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If you have read this blog for a while, you know that I trained to be a CASA which is a court appointed special advocate for the county.  This means in essence that I am an advocate for a child who finds themselves in the court system, mostly due to neglect or abuse.  Sometimes they have been removed from the home and are now in foster care.  Sometimes they are with extended family members.  Sometimes they have been reunited with family but are still being tracked by the court system should there be another incident.  This week I attended court, my first court date for my child.  There’s a lot I can’t say for confidentiality reasons, but I think it’s important to educate people about the program.  For me, I hope it will bring more volunteers into the program.  At last count there were approximately 100 children in my county waiting for an advocate.

Family court is an unpleasant place.  I don’t know if it is the most stressful kind of court, but it has to be up there.  Usually the hallways (at least in my county’s court) are packed.  The narrow benches are full.  There are often babies in strollers and older children are shuffled through in groups to the child waiting room, where they are semi sequestered from the adults, some of whom they know, some of whom have abused them.  It’s a bit of a farce really.  The room where the children are taken, or at least one of them, is at the end of a very crowded hallway and the children must walk past their own parents (in some cases) to get to it.  Imagine that for a minute.  Though I’m sure the lawyers and social workers do their best to shield them from seeing the parent who they are now separated from, it doesn’t always work.  To be fair, sometimes they want to see the parent who has hit them – who has done awful things we might think unforgivable.  Sometimes they don’t.  This is the case with the child I am an advocate for.  The child was badly abused in one very violence filled afternoon.  There had been abuse before, but for whatever reason, this particular day was the worst.  It  happened in front of siblings.  It was shocking and left scars on all of them.  They are (and the reports bare this out) still reeling.  They children are now out of the home, placed elsewhere.

My child who I have been assigned to through the program, was singled out by the offending parent.  This is often the case.  Abuse is not spread out evenly amongst siblings.  Almost always, one child will get the worst of it.  I remember years ago reading a memoir by the brother of Gary Gilmore, the murderer who became notorious for being the last man to die by firing squad in Texas.  His brother, Mikal (who writes for Rolling Stone) wrote the memoir and in it he talks at great lenghts about how Gary was brutally abused as a child while the other brothers in the family were spared.  He theorizes about this, but in the end I’m not sure even he knows why.  That’s the case with my child.  The other children have been spared for the most part.  At least physically.  Obvoiusly emotionally they have not been.

As a CASA I have to go to court, generally twice a year though this month I’ll be going twice because there were a few last minutes issues that caused a delay.  My child was not going to be there.  I’d asked when I saw the child the other week.  I reminded my child and told them they were allowed to go if they’d like.  But my child didn’t want to go.  In the hallway as we waited for the case to be called, the social worker told me of a few things that had just transpired.  Because of what had transpired, my child wanted no contact with the parent.  Ever.  No reunification services. No visits.  Nothing.  That’s unusual.

It’s always chaotic right before you’re called in to court.  There are often social workers having hurried, whispered conversations with lawyers.  Sometimes you get papers at the last minute.  I briefly saw my child as they passed me in the hallway. The child had their sleeves pulled down over their hands, they were smiling a lot which for a second I thought was good, but I realized they were just terrified and it was a nervous reaction.  Someone pointed out the parent to me and when the parent realized who I was and that I was part of the child’s case, they gave me a good stare down.  Look at me all you want, I thought, I know what you did.

In court the lawyer for my child made a good case for severing ties.  There was some legal maneuvering I didn’t understand and for a while it all went of the record.  At some point my child’s lawyer who kept hammering to make it so my child would not have to attend even supervised visits, hissed to me:  ”I really don’t like ____” referring to the parent.  I nodded.  In the end nothing was decided.  There was a continuance until later in the month.  It’s hard though.  I have read all the reports, I have seen the documented abuse.  And yet the parent in me has a difficult time reconciling these things in my brain. We were trained a great deal in the program to want and move towards reunification, because believe it or not that is often best.  And not all the cases are as grim as my child’s is.  We also know that the foster care system can be an ugly place.  Again, not always, but it is not ideal.  The children often want to be with their parent, they want to be home.   My child is old enough to have a say.  As I have come to know my child, I have come to realize that the same qualities that served them well during and after the abuse – bravery, resilience, perhaps even hope, are the same qualities that have aided them in making this massive decision.  So I have to believe it’s the right one.

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