Family Court and Parental Alienation

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An insidious morass of redundancies and allegiances to a host of personal agendas least of which are those of the children.

                 – My description of family court 

As a victim of parent alienation – that is, after experiencing first-hand the alienating behaviors of a parent whose sole purpose seems to be to destroy my relationship with my children – actions that have caused two of my daughters to be consumed by what Richard Warshak calls the irrational rejection of a parent, I've had plenty of time to think about the warlike tactics and insidious poisoning that make up parental alienation and to reflect on how this behavior may have gotten its start.

PART 3: MARY LIVES WITH DAD

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                                 Lincoln School from the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace

    They went down Hill Street to the vacant lot. It was knee deep with goldenrod and asters. It would have been fun to stop and play there, if they hadn't been going to school. But they cut through by a little path and came out on Pleasant Street.

Mary's Final Court Hearing – March 17, 2009

A little over a week later we held court again. On March 17th at 11:00 am, the whole team met in the courtroom for one of Mary's review hearings. This would be one of the last hearings held in the beautiful old court house in the older part of Mankato. It would also be Mary's last hearing.

The County Threatens Me

On March 6th, 2009 at 10:00 am we held our last team meeting. We met at the Social Services office to discuss the prospect of placing Mary in the foster home in Fergus Falls. The whole team attended this meeting except for Mary's lawyer who had a schedule conflict.

I Lose My Mother

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A few months later, on November 17th of that year, my mother died in a nursing home in Florida. According to her autopsy the cause of her death was "blunt head trauma." She was beaten numerous times in the chest and head while lying in her bed in the nursing home. The staff said she fell on the floor. I have never believed this.

She had been married to a man she met about eight years earlier, over the Internet, and throughout their strained marriage he had convinced her to turn against nearly everything she had formerly cherished: her children, her grandchildren, her sister, her religion, her political party, even her first husband — our dad. We could never understand why she suddenly wanted nothing to do with her family photo albums or why she returned her grandchildren's pictures, but we had an idea. As it turned out, her husband was a manipulative and abusive man who, I believe, poisoned her against her family.