When They Take Your Kid

I was one of the unfortunate early ones. Now, as we've seen in the news and read here, it's happening more frequently. Sorry about the second person, this was too painful to write in the first.

There’s no warning. They don’t come home from school, don’t come back from a visit, or people with name badges holding papers are suddenly at the door with a police officer saying things you are too in shock to understand.

You are in a panicked blur of phone calls, emails, shocked babbling family faces, texts, more phone calls and letters. Official mastheads and signatures frame stone walls of words. The voices and message tones of people who have tremendous power over your family’s well-being are hard, determined, even, empty. 

Your conferences with your lawyer, if you have one, are nightmarish from beginning to end. At first, you're literally unable to believe what you are hearing.

Your court session feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone.

No contact with your child is allowed. No contact. No contact, no contact. No. Contact. Days, then weeks, then months. Smelling their clothes, seeing their room, hearing their voice on video feels like falling into a pit of spikes.

A twisted, bizarro-world path eventually emerges that you might be able to traverse that could possibly result in seeing your kid. Your lawyer incessantly tamps down your expectations.

Okay! We can do this! you say to yourself. You have to jump through their hoops, do their dance, and cooperate, cooperate, cooperate with every outlandish demand, keep your true feelings hidden, and stay focused on the most important thing, the thing you know will be best for your child: reunification as soon as possible. 

The things you are willing to do and say and endure in order to make that happen fill you with disgust and outrage.

Training videos? Readings? Therapy? No problem! Interviews with purse-lipped Guardian ad Litems with skeptical voices and trap questions? A psychological evaluation with a bored-sounding PhD, bazillion-question multiple-choice tests and hours of in-person sessions? Of course. All paid for by you until your accounts are empty and assets gone? Without a second thought.

You must say that you disavow your gender-critical beliefs, views which you have already expressed to your kid and your ex more than once. This is something you naively thought you would never feel pressure to do. It's necessary in order to have the best chance at reunification sooner rather than later, your lawyer says. You agree to do so, an act that causes you the most shame of all.

You hope at first that cooperation will earn you accelerated progress and even the benefit of the doubt. But social services and the helping professions are populated mainly with those who have been trained to be woke activists in their work, especially if you are in a blue province/state. Most professionals you encounter interpret your words and actions in the worst possible way.

If you have the misfortune to read any of their reports, you are dumbfounded.

If, as occasionally happens, your co-parent or even your child has followed the coaching of trans activists to hint to the authorities at sexual improprieties by you, a chance at reunification may require you to subject yourself to the most invasive evaluation you can imagine. Sensors are attached to your body and cameras focused on your person while you are shown pictures and made to listen to disgusting and heartbreaking sounds. 

Not all of them are suggestive. Some are just normal pictures and audio of children. Don't allow the fact that you miss your own child so desperately to trigger you in these moments, because any interest you show by lingering momentarily over those images or voices will be interpreted as sexual in nature. You will fail the sex-abuser test if you like kids too much. 

If the family service agency takes those hints seriously, they have referred them to the Crown/District Attorney, and a criminal investigation has been opened against you. You need a criminal attorney, your civil lawyer tells you. Your child is interviewed by a forensic psychologist and specialist attorney. 

I know these people. They are much better trained and more careful in their jobs than the family services staff, says your criminal lawyer, if you get one. They have a very clever methodology. Chances are good that they're able to separate the fabrications and fantasies from the reality. Nevertheless, even when the investigation goes nowhere and you never hear from law enforcement, you are technically the subject of an open criminal case for the foreseeable future. They won't close it until the statute of limitations is reached. 

You are afraid this will hurt your chances of seeing your kid again. It might, might not, your lawyer says. I DIDN’T ABUSE MY KID I’LL DO ANY INTERROGATION THEY WANT TO CLEAR MY NAME, you say. We can’t make a stink about it. That will only increase the chances they’ll charge you with something, your lawyer says. You’ll have to ask the court to allow your psych evaluator to view the video of the interview so they can include it in their report. But even if your kid didn’t disclose abuse and they’re not planning to charge you, the prosecutor will oppose it. 

WHY, you say. IF THEY KNOW I’M INNOCENT WOULDN’T THEY WANT ME TO REUNIFY WITH MY KID. Matter of principle, says your lawyer. Prosecutors prefer to keep all evidence for themselves in case they decide to charge you later.

Now you must head back into the Twilight Zone, and the robed and suited denizens mumbling their legal incantations to each other while you wonder whether you’ll ever see your kid again, and doubt your ability to make it through all of this without breaking down completely.

If you can afford it and/or it’s covered, maybe you could arrange to see a therapist of your own choosing, spill your guts and start to process the shock, the bone-deep grief and intense visceral pain and sadness. 

But if a therapist was the person who betrayed your family to begin with? And all the time you have spent in sessions and interviews observing these MSWs, PhDs and PsyDs has made you realize how clueless, presumptuous and arrogant they can be? So you'd have to keep your gender-critical views to yourself? You might be too wary of them.

Maybe you have found a therapist who thinks all the gender stuff is nonsense. If you live in a liberal area, maybe you can't. Your insurance/Medicare may or may not cover virtual sessions with far-flung clinicians.

The prescription meds help some, if you get the right ones. The alcohol makes them go down easier and kick in quicker. Not more than a few gulps though, you don't want to kill yourself while you are numbing yourself.

You sleep, but you don't dream much. When you do, it's a horror.

Of course your kid's picture is your home screen on your phone and computer. You look at it obsessively, helplessly. You write them letters you are not allowed to send. You plan future birthdays, family gatherings, holidays that include them, then miss them.

If the separation drags on long enough, you start to be triggered by seeing other people's kids yours' age. You smile at them wistfully through your tears. Not too much though, especially if you’re a guy; people will think you're creepy.

You've lost most of your real-life friends by this point. The ones who stick with you don't know what to say. They look at you helplessly, as if they were seeing the victim of a car accident still trapped and in pain inside the wreckage waiting for the Jaws of Life.

But when those Jaws of Life finally, after endless struggle and interminable waiting, miraculously, joyfully come? And your chest grows tight and your throat constricts as you brace yourself not to break down bawling as you see them start to round the corner at the visitation center? All of it, every single outrage and humiliation and travesty is worth it, when you see your child's face and feel their hug again.