How Green Becomes Wood

Dark sighed, pushing his hair back with one hand and briefly grabbing the back of his head, "Okay," he swore and then apologized for it, "She can come now, I suppose. That way nobody can say we were trying to buy time to hide evidence. It is absurd I even need to have that concern. Okay. Thank you. I will talk to you later. Probably one week from now." After all the proper goodbyes were made, he swore again and cautiously sat up, trying to jostle Ivy as little as possible. If he wasn't so stressed about CPS, he might have reflected about how his current situation was more or less what Daizi had experienced for 8 months.

Instead, though, he whispered, in Arabic, "Oh, Ivy-Qadira, my little star... How are we going to explain this to you one day?"

Then, he texted the twins, "CPS is coming again in about 20 minutes. Will one of you wake Daizi? Ivy is asleep on me and I think if I try to go upstairs it will wake her."
 
Xander was in his shed working on a project. He answered first, and he had a few choice words of his own in the text, but the main gist was, Why are they coming again? This is stupid.

Alec went to wake up Daizi with a bit of charcoal from his drawing still on his fingers. He tapped lightly on the door, trying to wake her gently and not wanting to intrude on her room. "Daizi? Daizi, will you please wake up?" he called softly. "We are going to have a visitor soon."
 
Somebody called in a report again. Do not ask me why, it is illogical. Dark replied simply, pretending as if he didn't have a terrible suspicion regarding why they were being reported.

Since Daizi was a light sleeper, Alec's gentle knocking was enough to wake her. She groaned lightly and after a few moments she came and opened the door. Her greasy hair was up in a bun and she wore a milk-stained shirt, having given up on changing her shirt seemingly a thousand times a day, "Who's coming?" She asked, rubbing her face with one hand.
 
Xander didn't bother responding as he smacked things around aggressively in his shed, putting them away and getting cleaned up. Stupid CPS! Couldn't mind their own business. And what good did they do, anyway? Loads of kids were still in horrible places! Some of those horrible places were the foster homes. So what was the point?

Alec winced, hating to be the one to break it to her. "The CPS," he said gently. "I think they are going to be here in fifteen to twenty minutes."
 
Daizi's face fell as she processed what she had been told, eventually only managing to say, "Again?" She swallowed, fighting like hell to sort through her feelings, and, miraculously, managed to pull herself together enough, "At least they gave us some warning this time. I, um, I'm going to change my shirt. I don't want to give the wrong impression."
 
"The impression being that you are a busy mother trying to keep her baby fed?" Alec suggested. "It's okay if you don't want to, but you have plenty of time to change if you do want to. Ivy is still downstairs." He turned and headed off to wash his hands.
 
"I don't want it to look like I can't keep things together," She replied, "Like I can't cope." Daizi pulled lightly on her shirt, and then slipped back into her bedroom to change. After some time, maybe longer than she exactly needed to change, she came back out and went downstairs to wait for this new intrusion.
 
Xander came to join them, still smelling faintly of leather, and Alec stayed near him. They hung back, aware that the CPS agent might ask them to leave again.

Eventually, there came a knock on the door as Mrs. Smith stood waiting with a clipboard under one arm. She wore a jacket over her shirt even though it was not very chilly, and a coffee stain peaked out from under the jacket at shoulder height.
 
The house was tense, which meant Enkidu was tense, which meant the knock at the door sent him barking. His barking immediately woke Ivy, and so Daizi opened the door bouncing a screaming baby while Dark tried to put Enkidu outside.

"Hello again," Daizi said, knowing she was a few moments from her shirt looking like the one she had changed out of, and also that Ivy wasn't hungry, just upset to be woken up, "You can come in. Sssshhhh, habibti."
 
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"Big dog," Mrs. Smith commented, stepping inside carefully and glancing around. "Has he adjusted well to having a new person in the house? I know some pets can have some trouble adjusting."

"No more trouble than us adjusting to you coming over a lot," Xander growled.

Mrs. Smith just nodded vaguely and watched Daizi with Ivy.
 
Ivy was normally a very friendly, calm baby, but she hated being woken up prematurely, and now that she had fully developed lungs, she was loud. Her weak little cries from when she was only recently born were long gone, but it had happened so gradually Daizi didn't even have a chance to appreciate it. Instead, she just ignored Mrs. Smith's question so she could instead calmly rock and sing to Ivy, who had no interest in being calmed.

"She is always grumpy when she's woken up," Dark explained, coming up to them at last and holding out his hand to Mrs. Smith, trying to seem like a perfectly welcoming gentleman, "Hello, Mrs. Smith. Enkidu is doing really well with her, actually. He likes to be in whatever room she is."
 
"Hello, Mr. Dark," Mrs. Smith said, nodding toward him. She made a note on her clipboard. "I'm glad to hear your dog is handling this well. I have cats, myself, and one of them will protest by urinating on things if I so much as move the furniture." She glanced at Ivy and made another note. "Certainly can't say she's lethargic, can we?" She leaned over, not getting too close, but managing to get a good view of Ivy's arms and legs before making another note. "Any changes I should be aware of?"
 
That question Daizi heard, and in between singing and rocking, she was unable to prevent herself from asking in return, "Since last week?"

Hopefully it wouldn't be held against her. Dark tried instead to respond more broadly, "When she was first born, she slept much more, because being premature means just her baseline was exhausting, so she would sleep for a good hour and a half or more at a time and only rarely be able to stay awake for more time than it took to eat, but now she would be at around 39 weeks gestation, had she come on time, so now even though she still sleeps most of the day, the timing is far more sporadic. That is not new since last week, but we are more or less now dealing with a standard newborn, rather than a premature newborn."
 
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Mrs. Smith nodded as she made another note. "Thank you, though I meant more in terms of strange bruises, crying that is completely out of control, things like that. If you have any problems like that, you should peak with your pediatrician, but sometimes it's hard to tell what is normal or unusual when you're a first time parent of a brand newborn. Basically, go with your gut. If something feels wrong, talk to the doctor. Speaking of..." She opened a folder and flipped through a few pages before finding the one she wanted. "This is a document giving me permission to contact your doctor and ask a few questions. As far as I can tell, your pediatrician has not felt the need to contact us, which is good, so I am trying to figure out why someone would feel the need to report you. This is the first step. If you call them first, they can explain in more detail, but the short explanation is that if I contact them with your permission, they can tell me generalities, but no specifics. If they feel your child is actually in danger, they can tell me, but if they haven't contacted us yet, I highly doubt there will be much to discuss."
 
"No, I have not noticed anything like that." Dark said, suppressing his annoyance over being told the most basic advice as if it was novel, because he could only presume Mrs. Smith told it to everyone and that she meant nothing by it. He took the form and read over it briefly, "Generalities. Okay. Fine."

Daizi furrowed her brows as she did slow, controlled squats which, combined with prolonged shushing, miraculously was enough to quiet Ivy again, "Are you saying you don't even know why we were reported? You weren't given a reason?"
 
"If you could just sign that and give it back, I have another copy here for your records," Mrs. Smith said, handing Dark a second paper identical to the first. To Daizi, she said, "it was an anonymous report, which is sadly not unusual, and they said that an infant only a few weeks old.was being neglected and abused. No further details. Seeing as this is the second call but I see no signs of either of those things, my current theory is someone mistook a premie for being malnourished."
 
Dark took the papers into the kitchen to sign the one he needed to give back. Daizi had stopped squatting, and thankfully Ivy didn't immediately begin to cry again, "Or I'm blind, and Dark is tattooed, and we don't present as a normative household, and we're both immigrants," She said blandly, truly believing it to be a much more likely scenario. It wasn't like people hadn't reacted in shock and surprise at the doctor's office when noticing she was both blind and the mother of a newborn, or hadn't reacted in surprise over her being blind and pregnant.
 
Mrs. Smith sighed. "As much scorn, racism, ableism, or whatever else you may have faced in your life, people rarely actually report immigrants or those with disabilities to the CPS. It is not something that reaches official documents. As it happens, there is a woman who was born without arms who is currently raising an infant son. She changes diapers with her feet. Blindness is hardly an issue next to that, and you have a fully sighted partner. As for normative, I do not think there is such a thing anymore. Yes, there is a possibility that those subjects might play a factor, that is not my first suspicion."
 
"I don't doubt your experiences, but it doesn't change the fact that, according to sources related to the ADA, disabled parents are more likely to be reported to child welfare services and, once in the system, are more likely to have their children removed." Daizi replied calmly, "which is why the ADA's website specifically provides resources for this problem. And considering anytime an Arab girl goes missing, a commonly circulated theory is her father did an 'honour killing,' it would not surprise me if someone presumed my husband is abusive. Plus, when we were first reported she was only two weeks old, and most people have seen a small baby about that many weeks old: Unless the saw us leave for the hospital the morning she was born, I doubt anyone would recognize how old she actually is."
 
"And none of this speculation changes one thing," Mrs. Smith stated. "The facts stand that someone called the CPS. The CPS is bound by law to answer the call. After that, it is completely within my hands to decide what to do after that. I have to evaluate the situation. If I deem that there is no reason to take action, that is that, no matter how many times anyone calls. Sadly, many people who are disabled cannot properly care for their children, and that is a fact. That does not mean that all or even a large number of disabled people cannot care for them, and that is also a fact. You are disabled, but you are so high-functioning that I barely even realized it even knowing that you are. So instead of spending your energy worrying about why you have been reported, focus on doing exactly what you have been doing; taking care of your three children and yourself. Nothing else matters right now. If that changes, I will let you know."
 
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