I have come to realize that blogs are not necessarily private. Not that I think I have tons of avid readers---my guess is that by and large I have very few as my musings are pretty pedestrian. However the fact that there is some degree of publicness to this means that there are things I can not figure out how to write about when they bother me. Because of the confidentiality regulations of my job, I can't write about the truly pathetic parenting issues that I deal with. I can't really write about how it bothers me when I listen to what parents use as their defense when all our other options fail and we are forced to go to court. I can't write about how i feel about the children who are forced to deal with their parents dysfunction and do so with violence.
I can't write about the parents who really really should not have their children in their home. Maybe they should some day but not now. Yet the powers that be leave them there and i watch them suffer and can do so little to alleviate that.
I can't write about the parents who really really should have their children restored to their homes but the state has such a vendetta against the mother that there is a long legal battle that I have been pulled into while the mother attempts to regain custody.
Well, I can write about the situations like these blurbs above. Totally without any form of specificity. Without a context to explain what bothers me about these cases and my dealings with the families involved.
What perhaps I can write about more cogently is the way these situations make me feel. I feel angry. I feel confused. I look at my beautiful children that I love more than I have a capacity to explain and I feel confused. Should their parents have been subjected to TPR? I hope with all my heart that these were situations where it truly was in the children's best interest. I know it was presented to me that way in each and every case. In one case, the children were being hidden in a closet and the house was so filthy that the officials who entered it still remember the level of sanitation (or lack of) to this day. In another, the birth mom appears to have sought out the adoption agency so that she could find a safe happy home for her baby and be able to both return to school and to try and deal with her addictions. In another case. the birth mom had 6 other children, none of whom she was parenting. Family members were raising the other children but could not take on another child. Mom was facing jail time due to drugs and the baby tested positive for drugs. Both mom and dad allegedly voluntarily signed TPR's.
I hope things were as we were told. I really do.
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2 comments:
I've been thinking about these things a lot lately, the unknowability of what was really going on and whether things were really right. There's so much messiness and so much hurt involved in the process of TPR. Thank you for writing this, even if you can't write any more specifically.
At least one of my kids shouldn't have been taken into care. Well, by the time he was it was necessary, but it shouldn't have been necessary.
When you put a man in jail for attempting to kill the very young mother of his very young children, it should occur to someone that this woman is going to need help making it in the world. She needed intervention then. By the time it came, it was too late -- for reasons you may be able to imagine but I won't write.
All of our children are in care because of an act of injustice. There is a great difference between an injustice perpetrated by the system that was supposed to be protecting them, of course. But still. There it is.
All we can do is love them, and support them when and if they want the rest of their story.
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