And life goes on
Well, it’s over - the child has been taken away to live in a trailer park in rural Alberta, leaving a wake of devastation behind. I keep telling myself it’s not as bad as it sounds for the child - at least, I’m clinging to that hope. [Tangent: A friend and I had a long talk about adult responsibilities and choices of lifestyle, and I kept coming back to my position that children should not be treated as possessions; they are people, and they have emotional needs, and they should not be moved between the ages of 1 and 3. You want the child? Come back when he can talk and you can explain things to him. Moving children between 1 and 3 is otherwise job security for the juvenile detention system twelve to sixteen years out.]
Anyhow, once I’d wrapped my mind around the actual law and accepted the fact that the case would be lost, my focus snapped to how to make the transition as palatable for the child as possible. Doing so began my entry into a Kafkaesque existence for a couple of weeks, and I still find myself replaying scenes as I drive or cook or work, trying to make sense of the entire series of events.
The sad part was that by the end of the saga, it felt like the impact on the children had taken second (or third or maybe tenth) place to the adult drama going on. It was a little like watching a car wreck happen in slow motion - you watch the interpersonal dynamics happen, and you scrunch up your face as you watch the inevitable crash, helpless to change the course of events. And here are two predictions I wouldn’t have bet on at any odds: (1) that by the end of the saga, the weeks on end of neglecting our home and businesses to try to support people we’d come to consider close family would end in us being villified and my wife being slagged, not only behind her back but even to her face, for the efforts we decided we couldn’t sacrifice, and (2) that the single call of thanks we got, at the end, for being the voice of reason during the whole ordeal was from one of the social workers, who I came to respect for her stalwartness in the face of some pretty incomprehensible events. By all accounts, neither the child nor the sibling was adequately prepared for their separations, and I’m suspect that while the blame game will be popular for quite a while, the responsibility game won’t be cracked open quite so frequently.
I fully expect to get villified all over again for calling it as I see it and not taking sides unconditionally (even when that act would call for me to abandon my principles in the interest of blind-faith solidarity), but I’ve always called a spade a spade and I’m too old to be a hypocrite now. So the child is gone - I didn’t get to say goodbye because of some unfortunately-timed business travel), and we’re scrambling to catch up with a house that looks like a tornado hit, and way overdue business tasks. At least it keeps our minds occupied.