Watching the Waters has a horrific tale of child abuse committed by the state.
I begin with a disclaimer: I don’t know this woman, or the woman whose child was removed. I don’t know if it is one of those situations like with MilitaryMom, who blogged her sons drowning death and the general suspicion was that she was an irresponsible mother neglecting her son so she could describe her chickens. But the facts as they are presented here are incredibly scary:
I am sometimes so incredibly floored that I cannot put together coherent thoughts.
This is one of those times.
A good woman, an incredible parent, a mom who takes in the hardest of the hard children, has had three children removed from her home.
Her county is working overtime (they showed up at her home on Veteran’s Day) to try and remove her other 10 children.
Her crime? The alleged abuse?
She blogs.
I would love to say I am joking. I would love to say that this is a prank of some sort. It is not.
Rachel’s blog is here. I’ve not read it all, but there are updates and it’s harrowing.
Again: I don’t know if there is more to the story. But I think in general there should be an extremely high bar for removing legally adopted children from a home. (This seems to be an increasingly common response by governments in which the person has little recourse. Removing children is traumatic for the children and the parents. The governments should be damn sure there is actual abuse or illegal activity happening, and not just something they don’t like. Selling drugs from the home? Sure, remove the kids. But if a parent smokes while outside? No. NO.
Every day I rant about the ballooning scope of government. This is the danger of that expansion: that they are becoming intimately involved in the most sacred relationship at all: that of a family.
This has got to stop.
Oh my gosh. I read that blog all the time – I’ve been reading it for a couple of years now, and I wondered what had happened when her blog went private. This is horrifying. She is devoted to those very difficult children. Devoted. My heart is breaking for her. Thanks for this update – I had no idea what was going on, but I had a feeling it was bad.
This is horrific. Inexplicable and horrible. I can’t condemn this strongly enough. It breaks my heart.
She has already been through so much. She adopted six siblings – all of whom are very troubled, but she has done what needs to be done to keep them safe, and help them recover from their childhoods. There are other adopted kids as well in the family. She blogs about them, yes, but what mother doesn’t blog about her kids? Are they gonna go take Dooce’s kids away now because she blogs about them? Every mother who has a child and also has a blog blogs about that kid. This is a witch hunt.
She and her husband are devoted to those kids.
This is awful.
Yes, someone else mentioned Dooce and the other MommyBloggers. It’s a whole genre of blogging now. What are they gonna do, start rounding up all the mothers who blog? Is WordPress an illegal product?
Can you blog about your kid who is 17?
Don’t your actions have to imperil the children before they can be snatched away from the Gestapo?
She sounds like an amazing mother. I pray this gets remedied immediately.
Hi there~ Just so you know, you’re linking to MY blog (I’m an adult who was emancipated at 16 from the foster care system after being bounced around in over 50 homes in three years)… Rachels blog is currently completely private. I’m just providing updates for her on my blog so others are aware of what’s going on. I’d really appreciate if you could correct that
… Thanks!
Thank you for the clarification. As I said, I’d never read the blogs before so I wasn’t sure of all the details, so thanks for clearing that up.
And since her blog is private, isn’t that even more evidence that Rachel wasn’t doing anything wrong?