Mary came home with me that day and
lived with me for the next year and a half. She did extremely well
and was very proud of herself. It was the longest she had stayed
in one place in over two years. She was finally home. Her
behavior improved immensely, and she went to school like a normal
teenager and she hung out with her friends like a normal teenager. And
she wasn't getting into trouble anymore. I was extremely happy to
have her home and away from the County.
I was furious, however, to discover that she had sat for half a year doing nothing. From the day she
left the Forest Ridge group home in Iowa on September 26 of 2008, to
the day she came home with me, she sat in shelters without any
therapy or treatment of any kind when she could have been at home with
her family and her friends going to school like a normal kid.
She could have been home, but she sat and waited far from her home,
only to have her case dropped the moment the County found out
that threatening me wasn't going to make me give her to them.
For all those months, I couldn't be with
Mary and she couldn't be with me or anyone else. And other than her
lawyer, no one else seemed to care. No one else talked
about this forever-lost part of her life. No one else seemed to think it mattered. Would this have been okay
if it had happened to their child? I hope not. Is Mary ever going to
get this part of her life back? I hope so.
Of all the topics we never discussed,
this seemed to be the worst. And at that time this seemed to be the
most awful of all their secrets.
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