up little fists pawin' at the air...

Brandon gave me another update on baby Jesus. To recap, my mother-in-law was roommates with a woman, Diana, who just had a baby named Jesus. Diana’s boyfriend and the father of Jesus was from Mexico, but he’s most likely not coming back. Now, she has moved to Florida to live with her sister. This is the same woman who claimed that she didn’t even want her kid. It’s enough to make you sick, but this latest incident just makes it worse.

Initially, I gave a prediction of two possible positive outcomes for Jesus:

1, he will find a way to work through school and break out of the status he was born into, or 2, this woman will think hard about what she said and realize that she is not a fit mother.

I didn’t account for option 3 where he is taken from her by child protective services.

Keep in mind that all of this is hearsay, and I don’t have any evidence of the particulars, but having intimate knowledge of and dealings with this woman, I imagine the truth isn’t that far off. Apparently, this woman is bipolar, and I guess she wasn’t taking her medicine. From what we’ve heard, she had a manic episode and starting hitting Jesus. Her sister called the cops, and this woman is now in jail. Jesus is in the foster system in Florida.

This is a tough situation for us. Brandon’s mom has basically raised this kid. We’ve known for a while that this woman is not a fit mother, but there was only so much we could do. There is the possibility of trying to adopt Jesus ourselves, but Brandon is right at the end of school and is about to start working. It just highlights the extra troubles we have to go through when some people who shouldn’t be parents can do so easily.

If our timing was right, we would probably be on a plane today to Florida. Friends have already suggested it, but our dilemma is difficult. We have to make sure we can take care of ourselves before we can adopt, and one of the last hurdles is having Brandon finish up school stuff. I also don’t know if California adoption laws would trump Florida’s (currently it is limited to where same-sex couples can adopt in Florida). It’s a tough decision for us because we have some personal involvement and knowledge, but we also need to consider what we were told at the Alameda County foster orientation meeting: you can always say no and it won’t be held against you.

I also don’t know the full complications of trying to foster/adopt from across the country. We can probably establish a status of fictive kin, but we would also have to constantly worry about dealing with Jesus’ mother. I’ve been going back and forth in my mind, but we can’t beat ourselves up for not stepping in. There isn’t much we can do right now, but maybe there is a way to check in once we are at the point where we want to start the process…