The lawyer asked for another $10,000 minimum. He said, and he said this with a straight face too, from what he’d seen so far in the case this one was going to cost somewhere near $100,000 or maybe more.
A hundred-thousand dollars! I sat up at night all alone in the house crying and crying and crying. On top of being all alone and not having my kids there with me, on top of all the worry of what was happening to my kids, and the fears associated with not knowing where they were and not being able to find out where they were or how they were being cared for, now I had to worry about money.
My father was no happy camper. He and my mother had worked all their lives to save for retirement. They had put away what they thought was enough money for a comfortable retirement that would be supplemented by Social Security and his pension, but such an expenditure was never figured in. When we spoke, he asked me where he was supposed to get that kind of money, if I understood what that could do to his and my mother’s retirement. He was talking about selling his house. I was talking about selling my house. Suddenly, out of the blue, we were talking about me and my kids maybe moving to where they live and all of us living together in a downsized house.
I cried even more after I hung up the phone every night with my father. CPS had messed up my life and I had done nothing wrong, nothing! I had never laid a hand on my children. I had taken care of them, not adequately, but superbly as I saw it. They never went hungry. They never went without clothes, even a big selection of clothes. They had toys. My son, a bit older, had appropriate electronics. They wanted for nothing. He played in Little League, went to Boy Scouts, they both went to the doctor any and every time it was needed.
On the fourth day in court, the fourth one I was paying for, but really the third actual day we were there before the judge, none of this seemed to matter. The judge didn’t want to hear anything. He looked at me with sleepy, disinterested eyes and saw — I can’t imagine what he saw. I simply can’t imagine what was going on in his mind, what he thought, what he truly believed.
He listened to everything they presented. They had that original doctor’s report, their doctor. We showed them our doctors’ reports, ours of course presenting the whole history of my children, a history which showed only care and concern, physicals and checkups every year, all vaccinations up-to-date, appropriate physicals for school, for Little League and Boy Scouts. All my reports showed nothing but healthy, well-taken care-of children.
I would find out later that their doctor was one who made his living from CPS. I would find out that he had a long history of testifying in cases in court on CPS’s side, and my lawyer would petition the judge saying that he was a biased witness because in over thirty cases that he had testified in, he had never once found anything other than what CPS wanted him to find. He was, as my lawyer said it, their go-to guy.
And with my kids, they went to him.
So the judge sat with his cheek on his elbow his elbow on his desk or whatever they call that thing the judge sits in front of. The bench? He dozed off a couple of times as they presented the school report from that day, the doctor’s report from that day, the nurse’s opinion that it was possible he was hit in the eye.
Hello! He was hit in the eye. But not by me. By accident.
About an hour went by. Finally the judge asked CPS to begin formalizing a plan for my children, and to submit within thirty days their recommendations in the case. He banged down the gavel and once again remanded my children, for no real reason that anyone could discern, into CPS custody.
