9. How to have a Bad Mother's Day and Win Arguing that Grandparents have Rights with the Court

Set Boundaries with the Parents and Children's Protective Services

Heidi, our excellent attorney, before closing her practice and moving to Arizona, with baby Addie. This is possibly the most unflattering picture, of course, but it was just a family snapshot when taken. It was the only time I saw her in pants or with glasses! She was very polished-and had great shoes!

Mother’s Day 2018 sucked with Andy and Addie’s parents. It brought a storm to our situation and caused an unholy truce for us with CPS in that moment. Addicts cause chaos in the lives of those around them. I had been going to Alanon-which I encourage anyone who needs to find peace despite the problems of alcohol and drug addiction in their families to try, but I hadn’t fully realized the perception of Jen and Andrew toward us. (Hadn’t they chosen us?)

I invited Jen and Andrew for our typical feast at 2 pm (our normal holiday hour) even though they had already several no shows after I’d cooked big dinners. It was Mother’s Day and I thought we should recognize Jen’s accomplishments. It was a good five hours after our agreed meeting time when I gave up hope of their arrival and left to rock Addie, less than two weeks before her homecoming although we didn’t know that yet. I decided never to make dinner for the couple who didn’t care about the effort. Ned stayed home with Andy who was going to take a nap.

Andrew and Jen arrived shortly after I left, and picked an argument with my husband. It got loud. As Andrew was leading Andy to his car parked on the street, he taunted Ned, “What are you going to do about it (taking Andy)?” and Ned replied, “Call the CPS Hotline, and the police, if necessary”. Andy was let go and Ned called him over. They left, treating Ned like the enemy. Our policy of “call and come” to the parents was over.

From that moment on, we agreed to take CPS up on their offer to supervise visits, even though they really didn’t want to. Angel set up a weekly time and showed up. After that incident, she saw first hand that the parents weren’t interested in interacting with the kids, didn’t always show up, and never brought even a diaper. Days after Andy’s third birthday, they participated in their last visit, and we slipped them a wrapped gift to give him. He was thrilled with the basketball. The pair were acting stranger than usual, more distant. Andrew went outside to smoke a cigarette and didn’t even play with Andy. (I believe that Andrew loved Andy like crazy.) Jen wore a sleeveless shirt and I noticed track marks from inserting needles into her arm when she held the baby for a little while. She didn’t try to hide them. Angel had handed her Adeline and placed the infant in her arms, but would later deny seeing the marks at the scheduled CPS meeting, and when Ned asked her personally. During that last meeting, I told the moderator, “I’m all for reuniting the family, but the safety of the children should come first.”

Jen and Andrew, were not showing up for “drug court”, the kinder, friendlier court either. Drug court meant that as offenders attended rehab, which Jen and Andrew didn’t, they submitted to a weekly drug test (which was never once obtained), and could get charges removed when sobriety was achieved with some regularity (which never happened) over the seven plus months we dealt with CPS. If defendants don’t show up for two consecutive weeks, they are supposed to be put back to regular court, including jail if warranted. That didn’t happen. I call this flagrant enabling because it certainly can not be labeled helpful to us, the children, or the parents.

I used to confuse helping with enabling. In a nutshell, if the parents are ABLE to do something, and you do it for them or fix the end result of their mistakes, you are enabling. The results of their actions NEED to be unpleasant or there is no motivation to change. The dilemma is often that the innocent children are affected by the chaos, so the trick is to find a way to protect them, possibly separate from the parents, while the mom and dad straighten out their lives. Hopefully they return or learn in the home environment to be responsible for their families after healing has begun. I read this and realize how harsh that all sounds regarding consequences, but I know the futility firsthand of giving my adult son help, when he wasn’t ready to admit he had a problem.

• Takeaway: I know in my head that a very small minority recover from opiates, especially without help or if not ready. Two years out, from Googling various sources-mostly rehab facilities for my adult son, only about 7-12 percent are “clean”', and the statistics drop each year after. The numbers are hard to come by, and are reputed to have grown substantially worse with the pandemic. Measuring them would pose challenges because who wants to admit they have relapsed?

Ned took me with him to the duplex apartment Jennifer and Andrew had been evicted from. I only saw the garage filled with their property left behind. Ned had described the filth, brokenness and unsanitary mess of Andy’s room and I was fine missing the grand tour. I had dogs who had been given better living conditions. Since Ned had paid their rent, his landlord friend had allowed us to take anything that might be of use to the children. I looked in disbelief at things that could have been sold to pay the bills-items in good condition and of value. We chose two things and left the rest behind closing the garage door on lives fallen apart, but the environment Andy had been rescued from haunted me for nights.

Angel, our caseworker, was often hostile, “you know, only one of the parents has to get sober for the kids to be returned to them.” I was speechless for a moment. “So how exactly does that work?” I asked. “If one parent is recovering, and the other is doing heroin in their home, how exactly is that considered safe?” “We don’t have to give you any notice. We can just show up and take the kids back.” “Many drug addicted parents are highly functional,” (as if that forgave an environment where openly doing heroin wouldn’t be an influence…) I’d had enough of this insanity. At Ned’s urging, I agreed to hire an attorney. Our goal was to get custody, to protect the children and to keep CPS from putting them in harm’s way.

• Takeaway: At that time, the term “custody” was very generic to us. There’s “guardianship” (less control for the caregiver and more involved parents) and adoption, if the parents don’t change their lives. “Adoption”, on the other end of the spectrum, means you assume all parent rights and responsibilities including providing medical insurance in many cases. We would have been financially buried in medical debt with the amount of care both children receive, like Andy’s counseling, so adoption wasn’t our best choice. “Custody” allows us most parental rights, like signing the children up for school and doctor’s appointments, but with a few benefits, like Medicaid for the kids. It also keeps the door open to the parents, who can prove their situation has improved and reestablish their rights in court with some effort. The custody video at the following link may be helpful: Legal Resources including Types of Custody

I googled lawyers on the internet, and recognized a name Ned had mentioned when we’d first met, his children’s guardian ad litem during his court case to get visitation against Suzie, the mother of his children whom he’d never married. Although I’ve changed all the names except my own, I am keeping this one authentic, Jamie Callender, who had risen to the position of Republican State Representative for Ohio, by the time the children came into our lives, was an attorney, and had a law practice alongside his legal partner, Heidi, who happened to be his amiable ex-wife. Mr. Callender was in the middle of reelection at the time we were searching, and wasn’t taking cases. Heidi was taking cases on however. We hired her after a free consultation interview, and she was beautiful and brilliant.

“Grandparents don’t have rights.” came out of the very Democratic main Attorney in Juvenile Court (who is also the lawyer for CPS). Well, according to Heidi’s very explicit review of cases in the previous two years where grandparents HAVE won custody, and do under law, have rights as demonstrated in her list of cases, we fought back. Many on her list hadn’t as much involvement as Ned and I even, and won. The Juvenile Court Attorney’s arguments hadn’t been brushed up in ten years. Heidi’s sneaky-in-a-good-lawyer-way got us access to knowledge of the Drug Court hearings that the parents were supposed to be attending but weren’t present for. She had us show up dressed for court in a conspicuous way to attempt to get us into each closed session so that the same judge that determines custody (yup, the Drug Court Judge is also the Family Court Judge) saw us each and every time (and all of us knowing that Andrew and Jennifer no longer belonged in the kinder, friendlier, drug court)…

• Takeaway: When a case is tried in court and wins, a “precedent” is set. According to Britannica.com, a precedent is defined as “a judgement or decision of a court that is cited in a subsequent dispute as an example or analogy to justify deciding a similar case or point of law in the same manner.” By listing recent cases in our statement to the court where grandparents have won custody for doing less than us, Heidi was appealing to the court to treat us equally. Since the CPS attorney’s precedents were over ten years old, many had been “overturned” too. Our rights as grandparents stemmed from cases like ours with the outcome we wanted. There is little substitute for a professional attorney. Ohio Lifeline is a tax funded referral service that communicates free legal clinics in my area, but any local Council of Aging might be able to give similar information.

By the way, I could care less if Heidi was a Republican or a Democrat, but it did cause a friction with CPS’s attorney, clearly a Democrat, who was unprofessional in her comments to us and her dislike hurt our case. “You don’t have a right to sue for custody. Who do you think you are?” Heidi overheard close by and responded for us, “If they want to sue the Pope for being Catholic, they can. This IS America.”

The last CPS meeting was a discussion of a “Permanency Plan” (I’ll just call it PP). That’s a plan B. I’m told that if we had waited long enough, usually two years with the CPS we had to deal with, we’d be awarded custody through the PP. We were so enormously relieved when we no longer had to deal with CPS, that for us, it was worth it to pay to speed up that process. We also had no guarantee that the children wouldn’t be sent back home with continued heroin use occurring with one parent, because Angel’s statements were correct. I think it saved what little mental health we had to loose. We needed peace.

We were promised and contracted for a great deal from CPS and saw little-carseat, notice to all hearings involving the parents (listed in the contract), diapers and formula, and a rally “deal” by the primary attorney in Juvenile Court for giving us custody if we could get a copy of the eviction notice and proof of our ability to provide insurance coverage for the kids over one weekend, etc.

During that crazy two day scramble someone helped me meet the insurance demand anonymously at work…shortly after I talked to my boss about getting a day off to show up for yet another Drug Court the next week when her boss, Kim, was in the room. “I’ll help.'“ she stated simply. I was emailed a paragraph from the employee handbook (who knew there was such a thing?) that if I could prove we were providing “parental functions”, I could insure them under me. The email came from a general HR address within the hospital. I had an ancient scanner and singly processed each page of both children’s contracts-it took me over three hours, but on Monday, with proof in hand from my HR department at work (They actually wrote me a letter to give the court when I quoted the handbook and emailed the contracts!), and a copy of the eviction notice from Ned’s landlord friend, we had what was asked of us. Heidi met us with news outside the courthouse a few days later. They have rethought their decision to award custody despite us meeting their demands, but that only means it will take a little longer. I still wonder to this day if my boss’s boss was responsible for the support needed to get a response from HR, sending the general email. I like to think that, but bad things were happening elsewhere.

Suzi, Jennifer’s mother and the children’s grandmother, overdosed. Angel, the children’s caseworker, corrected me at least twice when I said it aloud during her next visit (no parents were present)-“medication mismanagement” was the CPS term. Jennifer’s mother was dead.

I was genuinely sorry for Jen’s loss. I do not see reason to try and fool anyone or how it helps. Grief happens because we lose something or someone precious to us, and the reason for the loss is just that. The hole in a heart does not fill up overnight.

Three months after, we were awarded legal custody for both children. The court proceeding did not take long to my surprise. Jen and Andrew didn’t appear in person but Heidi thought their court appointed attorney had put up the best argument under the circumstances-which our spitfire lawyer blasted away in seconds. (The death of Suzi months before had triggered a recent relapse.) They had had opportunity to get help, and hadn’t. The expectation wasn’t total health; it was only to start on the journey, and neither had stepped on the pathway.

Angel still made a few more visits. “It’s part of the process, and now you have to deal with parents’ visits without us. How do you think you’ll do it?” That became easy for us-we simply didn’t reach out, (or ask for trouble). We were done with being judged by CPS as if we were criminals. We had been inspected, background checked and fingerprinted, while watching the parents party on. We were threatened with “contempt of court” if we didn’t show up at places on predetermined dates that interfered with my work schedule with no flexibility (although winning custody hasn’t made that part go away.) There was a Christmas gift from CPS and Angel finally said her last good bye. I do not miss her.

Suddenly, I felt alone with Ned, like we were isolated on an island. I started to search for support, for others like us….