based upon a true story
The law says you have to have a hearing within three days. The weekend was in between so it would be six days before we got into court.
I was hard-pressed to find a lawyer. I called the GP lawyer I used and he recommended someone he knew of but didn’t actually know. I called immediately. Wow! Three hundred fifty dollars an hour and a five thousand dollar retainer. Where am I supposed to get this money, I asked. There was an awkward silence on the phone.
I made just barely too much money to be eligible for legal aid. What an eye opener that was. If I were an illegal alien I could have gotten legal aid. If I were an immigrant there were agencies to help me. It seemed as if I were all alone. And I was all alone, literally, my house was empty.
So I sucked it up. I called several friends and they all told me not to worry, to just go into court by myself and tell the judge what happened. Surely, they all agreed separately, the judge would believe me. No one could imagine that a judge wouldn’t believe me. I had no record. I had no previous contact with CPS. I’d never been in trouble. I was just a regular mom raising two kids on her own.
Yeah right. And pigs fly.
It was one of the worst weekends of my life. I cried all weekend long. My friends came over and sat with me for as long as they could. No one would dare bring their kids because they were afraid it would just plain set me off.
My parents live in a different state, so they couldn’t help other than to offer me support by phone. My father told me I needed to have a lawyer. I told him I couldn’t afford what lawyers cost. (When all was said and done, the legal bill would be well over $100,000.) He told me I couldn’t afford not to have a lawyer.
I listened to my father and called the lawyer back to retain him. We set up the meeting for the next day but I could only come up with a little over thousand dollars. My father agreed to send me some money, enough to cover the retainer, but it would take a few days for the check to arrive.
The lawyer took my check for a thousand dollars and said he could wait until the check from my father arrived for the rest of the retainer. In the course of things, the way things go, that was pretty nice of him altogether. He told me not to worry, that he couldn’t imagine this was anything other than a mistake and that if things went the way he hoped they would my kids would be returned after the hearing.
Yeah. Right.
I cried and cried and cried. Each morning for the next six days I would get up in despair, with this knot in the pit of my stomach and a headache that wouldn’t go away. I thought about going to my doctor to get something for the stress but the lawyer told me at the meeting to stay away from anything like that because anything like that would work against me.
I don’t want to say he was smug. I know he really felt for me and wanted to help me. But there I was in a law firm that owned its own building, and there he was behind a desk which probably cost more than all of my furniture altogether, wearing a suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe and the wardrobes of my kids too. Such is the way of the world, I was to discover.
Oh God! How naïve and stupid I was. How innocent I was. I really believed that people were good and that they wanted the best for everyone.
