Why, yes, I do rant a lot. I care about people, and I rant on their behalf if not on my own.
I can’t recall if I complained here about “volunteering”–going into work though they are no longer paying me to complete work I couldn’t get done sooner. But I’ve been doing it, though it inhales mightily. One thing I tell myself to get through, is that this is the price I pay for taking time for the students. That helps, because the students are what matters. More of that filing would have been done if I hadn’t taken ten minutes to help a twelve-year-old safety-pin her shirt, or five minutes to find out the reason a kid was half an hour late and looks teary is that his dog died last night. Oh well. I did what was important when it came to me, and let the filing wait.
On the other hand are cases like this. (text of the article copied here, in case they move the page)
As the article states, as you can see for yourself, all those girls needed was for someone to do their job. This is a problem, people. This is why you don’t get to dismiss that homeless guy or the teen mom with “there’s programs for people like that.” The programs don’t always work. Sometimes all that’s needed is that one extra bit of help. The one you could give.
We all know social services people are overworked. We pile on the cases and the paperwork and demand that they see the future, and wow do they catch hell if they get it wrong. And sometimes, perhaps because they’re lazy but more likely because they’re overwhelmed, they just don’t take that one last step, and someone dies.
I believe this is why my husband died. They had me pretty much barred from going near him, and his lawyer, my lawyer, Hope’s lawyer, our CPS case manager, his mental health case manager, his doctor–ALL of them, declined to take that extra step to help a family going under.
And now there’s just two of us. Four years later, it still hurts. It won’t ever stop hurting.
Wow, this is awfully rambly and I don’t have the heart to go back and clean it up. I’ll just hope it has some effect anyway.
May God, by any name, help us all to help each other.