Tag: Adversarial Process

Like An Avalanche

“The point was, I didn’t deserve my son to be taken.”

When my two sons were young, I had a constant fear of losing them to the state without cause. Thankfully, they are 19 and 22 and have never spent a day without at least one of their parents. Others are not so lucky. Today, I read a story in The Guardian about a mother who could not believe how fast the tables turned on her. LINK>’No matter what I do, I’m not in control’: what happens when the state takes your child.

All she wanted was change for bus fare but the store clerk copped an attitude, so she left (that’s her side of the story and I’m not here to question it). I do find what happened next tragic. The clerk made a “keep the peace” call to the police. When the police confronted her, she was on her way to work, pushing her young son’s stroller across the street. They arrested her for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and obstruction. Basically, they didn’t appreciate her challenging their authority. In their report, they indicated that they would have let her go, if she had not protested. 

It could have been worse, since Child Protective Services (CPS) initially placed her son with her brother. However, not informally as a temporary caregiver while she was locked up but formally, with the intention of allowing the state to take legal custody. This was even though, the doctor who examined the little boy wrote that he showed no concerns for neglect or injury. Nevertheless, the doctor authorized CPS to hold him for 72 hours, while the agency prepared to petition the court for custody. That’s how fast it happened. CPS hadn’t been in her life that morning but the situation didn’t just snowball; it came down on her like an avalanche.

From jail, her phoned her brother only to discover it was worse than at first believed. He told her that CPS had taken her son. “They said I couldn’t see him,” she later recalled. “I don’t have custody. I don’t have rights. Nothing.” So even though her criminal case was closed when the charges were dropped, the involvement of CPS wasn’t so easy to leave behind.

Forcible family separation – among the most extreme and intrusive of government actions – occurs much more often than many realize, particularly among Black and Native American families. One in eleven Black children and one in nine Native American children will be placed in foster care by the age of 18. Families come to CPS’s attention due to issues such as substance misuse, domestic violence, mental health needs, and homelessness. Most lack sufficient resources to address their challenges. Family separation essentially punishes parents and children for their poverty and adversity.

Foster care traumatizes children; forcible family separation generates immense pain and trauma for their parents. People’s everyday experiences as they interact with the state – whether public benefits programs, police, and schools, etc – fundamentally shapes what they know and think about government, inequality, and justice. Taking children has always been a political act that targets marginalized racial/ethnic groups to maintain power over them. Family separation teaches affected mothers that the state is an adversary, working against them, given their marginal social positions. CPS gives parents, especially mothers, first-hand experience with an antagonistic, controlling government. Caseworkers, attorneys, and judges claim to help, but in most of these mothers’ experiences, those officials are working against their interests. Mothers don’t see anyone on their side.

For the woman in this story, the path for get her son home became long and arduous, with CPS repeatedly adding obstacles.  CPS wanted her to demonstrate “progress” – as they defined it – in her ability to parent. The clock was ticking: per federal law, once children have spent 15 of the last 22 months in foster care, states are supposed to start the process of terminating parental rights permanently. Parents with limited resources face substantial, often essentially insurmountable, burdens to meet CPS’s requirements. It felt like as soon as mothers met one request, CPS added another. Their cases kept getting continued in court. Meanwhile, their kids were growing up.

Finally, a judge ordered that her son could go home – even though as far as she could tell, her situation hadn’t changed. What had changed was she had simply been assigned to a different judge, one who saw no reason her son couldn’t go home. And she figured her caseworker had grown tired of dealing with her. “I can’t even believe they took two years of my life,” she sighed. “They took two years of my son’s life that I can’t get back.”

In the US, CPS puts hundreds of thousands of parents each year through this devastating experience. Certainly, these parents are often experiencing substantial adversity; they cannot always meet children’s needs in their current circumstances. Nevertheless, all deserve to be treated with dignity; all ought to have a say.

A Multi-Generational Journey

A woman wrote on a page I follow that adoption is “a multi-generational journey. It is a stone thrown into the familial pond that ripples outward ad infinitum.”

She went on to share – Today my grandson-lost-to-adoption turns 34. My son-lost-to-adoption, along with his girlfriend, surrendered him when my son was just 18. My grandson found me last December and so far, I am his only connection to his family of origin. He has experienced “abandonment” by both of his birth parents twice: at 6 months of age when they terminated their parental rights and then recently when he learned of his father’s suicide and his mother’s reunion refusal.

Another woman commented – Four generations and counting for me.

blogger’s note – In my family too. Both parents were adoptees. Both of my sisters gave up babies to adoption. One also lost custody to her son’s grandparents (she also gave up my niece with coercion from our adoptee mom – unbelievable but true) and I physically lost custody to my ex-husband and his second wife (though my parental rights were never terminated, he ended up raising her – would not agree to paying child support and so, I found another way to get that financial support but at great cost to me). Thankfully, my grown daughter and I are very close, even though. So far, our children are not losing their own children.

With all of this in mind, I went looking. It is hard to find anything related among the numerous pro-adoption links.

At the American Adoption Congress, I found an article by Deborah Silverstein and Sharon Kaplan about the LINK>Lifelong Issues in Adoption. From that article –

Before the recent advent of open and cooperative practices, adoption – had been practiced as a win/lose or adversarial process. In such an approach, birth families lose their child in order for the adoptive family to gain a child. The adoptee was transposed from one family to another with time-limited and, at times, short-sighted consideration of the child’s long-term needs. Indeed, the emphasis has been on the needs of the adults–on the needs of the birth family not to parent and on the needs of the adoptive family to parent. The ramifications of this attitude can be seen in the number of difficulties experienced by adoptees and their families over their lifetimes.

blogger’s note – Certainly, both of my parents adoptions in the 1930s were NOT open adoptions.

The authors article above goes on to note – Adoption is created through loss; without loss there would be no adoption. Loss, then, is at the hub of the wheel. All birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees share in having experienced at least one major, life-altering loss before becoming involved in adoption. In adoption, in order to gain anything, one must first lose–a family, a child, a dream. It is these losses and the way they are accepted and, hopefully, resolved which set the tone for the lifelong process of adoption.

The grief process in adoption, so necessary for healthy functioning, is further complicated by the fact that there is no end to the losses, no closure to the loss experience. Loss in adoption is not a single occurrence. There is the initial, identifiable loss and innumerable secondary sub-losses. Loss becomes an evolving process, creating a theme of loss in both the individual’s and family’s development. Those losses affect all subsequent development.

blogger’s concluding notes – I found no resolution to this whole subject but at least people are reflecting and contemplating upon the issues.

For my own self, my feelings about adoption are complicated by the fact that – if there had not been adoption in my parents lives – I simply would not have existed. I am left with no choice but to accept this as best I can. I am not a fan of adoption. Recently I connected with a woman who knows quite a bit about adoption in general – she said, “I’ve never met anyone with so much adoption in their family.”

I did like the image I posted for this blog today. I do feel like I was preserved within my family (not given up for adoption when my teenage mom discovered she was pregnant before marriage) so that I could fulfill my own Life’s Purpose – knitting back together the fragments of my parents’ original birth parents’ families, so that our identity is now more whole.