Legally Responsible, Practically Erased

Content note: This piece discusses custody loss, parental alienation, child behavioral health crises, arrest, and systemic failures across family court, mental health, and child welfare systems.

In 2022, I was awarded sole legal and physical custody of my youngest son. That order still stands, but I haven’t seen or heard from him since November 9, 2025. Let me tell you why.

This is not a story about one bad judge, one bad social worker, or one bad parent. It’s a story about how systems that promise protection can quietly fail when they overlap, contradict each other, and shift responsibility instead of resolving harm.

For years, my life moved in and out of custody courtrooms. Reports were filed. Evaluations were done. A private Guardian ad Litem, requested by my ex and appointed by the court, submitted three separate reports. Each one recommended that both of my boys should be with me full time. The findings were clear: negligence, coercive control dynamics, and emotional manipulation were affecting them. The court acknowledged the reports.

And then the court split my children.

I was granted sole legal and physical custody of my youngest son, while my oldest remained with his father. The reasoning was procedural, not emotional. Stability, timing, schooling. Words that sound careful on paper. Words that don’t capture what it means to separate siblings already navigating stress.

This was my first lesson in systemic misalignment: evidence and outcomes do not move in straight lines.

The court created an order. The order said my son was to be with me. The system considers that resolution. But custody orders are paper. Enforcement is a different system entirely.

Over the years, I filed for contempt five times. Three of those times, the court found my ex in contempt of the custody order. That sounds like accountability. It isn’t. Each time, he received a suspended sentence for a set period. All he had to do was avoid getting caught again until the clock ran out. The message wasn’t correction. It was delay.

The violations continued, but in smaller, harder-to-prove ways. It started with my older son. Missed calls. Medical decisions made without consent. Schooling interference. Subtle, cumulative erosion of my role as the custodial parent. The system recognizes contempt as dramatic disobedience. Parental alienation is quieter. It hides inside “miscommunication.” It feels like your child slowly being moved out of your reach while you still technically have custody.

Over time, the contamination spilled over to include my youngest son during his biweekly visits and phone calls with his dad. He began struggling behaviorally. He was anxious, dysregulated, overwhelmed. I did what parents are told to do: I sought mental health support.

We contacted mobile crisis services. When they responded, they spoke with us and, as protocol allows, either recommended hospital evaluation or referred us back to outpatient services we were already waitlisted for. On the one occasion hospital evaluation was suggested, my son did not meet involuntary commitment criteria, which I already knew. The result was the same: we returned home without immediate support and remained on waiting lists in a region with extremely limited behavioral health resources.

While we waited, behaviors escalated.

Police were called during crises because there was no immediate therapeutic intervention available when situations became unsafe. Every call created documentation. Every documentation point became a mark against me and not a sign of a system unable to provide timely care.

That is another misalignment: when a child in crisis cannot access services, the parent managing the crisis becomes the problem in the record.

One night at the grocery store, my son had one of the behavioral episodes that had started to feel like our new normal. He refused to get into the car. He ran circles around it, dysregulated, panicked, spiraling the way kids do when their nervous system has taken the wheel. I stayed with him, talking, trying to co-regulate, trying to do what you do when you don’t have the services you’ve been begging for.

At one point, I stepped a short distance away, still in eyesight, to reset myself and give him space to reset. Not abandonment. Regulation. The “put your own oxygen mask on first” moment parents are told to use so things don’t escalate further.

People watching didn’t see nervous system overload. They saw a scene. They called the police.

When officers arrived, I still didn’t understand what was happening. I had no criminal history. I wasn’t violent, or out of control. I was a mother in the middle of a behavioral health crisis with no clinical support. Even when they told me to turn off the car and step out, it didn’t click.

Not until they said the words: “You’re under arrest.”

That sentence hit like a car crash.

My son saw me in handcuffs. Confused. Terrified. He tried to get out of the cruiser to get to me.

That was the last time I saw his face in person.

That arrest became the pivot point. Bond restrictions followed. Restrictions meant to manage “risk.” But in practice, they stripped me of the ability to physically retrieve my own child or assert authority without risking more charges.

No court ever transferred custody.

My custody order still stood.

On paper, I was the custodial parent.

In reality, I became a parent who legally existed, but couldn’t access her own child.

The system didn’t take my responsibility.

It only took my reach.

The bond restrictions that followed did not remove my custody. They did not transfer authority. They did not assign another legal guardian. They simply limited my ability to “physically retrieve” or have unsupervised contact. Language broad enough to create fear of further charges, but vague enough to provide no path forward.

I remained legally responsible, but practically immobilized.

The order didn’t answer a basic question: How does a custodial parent fulfill legal responsibility while being restricted from direct access?

No agency offered that answer. The gap became my reality.

Even after the arrest, the responsibility didn’t disappear.

The custody order didn’t vanish.

On paper, I was still the parent responsible for everything.

So I kept parenting in the only ways I could reach.

I coordinated his medication.

I handled therapy referrals.

I enrolled him in online schooling so he wouldn’t fall behind while everything was unstable.

Then communication stopped.

Not a gradual drift. A wall.

Calls unanswered. Messages unread.

Medical information I was legally responsible for went quiet.

I was no longer included in updates, decisions, or access, even though the legal responsibility remained mine.

Thanksgiving passed.

Christmas passed.

Christmas presents were sent with no acknowledgment.

DSS had already been involved because of the prior police calls tied to behavioral crises. They eventually closed their case, without any resolution, because of jurisdiction complications once my son crossed state lines. When communication ceased, they were no longer able to intervene.

The child welfare agency in his father’s state said it didn’t meet criteria. Not for investigation. Not for intervention. Not even for a wellness check.

So the systems that document everything suddenly had nothing to say.

Meanwhile, their father’s interference intensified. With my movement restricted and my credibility filtered through the lens of an arrest record stripped of context, the narrative moved further away from me. Once you are categorized in a system snapshot, you stop being a person in a layered situation. You become a label that follows you from agency to agency.

Each system sees its own piece.

None of them see the whole child.

So now I live in a reality where a standing court order says my son belongs with me, yet I have had no contact with him since November 2025.

The court created a right.

No system ensured its enforcement.

The mental health system could not provide timely support.

The enforcement system could not secure custody access.

The child welfare system evaluated the visible fallout, not the chain of events that caused it.

No one step looks catastrophic.

But when they stack, a parent can remain legally responsible while being practically erased.

No single person in these systems may be acting with malice.

Judges follow statutes.

Social workers follow protocols.

Police respond to calls.

But these systems operate in fragments.

When those fragments collide, families fall through the seams.

What worries me most isn’t just the absence. It’s what happens if and when my son returns.

Reunification is treated as a legal event, not a psychological process.

There is no structured plan for rebuilding trust, untangling loyalty conflicts, or helping a child decompress after prolonged separation shaped by fear, stress, and silence. That labor falls on the parent. The same parent who is often still under scrutiny while trying to repair what multiple systems helped fracture.

The expectation is immediate stability from a child who has been living in survival mode. The expectation is emotional regulation from a nervous system that has not been allowed safety. And when those expectations aren’t met, the parent becomes the concern again.

This is what systemic failure looks like from the inside.

Not dramatic collapse.

Slow displacement.

Orders exist, but access doesn’t.

Help is documented, but not delivered.

The parent who remains present becomes the problem... because she is the one visible.

The charges related to the arrest are expected to be dismissed.

On paper, that reads like resolution.

But legal closure does not automatically restore time lost, trust fractured, or access interrupted. One system ending its involvement does not mean the others reset. It simply shifts the landscape again — from criminal court to custody enforcement, from restriction to reunification, from absence to repair.

Systems close cases. Families live the aftermath.

My custody order still stands.

So does the system that has made it nearly meaningless.