When my depression kicks in, I don’t bathe and I barely eat. I just stay in my bed and sob and be mad for reasons I don’t even know.
Last winter I was depressed for about two weeks and missing work at Rise because of it. For the next issue of the magazine, I was supposed to interview a professor at Harvard. The deadline was quickly approaching. My editor, Nora, called to see if … Read More
When parents go to court, we feel scared and alone. A project to make sure that babies return to family as often as possible is trying to change that. I interviewed Lucy Hudson, director of ZERO to THREE’s Safe Babies Court Teams Project, which educates judges, lawyers and caseworkers about infant and toddler development and supports the parent and the court in working together.
My kids were removed as babies. Learning about … Read More
From the first day that the child welfare system came into my life, I felt confused, afraid to ask for help and alone, with no one to guide or support me. My case began five years ago. I got a call from Child Protective Services (CPS) in Detroit, asking me to come to a Team Decision Making meeting and to bring my five kids with me.
At the meeting, the CPS workers … Read More
When New York City’s Children’s Services (ACS) took my children three years ago, I was refusing to comply with mental healthtreatment and was getting into violent fights with my husband. I needed a lot of help. But I was assigned a lawyer who said he had never represented anyone in a child welfare case before.
My husband, on the other hand, was lucky enough to get a lawyer from Bronx Defenders, an … Read More
My mother grew up in South Carolina with about 11 siblings, maybe more. When I was a child, she’d tell me about her mother’s heartache; she had to bury four of her sons. But the stories that really rattled me were the ones about the abuse her mother took from her dad.
“He used to beat her,” she’d say as a matter of fact. No emotion, no sorrow. No anger or judgment. … Read More
