The older I get, the more I tend to see the world in shades of gray, rather than black and white.
And, as a reminder, I'm quite old already.
Take the opinion this morning from the Court of Appeal, for example. It's a parental termination case, and the facts of those are almost invariably super depressing. So my initial reaction was to view the parent in this case -- the mother -- as not really the protagonist of the story. There are super little kids at issue in the case; as the first sentence of the opinion lays out, "A.B.’s (mother’s) two young sons, J.R. who is now nearly four years old and B.R. who is now nearly three, were removed from her custody as a oneand-a-half-year-old toddler (J.R.) and a six-month-old infant (B.R.)." Then, reading on, you get more details: "The two young boys were removed from the custody of both of their parents, who are married, by the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services (agency) in May 2020, after a string of child abuse and neglect referrals stemming from repeated bouts of domestic violence between the couple, concerns over parental substance abuse and, in mother’s case, mental health concerns. As noted, J.R. was then 19 months old and B.R. was 6 months old. They were placed into foster care together, later joined by a newborn sister who was detained in a separate case (not at issue here) after mother tested positive for drugs at her birth. The juvenile court sustained allegations that the two young boys were at substantial risk of both serious physical and emotional harm due to their exposure to ongoing domestic violence in the home, father’s methamphetamine abuse and mother’s self-reported depression that was contributing to her inability to protect them.
Yeah. You can see why the primary concern here is for the (continuously-increasing-in-number) children and not really the parents.
The kids get placed into foster care, with the goal (not surprisingly) of adoption. Which I suspect would not be especially hard to make happen for children of this age.
But to do that, of course, you've got to terminate the rights of the biological parent. Not surprisingly, the mother doesn't want that, hence the current appeal when the trial court so orders.
Despite the initial impressions one gets at the outset of the opinion, there's other stuff later on that makes things seem more in the world-is-often-gray universe. The mother, for example, now says she's in a residential drug rehabilitation program, which okay, maybe that's going to work, maybe it won't. But what really got me was the description, later on in the opinion, of the facts on which the Court of Appeal relies to uphold the trial court's decision to take away the children (even though the trial court allegedly applied the wrong legal standard). Here's the relevant portion:
"Those 21 pages of visitation records, which we have independently reviewed, reflect that in about half of the visits the children would “sometimes” eagerly interact with mother and in one visit were noted as having been consistently responsive to her direction. But apart from a single time when the little boys were noted to have held hands with mother (once, as she was walking them into the visitation room), there is no record of either child ever hugging or kissing mother, displaying affection in other ways or even laughing during those visits. On the contrary, the logs indicate that they didn’t do any of those things. The logs contain boxes with descriptive behaviors for the visitation monitor to check off as appropriate (as a supplement to the narrative descriptions), and at every single visit the visitation monitor left blank the boxes indicating that the children “showed affection during visit” or “laughed.” There also was no evidence of crying when visits ended (the “cried” box was left unchecked at every visit too). There is no evidence either child ever asked to go home with mother. The box indicating whether the parents were “comforting and supporting” was left unchecked in all but two of the ten visits. Indeed, there is a record of mother hugging her children only once, during one visit when the log notes that she “hugged [J.R.].”
Okay, I get it. I understand why those facts are relevant, and why the Court of Appeal recites them to uphold the wholesale termination of parental rights.
But I nonetheless couldn't help thinking that were someone to take a secret video of me interacting with my own children -- children who are, incidentally, incredibly loved an nourished (IMHO) -- I bet that the notes that someone would take about that video would look markedly similar to the notes here. Do I sometimes hug my children? Yeah, sure. But definitely not always, and assuredly less than one time in twelve. Do the children "hug or kiss" me or "display affection" in similar ways? Uh, sometimes. Yeah. Much less the older ones, obviously. But even the younger ones, not so much, honestly.
It's not like my family is "cold" or unloving; far from it, I believe. And, yes, my children are older than two and four years old. But even at a super young age, it was sort of shocking to me to see the physical demonstration of family affection be so commoditized (to use a term). It just struck me as a kind of check-the-box approach to love and relationships that, I don't know, felt sort of artificial and downright icky.
But, again, I get it. You're creating a record of something intangible; family love. Hard to quantify. Hard to set forth on a piece of paper. So we have these artificial constructs and constraints that are our ways of putting things into little boxes and the like. And there's your appellate (and even trial court) record; written check-the-box notes for how much crying and how much hugging and how many times a kid felt like reaching our and holding a hand.
And that determines whether we take away your child.
Like I said (repeatedly), I get it.
But it still seems sort of icky, no?
