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Prologue
“All rise.”
As the judge comes into the courtroom—a rather grand name for a space the size of a classroom, fitted out with Formica tables and plastic chairs—my palms dampen. My heart races. For a second, I see stars and I think I might pass out. Finally this day is here, and I have no idea how to feel about it.
The judge, a woman with hair the color of steel and an expression to match, surveys the room, her gaze resting briefly and impassively on me, before she refers to her notes.
“This is the first hearing to review current custody arrangements for Dylan McBride.” The words fall into the stillness, and then she clears her throat as she looks down at the case file with all its notes and documentations, accusations and commendations, blame and praise.
I take a deep breath and glance at Lisa, the court-appointed lawyer standing next to me, a woman I’ve only met twice. So much hangs on her, on this moment, and of course on me. Me. I can’t pretend this isn’t all about me, and whether I am good enough. Strong enough. Mother enough.
I feel someone else’s eyes on me, a steady gaze I never expected, and I turn. And then we begin.
1
BETH
I’m about to lose my son over a pack of Twizzlers. Of course, that’s not the whole story. It can’t be. But in the moment when Susan, a kindly-looking woman I’ve learned not to trust, took Dylan away as he kicked and screamed for me, that’s how it felt. A lousy pack of Twizzlers.
But this is how it really happened—I was in the system, and once you’re in the system, with calls logged and visits made, with notes in the margins about how messy your house is or how tired you look, you’re screwed. That’s the unfortunate truth.
So when Dylan lost it in the middle of a CVS because I wouldn’t buy him a second pack of Twizzlers, and a woman in the next aisle poked her head around all suspiciously, eyes narrowed as she watched Dylan throw himself onto the floor and start banging his head against it—I realized this was going to be bad.
I’ve tried not to take Dylan out very much, for exactly this reason. We make do with the places he knows and loves—the park, the library, Whole Foods when it’s not busy. When he does melt down, and that happens fairly often, I try to get him out of the situation as quickly and safely as possible. I try, and sometimes I fail, and the guilt I feel is the worst part of it all. No one feels as bad about losing my temper as I do.
So that’s what happened in CVS. I told Dylan he couldn’t have the Twizzlers because I’d come out with a five-dollar bill and I’d already spent it. We’d been having a tough morning already, because Dylan woke up at three and didn’t go back to sleep till seven, and the only reason I was at CVS at all was because I needed tampons.
So there I was—tired, crampy, emotional, and wishing Dylan hadn’t seen the Twizzlers. He doesn’t even eat them, he just likes to play with them like they’re pipe cleaners or bendy straws, and he makes some pretty awesome creations out of them.
But today I didn’t have the money for two packs, and after promising him we could get them later—a concept that, at only just seven years old, he doesn’t fully appreciate—I lost my cool when he started screaming—a high-pitched, single-note shriek that I know people think is weird, and makes me feel anxious—that people are staring, that he won’t stop, that I can’t control this situation.
I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I know that. Of course I know that. But I did, just a little bit—even though all I did was shout his name, and grab his arm to pull him up from the floor, and then, before I knew it, there was a woman calling the hotline for DCF. That’s Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families, if you don’t know. I do.
Of course, nothing happens the minute someone makes that call. It took the store manager getting involved, and then the police had to come, and we ended up being taken by police car to the station on Raymond Road, with a paunchy officer telling everyone to calm down, although the only one who was upset was Dylan, and he wasn’t listening to the policeman’s advice.
I had my arm around my son, and he was both punching me and burrowing into me at the same time, and I stayed silent because I know by now saying anything in this type of situation is not a good idea. I just wanted to sit through the inevitable questions and comments, give the right answers and then go home, with DCF off my back, because that’s what happened before.
But this time it didn’t.
It didn’t because I was already on DCF’s radar, which I know sounds suspect. Even the most laid-back liberal person starts to look a little prim when they hear that DCF is involved. Their eyes n
arrow and their mouths purse and they say, well, what really happened? in a tone that suggests anything you say won’t be reason enough for someone’s child to be taken away, because only monsters have that happen to them.
So here it is: the first time DCF was called, it was by Dylan’s father, Marco. Dylan was two years old and he’d started to demonstrate symptoms—of what, we didn’t know and still don’t. Back then he was too young for most diagnoses—autism, ADHD, the nebulous PDD, or pervasive development disorder, when they can’t decide what’s wrong. The pediatrician, when I took Dylan at eighteen months old, told us to wait and see, and I was happy to do that, relieved to kick that particular can further down the road. But Marco had had enough of the sleepless nights, the tantrums that started for no good reason and sometimes didn’t end for hours, the terror of many household things that led to the aforementioned shrieking, the constant clinging to me—and one night, in boozed-up desperation, he called DCF and said he wanted to commit “voluntary relinquishment.” He’d looked it up on the internet; it’s basically where you give up your own child.
Fortunately, because I certainly didn’t want to give him up, and in any case, thankfully, it doesn’t actually work like that, no one took Dylan away. Still, DCF had a duty to get involved, and so we received a couple of visits. Our home, a shabby little duplex in Elmwood, was inspected, and we were referred to a pediatric psychiatrist all the way in Middletown, because none of the ones near us in West Hartford who accepted HUSKY—Connecticut’s Medicaid program for children—had room on their waiting lists.
I went to that first appointment, even though I was dreading it. Dylan didn’t do well on the bus—Marco said he had to take the car to work, even though he’d known about the appointment—and then the hour-long wait, even with all the toys and books available, strung us both out even more until Dylan was clinging to me like a monkey and burying his head in my shoulder. By the time we arrived in the examining room, he was about two minutes away from a meltdown.
And that’s just what he did, flinging himself on the floor while the psychiatrist, a stern-looking woman with permed hair and deep frown lines, looked on and wrote notes; the scratch of her pen made my own anxiety skyrocket. What was she writing—about what a terrible mother I was?
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I said, as I both tried to catch Dylan’s arms to keep him from hurting himself and sound reasonable.
“This isn’t about Dylan being on his best behavior,” she told me in a teacherish voice. She leaned forward, her expression intent as she spoke calmly. “Dylan, I see that you’re upset and tired. Maybe you’re frightened because of this new situation. But you cannot kick and hurt people, even when you feel that way.”
Dylan didn’t listen to a word she said, not that he would have understood, at just two and a half years old. It was undoubtedly all straight out of a parenting manual, or Psychology 101, and basically useless when it comes to the actual moment, such as it was.
I didn’t go back. DCF called and asked why I’d missed the next appointment, and then they visited us at home, and fortunately Dylan was having a good day, so they finally left us alone. For a while.
The second and last time we came onto DCF’s radar was when Dylan was five. By that time we were completely off the grid when it came to parenting—the playgroups, the story times, the Mommy and Me sessions that most parents seemed to go to, their worlds revolving around each other and their kids—cut-up carrot sticks, picnics in the park, wine o’clock for the mommies. I saw it from a distance, but we passed it all by, existing in our solitary bubble, because that was what worked.
I’d stopped with the yearly well checks at the pediatrician’s too, because they were too difficult, and Dylan had managed only two mornings of preschool, with me sitting next to him the whole time, talking to him quietly, before I realized that wasn’t going to work, either.
Marco had left us when Dylan was three, making do with sporadic visits that tapered off to basically nothing within a year, and Dylan and I didn’t go out at all, except for the library and the park, the occasional necessary shopping, and basically it sometimes felt as if, to the rest of the world, we had simply ceased to exist.
Which was why it was a surprise when DCF called eighteen months ago, because I hadn’t registered Dylan for kindergarten. Those two mornings at preschool had left enough of a footprint for them to check up on us, presumably since we were already written up in their notes somewhere.
I was annoyed, and afraid, and frankly totally fed up. I mean, you read about these cases of kids being killed by their parents, locked in cupboards or chained to a table, covered in cigarette burns and bruises, and somehow DCF leaves them alone but comes after me, when anyone can see I am trying my best. They come after me, and instead of actually helping me, they just pretend to, tsk-tsking under their breath while they smile and ask their questions.
That was the first time I met Susan and her kindly smile. She came to my door and she looked so compassionate and I felt so alone in that moment that I let my guard down. She made me a cup of tea while I sat at my kitchen table and sobbed. I hadn’t meant to; I hadn’t even realized I needed to. I thought, for the most part, that I was fine. Dylan and I both were.
