I did stay with my lawyer. The whole thing was a crap-shoot any way you sliced it. I was already a ton of money in the hole, I’d borrowed a fortune from my father literally messing up his retirement calculations. As a result of DCF, not for anything I’d done, I was going to have to sell my house and most probably move in with my parents who were mortgaging their paid-off house to pay off my lawyer.
Well, their mostly paid-off house, anyway, because my father told me there was still some left to pay off.
My lawyer said he was glad I was staying with him. He said, and to this day I believe this, that it was not about money. The money, he said, mostly went into his costs. He said he felt that he could best negotiate a good ending of the situation for me and that with his connections and reputation he was hoping that he could do it sooner than later.
Sooner than later. Yeah right. Turns out it was another six weeks to the next hearing date. In that six weeks I saw my kids only three times. I was supposed to see them every week, but DCF managed to make sure to cancel the visits at the last minute. Since the visits were there, at their office, and after school, I had to take the afternoon of the visits off work in order to get there in time. So on top of not seeing my kids three times out of the six, I still lost six afternoons’ work.
Each time they missed a visit, they made no apology. Each time I tried to reschedule, they made excuse after excuse such that accomplishing a visit became impossible.
But they knew all this. They knew exactly, precisely, what they were doing and they, of course, were doing it on purpose. They knew my funds were limited so they were purposefully costing me as much as they could so they could break me.
And they were doing a great job of it.
So each time they missed a visit I called my lawyer (costing me more money) and he called them (costing me more money).
That’s how it works.
Oh, I know. Don’t think so? Well it is so.
Twice they actually did reschedule only to call me at the last minute (again) to tell me they’d made a mistake and the kids had other appointments. They told me they didn’t know this when they rescheduled and would they make sure it would work for the next week’s visit. They did make sure never to miss two weeks in a row. That, I would discover, missing two weeks in a row, is a no-no to the judges.
So we got to the next hearing. The lawyer asked me to get there early, at least an hour early, first because he wanted to speak with me and second because he wanted to have a meeting with them. He assured me that they would be willing to have a meeting and that we might be able to effect what he hoped we could in order to get my children home to me.
I was a little skeptical. Okay. I wasn’t a little skeptical, I was very skeptical. I hoped beyond hope that he really could do what he was saying he could do, which was get my kids home without me having to actually cop to anything. But I knew they were holding both my kids and my kids were surely of the type that was eminently adoptable. In their terms, from all that I had read by now, I knew that this meant they were prime candidates for adoption, that DCF would do its best to make sure that I could never get my kids back.
