eomaia's blog

Since December 2006, I've been fighting DHS- to keep my kids out of foster care, to get them home from foster care, to keep them from being put back in foster care, and to keep my parental rights from being terminated. The whole time, my now ex-husband was dead weight at best, actively working to sabotage me at worst.

So, it's finally come down to this. My parental rights were terminated yesterday, I get one more visit with my kids to say goodbye, and then they'll be put into a pre-adoptive placement. I've still got an appeal, but my chances are slim. I'm not sure who will adopt them- their paternal aunt has been circling like a vulture since she heard there was a chance I might lose them, she's still mad at me because I could get pregnant and she couldn't, so she thinks it's fair that she gets to steal my kids. She lives halfway across the country, has only met them a few times, and didn't have much interest in them before she saw them as a chance for her to be a mommy. I want them to be adopted by their former foster parents, who know them, love them, live in town, and would allow some contact with me. The other possibility is stranger adoption, which I see as a risk, but probably better than their aunt.

I think I should tell them they're going to be taken away and adopted by a new family. My son is 7 1/2, my daughter is 5.  I know he'll remember me, and I'm assuming he'll be able to find me online within a few years.

I found a blog entry about a mentally disabled woman whose 7th child was put in foster care, and whether women like her should be sterilized.

My opinion is that either we should decide as a society that we'll give mothers with any kind of disability whatever support they need to play a role in their child's life, OR we should be up-front and tell disabled people that they will not be allowed to raise a child, so they might as well get sterilized and save themselves the trouble.  Instead, I've seen too many cases where CPS took a baby but told the mother it was because of some (frequently trivial or even total BS) thing she did wrong, leaving her thinking that if she had another baby, and either didn't make any mistakes, or didn't have some anal-retentive social worker distorting and exaggerating every mistake she made, then she'd be able to raise her baby. So, these women end up enduring pregnancy after pregnancy and heart-breaking loss after loss, because CPS just can't be honest and tell them to get sterilized.   Oh, and if someone's a little unstable to begin with, how sane will they be after having their babies taken away?                        

Of course, I'm looking at this from the mother's perspective. So, what do you kids think? What if you found out that your birth mother was mildly retarded, and that CPS had told her that they took you away because her apartment wasn't clean enough, so she had 6 more babies, and CPS kept finding something she did wrong to use as a reason to take them?