Hello,
I just wanted to send an email over to express my extreme disappointment over how our file was handled throughout the process of attempting to become foster parents through your county.
Before today I felt like we were not offered the same respect and honesty we gave you all, and today those feelings were confirmed. There is a large lack of looking at the big picture going on here and also some closed-mindedness and ignorance about medical marijuana itself.
Not to mention the fact other drugs that would be allowed in the household are far more dangerous and have negative impacts far larger than medical marijuana. Drugs that are also legal, and also abused by the families causing these children to be in limbo in the first place.
I digress, just wanted to let you know that Megan and I feel like we were strung along by your team and we would have appreciated you just letting us know you had no intention of giving us a chance from the get go when we told you about our medical use.
More than anything my heart hurts for the child or children that won’t get the chance for this good family and home, because you are unable to see the forest through the trees due to an old-fashioned, and frankly insulting pre-conceived notion about people who are proven to be both responsible and stable.
Hoping in time that your county will come to terms with the times, and understand that responsibility is responsibility and irresponsibility is not inherent to use of a plant that has many more medical uses than alcohol has ever had.
Good day,
Trevor Elms
Need to get this experience off my chest. Feeling rejected time and again through this particular path in life. The reflective experience of writing about things that mean so much to me always helps me get through the toughest ones.
Today, Megan and I were told that it would be a better idea to withdraw our application from the county we have been going through the process of fostering to adopt from. That in no uncertain terms we would be rejected due to our honest use of medical marijuana.
It’s a blow. Our New Year’s resolution was to begin the process of figuring out how we were going to adopt. Knowing it was going to be a long journey, certainly longer than 9 months; better now than never. We have been through many hours of training, paperwork, and travel since January. This is now reduced to another avenue we must mourn and move on from, to pick up the pieces and keep charging towards the next branch upon this crooked path.
Most frustrating thing for us both is that we are people that come from trauma. We faced some major ones as children as many people do. We have demons and failures while not being afraid to own them. To use them as lessons and reasons, the things in our lives that make us the strong and successful people we are today. We feel we are the exact kind of people well equipped to take in children that are inherently traumatized by their situations. Being removed from your family is serious business.
For this reason I need to reflect on this rejection as it not being a problem with myself and Megan — but the society we currently live in. A society that still has some growing up to do when it comes to understanding exactly what the War on Drugs was meant to do, and the kind of ignorance and bigotry it has fostered.
Rejection is just a fact of life. Getting down about it isn’t going to do us any favors and this experience, like much else that hurts — is another thing to bring us closer together.
We will have our family. We will have earned every bit of it when it arrives.
Thank you for reading.
If you have interest in reading anything else I have written please check the Table of Contents, here.
Trevor's Notepad 