Austin and Monica tried to provide a decent home, by their reckoning, and for four years they fought to keep their kids. The court agreed the Alpena parents loved their children.
And yet, when Children’s Protective Services workers visited Austin and Monica’s home, they found drugs, filth, and a carcass in the bathtub.
The help helped, but it wasn’t enough. The local court placed the couple’s first child into foster care in 2020, when the girl was five months old. In the ensuing months, Austin and Monica worked hard, got their home habitable, and brought their daughter home. Soon, though, the kitchen cupboards were again full of dirty dishes, flies were everywhere, and the girl’s new little brother had dirt caked into his car seat and his skin folds.
The parents refused to move dangerous items like a large fish tank on top of a dresser and left marijuana, drug equipment, and razors and knives within the children’s reach, CPS workers said. The more than 15 animals living in the home ― including ducks, rats, aggressive dogs, and a tarantula ― added to the chaos and uncleanliness. Workers tasked with helping the parents called them belligerent and disrespectful.
The court removed the children again. And again. And again ― each time providing services toward reunification, each time rewarded by a burst of productive energy from the parents, each time returning the two, and then three, children to the home.
The parents loved the children, everyone agreed. They tried.
Still, again and again the home became overrun with clutter and animal urine and broken glass and moldy sippy cups and fleas and guests doing drugs. A worker watched the oldest child, now 2, pick up a used marijuana joint off the floor and put it in her mouth. Daycare workers reported what they believed was feces caked into the bottom of the children’s feet. One caseworker found a deer carcass and an electric heater in the bathtub. Another witnessed the children licking milk off an unclean floor.
The oldest girl told a worker her mom had slapped her “because I’m a bad, bad baby.”
Monica’s anxiety and Austin’s angry impulsiveness, a remnant of his trauma-filled childhood, left the couple in a “devastating cycle,” feeding negatively off each other until “the whole household fell apart for lack of structure,” according to a psychologist who evaluated them.
The kids loved their parents and the parents loved their kids, said a state worker who observed their supervised visits.
But love was not enough.
The courts broke the cycle by breaking the family. It terminated Austin and Monica’s parental rights, and earlier this month the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld that decision.
Our heart breaks for these kids. They didn’t deserve to start life tossed back and forth between homes and living with a deer carcass in the bathtub where they should have giggled and splashed and played with bubbles.
My heart tugs, at least a little, for the parents. No, they didn’t take care of the children in their care the way they should have. But they’re parents who lost their kids, the biggest hurt any parent can suffer.
And my heart goes out to the community that didn’t know this drama was happening in their midst.
The community that doesn’t see the same drama still playing out in their midst, all over, all the time.
Last year, officials reported 100 confirmed child victims of abuse and/or neglect in Alpena County. That’s 100 kids ― and those are just the ones we know about ― living in rotten conditions, getting a rough start on their lives, probably carrying that hurt forward into adulthood.
It’s not an isolated problem, of course. More than 24,000 kids were determined to be abused or neglected in Michigan just last year, 661 of them in the county where I live.
Police and other officials tell me over and over that combating violence starts with protecting childhood. Making sure kids get fed. Get to school. Are held accountable. Feel loved.
When we fail at this, we all suffer. Tough childhoods directly contribute to more violent, less safe communities. You can hate Austin and Monica for not protecting their children. You can be glad they lost parental rights and say they deserve any pain they are feeling. But you cannot say that’s the end of it, because it’s not. And you can’t say it’s not about you, because it is.
Child abuse and neglect isn’t just sad. It makes you and your loved ones less safe.
Want to protect a child? Be alert for parents who are overwhelmed, isolated, and unsupported. Offer help so they know it’s OK to ask. Invite them to your church’s food pantry. Buy a package of diapers for the frazzled mom behind you in the checkout line. Support efforts that reduce family stress by providing affordable child care, transportation, healthy food, and health care access.
Volunteer for the school supply giveaway. Donate to the Boys and Girls Club. Treat kids with respect and know someone is watching you and learning from you.
Feeling sad for hurting kids doesn’t stop the hurt.
We do.
I almost didn’t write about this now, suspecting nobody’s going to want to read about a CPS case right before Christmas. But then I got to thinking…what good is this sacred December celebration if it doesn’t prompt us to see and respond to the hurts around us?
God so loved the world that He plunked His one and only Son in a manger, cute as a button, no crying He makes.
But love wasn’t enough.
Jesus didn’t come so we could celebrate His birth. He came because He had work to do. He came to eat with the hurting and the weak-willed and the failure. Came to flip over tables and wash feet and confound the wise and uplift the simple. He came to die so we can live.
We need the breathless pause of Christmas with its joy to the world and its heavenly peace and its cute cooing baby. But we also need the man/god on the cross and in the tomb, descending into Hell and beating the snot out of the old evil foe.
We need a God who walked on our soil and walks with us daily, strengthening us for the work we must do ― the work of stepping with compassion into the lives around us.
Because love isn’t enough.
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If you need help because you're at risk of abusing a child or you think someone else has abused or neglected a child, do something.
You can start by contacting your health care provider, a local child welfare agency, the police department, or a child abuse hotline for advice. In the U.S., you can get information and assistance by calling or texting the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453).
