The Termination

I do not recall my mom's parental rights being terminated. Maybe I never knew or maybe I blocked it out. What I do recall was rummaging through some old court documents to try to get something that would prove to the financial aid office at my college that I had been in care up to my 18th birthday. I was a freshman in college & finding the paperwork from the termination proceedings was the last thing I was expecting.

I remember the strength in my legs giving out & feeling ill. I felt numb as I read the document over & over. At that point, I had already aged out of care & it hit me how very alone I was in the world. Although my foster parents loved me & were fairly supportive, I realized in that moment that I had no legal, official, binding connection to anyone in the world. But as alone as I was, I knew someone who was even more alone.

I was the only child my birth mom ever had. Mom was born with cerebral palsy & mental retardation. She was shuffled from place to place until she aged out of foster care at 18. In the eight years she was in care, no one taught her how to care for herself or a child. Apparently no one ever expected her to get pregnant. Mom had been out of care less than a year when I was conceived.

We lived with her parents for six years, until her mother passed away. After that, Mom went back into an institution & I went to live with her sister for a year, before entering foster care. I lost touch with my biological family except Mom within a few years. Mom & I had visits every month, like clockwork. By the time I got to high school, we had started pretty much repeating the same visit every time.

Mom: I miss you.
Me: I miss you too, Mom.
Mom: How are you doing in school?
Me: Good. I got mostly A's again, except in math.
Mom: That's good. You are so smart. I'm very proud of you.
-Silence.-
Mom: Honey?
Me: What, Mom?
Mom: I'm gonna get out of here soon & get my own place. Would you want to come to live with me?
Me: We'll see. Let's worry about it when you get closer to getting out.
-This is where I changed the subject.- We repeated this conversation several times per visit with other subjects in between.

Even if Mom did not know, I knew she was never getting out. Even when I was ten, I could see the decline in her health from when I was younger. In my earliest childhood memories, I recall having to run to keep up with her walk. I remember calling to her to slow down as we walked a couple of blocks to the grocery store. By the time I was 11, her legs had weakened & she was falling so much that she started using a walker. Some time around my sixteenth birthday, she started using a wheel chair on bad days & by high school graduation, she could no longer walk at all.

Mom has five siblings who have seventeen children between them & yet, I am her only visitor. Correction. She has one brother who did visit for a while. He is on record as having given her enough alcohol (which does not mix well with her seizure medication) to get her drunk & try to pimp her out. That was while I was in care & I didn't find out until I aged out. He disappeared when my caseworker stepped in & when he suddenly showed back up at her facility when I was 19, I put a stop to those visits. No one else comes to see her.

When I told her I was getting married, she was afraid I was going to stop visiting her. No matter how often I told her that was not going to happen, the next time I came to see her, she needed reassurance that I would still come to see her once I got married. Even now, she still seems surprised each month when I show up to visit. I wish I could explain in a way she would understand. I tell her that love her & that she is my mom & always will be, no matter what. Even more than that, she is my only link to my past & I am hers. There is no one else in this world that can replace us in each other's lives.

I'm pretty sure Mom doesn't know about the termination. I'm not telling her. We both fought it tooth & nail. She knew I didn't want to be adopted & I knew she had no one but me. That wasn't enough for the judge. He thought the foster families I lived with were better for me. Some of the homes would've been okay. The rest make me wonder why they even bother with licensing foster families at all. I would have been better off on the street than in two of the placements. Oddly enough, those two were the ones that pushed hardest to adopt me & the ones who tried to punish me by taking away visits with my mom. I don't think so. Homey don't play that.