Now that I’ve had some time to process everything that has gone on with Sugar Biscuit’s case, I’m now able to start getting angry. I spent so much time being compassionate and loving to his birth mother, partly because I didn’t have the facts. 

Now that I know some of what happened, I’m mad. And disgusted. I know there’s probably so much more that we don’t know. I’m sure we were given half the truth, and half the truth was a million times worse than I could have dreamed. I’d like to say I understand addiction is an illness. Maybe I don’t, because I don’t understand making choices that engander the well being of your unborn child, even when you have opportunities to get well and do better. 

Maya Angelou says “when you know better you do better”. Not all the time. Some people don’t. Some people know better, and continue to do worse. Then those same people cry foul about life, and how it isn’t fair, and gloss over all the missed chances and the helping hands. Some of those same people honestly expect a jury to hand them a baby simply because now they claim to be clean. The same baby they knowingly poisoned, and left alone in the hospital,  and exposed to violence and rage. 

I’m astounded, is all I can say. I am finally in a place where I’m trying to process everything that’s happened to me since February 14, 2011. I wish I could share more facts, but I will say that you can imagine the worst things, and multiply them by a hundred, and you get the things that SB’s birth mother did to him and others. I honeslty didn’t know people could live like that. Call me sheltered, and I’ll call myself happy that my world doesn’t contain people who are capable of such horrible acts.

These are the reasons that after all the help I gave her, and as close as we became, that I cannot allow Sugar Biscuit’s birth mother into our lives. She is capable of horror. It makes me sad for him, and I haven’t even begun to process telling him some of the Bad Truth as he gets older. There are some things I hope he never knows. There are many things I wish I didn’t. I asked the caseworker why she didn’t tell me, or warn me. She stated that the birthparent’s information is confidential, as is ours, and that she couldn’t. Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe I would have been blinded by her manipulation. I don’t know.

I spent some time feeling guilt. Guilt that I hired a lawyer in order to keep SB, guilt about the money it cost my family, the extra stress we endured. I know now that it was abosultely necessary. This baby (who I still supersititously am scared to call Our Son) needed a fighter in his corner. He got one, a devil in a three piece suit who is the meanest, most darling man alive. And we won, and we kept him safe, and it is as it should be. I no longer regret any of it. 

I’m still trying to get over feeling that the trial a waste of time, energy, money, emotions. It was crazy of any birth parent with this type of history to insist on a trial. But, maybe it wasn’t useless. I have the information I need now to protect my family. I know what can happen, and some of what did, and how to try and protect us. I know that I can look my boy in the eye and tell him, with complete honesty, that I tried with everything in me to help his mother, and that I learned that she wasn’t able to keep him safe. I know this, with every inch of my skin and every fiber of my being.

Maybe the money we spent, the time, the tears, were worth it to get to this point. Maybe we needed to go to trial so we could see it all, learn everything, and find our way home under the bright meteor shower of light, under a little thing called the Truth.Â