I'm wactose intolerant.

Which made doing my job last week difficult, as child welfare is fundamentally wack. I had two big DCFS meetings in which people who had never met the children not only diagnosed these children but then made idiotic claims about what should be done to help them with the disorder we had just decided they had. Like therapy three times a week to address "attachment issues." Seeing as we had just removed this boy from his home before Christmas because, basically, his people are street-level West Siders, I was thinking that a good first step, beyond attachment centered play therapy, might be to give the child a fucking home. But that's just me. I'm not the head of DCFS clinical, and there is a reason for that: I am not a complete tool.

During the other meeting I admitted to my client that the whole thing was a set up to make the system--including, bless my heart, me--feel much better about steamrolling through childrens' lives. She suggested that she enter the room and yell "My caseworker thinks y'alls talking some bullshit!" and oh, I wish she had. Because they were talking some bullshit, asking this poor baby, all dressed up for yet another meeting about another foster home, to "tell us what you want out of this." She wants, if I may speak for her: to not have a crack addicted mother, to have not been placed in a foster home with a rapist, to have just one of the people who promises to be her mother actually be her mother. And these meetings, if they involve a teenager, always have this skin-crawling moment in which a caring adult makes stern eye contact and says that this is the time to make the choice to turn your life around. I hope you slept better after that completely useless speech, wackass. Does anyone really think that she has never heard that before? What if the life you are turning around is debased and shaky and badly in need of some gentle love?

My rage is righteous and justified. I will also mention, for full disclosure, that my rage is prideful; during both meetings there were allusions to the idea that the children might require more effective therapy. This is a knife in my heart. I don't think I can do any better than I am doing right at this moment, care anymore, work any harder, and the idea that my work isn't enough, or isn't right, just kills.

There is no way to know, is the problem. The measures they have developed to quantify therapeutic progress complete disintegrate when applied to multi-problem (poor, neglected, and abused) children and families. It's a creepy soft science and I cultivate this doubt, I think it keeps me sharp, a doubt in therapy and a doubt about my ability to do therapy. On the other had, I will not tolerate this doubt on the tongue of some bureaucrat who has hitched their star to the gruesome DCFS thresher.

Oh, the rheatoric. It feels good, it feels really 1998, to get back in touch with the seminal social work rage that put me on the path of poverty and righteousness I currently travel. Sometimes, with all the love and non-judgement and relativism, I forget how good it feels to find some wack bullshit and then just explode it with laser-like rage. In my head. While shaking hands. Polite smiles. Enjoy the holidays!