brodmanfamily

[brodmanfamily]

On custody & abuse

(If you arrived here accidentally, this post is tied to a GoFundMe campaign to help our family survive eviction and hopefully pay for our teenage daughter’s rehab treatment. Here is the link to the campaign: gf.me/u/zpuurv )

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          Our family has gone through so much collective trauma and individual trauma over the last 6 years. And nearly all of it is related to fighting for custody of our kids.

          We first became aware of emotional abuse that our kids were suffering at bio mom’s house in 2015. It was sporadic, and as far as the kids told us, a long time between occurrences. At one point in that year, during a visitation exchange where the kids were coming over to our house for the weekend, bio mom came to the front door and started hitting it with a shovel. She stood outside screaming, ringing the doorbell, and hitting the door while our two children sobbed in the back of the house, thinking someone was trying to break in. By the time we called the police, she was gone and nothing came of it.

          We also found out that bio mom was teaching our then 12 and 10 year old children to pole dance. She had a permanent pole installed in the upstairs landing of her home right outside the two children’s rooms. We tried to discourage our children from learning how to pole dance because it wasn’t appropriate for their ages, but they continued learning.

           Things really ramped up in 2016. Every month, something would happen. In January 2016, we became aware through our eldest daughter’s texts that bio mom had punched her so hard in the face that she had a bruised eye and swollen face, and that bio mom had held up a lighter to our daughter’s arm to try to burn her. When we found out, we submitted a report to CPS, along with details about a new story the kids had told us wherein bio mom pulled a gun on her step-son in the presence of our children. We never received a response.

           The following month, on Presidents’ Day of February 2016, we received a video message from our eldest that showed her mother dragging her sister by her hair openly down the sidewalks of Galveston. She texted us saying she was really scared and asked if the two of them could come stay over with us that night. We managed to convince bio mom to let us have the kids for the night. What we found out after the fact is that our youngest had bruises on her arm where she had been pinched, and a hand-shaped bruise around her wrist where she had been forcibly pulled. We submitted this video and pictures to HPD and nothing came of it.

           On and on, more incidents would happen. Every month, there was something new. Our kids were coming over on our visitation days, crying or sobbing about something that had happened at bio mom’s house. We were at a loss for what to do. By our 4th CPS report and no action, we felt so frustrated. We stupidly believed there would be relief through CPS – that through enough reports maybe the kids would be removed from bio mom’s care and allowed to be with us full-time. We were getting closer and closer to the idea of fighting for custody, but we also knew we wouldn’t have the funds for it.

           We tabled the idea until December 2016, when we finally became aware of abuse so vile that we simply couldn’t let our kids stay there. Our eldest, who was 13 at the time, came to us disgusting allegations against her stepdad. You do the math. The following morning we filed a report with CPS, we filed a report with the Harris County Sheriff Department, and found a lawyer. (Bio mom did not believe her child, still doesn’t, and she is still married to the man who victimized our children).

           Within a few weeks, we served a temporary restraining order against bio mom and took full temporary custody of the kids. That legal battle lasted a long time before the case was finalized in our favor. We were able to get some protections in place: an injunction against the stepfather being around the children, and no overnight visitation with bio mom at all. Even though we wanted more protections, namely supervised visitation to keep our children safe, we were advised that getting supervised visitation for our case would be nearly impossible in the Texas courts.

           We lived in this new normal, accepting that we had as many limitations as possible and with the hope that as the kids entered their teenage years, they could learn to set boundaries with bio mom and protect themselves. We thought for a time they were doing well, because they insisted bio mom wasn’t causing them anymore trouble. But we learned finally in July 2020 that the verbal, emotional, and (sometimes) physical abuse never stopped. Our eldest child had instead been feeding her addictions at bio mom’s house since 2018, and she had enlisted her younger sister to lie for her so they could continue seeing bio mom. For her, bio mom’s house meant freedom to engage in her addictions.

           By the time we found out all of the details, the web of lies, the continued abuse from bio mom, the harm our eldest caused our youngest, etc., our 16-year-old daughter was so far gone, she proudly stated she was going to live with her mom and become a stripper. At the encouragement of bio mom, she engaged in an addictive and reckless lifestyle. Bio mom was driving our daughter to and from boys’ houses, and allowing her to engage in her addictions in the privacy of her home. She bought our eldest a second phone so our child could run her secret, addictive lifestyle from a phone we had no knowledge of.

           There are so many more things involved, but they’re just too much to list. The summary is this: our eldest’s two therapists have stated that in their professional opinion, bio mom’s actions should be considered “borderline child prostitution” and “grooming for sex work.”

           Our eldest came from a deep history of trauma and we knew there were no other options besides removing her entirely from the toxic environment and get her help. The damage was so severe that her therapist at the rehab facility told us she was the worst case of sexual trauma and sexual addiction she had ever seen, after 10 years of working for CPS in her state.

           Our family has been through so much. Our kids have both been through so much. We are doing everything in our power to give them the safe home they deserve and a chance at a future that isn’t marred by the traumas they have been through. Our eldest is still not well enough to come out of treatment, and our youngest is doing her best to work through her traumas in therapy. It’s a day by day thing. Sometimes hour by hour. We are so busy focusing on making sure our family survives and our kids are okay, that we don’t even have the time to tend to our own mental health.

           We don’t regret for one moment what we spent to get full custody of our kids. But we simply never fully recovered from the debt. It was an extensive legal battle that spanned from January of 2017 until November of 2018. At the time that we entered these legal proceedings, we took out part of Jason’s 401k (with a penalty), emptied out our children’s college savings account, and got some of those sleazy payday/quick loans from one of those places with ridiculously high interest. All of these things were still not enough to cover our regular cost of living in addition to the legal expenses, which all in roughly come out to about $195k. We finished paying off our main lawyer in December 2019 and finished paying off one of our many loans in February 2020, just in time to have our former home burglarized, and just months before we had to scramble to get money to put our eldest daughter in treatment.

           We never fully recovered from the debt before we were hit with the next crisis.

           It has been a rough 6 years of ups and downs for us. Every time we feel like we have hit rock bottom, something else happens to shatter our sense of foundation. We keep trudging along, hoping the tide will turn for us. We still believe there are good things coming, we just don’t know when. We are hoping we can survive until the tide turns.

           We have said a lot here. We feel lost. We feel empty. We feel ashamed. But we have to do whatever it takes to take care of our children. They are, above all, our main motivation.

           Thank you for taking the time to read our story. Even if all you did was read it, it has been therapeutic for us to put it down in words. We are sending this out into the giant void that is the internet, and praying for a miracle.