And you wonder why people explode, why they want to just, you know, like, kill people. Of course I don’t mean kill as in actually kill someone. But I was feeling that I wanted run up to the judge and slap him silly, say “What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you see what’s going on here?”
But then that’s what they want. They want you to lose it, to go berserk so they can say they’ve been right all along. And that’s what they were waiting for from me, both in and out of court. That and for me to go broke.
Option B, the other option to cutting a deal of some sort, was for my lawyer to turn my case over to one of the smaller lawyers in private practice that he knew, one who would work for about a third of what he cost. He assured me that this other lawyer was every bit as good as he was. However, he had fewer resources and was a bit busier personally because he had less help and had to carry more cases on his own shoulders. But since he had much less overhead, he was much less expensive.
My lawyer assured me that he had plenty of experience. He wasn’t too clear on whether it would be a good thing to switch lawyers in terms of the case, this because it would signal to CPS that I was running out of funds or that I couldn’t afford to continue on the way we were going.
So I told him I would think about it, but I’d already made up my mind. I was willing, at least I thought so at the moment, to sell my house, even to go move in with my parents and to change our lives completely if I could only get my kids back.
I told him that I would probably continue on the way we were and that I would do my best to get him some money as quickly as I could. I told him that this meant getting money from my father, my father was already telling me that he had to take a home equity loan on his house in order to be able to access any funds.
And so there we were face-to-face, back on the clock again and discussing my case.
My lawyer told me that if I continued with him, and again he reminded me that he thought it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000, that at the next court date he would see about if they were willing to discuss options for getting the case over with quickly. He told me he could present to them the notion that it would be easier for them to find a way for unification with me and my children than it would for them to press for termination of parental rights. But he told me he couldn’t assure me they would agree to anything.
As we were speaking there were so many things we didn’t know, either him or me. But we would learn some of them at the next court date.
In his final instructions he told me to make sure that I was a model citizen at the visitations, that I did everything they asked of me, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it seemed. He reminded me that their game was to intimidate me and infuriate me, that they would do anything, including treating me like a baby and/or a moron, in order to do so. He reminded me that they were out to make me have an emotional outburst or go broke.
And then he said something very interesting. He told me that this case was no longer, and maybe never was, about my children. He told me it was about them and money.
