based upon a true story
Neglect my foot!
All my life I’ve done nothing but love and cherish my kids. I made all the sensible and reasonable decisions about vaccinations and preventive medical care. They went to the doctor and dentist regularly for checkups and any and every time they were sick. My kids never knew hunger, being left alone, not being cared for. They weren’t raised by a TV. I was never drunk or on drugs. I didn’t yell at them and certainly never hit them. They had toys and clothes, and my boy, who accidentally got hit in the eye with baseball bouncing off the bounce-back screen, was in Boy Scouts and Little League. The Scout Masters knew me. The Little League coaches knew me.
So what the hell?
A whole month went by. CPS never contacted me about visitation. I called them more than twenty times and could prove it with my phone records. But at that first real hearing they just outright lied. They said they called me repeatedly to accomplish visitation but I never answered my phone. My lawyer stated that this was not true, that in fact CPS never contacted me to set up the visitation. He asked the court to request the phone records, but the judge declined to do this. When my lawyer went to show him my phone records, he refused to see them, said they weren’t necessary.
In effect, overall, CPS argued that I was a disinterested, angry and embittered mother, that I took no actions to find out how my children were, how they were doing or to even arrange to see them.
When my lawyer objected, when he attempted to present testimonials from our doctors, from our friends and my children’s friends’ parents, etc., the judge waived him off and said that there would be time for all that eventually.
My lawyer was too nice, I thought. I thought he should have taken all the paperwork we had collected and dumped it on his desk. I thought he should have asked CPS to present one single shred of evidence.
But when we discussed it later, my lawyer told me that would have been a gross mistake. He said they had evidence. They had the school reports, which we had not yet discovered were edited so as to not include what my son had told all the school personnel, each one individually, which was exactly how it happened. The reports also didn’t include my son’s friend’s statement which of course verified what my son said.
They also had the doctor’s report. Eventually my lawyer would look into this doctor and find that in all the time he worked for CPS—he didn’t work for them but was contracted by them—he had never once diagnosed something they didn’t want him to. In 100% of the initial examinations when they brought a child they’d taken to him, like with my son, he never once found anything other than abuse. Then, in 100% of these cases, when the child was in CPS care, he never once found anything other than that an accident had occurred or that the child was being excellently taken care of.
The doctor’s financial records would show he made more than 90% of his income from CPS.
The judge ordered my kids to stay in CPS custody, told CPS that at the next hearing, which would not be for another 6 weeks, he’d better see that I had been having regular visitations with my children. Then he told me through my lawyer that we’d be able to discuss how we wanted to proceed after he’d seen the reports and recommendations from CPS.
And that was it. Another six weeks before we could even discuss what would happen to my children.
