things intensified. We had to write statements, go through the evidence—in particular, Lyn Edwards’s devastating report. She’d recommended that Theo be returned permanently to the Lamberts. He felt safe there, apparently. But so what? Theo felt safe everywhere. Theo would have felt safe on top of a burning skyscraper.
Even though we’d half expected it, seeing it in black and white like that was another crushing blow. Anita told us encouragingly there were lots of things in the report she could challenge. But I remembered what she’d said about CAFCASS in our very first meeting. It’s very, very rare for the judge not to go along with their views.
And now that Theo was staying with the Lamberts, they’d become the status quo. There was a reason possession was called nine-tenths of the law. If he was there, and settled, our strongest argument for keeping him—that moving families would cause disruption—now worked in their favor, not ours.
I invented a new word: CAFCA-esque. Like Kafkaesque, only with added heartbreak.
I still went to the parenting classes, even though I didn’t currently have a child to parent. I didn’t want to give CAFCASS any reason, however small, to say we weren’t being cooperative.
At the classes I talked to the other parents, and heard tales of unbelievable misery—misery even worse than ours. Parents whose kids had been taken away after anonymous tip-offs by disgruntled neighbors, or because hospitals had concerns about minor injuries, or because a parent had lost their temper with a social worker. Mothers who, having proved they were clean of drugs, relapsed into addiction when the system refused to give their kids back. Or even worse, mothers who stayed clean, only to be told that their kids were now settled and happy with their foster families and it wasn’t in their best interests for them to be moved again. Many of the people I spoke to were chaotic, admittedly, or working their way through various rehabilitation programs. But many were just sad and desperate and broken.
And one woman whose story chilled my soul—a woman about Maddie’s age, an artist, heavily pregnant, who’d been told that, because she’d been in a psychiatric unit in the past, she was considered “capable of abuse.” The psychiatrist who had written those words had never even met her. But unless she could convince a judge his diagnosis was wrong, her baby would be taken from her soon after it was born and given up for adoption. It was all to do with numbers, she told me wearily: Removal of newborns had more than doubled since the government introduced adoption targets. I checked, sure she must have gotten that figure wrong. But she was right.
Once, I would have written about these people, and tried to shine a light on the injustices they were suffering. But even if there’d been a newspaper I could publish in, I wasn’t allowed to write anything that related, however tangentially, to our case.
Ironically, as the hearing about Theo neared, the case about David was just getting going. I tried to spend some time researching hypoxia, so I could sound more confident when a social worker asked how we were going to care for him. But the more I read, the more futile it seemed. I looked at our tiny house and wondered how on earth we could accommodate a severely disabled child.
If we even had a tiny house. We could barely afford the first mortgage, let alone the second mortgage that was now covering our legal fees. And if we failed to gain custody of David, there was a high likelihood we’d end up having to pay child maintenance for him.
If worse came to worst, and we lost both Theo and David, there would be another consequence, too. I would no longer have a child to be a full-time father to. I’d have to get a job—not in journalism, obviously; that ship had sailed, but maybe stacking shelves in the local supermarket. Would that cover our mortgages? I looked to see how much shelf stackers got paid. The answer was no, it wouldn’t.
We couldn’t sleep. Night after night, we lay side by side, staring at the ceiling and twitching with stress. Even eating was difficult—the tension made it hard to swallow. There was a time when Maddie would have drunk to relax, but now the pills she was taking meant we couldn’t even have alcohol in the house.
I started sleeping in Theo’s room. There was still a faint, puppyish smell of him