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Originally Posted by Hadley2
Please tell me she has a lawyer. Please tell me that she filed CHINS on Matthew long ago. If her rights were terminated, so were her responsibilities. She may owe from before the termination, but I don't see how they can dun her for after. Surely a competent family law attorney with state experience could sort this out for her.
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She hired a Lawyer that supposedly specialized in family law the first time the state started coming after her for child support which was before she surrendered her parental rights. He ended up doing nothing for her but charging her money and telling her what she already knew. She ended up finding through her own research that AAP would pay for the child support since she was still considered financially responsible for Matthew. (when she took matthew to social services they stopped AAP which was a error on their part, they should never have stopped AAP funding unless parental rights were terminated or surrendered which they had not been at this point).
I should specify that my mother's parental rights were not "terminated". The state continued to try to give Matthew back to her and she continued to refuse siting the safety of her adopted daughters that were living in the home. You should have heard the social workers trying to make my mother feel guilty. It's amazing how the social workers seemed to care so much about getting Matthew back to my mom but they never seemed to address the problem of him molesting my sisters. They didn't seem to care about my sister's safety and psychological health. Now my mother has not had a legal counsel in at least 1 year mainly because of financial reasons and I think she is just exhausted. Everytime we think things are looking like their turning around it ends up getting worse.
Anyway I'm sorry I'm going off on a tangent here... My mother actually went to court and 'Surrendered' her parental rights. This is where the courts are getting her, they keep telling her since she "surrendered" her rights that she is still responsible for him financially. If she would have been aware of this she would have just allowed the state to "terminate" her rights!!! The only reason she surrendered them was because Matthew's foster family was eager to adopt him and the first step in that process was for my mom to surrender her parental rights. (sigh).
The thing that really gets me is when my parents adopted matthew I realize that they agree to be responsible for him financially etc. but realistically at least in California they never were. They always received funding from the state that paid for Matthew every month of his life, when my mom surrendered her rights the state stopped that funding. Which they should, but why would they then expect her to PAY money to the state?? That makes no sense to me. She was never paying money to take care of matthew, by them discontinuing AAP that should have taken care of any child support as well. Everytime she talks to someone at social services she gets a different answer and now she has received a court order to garnish wages and add matthew to her medical. Which again when Matthew was with our family my parents never paid for his medical care, the state did, so why now that he is not here would it by my mom's responsibility?
I am not familiar with CHINS, what exactly is it? No one my mother has ever spoken to has mentioned CHINS so I would really appreciate any info ! Thank you so much for all your responses. If anything it's nice to know that someone is listening.
~Suzanne
