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Are you a good parent?  Are you sure?  What if you had to prove it to the courts or to Child Protective Services?

We NEED the Parental Rights Amendment (S.J.Res 16 and H.J.Res 42).  I first learned about the Parental Rights Amendment when my sister first started homeschooling my daughter.  I learned about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a United Nation’s treaty which, if ratified by the United States Senate, would become the law of the land.  It would override parental rights and override state rights.  I’ve written several articles about the treaty here at my blog.  If you have not heard about the treaty, I would urge you to read them. 

But in recent months I have been hearing about several different cases of the abuse of power by family court judges and Child Protective Services throughout the United States which is happening now without the treaty being ratified.  Below are some websites that have different stories of what is happening:

http://www.justicewomen.com/tips_bewarechildprotectiveservices.html

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/474920559

http://fightcps.com/

Now, I’m all for protecting abused children, and while child abuse still continues in the United States, it is a small percentage of the population and all cases should be handled individually.  While I, myself, have not been a perfect mother, I feel that I have done well with my children.  Could I have done better?  Maybe.  If a case worker came into my home and trampled my privacy, would I be deemed a fit parent?  I would hope so, but I would hate for the fate of my children and my fitness as a parent to be placed into the hands of a third party that had an ideological idea of parenting.

Some states are passing measures to urge Congress to ratify the Parental Rights Amendment and send it to the states for ratification.  My state of Louisiana is one of those states.  I urge you to talk with your state representatives to do the same.  If you go to http://www.parentalrights.org/ you can also see if your Senator or Representative in Congress is co-sponsors of the Amendments.

The Louisiana House of Representatives yesterday voted unanimously to urge Congress to pass the Parental Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. The House vote of 93-0 followed the April 29th vote of 34-0 approving the same measure in the Louisiana Senate.  The parental rights resolution was championed by Senator Gerald Long and Representative Jonathan Perry as lead sponsors.

The measure cites concern over the erosion of traditional parental rights in recent Supreme Court decisions which have “created confusion and ambiguity about the fundamental nature of parental rights.” 

The Louisiana measure (SCR 38) calls on Congress to approve the Parental Rights Amendment which is pending in both houses of Congress. There are currently 137 co-sponsors in the U.S. House, including five from Louisiana, and seven co-sponsors in the Senate, including Senator David Vitter from Louisiana. 

What got me started on this whole rant was an article I read from Liane Carter, the mother of an autistic child who was trying to get guardianship for her 17 year old son for when he turns 18.  The courts will decide if she is a “fit” guardian for her son.  The same son she has cared for and nurtured since he was a baby.  Here is her story:

WHEN CHILDHOOD DOESN’T END
By Liane Kupferberg Carter

The woman on the phone said her name was Aretha Franklin.

“Really,” she added.

She was calling, she said, because the Surrogate’s Court had just appointed her agency as guardian ad litem, temporary guardian for our 17-year-old son Mickey. We had just filed papers two days earlier, asking the court to allow us to assume guardianship of all legal, medical and financial decisions on Mickey’s behalf.  This is something that must be done before his 18th birthday, the age of majority, when in the eyes of the law he becomes an adult.

While other parents have been shepherding their children through SATs and college essays, our time has been filled with lawyers and estate planners, as we struggled through setting up several supplemental special needs trusts on behalf of our developmentally disabled son. The guardianship piece is the last step in this painstaking process; we have had to examine and project every possible scenario of our deaths and what this would mean for our son.  It has brought up feelings I didn’t fully anticipate. Not just the obvious ones, the fear of one’s own mortality.  As the parent of an autistic child you think you’ve done your grieving. Then it smacks you in the face again.

Last week we had to take Mickey to the lawyer’s office so that Diana, the paralegal, could officially serve him with papers notifying him that we were petitioning the court on his behalf.  Mickey, knowing that something was up, refused to stand. He refused to shake her hand or make eye contact.  Standard M.O. for him in a new situation when he is anxious. Standard embarrassment for us.

“As part of the procedure, the court has appointed Mental Hygiene Legal Services for Mickey,” she said. “Basically, their role is to complete some interviews with both of you as proposed guardians for him and with anyone else they feel would be a useful source of information.  The court will rely on their report to determine if this guardianship is a safe and appropriate one for Michael.”

Appropriate? We are his parents.

I know that having the state appoint a temporary legal guardian while they process our appeal is pro forma. They do it for every case.  It’s meant to protect my child’s best interests.  It’s meant to protect all the children in the system.  So why am I feeling as if someone has called Child Protective Services on us and now a social worker is coming to make a home visit and poke into the personal business of  how we have raised our child?  What if we don’t pass the test? Does that mean the state gets to decide what school he attends? Which medications best treat his seizures? Where, how and with whom he lives?

For the past 17 years, we have had therapists, teachers and administrators in our home — in our lives, evaluating him, and by extension, it often feels, us. Most of them have been lovely. (A few, not. One, it turned out, abusive. That is another story.) But there is such a lack of privacy. With 10 hours a week of ongoing after-school therapy in our home, we haven’t been able to sit down and eat a normal family dinner in years. It’s bad enough we get stared at in public; you learn to expect it. But no one wants to be observed during intimate family moments. I’m tired of the well-meaning questions that often feel like veiled criticisms: Why do you let him wear sweat pants to school when the other kids are wearing jeans? Why does he use such tepid water when he showers? Why can’t you make him eat vegetables? Last year, his teacher sat in our kitchen sipping green tea one afternoon and suggested we put kale in the blender to make a vegetable smoothie.

“And who’s going to get him to drink that?” I asked. I laughed but thought, Obviously you don’t have any children of your own yet. The underlying message often feels like: You need to discipline him better. You’re not setting the right limits. I’m weary of being watched all the time, feeling I have to defend every parenting choice I make. It doesn’t feel good.

When Aretha Franklin called, I was my most friendly and chipper. We made an appointment. Then I stewed in an icy hot bath of nerves all weekend. Should I bake brownies with Mickey before she arrived, so that she would see what a great mother I am? Isn’t that what you do when you are showing your house to prospective buyers, bake something with the subliminal scents of cinnamon and vanilla to make the house smell warm and inviting and cozy? Or would that look too obvious?

Would she ask him if he liked living with us? If we were kind to him? What if Mickey said the wrong thing? Once, when he was in fifth grade, a new therapist sat down at the table with him and introduced herself, and he got a glint in his eye.

“I like to play with matches,” he told her.

He doesn’t. But he does like to say provocative things, just to get a reaction.

O.K., I decided, bakery-bought cookies would do. She probably wouldn’t eat anything anyway. We vacuumed up cat hair, washed a bowl of grapes, brewed a perk pot of coffee.

“Make sure we hide the bong and the beer bottles,” my husband said wryly.

Aretha Franklin was lovely — professional and pretty. And young. So young. She arrived 10 minutes early with a large Coach tote bag and drew out a thick manila file folder. “Tell me about Mickey,” she said.

Do you have a few hours? I thought. Remember to smile. “What would you like to know?” I said.

“Where is he in school?” she said. Wasn’t that already in all the documentation we provided?

“He’s in a wonderful life skills program at the local high school,” I said. A program we had to force our school district to create.

“What activities do you do with him?” What haven’t we tried? His reportory is rigid and  limited. That’s the hallmark of autism.

“He loves the beach,” I said.

“Museums,” Marc said. Uh, oh, did that make us sound like we’re trying too hard to impress?

“Sports! He loves sports, he’s in a recreation program here in town,” Marc added.

I thought for a nanosecond of adding, it’s a sports program we started for special needs kids, because there weren’t any programs that would take kids like him. I stopped myself; it sounded self-serving.

“Visiting his cousins, that’s his favorite thing. Books. T.V. Video games. But we try to limit them,” I hastened to add. What if she thought we park him in front of the television?

“Would you like to meet him?” Marc said.

“Of course.”  She smiled. She was really very pretty. We coaxed him into the room, set out a large black-and-white cookie – his favorite – and a glass of skim milk. See, we give him skim, not full fat, because we are conscientious parents who watch his fat and cholesterol intake.

Mickey acted silly. He wouldn’t answer her questions. “Chicken!” he said. That’s what he calls people when he’s anxious. “I don’t want to talk,” he said. He gobbled his cookie and left.

“I know this may sound strange, but why do you want to be his guardians?” she said.

Wasn’t it obvious?

Marc said, “Who else? No one loves him as much as we do.”

“We signed on for life,” I added.

She asked for names and numbers. Mickey’s teacher. Mickey’s standby guardians, in case anything happens to us: my brother Marty; our older son Jonathan, away at college.

Smiles and handshakes all around; she leaves. I e-mail my brother at work, tell him to expect a call from Aretha Franklin.

He e-mails back: “I will be sure to give her R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

It breaks the tension. Marc and I laugh.

“What’s Mommy’s job?” I used to say to Mickey when he was little.

“To keep me safe,” he would say.

I’m angry we have to go through this process. And afraid. Could the court possibly rule against us?

Because no matter how much I know logically all that we have done for our son, it never feels like enough.   It’s the endless loop in my head: could’ve, should’ve. After he was first diagnosed, I continually felt as if there were always one more therapy, one more intervention, one more special diet out there to try, that that would be the critical one, the magic, miraculous cure that eluded us, and that if we didn’t try, it meant we weren’t good parents. The recriminations. What did I do wrong during my pregnancy? Was it that Advil I took the week before I realized I was pregnant?  Did I not play with him enough as an infant? Not go to enough conferences, seminars and workshops? Or go to too many that took me away from him?  Should we have taken him to see other experts?  I should have done more.

But I don’t know what more could have been.  Sometimes, in dark moments, I think, I have not been a good enough mother.

Because if I had, he wouldn’t be autistic anymore.

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