OT - On Parenting and Zealous Representation

This is totally off topic, and it would take pages to trace how I got here, so I'll skip that part and just dive in:  I'm thinking about the attorney who represented my daughter's mother (yeah, I know, your head is starting to hurt already) way back when my daughter was my foster daughter. Sometimes, I feel so much anger towards this woman, whom I have never met, it scares me.

I know that lawyers have an obligation to zealously represent their clients.  I also know that zealous representation does not mean without limitation or regard for others - like the client's own child.  A client in a dependency case should, must, be concerned about the well-being of the child.  But this lawyer had a deep, unshakable certainty that all children - ALL  children - belong with their biological parents, no matter what!!!  And that is the result for which she fought - without regard for anything else.  She did not care what was good for the child, what was good for her client, what was good for any other children in the family - she wanted every, single child that she could litigate over, to be back with her client, the mother.

So, my daughter, essentially a pawn in this woman's game, was relegated to staying with the mother when others of the children were removed, because of abuse and severe neglect (fun fact: more children die from neglect than from abuse).  She stayed for two and half more years, after the others were removed.  During that time, she experienced, of course, abuse and severe neglect.  She was also pimped out by her father, and raped by more than one man.  She was seen by neighbors fellating neighborhood boys.  She was four years old.  Yes, Ms. Attorney, you did her a huge favor, allowing her to stay with her mother.

"But that's not all," as the promos on TV always tell us.  You made sure her mother had control over everything she possibly could.  You made sure that her mother prohibited her from cutting her hair.  She wanted to cut her hair short, when she was seven or eight years old. Why shouldn't a child that age have some say over how she wears her hair?  Because her mother didn't want to allow it, and you made sure she had that kind of control over a child who didn't know where she would be living, or who she would call "Mom," from one month to the next.  Good job.

But that, and the refusal to allow her access to her favorite toys from her mother's house - those were the small stuff.  The big stuff was the stuff the smacked us in the face much, much later;  after we'd adopted her.

It turned out that those "supervised" visits that took place so close to bio Mom's house, so it would be "convenient," even though she had door-to-door transportation provided when they were held elsewhere, weren't so well supervised, after all.  At one of them, when my daughter was about eight or nine years old, and it was pretty clear that eventually, after you did all the foot -dragging and court appeals you could do, my daughter would be freed up for adoption, and we would be adopting her, your client - the woman who you insisted should be allowed to raise my daughter because my daughter belonged with her - elicited from that little girl a promise: a promise that when she was eighteen years old, and she was able to make her own decision about where to live, she would come back to live with her mother.  

My daughter is a person of integrity.  As she grew older, and age eighteen no longer seemed quite so far away, the prospect of the time coming when she would have to fulfill the promise became intolerable. She became severely depressed, suicidal.  She could not go back to live in the house with a man who had sexually assaulted her, and the woman (her mother) who had not only witnessed it, but had denied knowing of its occurrence.  My daughter believed she could not renege on her promise.  She saw her only way out as suicide.  

Ms. Attorney - I believe you set up this situation.  I believe that you, in your relentless, soul crushing insistence that only a birth mother is the proper person to raise a child, set up the ongoing living arrangement, when my child was a pre-schooler, for her to be repeatedly sexually assaulted, and then, when she was a somewhat older child, to be placed in a position where she was not protected from the woman who was supposed to be the person who was supposed to be her primary protector.

The good news is, my daughter is great!  She's grown up, with the help of countless people (mental health professionals, educators, amazing people who went way beyond what would be "expected"), she has survived some very difficult times.  She now has her own family, and is happy.  Her early life still affects her - it is not possible to "get over" the kinds of early life trauma that she endured.  It is possible to learn to live with it, and to thrive - but it takes a lot of support, and a lot of work.

This is Child Abuse Awareness Month.

Happy Mother's Day

My daughter made me a mother.  

My mother never thought so.  The Mother's Day after my son was born, when I called my mother to wish her a happy Mother's Day, she returned the greeting, saying, "You're a mother, too!"  She sounded so happy for me.

It's always been a complicated, and difficult dance.  "I've been a mother," I responded.  "Yes," she answered, irritably, "but now you're really a mother.  

So the prior four years hadn't been real.

And so it has always been, and continues to be.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother said to me, "Can you believe that your sister is a grandmother? and she's the same age as you?"  Yes, I am a twin.  "Well, I am also a grandmother," I answered, resisting the urge to say I have been for longer.  "Yes, but that's different."

Obviously, there's a back story here.  My daughter is adopted; she was an "older" adopted child.  I never had the opportunity to rock my daughter, as a baby, to sleep, or to nurse her, feed her baby food, see her roll over for the first time, take her first steps, hear her first words.  I also didn't get to prevent her first, second or umpteenth assault at the hands of caretakers who were supposed to love her.  I wasn't there when she was ripped, literally, from the arms of her biological mother, by police officers who were trying to protect her from the abuse she'd already suffered in her young life.

I was there when she screamed every time she saw a police car, or a police officer in uniform.  I was there when she, hesitantly, started to reveal bits and pieces of what had happened to her.

I was there during what was euphemistically called her "rocky" adolescence, when she had to deal with what her early childhood trauma had meant to her, and what it meant to her future ... if she could envision one.  Mostly, she could not.

My daughter and I have been through a lot ... together.  We both know it.  It has made us very close.  We laugh about things that no one should laugh about.  We got through it, so it can now be funny.  She IS my daughter, and I AM her mom.  Neither of us has the slightest doubt about it.

When people talk about a "real" parent, biology has little, if anything to do with it.  

Happy Mother's Day, to all the mothers, and to all the children who made their mothers into mothers!

Residential Facilities ... Fatalities

There have been a number of disturbing, sad stories recently about residents in a local facility which is supposed to provide for individuals with serious needs - autism, cognitive impairment, etc.  Many of the residents are school-age, meaning age 21 or under; some are, I believe, older.  Some are verbal, some are not.  

The recent round of stories started with a 20 year old youngster who was left in a van on a very hot day, and died there after no one noticed his absence four five hours!  In the aftermath of this horrific incident, the story of a youngster who had run from his unit, scaled a fence, and jumped (dropped?) over an overpass onto a roadway and been hit and killed by passing traffic, has been told and re-told.  There were questions about whether the alarm on the door had been functioning correctly.  Meanwhile, a staff person was arrested in a cocaine sale in the facility parking lot.  Another incident has now been reported, wherein a resident was allegedly abused by a staff person, was hospitalized for treatment for his injuries, and then released by to the same facility.

Protesters are demonstrating outside, calling for the facility to be closed, and for all such facilities to be closed so that people can be cared for in their communities rather than in "secluded" facilities.  Those who are in charge of the facility are issuing statements assuring concerned parties that everything is "fine."  Parents are upset - they are concerned about their children, and they don't want people demonstrating at the place where their children live - it is scary for their children to see these strangers marching and shouting.  It is scary for the parents to think of their children being thrown out of the place that has been a home to them - sometimes for many years (the youngster who died in the van had lived there for 6 years).

I hate seeing tragedies being twisted into opportunities for political grandstanding.  Is the situation at this facility awful?  Yes.  Do I believe that this facility needs to be shut down?  Probably - if not shut down, it needs to have a clean sweep and start-over.  There's a problem there that is ingrained, and it's not a simple matter of one or two employees, or "a mistake."  I know, from people who've worked there, that there is a substantial attitude that is abusive, and that there is a segment of the staff that not only tolerates abuse of residents, but threatens staff who might show signs of not tolerating it - maybe not the abuse that winds residents up in the hospital, but abuse nonetheless.  Not all facilities, however, are like this.  There are facilities where the staff genuinely care about their charges.  There are places where residents are safe, loved, and cared for.  There are some people, admittedly few, but some, who may not be as safe in a community setting, and who may need the kind of oversight that these facilities can offer.  This does not mean that people shouldn't have choices - they should.  But for those for whom a facility is necessary, we need for these facilities to exist also.  They need to exist, but safely, and properly.  This facility is not a safe facility; it doesn't mean there are none.

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And now, the owners of the Pennhurst property, which was one of the biggest state institutions in Pennsylvania, are planning to open a "haunted attraction" on September 23, with an asylum theme.  The lawsuits stemming from the horrors of the abuse, neglect and mistreatment that occurred at Pennhurst led to the closing, not only of Pennhurst, but of numerous state institutions across the country.  To use the memory of those horrors as an entertainment device is beyond appalling.  That's a demonstration I could get behind!