Today I read an essay about this election season and the damage already done, no matter the outcome. It really touched something in me; our country is in a battle that encompasses so much more than politicians. For so long, the nation has been arguing and fussing and fighting and it's been getting worse and worse, with lots of "if you vote for person x, unfriend me" drama. I admit, I have felt and potentially said similar things.
But lately my mind has been on the after. What happens when the votes are cast and the winner is declared? How do we go back to being neighbors, friends, family in the aftermath?
This is such a direct analogy to the court process that I can't help but make the comparisons. When a court case ends, there is the same fallout. Parents may or may not be "elected" to have their kids returned to them. On all sides - mother, father, foster families, children- there have been people rooting for a specific outcome, and some of those people are going to "lose."
At the end of the case, the lawyers, the judge, the GAL, the social workers and therapists step out of the family's life, just as the commentators, campaign managers and the pollsters go away. The real people are left trying to rebuild the family, with or without their children. If the children have returned, it might seem like things could go back to the way they were before the court was involved, but over and over parents and children have told me that is not the case. Relationships are altered, and some of them broken, and our hope is that has happened as a direct result of parents and families mending the root cause that brought them to court in abuse and neglect cases.
The extended family is also changed, and often this is because of who they supported, and who they did not, in the court case. So often the court case stirs up the extended family, the church, the neighborhood in ways that can't easily be undone or forgotten, just like the election talk and its inevitable polarizing. It's hard to imagine the way forward, and yet families all over America do it every day, every month of every year.
On the other hand, if the kids are not reunited with one or both parents, the whole family structure is forever altered in a way that cannot be completely mended. A child returned to one parent but forever separated from the other adds a lot of questions into the child's future, and there is no denying the fact that loss is involved, for the child of course but also for other family members. A child removed from both parents is removed from the greater family in many cases, and if the child is placed with a family member at the conclusion and parents' rights are terminated, then the family "loses" the parents. Any solution where the child doesn't return to both parents is fraught with lots of difficulty in the future, even though that decision may be in the best interests of the child involved.
This feels like a long way around a really important point, one that a dear friend of mine faces every day, regardless of who is president: when the court gavel bangs its last tired note, the real people in child abuse and neglect cases, the ones whose lives are being scrutinized and taken apart and families disrupted, those people live the aftermath of the decision. My dear friend has four children, all affected profoundly by a case that happened a decade ago. The family structures of the adults and the children were altered forever.
And our nation is about to experience a similar rift. I wonder how many decades it will take for our families and friends and neighbors to right themselves, or to take on the new normal?
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