A few weeks after the New Year started we got a call from the case worker for Rebecca. She said that the biological mother was going to fight for custody of her. I immediately began to start crying. This sweet little girl had only been in our family for a few weeks but she already had a huge piece of our hearts. I cannot believe that the CPS case worker was actually considering reunification. I asked her how that could be the biological mother abandoned George under a car the end of July in Houston when he was two months old. She used to let her boyfriend’s use him as punching bag and she used him to help her shop lift. So how could they even consider her as an option for reunification?
I asked the case worker if she had read any of the case histories from Rebecca’s biological brothers, she said that she did not have the case file on them that she was just working from the information that she had. I also was wondering why they did not tell us this before they placed her with us. How could they consider taking Rebecca away from her brothers? The biological mother’s parental rights had been severed and she did not even fight for them so why would she want to fight for the baby?
After I hung up with the case worker I called our agency and asked what we could do to stop them from taking Rebecca from us and letting the tummy mommy have her. We were told that if we could fight to adopt her. I started our fight the very next day when I went to work, explained what had happened the day before and asked if I could use the office copier for personal use. When I had the ok I started copying the 4” thick binder referred to as the redacted records from CPS on Steve and George. A redacted record basically means someone takes all of case notes, notes from the Child Advocate, police documents and take a black marker and black out names, socials etc. from the record.
I went to the post office at lunch and sent the files overnight to the Case Worker for Rebecca. If she could read that and still think reunification was an option than I was going to start getting ready to fight.