Removal
I pressed the red end call button late on Friday, I had finally reached the CPS worker after blowing up her phone for three days.
It's better than waiting for the chips to fall. Trust me, I know my junior year of high school, I came home to a bright kitchen, everyone around the table for supper and a family missing its youngest member. Child Protective Services in a rural Midwest town in the 90s had reasons I didn't understand at the time to take my sister, but then, why did they leave the rest of us five siblings, and why did they let her return after four months in foster care with only temporary removal of the abuser, my father, it took me decades to get that CPS mistake was not entering our lives, but instead leaving too soon, their presence was wholly disruptive.
As a kid in a toxic home, doing my best to survive, I endured their questioning in the school guidance counselor's office and again, in a courtroom. I went to the supervised visits, and we had my sister's seventh birthday at a pizza place with the foster family at the next table. CPS was the enemy when you live inside of a traumatic environment, when it's all you know, the outside world is the biggest threat. I spent years seeking the truth. If the removal was warranted, why didn't CPS do more, and why didn't anyone care what he had done to me?
Then, in my mid 20s, a detective knocked on my mother's door. He was looking for my sister, a long awaited answer, CPS had lost the file for 13 years, oops, over a decade of inconclusive confusion and profound powerlessness. The statute of limitations would last until she was 40, but my sister didn't want to turn back. I was angry, they just dropped the ball and gave permission for our family to go on the way it was until each woman found their own way out.
Two weeks after I turned 18, I moved 2000 miles away to a place I knew no one with $700 to my name. I worked low wage jobs, moved again to California and took a couple classes at a time until I completed my BSN, 18 years after I started it, when I became an NFP nurse, I had no idea I would collect the cell phone numbers of CPS workers that I would have any association with the removal of children, but I do, and I have medical privilege to harness for the well being of my clients and their kids, and so I call and call And call, and I don't stop until somebody answers.