Listen to Judith. Do as Judith says, for it does seem like she’s 100 percent correct.

Her family actually adopted Lady! Her real name is Zunni. I know this. For reasons.

one sentence was especially reveiling:
“He watched me sing so intently, staring up at me as if I was the sun, moon and stars all rolled in one.”
we applied for adoption and have heard this so many times: women who had no means to raise a child but hesitated to put their child for adoption used to say or write this -…

You put that perfectly. It’s one thing to teach a child to make some allowances (like having to wait til next weekend to see a movie cause Mom has a migraine, something I hated having to do) but it’s another to put everything on the child’s shoulders. What particularly struck me was when the incarcerated mom blamed…

I feel as if almost all the parents in this series are trying to turn the tables on how this should work and put the burden of the relationship on the children instead of themselves. It’s the children who have to deal with their psychological or physical absence, their abuse, their lack of preparedness for their…

Seriously, I’m kind of blown away that she still expects to be seen as a parent after over a decade of separation. The self centered nature of this thought process is not striking a sympathetic note with me at all. Most of the stories in this series don’t.
 

I keep reading these stories hoping to learn something and empathize, but I keep getting farther away from the conclusion I feel like I’m supposed to draw. The women are sad and depressed because of their feelings, not because of concern for their kids or what is best for them. As an adult, I went back and read the…

These cases are once again making me wish we had the childrens’ perspectives on the situation. I’m reading this and wondering how long a child should remain linked with an incarcerated parent, especially if others are stepping in to be their parents. Childhood lasts such a short time, how fair is it to children to…

Obviously in an ideal scenario, I would have been born into an amazing, stable bio family without demons that prevented them from being good parents. But if that isn’t an option, having someone want to adopt you (especially a kid like me, who was already 8 and had social problems from being neglected) is a rad backup…

I was adopted as an infant, but know my biological family and I totally agree.

From my perspective, trying really hard and two bucks will get you on the subway. If your best isn’t good enough, it’s not good enough. My mom’s best was certainly not good enough for me and I resent her for her efforts to prevent me from being cared for properly by others when she wasn’t fit, regardless of her…

Usually I see this post too late to comment, but I am enraged by it every week. My mom’s story would sound exactly like this, that she was a good mom and every external force in the world separated us - it was my dad’s fault, it was the neighbor’s fault who reported her, it was my fault for telling my teacher I didn’t…

I find it hard to put too much trust in these emotionally charged, one sided stories. I’d love to know what the foster parents (with more first hand knowledge of the children’s emotional states) have to say about the situation.

Thanks so much for sharing your perspective on this. I know that the purpose of this series is to highlight the parents’ perspective in the system, but having worked on the “child’s” side of the system, I think the children’s stories are necessary to give a complete picture.

I’m an adult now with a good life, but I was a child with a mother like the women in these stories. She was stripped of her parental rights by a Midwestern state in the early 90s. I don’t know how much you all know about the Midwest, but for my home state to decide that a woman was not fit to parent, her behavior had…

We adopted our daughter by a young woman who was incarcerated and gave birth in prison, a relative of mine. It was very stressful and painful for her to give up her parental rights (we did not ask her, she asked us) but she also felt relief once she knew her daughter would be in a safe, secure, stable home surrounded…

“On more than one occasion, his foster mother told me that he got depressed after visits and acted out by being disrespectful or breaking his possessions. Those were little signs, she told me, that “maybe the visits aren’t such a good idea.” I felt that if he were allowed to see me more often, then it would not be so…

Dammit, I hadn’t seen the ep yet!

lol Rand is just embarrassed that he’s wearing the same color tie, OH NO, NOW PEOPLE WILL THINK WE ARRANGED THIS AHEAD OF TIME

Haha! I refer to myself as the Soap Opera Effect Ninja because I will stealthily remove that shit from EVERY TV I see it on. I don’t even suffer from motion sickness but that effect is like, motion-sickness adjacent. It drives me most insane when people don’t notice the difference between before and after!