RAD and the law

Well, I still don’t have it all figured out. But I do find myself continuing to peruse message boards and blogs that relate to attachment disorder, foster care and adoption. Less so boards that relate to childhood mental health problems in the absence of trauma. I think of my son nearly every day. I wish I could picture him living happily and successfully, just as though nothing bad ever happened to him at all. I think every mother would wish that for her child, just to be able to fix all the problems. I couldn’t fix them so now I just like to dream that the problems just magically disappeared for him once I stepped out of the picture. But in my heart I know that is an illusion. Last night I almost signed up on a message board for people who have experienced disrupted adoptions. But I stopped because I figure most of those people had infants who they wanted and never got rather than mothers like me who voluntarily (and necessarily) gave up a child and returned him to the custody of the state. It nearly killed me. But the damage done to him, to me, and particularly to my other children would have been much more substantial if I had continued down an impossible path. I was way out of my league. Sadly, I don’t think there is a league that is prepared to deal with the serious disturbances that can result when a human being is tortured for the first few years of life. If there was, I surely would have found it. The struggle now is to figure out how the law can benefit these children, or better yet, how it can be applied to protect them in the first place. I think the basis for this needs to be found in the constitution.  I will be working with a professor over the summer on establishing a network within the school for training to be a court appointed special advocate (CASA) and guardian ad litem (GAL) for children in state placement. That is good. But it is not the solution to the underlying problem, which is my focus and ultimate goal. The children in this country must have certain rights, and when those rights are violated, they must have access to justice and appropriate restitution, including appropriate physical, mental, and emotional health care. And I need to either locate or perform research that will establish that these children DO NOT recover from their substantial injury. I suspect that is the case more often than not, despite the happy face people want to put on the situation. It is not enough to promote foster care and adoption. That does not put these children into a position where they are made whole.  I am not anti-foster care. I am Pro-child. Every child, including the invisible ones. So…at the end of my first year of law school, I remain committed to the children, even if I have needed to devote my energy to legal subjects that seem to have nothing to do with child welfare at all.

Matrimony

Hurt children, adoption, mental health, law school, and sanity? It occurs to me that I am attempting to blend things that do not go well together and I have yet to figure out how I’m going to make it all work. Today’s search terms for the blog:  Threatening adopted child with foster care.  Attachment Disorder Single Mom. Law school scholarships. Older Law Student.  How to make it work – that is the question. To all you parents out there who are finding my blog, welcome.  To other law students, I’m probably not your average student and you may want to disregard most of what I say. I am a woman on a mission. I just don’t know exactly how to go about it. For today, I am applying for some paid internships that have more to do with public health than they do with the law. Did I choose the wrong degree? I don’t think so. I stopped into career services and they are supportive of the internship and gave helpful advice. Beyond that, I am clueless.  I don’t want to just volunteer my time over the summer to causes that I care about but that do not help me achieve my goals. I want to make progress. I want to see how it all fits together. And as usual, everything will happen exactly as God intends it to happen regardless of my well laid plans. As though I have any of those, right? Children are being harmed, families are suffering, mental health systems are contributing to the problem, educators fail to understand, and most of the world is ignorant. And I am arrogant enough to suppose I might be able to help? Yeah. The other half of the time I want to go blind, lose my memory, feign ignorance and go earn some money. The real problem is I do need to earn money because without that I can’t do anything for anyone, including myself. All the knowledge in the world does not pay my bills. But I will thank you parents of kids with RAD for reminding me that I got here from a place, and that place still exists for too many. Not only that, my son with RAD is only 15 and needs to live in this world despite his life. Not only does he need to live here, but all of society needs to share the world with him and live with the consequences. So….law school. Con Law, Property, Civ Pro, Contracts, and Legal Writing and Research call me now. I will master these subjects, make no mistake about it.

Wednesday 1/21/09

Week 3 of the second semester of the first year of law school. How sweet. The problem is I am very far from being transformed into an attorney. I can’t even picture myself working as an attorney. When I look around my classroom I can’t picture most of them working as lawyers either. Contemplating summer work is difficult. I think my inability to believe the idea is interfering with my ability to get resumes in the mail. Tonight on the ride home I was sort of contemplating the places I might like to work. And law firms are not the answer. I think I would like to work in the legal department of a hospital, or more particularly, a mental health hospital. I wonder if they even have legal departments. If they don’t, they should. But I haven’t even inquired. So that is the task I am assigning to myself for this week: create my own list of ideal legal experiences and try to make one of them happen for this summer. While the idea of “trying out different things” that I talked about a few weeks ago makes some sense, it is not me. I have always devoted myself to the disabled and this is no time to stop.  A revelation for today. We shall see how long it lasts or where this road actually leads to. Guardian ad litem training is off for the time being due to events outside my control. I realize how much I was looking forward to that and need to find something to replace it with. The purpose of attending law school is to use my skills to help others – that is my purpose. I will not lose it along the way. Neither will I lose my desire to finish at the top of my class. On that note, I have met with two prof’s re: my exams and have a third appointment set up. Not to whine – just to understand and use this experience to improve next time.

On the homefront: sonny boy’s new fish had babies and ate them. This is not cool. We went out tonight and bought a “baby-saver” for the fish tank. I am learning more about fish than I ever needed to know. We also picked up five neons to go with the three mollies in the tank. PETCO promises if I can save the babies they will take them and adopt them out. This is encouraging.  I realize lately that the term adoption is not really meant to be interpreted as broadly as we apply it. If human babies are “adopted” and this is a lovely and beautiful thing that is meaningful and the equivalent of belonging to a family as if born there, we really need to think of a different term for cats and dogs and fish. Ditto for the words “foster home”. We need to afford a bit more dignity to our children than we do to our animals. And make no mistake – I am an animal lover. Children are not animals, and what works for the animals may not be adequate for the human beings we distribute to new homes without blinking. This is a problem.  Something needs to be done about it.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t be so quick to give up animals either. They are not objects. Just a thought.  If only the law was a solution – so far, it doesn’t look that easy. For the fish? Well, a trip to PETCO and a new tank beats being eaten by a big fish or flushed down the drain. So I guess adoption for fish is a positive outcome. I’ll try to remember that. I hope my readers have a lovely day. I can promise you that if a state worker showed up at your door and told you they had a new, safe, happy home for you  it wouldn’t be a happy day.

Oh October

It deserves a song all its own. My life is about to change again. School demands time. More time. The semester is officially half over already. I need to step it up. This week I have been engaged with the national political news. It has consumed me. In addition my lovely child/teenager who made me so proud a few months ago by overcoming the odds and finding a job is sitting in jail tonight. It is a disgusting mess. A social worker called me from the hospital side of the jail. I’m not even sure how she got involved. Anyway…he’s in jail. And I’m not bailing him out. But add him to the list of children who we have failed repeatedly via the foster and adoptive system in this country.  First homeless, now in jail. Go figure. We let this happen. There is no money to help this kid or others like him. No services, no money, and no one cares. I don’t suppose I need to tell anyone here that this bailout plan for the banks doesn’t do a damn thing for my homeless mentally retarded foster child/adopted immigrant/needy kid who will never own a home or stock either. He’s not my kid. He has nobody in this world and no blood relative in this country. So who is it that is going to step up and care about that? So…in the face of this I move on to torts and contracts. I hope all my readers have a lovely day. A purposeful week. And please, call your representatives regarding this bailout. Either support it or don’t. But let it be the voice of the people that decides, not the voice of money. Thank you.

Moving in more ways than one

I moved all day, from 7AM until 10PM. I moved boxes, cleaned house, picked the dog up at the vet (she was spayed  yesterday), brought my daughter to my sisters place to babysit (alternative was to give up my car for the evening….not), went shopping, and got a lot accomplished. What I didn’t do was anything law school related. I am tired. The changes that are happening in my life right now are overwhelming.

A few years ago I went through major life change. I lost my son, lost a brother-in-law to a fatal car accident, lost my husband to mental illness, and lost my beautiful home in the middle of the country along the way to a divorce. That I am in as good of condition as I am is nothing short of a miracle. But packing my belongings and moving my oldest off to college and my boys into the home of my man-friend is just a far cry from where I had imagined I would be right now. Packing up right now seems to bring up the wounds of the past as if they were not that long ago at all. And I suppose in reality the time is short. I left my husband the summer before my daughter’s freshman year of high school. And I’m moving on again during the summer before her freshman year of college. Four short years and I am moving on to “life” number three. I was with my husband for so long that I forgot anything about lives that happened before that.

So…I’m going to be a new law school mom. A parent of a new college student, living in a new home, having a new life, with a new man, and expecting my two young boys to go with the flow, while one becomes a new middle school student and the other transfers to a new school for 3rd grade. I guess it is fair to feel a tad overwhelmed once in a while. But moving on is the only choice I find acceptable. Sometimes it would be easier to die. But usually I focus on the future. I hope some day my current life is as satisfactory to me as the life I had. I don’t want to live forever thinking that I lost everything that mattered when I was 35. Especially considering I am meeting awesome people, experiencing things that I never dreamed possible, and doing some things that are really pretty cool. (Yes, to those of you who are wondering, I am in love with my honey. I love him dearly and I am in love with him. But we also have a trauma bond. Some losses are beyond words. He has lost in a very similar way. Who knows what the future holds. We love each other, but we are both traumatized. That does influence our view of the world…) I can only pray that God finds my current choices acceptable. Because they look bad from my old view of what is right and good and fair. In my old view, just FYI, failing a child or giving up on a child or leaving a child behind is simply unacceptable. I never would have done it. Never meant to do it. And never actually had a choice. Because he was only given to me for a little while. And that is just how it is. The word adoption doesn’t change that small fact.

Sad crimes and my life

I got a lot done today. I am off to law school and committed to living every day of my life to the fullest, realizing I could die any day, same as the rest of you. There is usually no forewarning. But certain things can be predicted. I predict that if we continue to abuse and neglect our own children and fail to recognize that simply giving a child a new family does not solve their problems, we will continue to see some of these children commit crimes as adults. Two different crime anniversaries have been in the news this week, and both cases involve adults adopted as children. 

Edwin Hall kidnapped, raped, and murdered an 18-year old Kansas girl just over one year ago. Today he pleaded guilty and offered that he thought the girl was twelve and had nice legs. This man was removed from his adoptive home as a teenager after threatening harm to his adopted sister.  Why? Because there is a mental and emotional disconnect. If a person is unable to connect with their mother and father, unable to feel connected to other people in the world, there is no sense of decency necessary. There is no understanding of decency. Learning the standard expectations of society is like learning a foreign language without having any expectation of needing to use it in the future. Even if the individual is able to recite the rules of appropriate language, there is no internalization behind it. Considering my son was removed from my home after threatening to murder our entire family, and considering a few years before that he pulled a knife on his social worker and attempted to feed my two-year-old a large assortment of his own medications, I think I have a right to be concerned about it. This could be my kid in the news ten or fewer years from now. It is my greatest fear.

In the second case, the home invasion in Cheshire, CT happened exactly one year ago today. A mother and her two innocent daughters were raped and murdered while the husband was severely beaten and left for dead in the basement while his house was set on fire. It was a terrible crime committed by two men. One of those men was adopted as a child, and his parents claim that he was always “distant” and “unconnected”. The word for this is Reactive Attachment Disorder. It is the pre-cursor to sociopathic behavior. It is real, and it has a preventable cause. If there is one study I would like to do during my lifetime, it would be to research how many of our jailed criminals had a history of being placed into foster care, adoption, or other situations where they were separated from their biological parents.  These criminals were not necessarily born bad or even born different. It is their life circumstances that have contributed to their behavior. And it is our society that allows those life circumstances to exist.