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.

Mother's Day Too

When my older boy was about two years old, he asked me where his other mother was.  I had to give him the "sad" news that he didn't have another mother.  And no, he didn't have other siblings, either.  Poor boy.

He lived in an ... unusual household.

His sisters both had other mothers and siblings about whom they spoke, and whom they sometimes visited.  It was a bit confusing for a two-year-old who, not surprisingly, figured that this was the norm.  It was, obviously, his norm.

One sister was a "newcomer," although, to a two-year-old, it probably was hardly within his memory that she hadn't always been with us.  A teenager with some "family issues," she lived with us for about two years, and grew up with a happy "ending."  She re-established a healthy connection with her family, and established an independent living situation.  There aren't many of those in the dependency system.  She regularly visited her siblings; less regularly her parents.  She spoke often about all of them.  I think about her often.  I think that she's what foster care is supposed to be about ... but rarely is.

The other sister was my daughter, who came to me as an emergency foster placement, to stay for "two weeks-to-six months" when she was five years old.  She is now married, with a child of her own.  She had siblings who were part of her "case," who she visited regularly for the first years she lived with me - until after her adoption finally came through.  She also visited her biological mother during those years:  supervised visits that were emotionally draining and, as we learned later, not adequately supervised.  Later, the visits were not as regular, but when they happened were more real - the kids met in each other's homes, in their real lives.  Most of them still keep in touch in various ways.  But the mothers who raised them are their mothers.  The mother who birthed them is their "bio mom."

My son has no wish for another mother anymore.  I don't think he did then, either.  He was just trying to figure things out.  He was always very analytical, and in his own careful way, he was trying to assess the situation.  Something wasn't sitting right, and he didn't want any unpleasant surprises later.  

My boy liked to find structure in the world.  When his brother was little, he asked whether we'd be moving.  We had moved when he was two, so he figured we'd move again when his brother was two.  

Being a mother has given me the joy of seeing the world through the eyes, not simply of a child, but of someone who sees the world from a totally different angle - and each of my children has seen the world from a totally different perspective.  What a gift!