Dr. Grant, you have forever changed my life

"River, where are your pants?"

My heart did a little flop as I heard my son's teacher's words to my bottomless two year old daughter.  Every mom knows the sitch: you're in a hurry, you can't find shoes, socks, pants, or whatev's for the toddler, and you are faced with two options.  You can be late, or you can just let your child free style
it like a boss.

Pant-less Hot Mess

So there you are, surrounded by moms and teachers, with a toddler that isn't wearing all their clothes.  Normally, you feel a little embarrassed.  You feel like you aren't as put together as the other moms.  You feel like you're the only one who can't seem to get it together.  You feel like the teacher is thinking "this mom is just a hot mess."  Your husband gets home that night, and you tell him how embarrassed you were toting a half naked toddler to and from school.

But some of us moms have thoughts beyond those.  Some of us feel more than embarrassment.

My son LOVES his teacher, and therefore I LOVE his teacher, but as those words came out of her mouth, my stomach froze as I thought to myself, "is she going to call CPS on me?"

I know, I know.  You're sitting there, reading this, telling me that I'm paranoid  If a pant-less two year old is child neglect, then they need to lock up every mom that ever lived.  I mean, seriously, in the middle of a Texas summer, it's almost child neglect to put pants ON a child.  Just walking across the street to drop off my son is pretty much torture.  I would love nothing more than to laugh off the embarrassment of being caught with a partially dressed child, but I'm not embarrassed.

I'm scared.

Dr. Grant, I sometimes wonder if you even remember us.  Do you ever sit at your desk and think "I wonder what happened with that five week old infant with the broken leg?"  Or ask yourself if you did the right thing signing an affidavit that our children needed to be taken from our care.  I wonder if it was even hard for you to make the decision, since you did it so quickly.  I was still sitting in a hospital room crying, mere hours after arrival, when that affidavit was notarized.  You didn't even wait for the blood work to come back.

But I remember you.  I think about you everyday.  I remember that you had a baby yourself.  You told me about making your own baby food with a blender so you that you knew what your little one was eating.  I remember that you talked kindly to me as long as it wasn't about my son.  I thought that I could trust you to make his health your top priority.  Yet, as soon as I asked questions about my five week old's broken leg, you would clam up.  The moment I even mentioned that I thought there was something that had been passed down to him by his dad, you shut me down.

Do you know what that's like?  To be sitting in a hospital room with your infant and have every doctor and nurse that comes in refuse to tell you anything about your crying child's health?  The only thing anyone would tell me was that I wasn't allowed to feed him in case he needed surgery.  Surgery.... I kept being told my son might need SURGERY.... yet not a single person would tell me what this alleged surgery was even for.  It wasn't for his leg.  So then for what?

You let me sit and cry hysterically for hours without being allowed to hold or feed my son.  You let me sit in fear that someone was going to start cutting on my child without even telling me what the surgery was.

And then it only got worse.

I have a whole other blog post dedicated to the nightmare you caused me, Dr. Grant, so I won't go into it.  I will say that our lives are almost normal now.  It has been such a blissful feeling.  We are now slowly paying off the massive debt we accrued over those two years.  CPS is no longer in our lives, Charlie no longer has criminal charges looming over him that threaten jail time, and his ex wife had to drop her petition to remove his legal rights to their daughter.  Sometimes, I can almost forget that the nightmare ever happened.

But then someone makes a comment about my daughter not having pants, or the pediatrician mentions that my kid is a little behind on the vaccine schedule.  Or maybe I forgot to brush my daughter's hair and she looks like Mogly from The Jungle Book.  I'm even too scared to post some of the pictures of have of my children on Facebook.  Why?  Because the living room behind them is a mess.

You know that saying that mom's use to comfort each other?  Something like this:
If you have dirty dishes in your sink, it means your kids are being fed.
If you have piles of dirty laundry, it means your kids have clothes.
If there are toys all over the floor, it means your kids have things to play with.

But you know what I learned over those two years?  CPS doesn't agree.  I've read the hospital and CPS reports in my son's case.  The doctors, case workers, AND POLICE write down and take note of the cleanliness and state of your children, you, and your home.  When my home is messy, I don't think "ugh, how embarrassing.  I suck at parenting."  Rather, I think, "what if something happens and CPS makes a visit?"

Dr. Grant, I don't remember if your little one was a boy or girl, but right now, they are three, possibly four years old.  I'm sure you take them to the park and they play and laugh.  You watch them climb up the slide and go down the fireman's pole.  They might even be brave enough to try the monkey bars.  I'm sure you've on more than one occasion held your breath and hoped they didn't fall and break a bone.  But me?  I'm a helicopter parent.  When my four year old climbs on equipment, I have to fight panic attacks.  I try to take slow, even breaths as I wipe sweating palms on my pants.  Sometimes, I tell my husband that he gets to watch her so I can walk away.

I'm not scared of a broken arm, doctor.  Kids play and break bones.  It happens.  What I'm scared of is running into you again.  I'm scared of CPS re-entering our lives.  When I watch my daughter climb on park equipment, I'm scared that she's one fall away from being taken away from me.

Do you know how hard that is?  To live like that?  Do you know how much you kick yourself because you feel like your paranoia is holding back your children, but you'll be damned if you let CPS take your children from you?

I do get that you see some pretty awful stuff sometimes.  There really are parents out there who hurt their children.  I've seen pictures that made me cry.  I know being an ER doctor and seeing these hurt, abused children who can't help themselves must be heart-wrenching.  But that wasn't my son.  He was clean, he was well fed, he had an older sister that was also clean and who was snuggled against her daddy that showed no fear.  No bruises were found on anyone.  And if that wasn't enough, we had TWO experts diagnose my son with EDS, a genetic disorder both were willing to testify can cause bone fragility.  One expert is an endocrinologist who specializes in bone metabolism, and the other is a geneticist.  Know what the prosecution told us?  They said that you admitted you were not familiar with EDS, you acknowledged that we had experts on our side, but that you were still standing by your statement and would still testify against us.

Come on, Sophia, let's be straight.  That's not a doctor that cares about a little boy.  That's a doctor that doesn't want to be wrong.

I always think it's such a joke when I see articles about suing for emotional distress.  How much emotional distress does a doctor or CPS have to cause before it's unethical and inhumane?  Why do I get to live with a specialized form of PTSD while you, Dr. Grant, the Cook's children's ER staff, and CPS get to sleep each night without ever having to think of my family or my little boy ever again?  Why is it up to me to learn how to forgive you when you probably don't even remember me?

I know you won't ever read this, Dr. Sophia Grant, but if you ever do, and you actually are interested in knowing how that little infant with a broken leg turned out, I'll tell you.  He is wonderful.  Thanks to early diagnosis, the EDS is not much of a problem as of now.  He is on the autism spectrum, but I called ECI and he was receiving speech therapy by 20 months.  He's now enrolled in PPCD and spends 3 hours a day in school.  He LOVES it and his teacher is absolutely awesome.  He is already
reading at a basic level and can count into the thousands.  He is obsessed with music and loves to "play" the piano and guitar.  And when that little guy smiles... oh man, I just have to squeeze him super tight and give him a giant kiss.  That grin is just heart-melting.

Life is good now.  We're busy and sometimes overwhelmed, but in the "normal American family" kind of way.  We laugh, make plans, order pizza, have play dates, you know, all the wonderfully normal things that people do everyday.  We do them and it's wonderful.

But don't worry, Dr. Grant.  I'll never forget you.  I'll think of you every time I take a child to the pediatrician, every time one of my children climbs rocks or park equipment, every time they fall face first off the couch.  I'll think of you every time I take my daughter out in public without pants on.

I remember you Every. Single. Day.  I remember you, Dr. Sophia Grant, because you have forever changed my life.