Rise Magazine is one of the few places I know of that gives voice to the experiences of parents who have children involved with child welfare.
About Rise:
Every year almost 300,000 children enter foster care nationwide. Media coverage of foster care focuses on tragic child deaths, the need for foster and adoptive parents, and the experiences of young people who age out of foster care at 18 or 21. Less understood is that more than half of children in foster care return home to their parents and that nearly every child who enters foster care wants to go home.
Accessing family support services and navigating the family court system with little support requires extraordinary determination. For 10 years Rise has worked with these parents to write and share their stories in order to deepen understanding of fragile families, provide information, healing and encouragement to parents, and guide child welfare professionals in becoming more responsive to the families and communities they serve.
Through therapeutic writing workshops for parents, a publication reaching 20,000 readers nationwide, public speaking and staff training reaching more than 2,000 child welfare professionals in New York City, and partnerships with foster care agencies to strengthen their supports for parents, Rise changes the story of who these parents are and who they can become.
Here are excerpts from a recently published piece by Lisa Maria Barbas wrote:
My daughter was taken from me when she was 10 years old because I struggle with mental illness, and because, at the time she was taken I was addicted to opioid painkillers that a doctor had prescribed for rheumatoid arthritis. I was a loving mother who did so much with her daughter, including reading, cooking, knitting, volunteering at her school and going on train trips, which my daughter loved. But opioids made it harder for me to control my mental illness or to protect my daughter from it, even though no one knew I was addicted but me.
A month after my daughter was removed from home the court ordered two psychiatric evaluations. At the time, I had managed to stop using opioids, but I still suffered from post-acute withdrawal syndrome, a brain chemistry imbalance that can happen after long-term substance abuse. It makes your brain foggy and can take a year or so to resolve.
The evaluations had absolutely nothing positive to say about me or how I had cared for my daughter, even though my daughter was on the honor roll in a wonderful school, and was a thriving child with many people that loved her. These evaluations brought me so much pain. I asked myself: How could someone know me well enough in such a short time to be so critical and judgmental of my character? It felt like a formality. Yet their opinions mattered so much.
I thought about my daughter. If her mother is a piece of shit then what does that make my daughter think about herself?
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