‘Never Tear Us Apart’: a Mother’s Story of Seeking Justice for Justice

Warning:  This story contains descriptions of trauma, still birth and suicidal ideation.
Note:  It was important to mum that the real name of her son, “Justice” was used in this story.  Other names have been changed to protect the identity of parents and siblings.
Abbreviations: DOCS is a well-known acronym amongst the community, representing the department that looks after child protection issues in the state.

Hopes for Sharing This Story

Rowena is a mum to five children, one of whom was taken from her care.  Rowena wanted to share her story of trauma to show what the outcomes can be of interventions by the health and child protection system.  Rowena’s story demonstrates how she learned to identify the symptoms of trauma and how she learned to cope.  You’ll also read a story of strength, with Rowena reflecting on the skills, knowledge and values system, she drew on to get through her most difficult times.

This story will be of interest to:

• Mothers of babies with down syndrome and pregnant mothers.  Rowena says “a lot of mothers are pressured into abortion or adoption.  All the mothers with children who have down syndrome might find it helpful to know that others are going through the same thing and to know that the hospital is not personally attacking them.” 
• Women who have experienced medical trauma and parents of children who come in contact with the child protection system.  Rowena says she wants to share this story to “show people that trauma does happen in those systems, what the outcomes are and how to cope with the symptoms.  Things like depression can make you feel self-blame.  Being able to understand why you have trauma helps to not blame yourself.” 
• People who work in the child protection system.  “What they did to me is harmful to children.  My children will be different now because they are growing up with my trauma from the system.  If you’ve gone into the job to help children, then do that, but don’t destroy their lives in the process.  It’s not just the life of the person you’re dealing with, it’s their family, extended family, their kids as well, and any children to come.”
• People who work in the medical system.  Rowena says “I’d like the systems to acknowledge that trauma does happen, and it is not there because that is what people are like.  Some systems can cause PTSD when they are meant to help you and then they don’t.”
• Counsellors.  Rowena stressed how important it is for people’s stories to be believed.  “One of the first counsellors I went to, told me DOCS wouldn’t take a kid off someone for being a victim of domestic violence.  It’s important that people understand that it does happen.  My hope is that counsellors don’t judge people, but learn who they are first, and where they are coming from.” 

The Day Things Started Going Terribly Wrong

Two weeks after having my first baby, Justice, I’d had a sore back throughout the day, and I went to have a hot shower to try and help it.  Then I just stopped breathing and collapsed.  The ambulance came and took me to hospital.  Justice had to come as well because I was breastfeeding, but as soon as they put me on blood thinners I couldn’t breastfeed anymore.  I had no idea that I would get blood clots.  At first, I was told something had gone wrong with the caesarean, and that’s why I was getting blood clots.  It wasn’t until later that they found out that I had an autoimmune disease called Catastrophic Antiphospholipid Syndrome. I was gasping for breath.  I was in so much pain every time I breathed in or out.  I had hundreds of clots in one lung.  One of them was the size of a 50-cent piece. They told me that it would be a miracle if I survived.  I had to stay in bed, not that I could move anyway. 

Justice was put into the ICU for premmie babies.  He was looked after by the nurses there, but nobody told them that I was a patient in the hospital.  They just got this baby; they didn’t know where he came from.  They made one of the first complaints to DOCs that no-one was coming to look after this baby, and that I hadn’t supplied formula and all these things.  Meanwhile I’m downstairs and I can’t even talk.  I had a really big nurse come.  I couldn’t get out of bed.  She had to lift me up to put me onto a pan to go to the toilet.  She started mouthing off about my size because I’d had pre-eclampsia, so I got really big.  My whole body swelled up.  I went from 48 kg to just over 100kg.  I looked massive because it was all fluid.  She didn’t want to lift me.  She said “How the hell did you ever get through labour?” and she ripped me by one arm out of the bed.  The nurses had to help me back in; the whole time I was gasping for breath.  A few nurses sat down and wrote a formal complaint about her.  They left that on my little table, and I went to sleep. 

I woke up with DOCS over me saying they were coming to take my son because there had been a report of ‘failure to thrive’.  There was a doctor there saying that that is wrong.  He said it was my body that was fighting blood clots and had stopped making milk.  DOCS were saying I had starved my son and that they didn’t have to take anything the doctor said into consideration.  They’d had complaints received and they had to act on them now.  They don’t take any other evidence; they just go on the bad things said about you.

My understanding is that the blood clots are more likely to happen after pregnancy.  That was the worst time I’ve ever had them, because I’ve been on blood thinners since then.  The condition itself is triggered during pregnancy.  Pre-eclampsia is part of it as well. Catastrophic Antiphospholipid Syndrome stops you from producing breastmilk.  There is no way to measure how much milk I was making while feeding Justice.  I had said to the nurse I was worried about his neck because he used to turn his neck right around, like he was going for another boob somewhere else.  Not until after this happened, did I realise that he was looking for another one.  Being the first time I’d ever breastfed, I didn’t know any different.  It felt like it was working to me.  I had nurses signing his little blue book, when they would come out to visit for those first two weeks.  It seemed as if he was feeding great and there were no problems. 

Once Justice got admitted to hospital, they wouldn’t give him a bottle straight away, when I was saying I couldn’t feed him.  I couldn’t hold him or anything.  They didn’t feed him for 24 hours and then they gave him hydrolyte and he turned bright red.  One of the reports to DOCS was that I brought him in like that, bright red, covered in a rash.  Mum and I knew that he didn’t have a rash but that was one of the reports, totally false.  It felt like the hospital were covering up something that they had done or didn’t do.  I found out that when they go red, that’s just a reaction they have when they go from milk to formula or the hydrolite could also have been an allergic reaction. 

I don’t know why they didn’t feed Justice the first 24 hours. I think it had something to do with the ‘whole breast is best’ thing, that they were trying to force me to breastfeed him.  But it wasn’t possible.  I was on, blood thinners and different kinds of morphine – it was really painful, the doctors thought I was going to die.  It was to keep me pain free when I was on my way out.  Even after the clots went, I couldn’t hold my baby for two weeks because of the pain.  I had to stay in ICU with Justice to prove that I would be able to look after him.  It was four weeks all up I stayed in the hospital. 

Around that time it was new hospital protocol to report people to DOCS.  The nursing unit manager of the ICU where Justice was, was absolutely shocked, because she didn’t know all those reports had come from her staff.  She could see the impact of the situation, the reports that were unfounded, the reports that I couldn’t afford to feed him.  I had $6000 in the bank, and I had showed them that there.  The nursing unit manager was in tears.  It was a situation she felt responsible for, it was her workers that did it. 

When DOCS showed up that first time in hospital, it was very hard not being able to speak.  Maybe that’s why I want to tell this story now, because a lot of the time, I couldn’t speak at all.  I’d gone from thinking that I was going to die and not be around to see my child, to keeping me away from him until I do die.  Another report was that I didn’t hold my baby.  The doctors had told me not to, that it was too dangerous and to just wait a few weeks.  DOCS said I didn’t hold my baby and that I was picking up other peoples.  Well, I didn’t pick up other people’s babies.   I was listening to the doctor’s advice because I wanted to be around for my baby. 

In the ICU there was only two mothers and babies that did not have DOCS involvement.  There was 10 mothers that did.  That’s what the unit manager was so shocked about.  People were accusing her of baby farming.  But that’s not what I think was going on.  It was just the result of a new system of mandatory reporting in the hospital setting.  There were people there that didn’t seem to have any reason to have involvement.  There was a girl whose partner was illiterate so they made him out to be mentally retarded and unable to care for a child, when he just couldn’t read or write.  There were no drug addicts there or any other reason to have their children taken away. 

DOCS made me sign up for different parenting courses once I left.  They made me go and live with my grandmother for a month afterwards.  They didn’t want me to be home alone in case I dropped the baby, while I had the clots.

Let Down By ‘The System’

The ICU should liaise with different parts of hospital.  The maternity ward should have been told I was in there as a patient and that’s why my baby was there.  They should have been told that I couldn’t carry the baby.  I was only allowed to go up, if I was pushed up in a wheelchair.  I couldn’t walk up. 

DOCS should take into consideration the medical reasons for a baby being underweight, that it was nothing to do with me.  Instead, they just based their decision against complaints made against you, instead of hearing your side of it.  They should investigate the other side of it, because it would save a lot of work in the long run and a lot of trauma. 

Losing My Babies

I was 31 weeks pregnant when my second child was still born.  I was put on a blood thinner during the pregnancy called Clexane and I believe it caused the placenta to erupt and the baby drowned in my blood.  I’d gone up to the hospital the night before, because I had really bad headaches and they sent me home saying everything was OK.  The headache had gone from my head down to my shoulders.  It was a really bad pain, so I went back in the morning, and they couldn’t find a heartbeat.  I’d been taking the drug for two weeks.  They said to wait a week until the Clexane was out of my system to give birth, so I carried her for four days and then I was meant to get induced but then things started naturally.  So I had to go in and have her then.  The Clexane was given to me, I was told to prevent blood clots, but it didn’t.  When I read the insert, I said I didn’t want it because it had only been tested on rats and rabbits and that two out of eight mothers had died, so I said ‘No, I don’t want it’.  I had an obstetrician come in and abuse me that I had a little baby with me (Justice) and that I didn’t care about him if I wasn’t going to take this medication.  She said if I refused that medication, then the hospital had the right to refuse me any medication for me or my children.  The obstetrician was just as pregnant as I was.  I felt forced into taking it.  Another doctor tried to show me a textbook, saying there was nothing in there about that drug.  I said that’s because they haven’t tested it on humans.  But they guaranteed me that the drug was fine and it was just a protocol that they put in the warnings.  So, I took it. 

One of midwives that delivered Jill said that it was the placenta that had ruptured.  The placenta was rock hard, not like a normal placenta.  She explained that the baby had drowned in my blood and that’s why she looked the way she did.  I could see the blood all inside her and it was starting to tear at the stomach because she was so full of it.  They said there was too much blood flowing through (as the cause of the ruptured placenta).  I asked if that was because of the Clexane.  They denied it.  They explained to me the process of how they do an autopsy. They said they would crack open the back of the skull and rip open her rib cage.  They told me all these steps, that really turned me off having it done.  I said I didn’t want her to go through any more pain.  She’d been through enough. 

As I was being wheeled in to give birth to Jill, the woman that had made me take the Clexane was going past the front desk and she danced in front of me, saying ‘it’s time’.  She must have been induced in the room next to me while I was giving birth.  Moments after I’d birthed Jill, they came in and asked me if their colleague next door could have her eyes, because her daughter had a problem with her eyes.  I said ‘No’ because I knew which woman it was and how she had danced in front of me.  I felt like that she had put me on that medication so my baby would die, and that she could heal hers.  It made it all very hard.  I just wanted to get out of there.  They wouldn’t allow me to.  They said I had to stay with my baby overnight and sleep next to her.  They tried to tell me to walk around and make memories with her.  But I couldn’t do any of that.  It felt really traumatic.  It was good to have my family with me there.  But they weren’t allowed to stay, I stayed there by myself.  I went home the next day but came back to visit the baby again. 

I had to cancel Jill’s funeral because I’d made it for a week after, and then the hospital didn’t sign the body over to the guy that picks it up.  They hadn’t signed the right paperwork, so it all got delayed.  The morning of the funeral, I got blood clots again, my second time.  I demanded to go to the funeral anyway, because I knew I could not live with myself if I didn’t go.  In the end they let me go.  They got my bed set up, upstairs and they gave me morphine to go.  They said I wasn’t allowed to cry which is impossible.  The doctor said it would affect me too much with the clots if I got too emotional.  Years later I saw that doctor on the news, that he was a fake doctor.  He had never done all his paperwork and stuff.  I think he might have just sent me, so he didn’t get caught out.  He never had any credentials; he had all papers from overseas.  He was the only one who let me go to the funeral, and that was something I really needed to do. 

Six weeks after losing my child, and being told I couldn’t have any more, the nurse came into my hospital room and said that DOCS had rang.  She said they had closed for the weekend, but they’d taken Justice and they will come by on Monday.  Justice was with his father when they took him because I was in hospital.  My first contact with DOCS meant that I was already on their books and that gave them the right to take Justice.  I was a nervous wreck, and I called the DOCS Hotline to try and find out what was going on.  There was nothing I could do until Monday.  Then when I went in with my mother, they basically told me they had put him into immediate foster care because I was a victim of domestic violence.  They said I couldn’t get him back and that I would have to go through the court process to get him back.  They said it was a two year process and there would be all these requirements of me in the meantime.  At the time, I was separated over a domestic violence incident. 

Fighting for Justice

It felt hard when they took Justice away.  The first three months were the most difficult.  I didn’t see him for the first month and the next two I was fighting for him to be with my Aunty.  It was hard to get back into the feeling of being a mum.  But it was my son, Justice that kept me going.  Even when I lost the baby, it was him that kept me going, knowing that I could still do everything for him.  I could still give him a good life.  I knew I had to get better for him.  He was always the main focus.  He was the reason I got up each day.  One of the things DOCs said was that I couldn’t possibly look after him, having lost a baby, which wasn’t true because he’s what kept me going.  I would probably have looked after him better, because I didn’t want to take my eyes off him.  I would worry about anything happening to that child.

There were a lot of things I was made to do by DOCS like going to courses.  It was all just common sense, the things they taught.  People would know that stuff anyway.  It was a huge waste of time.  I felt like I was putting myself at risk because I had the doctor telling me to ‘stay in bed, don’t exert yourself, don’t do too much’.  I had to race around on public transport to get everywhere DOCS wanted me to be.  They used to call me for a drug test even though I wasn’t on drugs.  They knew I took medical drugs like morphine and Oxycodone, and they said that that had something in it that I could be using to hide a heroin habit.  You can tell by medical records that I wasn’t on drugs.  You can tell when someone is on heroin.  But they would do on-call drug testing at the drop of a hat. Even the judge said to them that was an unnecessary thing they’re putting me through.  I had many times in hospital with the clots again, and so I refused the pain relief medication when I went in.  When the court case came around, I was unable to talk or move.  The solicitor told the judge I’d refused pain medication because DOCS was using it against me.  I was just putting up with it all, in the hope that it would please DOCS. 

I was meant to see Justice once a week, but that caseworker used to give me the wrong dates, so that I wouldn’t turn up for the visit.  It looked bad for me.  Or I would get there, and they’d say that his father hadn’t turned up.  He was due to see Justice right before me.  They’d say Justice had to go home early because he had already been there for an hour waiting before I got there.  It would be the same situation of giving the father the wrong dates.  Little things like that made it even harder on us.  It was four weeks before I ever got to see Justice.  DOCS said they had trouble organising the place that supervises the visit organised by Wesley Mission.  Justice didn’t understand.  As soon as I got there to see him, he would run up, grab my hand and try to walk out the door with me.  He didn’t want to stay.  I used to take him his favourite foods like cheese and bikkies, meat and salad, that he loved.  Even though it was all healthy food, they said I wasn’t allowed to take it because he would apparently go home to his foster mother and refuse to eat.  DOCS said all Justice had was his bottles, but he had stopped drinking bottles when he was one.  The carer had put him back on formula.

There was a time when I organised to get Santa photos done with him, that is all I was offered apart from the weekly visits.  I was told I could have the weekly visit in the supermarket and get his photos done there.  My family got to come and see him the week before Christmas.  We all got to give him gifts over an hour period. I had about 20 family members all come and give him gifts.  When Justice came back to us, we didn’t get those gifts back.  I said something to the (new) caseworker at the time.  The carer had actually sold them.  Some of them were given back but she’d sold the rest.  She also claimed a certain amount of money off DOCS in order to buy him Christmas presents, and she had nothing to show for that. 

I struggled a lot with the Caseworker, she made things very difficult.  She threatened me that if she could drag the case out for longer than six months that I will never get to see Justice again due to his age of being so young, that he would lose the maternal bond.  And that was part of the reason why it ended up getting out of court in only eight months.  The judge was aware she was making those threats to me and he didn’t want it to go longer than six months.  The first three months I was fighting for him to be with my family.  He was put into immediate foster care and he wasn’t being cared for.  Justice was only one and a half.  But he told me the town he was in.  He learned to talk while he was one.  I knew he was out at Killarney way.  I knew he didn’t like the lady.  He liked the boy that was there, but he was very scared of the dog.  Justice was attacked by the dog.  He had a scratch down his face and got a scar from it.  Justice told us that it was the dog that scratched him, but the caseworker told us that he was scratched by another girl at the park.  He had a fear of dogs ever since then.  He doesn’t remember the whole situation, but he remembers that lady and that dog. 

After three months when Justice came back to live with my Aunty, he had a broken arm.  His arm was bruised from the middle of the arm to up past the elbow.  It was black and purple bruising, very swollen.  Justice already knew how to carry it without it hurting as much.  DOCS told me not to take him to a doctor or hospital because then I would just get another Risk of Harm report and he would be taken back into care.  They obviously just covered it up.  DOCS assured me it wasn’t broken but years later, he did break his arm again and I realised that he didn’t have any bruising or swelling, so it must have been broken the time before.  The Foster Carer was under investigation for that.  Her excuse of how that happened was that he must have woken up, climbed out of his crib and fallen.  I don’t believe that’s what happened at all.  We’d already told them he didn’t sleep in a crib anymore.  He’d been sleeping in a single bed when they took him.  He didn’t have any trouble getting in or out.  That was what he was used to, but the carer babied him by putting him back in a cot with a bottle. 

I didn’t get a fair say over Justice’s care needs.  They asked me about all the things he liked; I told them how he liked his sandwiches cut and all those little things.  I think that’s part of why he didn’t eat for the carer because she didn’t pay attention to the routine of things that he was used to.  I knew how hard it would be for him because he was such a mummy’s boy.  I wanted him to still be comfortable.  I wanted them to know his routines, to know what made him happy, his favourite shows and songs, little things like that. 

By the time he went to my Aunty, the judge had got wind of the things the caseworker was doing.  So, DOCS changed the caseworker.  This new caseworker was a lot better.  She wasn’t like the other one who had threatened me.  The old one used to laugh at me.  She used to say she knew I was a good parent, but they took my son, because it was all about money.  She would tell me there were high people in the town and there’s a man that runs that town; that he has family and friends in all these high places and pays to keep them employed.  And that for them to have good lives, there’s people like me that they need to use our children to make money in places like the hospital and the place where Justice’s father had been sent for rehab.  DOCS said if I ever went back to be with Justice’s father, I would have no chance of getting my son back at all.  And even in the future, that DOCS would take him again.  I had to remain single or at least not be with his father.  He was put into rehab, and sent to live in a homeless shelter, and that was run by the man that runs the town, the caseworker said.  He also owned a whole block of units, that he rented out.  I didn’t find out until years later that she was talking about the Mayor of Gosford who later got pulled up for a historical sex scandal.  Before he was the mayor, he worked at BoysTown in Sydney and it was going through the courts what had happened with the boys back then.  They said in the newspaper what a good guy he was and how his family worked for him.  They named all the places as being DOCS, Hospital, all the places she had said to me that day.  That’s when I realised the mayor of Gosford was who she was talking about.  Back then I thought she was just making stuff up to make it harder for me. 

I’d gone out to get a solicitor as soon as they took Justice, to find out what I had to do to get my son back.  The solicitor told me the things that DOCS would expect of me, like doing parenting courses, and DV courses, and all that.  So I went out and did them before they even got their butts into gear to tell me what to do.  The caseworker didn’t like that at all.  She went off at me that I had already done those courses and had nothing else for me to do.  I ended up doing the Butterfly Group DV course five times.  The last couple of times I did it, they said I wasn’t allowed to answer any questions.  I just had to sit there and be present because I knew it all.  I had to give the other woman a chance to learn. 

The caseworker once told me DOCS were in trouble for taking so many Aboriginal kids and getting in trouble for not doing their job.  She said now they were taking kids because they were Catholic.  For them it was easy to say I did not follow my morals or live up to these standards.  It made me an easy target.  Instead of DOCS being blamed for targeting Aboriginal kids, they decided to target Catholics because they were easy.  None of it really made sense.  She had this really big evil laugh she used to do.  She always used to torment me and try to upset me. 

The things that DOC said in court weren’t applicable and didn’t make sense.  DOCS said that because I cried when they took my son, they thought I had a psychiatric problem.  They ordered me to get a psychiatric assessment which the judge never made me do.  Every court case they would adjourn, DOCS never did the work.  I would call up to see when I would get to see my son again and the caseworker would say we have more important things to deal with because my case wasn’t important.  She said there were actually people out there that deserved to have their kids taken.  She always made the point that I didn’t deserve to get him taken off me.  She laughed at me for that.  She knew that all along. I asked my solicitor if there is any way of changing the caseworker and he said ‘I’ve proved her wrong a million times, we’re better off keeping her’ because of the way it was starting to unfold and the judge was saying ‘No’ to all the things she would ask for.  The caseworker didn’t have a leg to stand on against me.  DOCS changed the caseworker anyway, and I got a better one.  When my son got to go and live with my Aunty the new caseworker actually allowed me to go and live there too.  I didn’t have to see him once a week anymore, no set time; I could spend as much time as I wanted to, at my Auntie’s with him, but I did have to be back in my own town for all the obligations that were set for me.  So, I couldn’t live there full time.  I spent every minute I could with him, during that time.  That was a positive thing, in the middle of it all.

After the eight months, at the end of it, the judge said to DOCs if they tried to adjourn it again he was just going to throw it out because they had nothing against me and they should never have taken Justice off me.  They tried to also say that because I’d lost my daughter, I wasn’t fit to be a mother.  If you’ve lost one, you’d be too upset to raise another one.  That’s not the truth at all.  Justice was what kept me going. 

Hard Times Just Fed My Drive

When Justice’s father first came to the hospital, to say that they’d taken him, I felt like jumping out the window there for a second.  I’d just lost two children and I’d been advised I couldn’t have any more children.  My first thought was to jump out that window.  But as quick as I thought that, I knew I couldn’t do that to my son.  I had to be there for him, to get him back.  I had to fix things for him.  My whole drive was to just get him back.  I knew I’d done nothing wrong.  It just made things harder when I had that caseworker who also knew that I’d done nothing wrong, try to make out that I did.  She tried to cause trouble between my family members too. 

Once I was staying at my mothers’ and I was called to go in for a meeting.  So, I jumped straight on the train.  When I got there, they said that the caseworker had left, so I jumped back on the train to go home.  It was only 10 minutes on the train and a five-minute walk.  The caseworker didn’t realise that I would have got home that quick, I guess.  She has rung my mother and told her that I was at DOCS now causing a scene, getting extremely abusive and violent at all the ladies.  My mum said ‘No she is here with me.  She’s just walked through the door, I know you’re lying’.  With that, she hung up.  My mum went to ring her mum, my grandmother, to tell her what had just happened.  My grandmother’s phone was engaged and mum said, ‘I bet she’s on the phone to her now’ and she was.  The caseworker had rung my grandmother and told her the exact same lie.  My grandmother told the caseworker off because she knew that wasn’t like me at all.  I wouldn’t be doing that kind of thing.  My grandmother rang us straight afterwards and told us what had happened.  That’s just the little things DOCS do, to try to turn your family members against you, so you’ve got no-one and no support.  The Caseworker did actually say at one point, she was trying to drive me crazy and that people that go through these kinds of things will always come back to them.  She said if she didn’t get my son this time, that they will get him further on down the track, based on what they were going to do to me.  That was just another one of the threats.  Those things only gave me more drive to get him back.  I didn’t realise that I had trauma from it then, but at the same time I didn’t let it affect me.  I had to get justice for Justice.

Sometimes memories keep you going.  I have fond memories of moments at home, being with family and all his little milestones.  I remember him walking, I remember his laugh, playing with toys, he used to sing and dance.  He was quite advanced.  He wasn’t like the other kids, taking a bit longer, everything just came naturally to him. 

Resisting the Urge to Give Up

I almost felt like giving up.  It was only 6 weeks after losing my daughter when I lost Justice.  I was still very much grieving for her.  I was grieving for him at the same time, someone that I’d known and was used to being with all the time.  And I felt guilty to my daughter for that.  I still do.  Even though I was pushed so much by the case worker, that’s what helped me not give up.  It pushed me to keep going.  I think it worked oppositely to what she intended. 

Justice’s father was the opposite to me.  He gave up.  He didn’t go through the rehab that he was supposed to do.  He just walked away and said ‘I’ll get him when he’s older’.  That was his plan all along.  He was a different kind of person whereas I did everything I could to get my son back.  He was more of a narcissist.  He refused to do anything they said.  I haven’t spoken to him about it, so I don’t know what kinds of things they threatened him with.

The Judge’s Decision

The judge actually made a mistake.  First, he said that Justice’s father will lose all care of him until he’s 18.  Then he said that Justice’s mother will lose all care of him until he’s 18.  As he said that, every single person in the courthouse, except me, stood up and gasped.  Not just my solicitor, but the person representing my son and even the caseworker.  They all knew that was not what was meant to happen.  Then the judge said, ‘sorry, I’ve made a mistake.  Justice is to go home with his mother today’.  I nearly had a heart attack in that moment because I thought that I’d lost him. 

Even now, the trauma of that day can feel like it’s happening again.  My Aunty bought him home that day.  Justice remained under the Care of the Minister for two years from that day.  I still had to go for those random drug tests.  I still had to do all these courses.  I had to enrol Justice into preschool three days a week.  That ended up being good for him in the end.  He was two and a half.  I put him in for those two years then I pulled him out so that he had a year of break before he started school.  I wouldn’t have sent him for that long if it was my choice, I might have sent him for a day or so, but it was good for him to have other children around.  I was the oldest of all my cousins and brothers and sisters; there were no other kids for him to play with in the family, so that gave him a chance to meet other kids.  The childcare centre was somehow employed by DOCS to keep an eye on him.  There were times when they called DOCS.  Once Justice went in and they asked him if mum gave him breakfast today and he said ‘No’.  So, they gave him breakfast.  They came up to me and said they’d called DOCS because I didn’t give him breakfast.  I said ‘I didn’t make him breakfast because my brothers girlfriend stayed over and she made him bacon and eggs for breakfast’.  So they asked “Is this true Justice?’ and he said ‘Yeah Nicole gave me breakfast, mum didn’t.’  But they’d already made that report. 

DOCS spoke to everybody I had to deal with.  Everyone changed their demeanour with me.  I felt like everybody was curious of me and had a totally different reaction towards me.  They made me out to be this really bad person.  Still to this day, I have no idea what DOCS said to them.  But I did find out later on, they told my doctor and my counsellor all different things that were not true.  Once they got to speak to each other, they realised they had been told different stories and I’d made out to be this really bad person.  They realised I was telling the truth.  I remember DOCS made me go to this first counsellor.  She got really defensive and accused me of lying all the time, because what I was saying about DOCS they would never do.  She would say ‘No one ever gets their kids taken off them for being a victim of domestic violence’.  Well, I was here, it was happening, that’s why they sent me here.  Now that I look back at what the caseworker said about the mayor and everything, it feels like that counsellor was probably part of all that, another one in the circle that were trying to push me over the edge. 

Being Watched

During those two years when DOCS was looking over my shoulder, there were a few occasions, when I had to go back and talk to them when Justice’s father had tried to kidnap him.  Justice was probably three or four.  I had to supervise his father’s visits at this stage because DOCS weren’t willing to pay for the Wesley mission anymore to do it.  They weren’t happy for him to be unsupervised, so they said I had to do it.  That went on for a few years.  It felt wrong because I didn’t want anything to do with his father.  I believe if you’re in a domestic violence situation you don’t put the person with them, which is what they were doing.  I felt that was just going to give DOCS a reason to take Justice again.  If his father did fly off the handle, or if he turned up drunk or something, then it would be my fault because I had him there.  I was told if I didn’t allow Justice to see his father then they would take him back into the system, because I’d be the bad parent for refusing access to his father. 

On one occasion the court said he could have Justice for a few hours on Christmas Day.  He took Justice and he was supposed to bring Justice home, but he had turned his phone off and I didn’t know where they were.  The next morning, I went to the police.  They said they had spoken to his father and because there was no family court orders in place, they’d give him permission to leave the state but not the country.  They said if I wanted my son back and had to go through a family court and fight back.  I said there are no family court orders, because there are children’s court orders.  The policewoman gasped and said ‘What have we done?’  Justice got to stay with his father for two weeks because DOCS and court all close over Christmas for that time period.  The police couldn’t do an amber alert until the court reopened and they got the court records.  The day before they were going to do the amber alert, the police talked his father into giving Justice back, so they didn’t have to walk in and arrest him in front of Justice.  Because there were children’s court orders that Justice would be in my care until he was 18, we weren’t able to make a family court order, we were told.  It didn’t matter.  My understanding was he would still remain under the care of the Minister for two years but after that he was in my care. 

Justice’s father had a new partner.  His partner’s mother and father had worked for DOCS; one was a Justice of the Peace.  So, his dad told me that when Justice turned 13, he would get him back.  I spoke to DOCS about that, and they said don’t worry because the court order you have says you have him until he is 18.  What they’re talking about is a family court order where a child gets to make their own decision once they are a certain age.  They said it would never happen.  They said his father might try but it would never actually happen. 

There was another time when he tried to kidnap Justice.  He said that he was taking Justice to his girlfriend’s mothers house for lunch.  That was right near my Auntie’s so I knew where that was.  It was an hour north of where I lived at the time.  So, it was 7 o’clock that night he said he’d bring Justice home for dinner.  I was cooking dinner and the police rang me and they said ‘We have your son at Sutherland police station’.  It turned out they were 4.5 hours south, when he was supposed to be an hour north.  The police said ‘You have to get here by midnight tonight otherwise he will go into the care of DOCS again’.  I was relying on public transport.  I wouldn’t have made it.  Luckily my grandmothers’ sister lived close to Sutherland.  She was a nun.  I didn’t really have contact with her, but my grandmother did, so she was able to get Justice from the police station. 

His father was arrested.  Justice said he was in the car with his father, they had stopped and he got an orange juice and donut.  When Justice has got back in the car, the girlfriend has locked the father out of the car.  The father somehow got a baseball bat out of the boot and smashed through the windscreen to get to the girlfriend.  The police told me that they were both on the drug ICE.  They told me that his girlfriend had a really long history of using it, and though his father had no history of it, they suspected he was on it due to his behaviour.  Justice was alright.  He was in the back of the car.  The police said they couldn’t tell me any details of what happened because it didn’t involve me.  But my son told me the details and DOCS told me as well, because I had to go and speak to them about visitation with dad.  Dad spent three months in jail for that.  Once he got out, the manager at DOCS forced me to do supervised visits again. 

A New Baby

The next born was Chantelle with my new partner Aaron.  Because I got the blood clots with my first two children, Justice’s father would ring and abuse me and say that I shouldn’t be having another child because Justice could lose me.  He wanted me to have an abortion.  I was told there was a 98% chance I couldn’t have any more kids.  Justice used to ask me every day if he could have a sister.  I used to tell him I can’t have any more.  He would always say to me ‘doctors can be wrong you know mum’.  He was really happy when he found out I was having his sister. 

Justice’s father tried to take him again after Chantelle was born.  He said because I had another child it was only fair that he took Justice.  And with every other baby I had, he would say it was only right he should have Justice now.  He thought he was entitled to take Justice because his girlfriend couldn’t have any more children.  She lost her job at the hospital for stealing drugs from there.  Whenever he would drop Justice back after a visit, he would say to him, ‘Your mum is slack because she has a kid and I don’t’.  His dad would pretend to cry and make Justice feel bad for him.  Justice didn’t think highly of him at all.  Justice was always very mature for his age.  He could see straight through his father, and there was no way he was wanting to go with his father and leave Chantelle. 

Second Class Hospital Care

After I had Chantelle, Grace came really quick.  It was Jill’s birthday again when I found out I was pregnant with Grace.  I thought I couldn’t have any more kids.  We were in Sydney at that time.  We went to Nepean Hospital, and it was good to get away from Gosford Hospital.  I felt more comfortable going there.  Everything seemed fine until about halfway through the pregnancy when they said there was a problem with my blood flow.  They called me into the doctors, and I waited there for eight hours to find out what was happening.  I was a bit of a mess because it reminded me of what happened with Jill.  But Grace wasn’t drowning in blood or anything which was what I was fearing.  One of what they called a ‘doppler’ had failed, which is one of the tubes that attaches to the placenta, so I needed ultrasounds every four days to check up on it. 

Every time I went for an ultrasound, they would ask me if I’d had the down syndrome tests.  I refused it knowing that I was only going to be offered an abortion if they detected it.  I said I was going to keep the baby either way so it would be a waste of time.  But the doctor refused to keep me on as a patient if I didn’t have it.  So, I agreed that I would get it done.  I went in for the appointment and the sonographer hadn’t turned up that day, so they sent me home.  When I went back, they said it was too late to be able to do it, because I was past the time.  So, it never got done.  I was in a high-risk category.  The main doctor refused to care for me after that.  The doctor had said to me ‘What if the child has down syndrome?’ and I said it wouldn’t change a thing. 

I didn’t know much about down syndrome.  I didn’t think that any kind of disability would make me not want my child.  The doctor accused me of having already lost a baby that I would take anything; that I would be happy to put a child through hell just so I got that living child.  It wasn’t the case.  I didn’t then, and I don’t now see downs syndrome as a lack of quality of life.  My daughter is very happy, and I think she’s got a great life.  I think she would say she has anyway.  They deserve the chance to live.  The doctor said, ‘What if it is a condition that the baby will die soon after birth?’ and I said ‘Well at least they would have the experience of living, rather than me just stop that altogether’. 

I told Justice that if this baby died it would be Jill getting another baby brother or sister instead of him; that’s how we explained it to the kids.  I didn’t have any more appointments with that doctor after 27 weeks.  Around that time, Aaron’s daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia again.  She had it when she was 1-3 years old and it came back, when she was around 15-16.  She had two types and one of them was rare, so she was in Westmead hospital, and I went in to have Grace at the Nepean hospital.  I didn’t get to see much of the kids or my partner because they were running back and forth between hospitals. 

I was 37 weeks pregnant when they started talking about inducing me.  I was on blood thinners for the clots, which is why they were going to induce me.  Aaron had gone up to Bowraville for his daughter’s special fundraiser for leukemia.  He stayed up there for three days while I was in labour.  I didn’t want to say anything at first but on the last day I said that I had to go to hospital.  He made it back to the house to look after the kids just in time.  They said that they had to whisk her away to NICU because she was so small.  I said, ‘Don’t worry all my babies have been small’, but I didn’t realise how tiny she was, smaller than a teddy she’d been given, at 2 ½ pounds. 

The next day they told me there were signs of a chromosomal disorder and they weren’t sure what it was.  They couldn’t give me any real information, but they could point out the indicators.  It was all a bit of a shock, but I was just taking it all in.  They referred to everything like an animal.  They said Grace had animal claws, that she had really sharp fingernails, like Freddy Kruger.  They said her feet were like a duck, that she had eyes that were different shapes and that she had a cleft palette.  We took her to a plastic surgeon years later and he said she doesn’t even have it.  Grace did have a really highly raised palette but no split in it.  She had no muscle tone whatsoever.  Grace’s whole body was floppy.  She didn’t put on any weight while she was in hospital.  She couldn’t take the bottle and she had to be tube fed.  If we fed her with a bottle, she would have a few sucks and then let it all run out.  Because of the low muscle tone in her mouth, she had to strengthen those tongue muscles and we ended up spending three weeks in the NICU just learning how to feed.  That was the only issue really.  They let her out on her due date which was Chantelle’s first birthday. 

The first three days I got to stay in hospital, they were testing me for blood clots, then they sent me home.  It was two hours of bus trips back and forth from the hospital.  It was pretty stressful knowing she was in there.  I would go into hospital and let my hair out so Grace would know that it was me.  That was how I bonded with her.  All the nurses had their hair up.  She was about 3-4 days old when they said it was down syndrome.  By this time, I had already been asking questions because my mum was a nurse.  She said it might be down syndrome.  When I was questioning it, they said there were other chromosomal signs as well, so they didn’t suspect that.  Once they found out it was down syndrome, they starting talking to me about adopting her out.  They said that my other kids wouldn’t have a good life, that I wouldn’t have time for myself or my partner, that we would end up splitting up because that’s what families do, that my whole life would be filled with medical appts and therapies, and that we would be run off our feet, which isn’t true.  It might be true for the first couple of months. 

Everything that the doctors in the NICU said, I always had an opposite reaction to it.  I was really happy.  They said I shouldn’t have been happy; that I should have been distraught and in tears with the diagnosis.  They said I should have felt bad towards my baby, not happy with her.  They thought that adoption would be the best way for all the family.  They said she’ll never grow up to be anything; that the most she can hope for is a job with Bakers Delight.  That had me laughing because my little brother was working at Bakers Delight at that time.  I told them I wasn’t having kids to get them to be a police officer or a nurse.  I’m not going to push them into one job.  My job is to help them as they grow and do what they want to do, not push them to be anything or tell them that what they want to be is not good enough.  I told them if my mum had of known about all my health problems which I was born with, would she have gone ahead and aborted me because it was going to be painful later on in life?  I wouldn’t be in a state to look after my kids, if I gave Grace away or aborted her. 

I’ve seen over the years what it is like for women that do give them up or have the abortion and regret it later on.  So, I feel like I was in the right with it all.  There was a lot of pressure.  Every time I asked questions about it, they only seemed to know the medical details about down syndrome, and they would say ‘go google it’.  I said ‘what’s so bad about down syndrome’?  I didn’t see it as a life sentence.  They told me things that really weren’t true.  They told me that Grace would be like a family pet; ‘you’ll love her like a dog, but she will never be able to love you back’.  But now she gives me so much love, and she tells me all the time, way more than my other kids, so she really understands it.  They would contradict themselves and say that down syndrome kids are always happy which is another one that is just not true; they feel every emotion just like everyone.  They are not always happy.  They have trouble getting their point across sometimes, so they do get frustrated and angry.  It’s normal.  They will fight with their siblings just like other kids.  They told me that they have a brain of a goldfish, that they will forget seconds later what has been said to them.  And that when they get older, they will regress which is possible in some cases.  There is early onset Alzheimer’s which can cause them to regress as they get older.  They go on to say about what happened to them in the past, like when they were institutionalised and how nobody has ever really wanted them, and that we are lucky that we have the option these days to abort or adopt. 

They told me that Grace wouldn’t look anything like any of us; that she will look like any other girl with down syndrome.  So, I asked what does one look like?  They couldn’t show me that, they said to go google that too.  I found that every girl is different.  When I got in contact with down syndrome groups in Australia, I realised that’s how they treat anyone who is having a baby with down syndrome.  The abortion rate is 98% and I think a lot of it is due to coercion of sonographers and the doctors that give the diagnoses.  I also learnt about the prenatal testing side of things, how they use the word ‘risk’ to make it sound like it is a bad thing you are risking.  The down syndrome groups fought to get that changed to the word ‘chance’.  While it changed the wording on paper, it didn’t change what they were telling people.  I still hear these days of people being told similar things.  And even when you go on to have your next baby, you are pushed to have the testing.  They talk about abortion before you’ve even gone past the danger stage in your pregnancy. 

In the down syndrome groups, I got to learn the truth about it.  When you are in hospital, you are hit with all these different conditions that could happen.  And I learnt how rare they actually are.  We were told that because Aaron had a daughter with leukemia, that kids with down syndrome have a higher chance of getting leukemia as well.  So that gave Grace over a 50% chance that she would have leukemia.  That was a bit of a scare.  Now that Grace is seven years old, I’ve only known two kids like her that have leukemia, out of thousands that I know online; that’s how rare it actually is.  Even if she had a higher chance of getting it, it wasn’t anywhere near 50% because it’s only 1% of down syndrome kids that get it anyway. 

The social worker gave me a book that was from Down Syndrome NSW or Australia, and they told me to wait until I had accepted the diagnosis, then call them.  They said it doesn’t matter how long you wait; you need to accept it.  I said I’ve already accepted the diagnosis.  Once I got home, the social worker came out to see me and Grace.  They were saying they can understand I’m grieving, and I was just expected to be in this ‘hate my baby’ kind of stage.  There was an assumption.  A lot of people seem to go through that, but I didn’t.  They sent me home with a counsellor that I had to see for a year.  They said there was something wrong with me because I was ‘too happy’. 

My grandmother said to me the reason everyone in the family took it so well was because I did.  And Grace was just immediately accepted.  I saw that counsellor for a year, and she started to hear all the things that the hospital were doing to me.  Then she quit her job and wasn’t going to work with the hospital anymore.  It was too much, and she could see there was nothing wrong with me.  I was basically threatened with DOCS that if I didn’t do the counselling it wasn’t in the best interests of my child or something like that.  I don’t think I had an option to not see her. 

When Grace was born, I felt with a really strong instant bond.  I was already in love with her before they told me she had down syndrome.  I didn’t care about all these bad things they were trying to tell me might happen.  I would wait until they happened and then deal with it.  I had enough to deal with already and I didn’t want to overload myself.  I always try to do that; not have too much worry around, just deal with it when it comes.  I threw myself into learning about down syndrome, so I could prepare for these things to happen.  But nothing has ever happened, what I looked into.  I got her into therapies straight away at three months old.  There was nothing that they could really do, but it was still helpful to get an idea of what was going to happen and what would help her. 

It was pretty full on with tests in those first years.  There’s a lot more blood tests, things like that.  We did find out later they were meant to give her a heart check in hospital, and they didn’t.  Once I got into the down syndrome groups, they told me to push for that, so I did.  It took me six months to find out that she did have a hole in her heart.  But I was born with the same hole and mine had closed by the time I was three.  My cousin was born with the same hole in her heart and had to have an operation when she was one.  I learnt that a lot of kids with down syndrome have that, and they basically come through the operation well, because they have learnt a lot more about it since I was a kid.  In my day, they didn’t operate on kids until they turned 21 so your life expectancy was 12 years.  They said to my mum to take her home and just don’t get attached to her.  But my hole closed up on its own.  I wasn’t really worried about that.  I was looking at the positive side thinking about me and my cousin going through it, and I knew what to expect.  The leukaemia thing was a bit more worrying because we would go in and see Charlotte and see how sick she was.  I thought how would this tiny little baby handle that. 

When Grace was a couple of weeks old, I got the blood clots again and stopped breathing.  I called the ambulance.  She was home then, less than a week.  I went into hospital, and they didn’t do the right tests to check for clots.  I told the doctor you can’t just do a normal chest Xray because they don’t show up.  I told him how many times I’d had clots; at every midwife appointment I’d spoken about it.  The doctor that didn’t want anything to do with me, came down into the emergency room and I saw him speaking to other doctors, and leave.  The doctors said to me that they thought I was just there for drugs because they could see on my record that I’d had a baby with down syndrome.  I said that I’ve got this history of blood clots and I know what’s happening.  I can feel it.  He laughed at me and said ‘that’s a load of bull, you can’t feel you have got blood clots.’  I said you definitely can, and I explained it to him.  He sent me home at 3am with a prescription for one tablet of panadeine forte.  He didn’t give me anything while I was in hospital. 

As soon as the chemist was open, I got in there and I was gasping for breath.  The pharmacist knew me, because of the medication I was on when I wasn’t pregnant.  I was on strong blood thinners then.  They called the doctor in, he closed his practice and came to stay with me.  They called the ambulance.  The chemist and doctor – one of them was on the phone to the ambulance and the other was on the phone to Emergency.  They were demanding that I get in and be seen straight away.  They knew the risk of how bad it is; it is a fatal condition.  So, I got back to hospital, they sent me for the proper testing, and it showed exactly what I’d told the doctor.  I told them that I had a large clot on the side of the lung on the left side and there would be little ones all through.  And that was exactly how it came out.  The doctor went bright red and walked away.  He saw other patients.  He didn’t do anything with me and all of a sudden, I got a new team of doctors and nurses.  He refused to have anything to do with me after that, because he knew he was wrong. 

I’d go on to make a complaint about that years later, but they maintained I’d never made a complaint.  So, I guess it was just destroyed.  The doctors said after they did the proper tests the night before that they couldn’t be used.  Even though the test was not supposed to show the clots, mine were that bad that they did show up.  They said I had to go for a third type of testing, the one where they put dye into your blood.  They do that to see if they are old ones or new ones, and of course they were new ones.  They said that what I actually had was an infarction where a clot had stuck itself to the side of the lung because it had been left untreated and that lung would die off.  And there’s nothing that can be done about it.  Basically, I lost one lung from that doctor not giving me help when it was vital.  They said it was miraculous that I survived.  This time they just gave me the script for the warfarin and said, ‘you know what to do, go home and do it yourself’.  Whereas at Gosford hospital, I’d always spent at least one week in hospital and up to four weeks sometimes because of how bad it was.  It was just strange that they sent me home.  

I had to lock the bedroom door and keep the kids away from me because I couldn’t get my bed bumped or anything, being in extreme pain.  I could barely speak.  When I think back to my experience in hospital, it’s very distressing, especially when a lot of the time they just said I had anxiety.  But I believe they gave me anxiety by saying that to me all the time, refusing to help me, just saying ‘oh you’ve got anxiety, have you ever been tested for anxiety’.  It’s because of the gasping for breath that they think that.  Now that I really do have anxiety, I don’t gasp like I do when I get the clots.  With the clots the pain is so severe it feels like a knife is being put in your ribs, either the front or the back depending on where it is.  With each breath in and out it is like a blade going in and out as well.  It’s really hard to talk.  You can only get half a word out when you do talk, then you gasp again.  If they give you a pen and paper, it’s really hard to move any part of your body.  Even the doctors throwing the clipboard back on the end of your bed, would get me gasping and in so much pain that they would have to hold me down and give me morphine.  No medication actually took the pain away, but it did help me to be calmer and breath through it a bit. 

Knowing the first time that I had blood clots they were worried I was going to die, now every time it happens, I think this is the end.  Anybody else that I know that has got blood clots have died the first time, so that plays on my mind when it happens.  I wonder how I can survive it when other people can’t.  That’s part of the antiphospholipid syndrome.  Somehow, we can survive these fatal conditions, unlike other people but we’re prone to getting clots constantly.  I wouldn’t know what a leg clot feels like, but I know what it feels like as soon as I get it in the lungs. 

Being the Mum I Want to Be

Being able to manage difficulties in life depends on what you’ve lived through before.  I think losing Jill did play a part in helping me get through.  I would have been happy for Jill to be alive with any disability and helped her live with that; it’s better than not living at all, through my eyes.  I know that other mothers with babies who have down syndrome do fear about the children they already have and how it’s going to impact on their future.  I knew Chantelle was just a baby; it wasn’t going to impact on her. 

With Justice I knew how much he was looking forward to having a sister.  I knew that this could only be positive.  I remember in those early days that I wanted to tell him about it before anyone else in the family.  I was explaining the chromosomes and how instead of 46, Grace has 47, how she has this extra DNA and it doesn’t come from me or her dad.  They call it ‘alien DNA’ because its origin is unknown, so that made it a fascinating experience for a young boy to hear about.  I told Justice that she will be different, and he said ‘No mum, she’s just like us’.  I pointed out to him a few things that the hospital were showing me.  Justice said ‘That doesn’t matter, you can cut her nails, she’s perfect’.  We went home and he loved her, just like Chantelle. 

One day he said ‘Mum, there’s a show on about down syndrome tonight, can we watch it?’  And I said ‘Yeah sure’, not thinking what it would be about.  When we put it on, it was about the abortion rates and how many people abort the babies.  They went on to say how it ruins other kids’ lives.  I was speechless. I didn’t want to turn it off on Justice.  I knew it was going to promote questioning.  After it finished, he turned to me, he had tears in his eyes and he said ‘Don’t you ever let anyone tell you, you’re a bad mum for keeping Grace.  He said you’re like a God of mums that makes you right up the top”.  He was really proud of Grace and proud of me.  And that’s when I noticed how really accepting he was of Grace. 

Another thing the hospital had said to me originally was that I was burdening my children with having to care for their sister when she’s older.  I said ‘They’ll care about her but not necessarily care for her.  If they care about her then caring for her will be a choice of their own’.  The hospital staff said that with my medical conditions that I wasn’t going to be around, so I was just lumping her on my other children and the rest of the family.  Without me telling Justice those things, he was learning for himself.   I would catch him listening in when she had a therapist there so he could learn little tricks to help her get moving.  Everything is delayed, like walking and crawling, so he wanted to try to help with all that.  He wasn’t just content with me telling him afterwards, he would be there listening, hearing what’s going on, then he would come and talk afterwards with me about it.

DOCS come Knocking Again

When Grace was around six months, I’d taken Justice to school, Aaron was feeding Chantelle and Grace was in a little electric swing that swung itself.  Chantelle had gone to sleep and he went and laid her on the bed.  Aaron went to the toilet and then he heard Chantelle’s feet run down the hall, so he quickly jumped out and saw she was pulling the baby by the arm.  Grace’s arm had gone in between the seat where it swings and it hurt her.  I’ve come home and Aaron was a mess.  He was freaking out that Chantelle had hurt the baby.  I picked Grace up and she stopped crying instantly and I said, ‘She’s fine’.  I went and made Aaron a coffee and I tried to calm him down.  Grace seemed fine until she started to roll.  It was two weeks later that I got her out of her bed and one of her arms was limp.  It was just hanging there.  I said, ‘Something is not right’ so I took her to the doctors and he sent me straight to have an Xray at the children’s hospital. 

In the hospital, they put me in this little room with Grace and I was just feeding her and changing her.  The lady came back in and her demeanour had changed.  She was white and shaking.  She was speaking like she was really angry.  She said to me that Grace had a broken arm and I just burst out into tears because I thought they would have to rebreak her arm so that it healed properly.  They took Grace away from me and they put me on the phone to call Aaron, I wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital.  They accused me of knowing and covering it up.  This is where I ended up with complex PTSD after another DOCS intervention, but it was to do with the earlier stuff as well.  It all just moulded together to make it complex PTSD and multiple traumas.

My Complex PTSD Diagnosis

I was stuck with my family hours away.  I said Aaron, ‘Get up here because it looks like they’re going to take Grace and we’re not going to see her again, so bring the kids up to say goodbye’.  Before I knew it, there were investigators that come in before DOCS.  They investigate it and decide whether it goes off to DOCS or not.  We ended up dealing with them for a few months.  They talked to Justice up at the school to try to get him to say stuff.  It had already come back at the hospital that the arm wasn’t broken by any kind of human intervention.  The bone doctor said, ‘It was definitely that swing, you can see by the way its broken’.  They cleared all that.  But the DOCS people still were intimidating and humiliating me. 

One day they grilled Justice at school; they rang us up and said that he was at the DOCS office and that we had to come up there.  They told me this is the last day they had to do their report and they said, ‘We’re seriously considering taking your kids’ because they saw this record of Aiden being in a rehab facility and not finishing it.  Aaron had never been into any rehab.  I said, ‘No that was Justice’s father, and it’s definitely not Aaron’.  They said it was definitely Aaron.  Aaron said, ‘Someone must be using my name, look into it, call the place, show them a photo of me, look at their videos, it’s not me’.  DOCS said, ‘No you’ve got to sign this document’.  My solicitor had advised me not to sign anything.  But DOCS were adamant that if I didn’t sign that document I wasn’t walking out of there with my kids that day.  So, I said alright I will sign it.  It was an agreement that we would deal with DOCS for two years.  We left and DOCS said they would be in touch with me. 

The second I walked out that DOCS office, everything about me felt different.  That was the moment that complex PTSD hit me.  And I wouldn’t find out until later what it was.  I had PTSD before that, but it wasn’t until it turned into the complex one that I could feel it constantly.  Time seemed to go quick, my heart raced.  I had this burning anxiety and fear there constantly.  I started to have trouble sleeping.  The main thing was the racing thoughts, like there were ten different things going on at once in my mind.  I felt like I was going crazy.  That’s the only way I can explain it. 

When DOCS turned up, they said they wanted to drop the case; that they didn’t want to deal with us at all, that there was no reason.   I said, ‘Well there is because now this has happened to me and you have caused it so I want you to fix it.  You’ve done this to me, I’m not going to be able to get help myself, you have to help me fix it.’  It was my way of saying I am not a bad mum, but you’ve done this to me and now maybe I might be, because I’m not concentrating properly.  I wanted to find out what it was and what to do about it.  The intimidation and belittlement is what caused this.  I told them all about all the things the first caseworker had done and so the second one went along and did that too.  They learnt that that’s what hurt me and so that became a tool for them to continue.  DOCS were a bit gob smacked.  They said no one has ever begged them not to close their case, but I knew I needed help and I didn’t know how to get it.  I hadn’t had good experiences at the Nepean hospital.  I didn’t expect to be able to go in there and get help.  I hadn’t had help after what happened with Justice when I’d gone to the counsellor who said ‘They don’t take kids away because of domestic violence’.  So, DOCS agreed to get me a counsellor. 

It was months of working with the counsellor when she told me it was complex trauma and helped me learn about it.  It’s not ever going to go away but you have to learn to live with the symptoms and how to manage each symptom and accept it before it can get better.  In those early days I didn’t really believe it. I thought there is still a way to get rid of it.  Seeing that counsellor was a good experience, it helped me a lot.  It prompted me to look into complex PTSD myself, what it was and how to manage it.  The counsellor that the hospital had sent me home with after Grace – she tried to teach me mindfulness and at the time I didn’t know why I really needed it and why it would help me, or anything.  Her way of teaching me mindfulness was watching the clock for sixty seconds and then to watch her breasts go up and down as she breathed for sixty seconds and that made me feel uncomfortable; staring at someone’s breasts made me feel weird about the situation.  I didn’t think that was going to help me. 

The new counsellor showed me things that you can do, like looking for five colours around the room, listening out for sounds, those kinds of things that would more or less take my mind off it because I’m concentrating on other things.  When I get talking too much, the hospital would say to me ‘What’s your kids date of birth?’.   I used to get frustrated with them because I’d already told them a million times.  I realised that’s the way they are trained to take you back, like a mindfulness technique to change your thoughts, so you don’t get too worked up and can get through things.  One day I said something about sometimes wishing I could drink alcohol but because of the blood thinners I can’t.  I said it would be good to just get out and actually forget about things for a while.  The counsellor actually said that she was a drug and alcohol counsellor and was sent to counsel me for a drug and alcohol problem, not about what DOCS had done to me.  So, it was a shock for both of us to find that out.  She ended up leaving her job as well.  She said she would keep all the records in case I ever went to court to do something about it.  DOCS closed the case after that.  With her final report she said that they weren’t able to help me.  She apologised and said there’s nothing you can do about it; you’ve just got to learn to live with it. 

Life Without Justice

When I had Zara it was the end of 2018.  In 2019, when COVID came we got kicked out of a rental property in Sydney.  They wanted to use it for an AirBnB for COVID travellers, so we had to find somewhere else to live.  There was six of us.  We couldn’t get a place in time, so Aaron came up to the Mid North Coast of NSW to help his father with his house and I went to my mother’s on the Central Coast with the four kids. I enrolled them in school there but as it was the end of the year, I didn’t want Justice turning up to a new high school not knowing anybody.  So, I sent him up three months before us to stay with mum so he could finish primary school there.  That way he got to meet the kids he would be starting high school with.  He had been to that school before.  He’d done kindergarten and half of year one there before we moved to Sydney.  Once he got there most of the kids remembered him anyway.  So that was a positive.  He had friends to start the new school with. 

His dad had lost all parental responsibility and had no care of him until he was 18.  Once we got up to mum’s place, his father did say he wanted Justice to live with him because he didn’t want Justice living with my mother.  I explained to him that it was only temporary for three months until we moved there.  Me and the girls caught the train up every weekend and saw Justice anyway.  Once I finished up my daughters’ therapies and packed up the house, we moved up to live with mum.  We couldn’t get any housing there because of the rental crisis.  Everyone was homeless at the time.  They said every garage had someone living in it, that’s how bad it was.  We were there nearly a year, and looking every week for a house, but just getting nowhere.  It was Christmas holidays and Justice’s father wanted to take him during the holidays.  That meant that he would be flying up to Alice Springs.  He’d done that before.  I knew Justice wanted to get away and have a break.  I bought him a mobile phone so he could call me if anything went wrong and just to keep in touch.  My communication with his father was alright; we only communicated in regards to his visits.  I was a bit worried with COVID and how they were changing all the rules with the airports.  I was worried about Justice having to quarantine and miss out on school and that I wouldn’t be able to quarantine with him because of all the other kids.  His father did agree that if things did change and Justice had to quarantine that he would fly back with Justice and quarantine with him, then go back home.  But Justice never came back.  Dad decided to keep him there.  The day before Justice was due to come home, I was talking to him about what he wanted for dinner when he got back.  He said, ‘I have to go, I will call you back’.  As a mum, I could tell that he was more emotional that he would be normally.  He usually hides that from people.  I could tell, even now, there’s things that he will clam up and not talk about or hide from me.  Then I got a text message off his father that he wasn’t coming back.  His exact words were ‘Justice won’t be returning to the coast and you’ll hear from my lawyer’.  I tried to call back and I didn’t get through. 

I could tell from Justice’s phone call that it was not his decision, that he was going along with his father’s decision.  Justice couldn’t tell me himself.  I never got to speak with his father again after that; even now, we only communicate by text or email.  Even though he said ‘You will hear from my solicitor’, I didn’t.  It wasn’t until my solicitor had contacted him, and police and DOCS had been around to his house, that I heard anything. 

The first thing I did is google what to do.  It said to call 000.  They told me to call the local police station and the police station in the Northern Territory.  I did that.  They told me to call DOCS because it was a DOCS matter that stopped him from having his parental rights.  I had spoken to different DOCS people over the years and his threats that he would take Justice.  They all said not to worry, that the orders stop him from taking Justice until he is 18.  And if it happened, they would be able to get him back.  Even though I was worried and stressed about it, I still thought there would be a process of him coming back.  I was always under that impression that it’s a law that he is breaking so you’d think they could do something about it.  DOCS did nothing.  I met with them.  DOCS in the Northern territory did go out to his Father’s house and they spoke to him.  His fathers’ girlfriend wasn’t home at the time.  She was one of the main concerns with DOCS on the central coast because of her drug history of using ICE.  For DOCS to not even speak to her or visualise her and just leave, was just a bit dodgy.  They didn’t even let me know that they had gone to do that.  I spoke to DOCS hotline on the phone and then to the Central Coast Department.  There was nothing that they could do; I just had to take it back to my solicitor and back Woy Woy children’s court.  We did that.  I think they sent us to the Family Court and then we went to the Federal Court.  The police in the Northern Territory told me that if I could get the original court papers they could go and retrieve Justice straight away.  I went and did that.  Then they said they couldn’t retrieve him because it was a federal court matter due to Justice being in the NT and us in NSW. 

Even though the court order stated dad wasn’t to have justice until he was 18, the children’s court order doesn’t cover all of Australia; no-one could legally get him from the NT.  The police had actually tried to go and get him but the supervisor pulled him up and said, ‘No, you’ve got to go through the federal police to go and collect him’.  So, I rang the Australian Federal police and they said I had to take it to a Federal Court and get an order for them to go and collect him.  So, I took it to the Federal Court, and they said there was nothing they could actually do.  The judge said his hands were tied with a 120 year old law that stops anyone from the States interfering with the Territories.  He said that if we went back to the original court at Woy Woy, that they could do a something for them to go and get him.  And then we could go back to the federal court, if they had permission from Woy Woy children’s court to make the order. 

The Federal Court judge said he felt disgraced because it was a kidnapping situation; that Justice was being kept from his family and not allowed to see us by someone who was illegally allowed to have him.  The judge said he would be writing to parliament (which was closed at the time due to COVID) in the request for the law to change.  It wouldn’t help our case, but in the future it may help other people and he was going to use our case as a prime example.  The judge ordered Justice’s father to go back to the Woy Woy Children’s court and open up a claim for them to change the original orders.  He initially did that.  But it looked like he was going to lose, so he cancelled that application just before the final outcome and re-opened it again back at the Federal Court.  We never actually got to go back there because there was already a mediation set up by the Woy Woy Children’s Court.  We had to do that first, the day before the next court was due to start.  My solicitor then told me that there was no chance of us succeeding, because we had over-run the time for a retrieval; it had been over a year by that stage.  The mediation was supposed to be for us to come to an agreement that would still be a law-abiding agreement, to try to get some visitation for us because we hadn’t seen Justice for a year and a half.  My solicitor said I had to agree to shared parental responsibility, and to take whatever time I could get with him.  His father had already broken every rule that the Woy Woy Children’s Court had made so even with the Federal Court wasn’t happy with him.  The only way he could win was to delay things and stuff them around until such time had passed; he knew how to beat the law.  We had the mediation.  We wanted to see Justice on holidays, and they said that due to Justice’s age he was only to come for two holidays a year, so he had other time with his friends.  My solicitor said that if we didn’t agree to it and we took it to court there’s a good chance we could end up with nothing.  I had no option.  At the end of it, they congratulated me for coming to an outcome, that felt wrong at every level. 

I told them of my fears of Justice being there with his father and his girlfriend, their drug use and violence, their history.  His father just snaps at anybody on the street.  He’s just a very aggressive person.  I was worried about how he would mould Justice in a way.  I thought that Justice might end up like him.   Thankfully he’s nothing like his father in that way yet.  Alice Springs is also a dangerous place with lots of crime with children.  I thought it’s a bad area for him to grow up in.  Justice had said to me once that his father had taken him to learn how to drive a car, paddock bashing with dad and his mates, he was 13.  I was worried about that, knowing that they would all be under the influence of alcohol.  He was going out to the pub with his dad every day, riding motor bikes; it just seemed like his father was not being a parent to him but rather like a drunken mate. 

If I rang Justice while he was at the pub, he said the music was too loud and he couldn’t talk.  His dad tried to say that I could only call him once a week; have one call on a Sunday at a certain time.  I said, ‘that’s not possible’.  I have so many other kids to deal with.  You can’t just pause everything else at that one particular time. Justice was never available to talk to me at that time anyway.  He will only talk to me when he is on his way home from school or at his friend’s house; he doesn’t talk around his father.  Until I got to see Justice in person, there were always worries.  He seemed very distant and keeping a lot from me, he couldn’t say things.  He would say something like ‘I went out with my friends yesterday’ and I might say ‘What did you do?’, and he would freeze up.  He wouldn’t say anything and change the subject. 

His father’s got orders put through that I am not allowed to talk to Justice about court at all.  I’m not allowed to talk to him about his father or anything his father has done in the past.  I‘m not allowed to talk to him about travel arrangements, this has to go through his father.  But his father doesn’t answer messages, so I feel he is trying to set me up to break the orders.  I said that to the mediators, that he has never actually abided by any order from a court, whether it has got to do with our son or losing his licence.  Apparently, he has lost his licence indefinitely because he has been caught that many times unlicensed.  I said that to the mediator that whatever orders they make he won’t abide by them.  I predicted that he would do it for the first holidays which would be this Christmas but that after that, he would refuse.    It feels like it is all about revenge for him, for what the court put to him first time around and DOCS saying he had to have supervised visits.  He’s always had a grudge at me for that and blamed me for what the court said.  It was entirely out of my hands.  None of Justice being taken was not my fault in the first place.  It was his actions that caused it, I was in hospital at the time.

The search for healing

DOCS as an organisation had caused my problems.  I was never told about any avenues of justice.  The only time I was informed was much later when I was back in court fighting for Justice.  I went back into Woy Woy Children’s Court house and the front desk workers recognised me as one of the women that worked with a certain caseworker.  I said yeah ‘That’s true’ and straight away I teared up and so did they. They said ‘We’ve been waiting for you to come back’ and they told me that a lot of other people took that caseworker to court and that she doesn’t work at DOCS anymore.  They said that after I’m finished with court that I should take that avenue too.  I was gobsmacked.  It was many years since I’d been there, but they recognised me straight away.  They knew that I was one of her cases.  There was an immediate understanding about how I felt.  I felt they understood the position I was in and why I might have been pretty upset about everything.  When I left there, I was in tears and I had to walk back from Woy Woy to Umina, about 40 minutes.  I had people stopping asking me if I was OK, because I couldn’t stop the tears flowing.  That’s strange for me.  I couldn’t stop bawling.  I had no control over that.  Those court women gave me the validation that I had never got before.  It made me feel good that other people who had been through it as well, might have gotten their justice in the end.  I don’t know the outcome of it, or whether they got justice, but they at least took her to court.  She had to face what she’d done to people.  I’d love to do it, not just her, but the whole system itself need to really re-evaluate what they do to people. 

After my experience, I tried to learn about other things like the Stolen Generations and see if there was any way that those people had gotten through it that maybe could help me.  I also looked at the young mothers that had their babies taken when they were under sixteen or unmarried.  I looked at their court records, at their histories.  I wanted to see how those movements of people got help, what helped them in the end, not necessarily justice.  I wanted to see what could help me work through it.  Basically, what I learned was that with each generation DOCS learn better how to affect people and how to take the kids away.  I learned that those people never really got justice, they may have got a small pay out, there was never a closure or anything.  They might have got a formal apology by the government but there was nothing ever shown that they meant it.  There was nothing ever done to change the way they work. 

When mandatory reporting had come into the hospitals, I feel that was just another way of getting more children and to keep the business rolling.  That’s how I see it.  That’s what the original caseworker told me, that it keeps the people in town rich and there’s important people that need to stay in their jobs.  I see it like that, like a business.  What I saw is that systems like DOCS just learn better ways of stealing more children and learn better ways of stuffing up the mothers, like what’s happened to me getting PTSD.  That caseworker had said to me ‘Women like you will always be back in the system now that you’ve dealt with us’.  She saw me as being weak and an easy target and that will keep me in the system.  I know that a lot of people with PTSD turn to drugs or have mental health issues from their experience, so that would get people back in the system. 

Coping with the Triggers of Trauma

Throughout the whole court process, I was always really worried about the trauma and getting triggered.  I was worried if it got too bad with me, I would struggle with looking after the other kids.  So, I always wanted to keep myself together.  Going to the court and bringing it all back up; triggers flashbacks, dreams, insomnia, anxiety and all those things.  I was most worried about the suicidal thoughts.  Even though I know I don’t have the intention, it’s just thoughts, they’re just going to happen anyway, normally I can turn them off.  I thought going through court knowing it’s my son, I wondered ‘Would I still be able to turn them off?’  I was worried about not just how I thought, but how his sisters felt and how he would feel once he grew up in a few years.  It might be all good now that Justice is getting motorbikes but when he grows up and realises he has got no-one, he doesn’t have a relationship with any siblings, how bad that would be for him? 

I get problems that I think is related to the trauma.  It often happens that my nerves will play up, my fingertips will start to get on fire and up my arms feel like they’re on fire.  My legs will just collapse, I lose feeling altogether.  Sometimes that happens with my hands, but I can still feel the burning.  Usually, the collapsing happens when I am walking upstairs, but my legs feel like they are not there and I will just fall to the ground.  I end up hurting my feet because they will be all floppy and if I don’t hold them into place before the feeling comes back, and they are still bent over all floppy, then it’s very painful to move back and I can’t walk on it for a few days.  I first experience this collapse not long after losing my daughter, Jill and they took Justice.  At the time I didn’t relate it to trauma at all.  They suspected it was a stroke.  When they realised it wasn’t they sent me to a neurologist, he said there was no obvious reason for it, looking at my nerve scans.  They did a lot of blood tests. 

My eyes also go bright, like a migraine when you see bright lights and stars.  It is just constant, and I can’t see much of anything.  There are a few other times this has happened, like when Justice was kidnapped, and I had to wait for court to open to try to get him back.  Any time, when there is a lot of stress in my life it tends to happen.  That’s when I put two and two together and realised it was complex PTSD, not to do with the autoimmune disease or clots.  There’s nothing you can do to relieve it.  Some tablets help with the nerve pain and lessen the activity.  Sometimes my hands can feel like they’re really burning so I’ll be shaking my hands trying to put the fire out.  Even if it put my hands in the freezer, they would still feel like they are on fire.  Sometimes I get the feeling of water running down my legs.  I did expect it to happen more than it has, so I’m glad it hasn’t happened all that much.

When it first became complex PTSD and everything changed, that’s when I started to try to take medication to stop it, because I thought it was stoppable.  But the medication was wrong for me and no matter what they put me on, I would end up with all different side effects.  When they put me on Valium, it made me so angry for no reason at all; my whole body tensed up.  Other medications would make me not sleep.  It was really hard; I didn’t want to be around the children with it happening.  I never found anything that worked.  What worked was realising that the trauma was something I would have to live with and that I didn’t need medication.  I thought medication was going to be the answer when it really just caused more problems. 

Living my New Normal

In the last 12 months, being pregnant again, I wanted to minimise stress.  Being in Bowraville has been helpful.  Now when I leave the house, it is not as busy out on the street; less people around.  Our house is secluded, so you can look out the back; it’s an open area.  There’s no neighbours right on top of you.  It made me feel more secluded than what we actually are.  Just being there with the rest of my children, knowing that I didn’t have Justice, but that I still had to make memories with them and do good things with them. 

With the kids, I know that I am all that they have got.  I have an important role to play in Grace’s life with all her therapies.  I’ve had people say to me, if anything happened to me, they wouldn’t be able to take my kids.  So that is a big responsibility.  I can’t let myself go.  I might get the thought of not being able to handle things, or I might just get a thought in my head about jumping off a bridge, but at the same time I have always got in the back of my head that I want to be here for my kids; I don’t want to do that.  With Grace and her disabilities, and no-one else being able to look after her, that’s one thing.  I’ve got Zara.  She’s a real mummy’s girl, won’t let me leave the room.  She will cry if I go to the other half of the room.  If she’s upset, she won’t look at other people.  I’m the only one that can help her there.  If something happened to me, I know the kids would probably get separated.  That’s something I never want to happen.  If I did something, Justice would have to live with knowing that he was part of what drove me there, and that would be a terrible thing which I wouldn’t want.  I don’t want him to feel blame. 

I think keeping the family together was really important to me.  People have said that they couldn’t look after my children.  If DOCS were to take them then they would split up my children.  In the long run, when Justice turns 18, he will be able to make up his own mind about his future and where he wants to be.  I do believe when he grows up, he will see how his father controlled his thoughts around situations.  I raised him for those first 13 years without any help from his father.  So, he’s already the person that he is.  If it hasn’t changed over the year and a half that he was kept from us, then he is not going to change, that’s who he is.  Even though he is staying up there with his father, Justice misses all the family.  He voices that a lot.  Not just for his sisters, but his grandmothers, and aunties and uncles too.  He talks about how he wants to see the children.  I’m sure when he is older he will come back.  I know that you can’t mould who your kids become but you can guide them, and I did that.  Now I know that I have to step back and let him make his own mistakes and learn from them; be a cushion when he falls.  It’s easier to be a guide when he is visiting with us, because he is more open and he doesn’t hold much back. 

I hope to have more time for Justice in future visits.  Sometimes with the four girls you don’t have much time, but I’d like to have more alone time with him.  I’ve taught him a lot of things like values already.  He wasn’t a big fan of school, but I’ve told him that even though you don’t like it, it’s something you have to do, to get somewhere in life.  Now he is doing that.  He doesn’t want to do what his dad does, a cleaner.  He’s looking further, like something to do with computers.  In the future, I’d like to help him doing what he wants, whether it’s from a distance or not.  The family values, hopefully he gets that from us.  He knows I will go without anything to give to the kids. Rather than ending up like his dad who walks away on him as a child; hopefully he doesn’t do that to his own children one day.  I hope Justice holds onto his family values; his attitude tells me he does.  Most kids when you drop them at school won’t let you kiss them, but he is the one that says give me a kiss.  He’s affectionate.  Even though he hasn’t been much of a person to stand up for himself, he will stand up for his sisters.  Justice is a good brother, he always wanted sisters, lots of sisters and be the oldest brother to them.  Even though he is not around to do that, he is still there, and he can see how he is still a role model especially with Chantelle.

I still have that tiny bit of worry in my mind because I know he is still with his father and I know what Alice Springs is like but I know him better than anybody else does.  It really is just a fear of mine, and based on who his father is, not who Justice is.  So, I realise that now.  I just have to take it as it comes.  It gives me comfort knowing that if Justice could stand up and walk away from us, based on how close he is with us, that he is capable of doing that with his dad.  He will be ready one day to move out on his own and won’t have fear holding him back.  He’s not going to be someone stuck at home until his 30s or 40’s.  Justice will be capable of going out on his own, with strong independence.  I’m most proud of the way he was when he came back to visit us, how he was still himself and there was no animosity.  It was like he never left.  I’m proud of Justice for how he has made friends, going into a whole new community.   

What Got Me Through the Toughest Times

My lowest moment was back in the beginning when Justice’s father took him, when everywhere I turned, they turned me away somewhere else.  Everything that I was being told about Justice being in my care until he was 18, was all a lie.  Finding that out, on top of not being able to get a house on the Central coast to be with my family, having to make the decision to come up to Bowraville and leave all the family behind.  Around that time, would have been the lowest.  I was worried about not getting housing and going through court, not being able to get my son back without a house.  The suicidal thoughts would just sneak their way in.  A lot of the time it was of a night when I was having night terrors and flashbacks, while I was sleeping.  You feel like it’s more real than you do during the day, because when you wake up you still feel all the emotions, as if it’s just actually happened.  I couldn’t stop it to get back to sleep.  At the time, it was really hard to hold onto hope. 

When fear was around, I would watch a lot of movies, not similar to what I was going through, but people experiencing other bad situations.  It helped to see a lot of bad stuff happens to people, not just you.  By watching movies, I also learnt that things don’t always end how you expect.  You have all these fears and worries, and things telling you what’s going to happen.  You’ve just got to believe that’s not going to be the final outcome.  You just have to keep on going and deal with each thing as it comes.  It may not be how it ends up. 

You have to keep going.  It’s hard when people are making you out to be something that you’re not.  In those moments when I might have felt like giving up, I held onto the fact my family knew the truth.  My family knew DOCS were making up all the lies; they knew that I’d just been caught in a bad situation.  I’d picked the wrong partner basically, and it wasn’t a crime.

Sometimes I would say myself just “Fake it ‘til you make it”.  No matter who I saw I would smile and after a while of doing that, I end up feeling happy anyway.  I wouldn’t like the children to pick up on my sadness.  I would pretend to be happy, being silly and dancing with the kids.  That would make them happy and their happiness would make me feel happy too.

I kept some of Justice’s toys by my bed, as a constant reminder of him, even though when you wake up it’s your first thought anyway.  It’s important so you don’t lose the attachment.  One of the things you worry about is losing the bond and once you get your kids back, you’ve got to learn how to be a mother again.  By keeping reminders and knowing wherever they are, you are still looking up at the same sky.  For me, that was important because I’d lost Jill as well.  It was important to realise that he might not be physically in the room with me, but I hadn’t totally lost him.  When I’d go in and visit Justice I’d take him food; he remembers that. 

Each trauma helps me get through to the next, knowing that I’ve made it through.  I think I’ve gained a lot of knowledge – little tricks to help myself – that will help me a better parent in the future.  I’ll be able to support them in their mental health because I’ve had to do it for myself.  I’ve learnt how to not be a judgemental person, that things happen for different reasons, to be more understanding of people, how minds work, people’s reactions and stuff like that.  I researched trauma for all different reasons, not just medical trauma, but to learn how it works for everyone.  I think what pushed me to do that was because I’d heard that people getting PTSD become violent.  When I looked into it, I realised it was people that go off to war, they see violence, they live violence, when they are triggered that is what will come out.  I didn’t get violent, but I did get snappy when a lot of voices kept coming into my head.  Everything just keeps replaying and I don’t hear who’s around me.  I would snap.  Other times I would just say ‘yeah’ to acknowledge them, but they thought I was just ignoring them.  Little things I’ve realised with the trauma that I do, I try to work on that now.  I’ve learned how to block out, instead of voices and replays taking over.  I’ve learnt how to hear the real world on top of it.  It does take a lot of time, only those that go through it would know what I mean. 

I know that I’m going to keep going no matter what.  My past experiences have given me that drive.  I want to get out and get a job.  My youngest is only six months old at the moment, but I will work on it, in the meantime.  I’d like to set up a home business that my daughter Grace, can do when she’s older because she might not make much money.  She may not survive if we don’t do something to set things up.  So being involved in our business she could be paid what she is worth. 

I never talked to Justice about what had happened, until a couple of years after I got him back.  I just hoped it would go away and Justice would grow up and not remember what happened.  But he didn’t forget about it.  Even remembers being with that foster carer for a short period of his life.  I remember the moment he realised how he felt about it all and that prompted us to talk about it.  He would have been four or five.  There was an INXS documentary on TV and the song playing was ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ and he was singing the words to me.  “I was standing, you were there, two worlds colliding, and they could never tear us apart”.  And that was his view on it.  Throughout the times that dad had taken Justice, I’ve been able to reflect on that song.  Justice is such a good kid, so loving.  He’s given me a lot of good memories like that.  Every time that song would come on, he would grab me, with his arm around my neck and sing it to me.  It’s something that has really showed his character; who he was. 

I would always call Justice to hear his voice and talk to him about anything.  It just reassures me, he is still the same kid.  He is a great person; just hearing his voice I know all that.  I think of that song ‘Never Tear us apart’, and it reminds me no matter what his dad keeps pushing on Justice, we will always have our mother-son bond. 

Wisdom for Others

If I was to share advice with others, these would be my tips.

• Learn to accept the effects of the trauma.  Stop chasing the cure which doesn’t exist and start to live your new normal.
  The fear stays with you all the time.  Like with grief, your body gets used to it.  Finding out about the trauma and accepting I was always going to have that fear and anxiety was my key to learning to live with it.  It helped to learn I wasn’t actually crazy, it’s just an injury that happens to your mind.
• No matter how many times the system tries to shatter you, find something to have hope for.
  No matter how much you don’t feel like it, you have to get out of bed, you’ve got to shower, you’ve got to eat; do all those things with that hope of knowing that it will be better.  You’ve just got to keep yourself going. 
  When this first all happened to me it rocked my world, because I didn’t think the world was like that.  Whether I got Justice back was always an uncertainty but I always had hope and that’s what kept me going.  No matter how dark it is, you’ve just got to keep hope going.
• Take care of yourself.
  Having that fear all the time, you have to nurture yourself.  Like you would if your child was scared, you have to do that for yourself.  Do something small to get through those really hard times like having a hot shower and enjoying the feeling of that on your skin.  If things are really bad, have a rest.  Go and sleep, make yourself get up and keep going. 
• Do what makes you happy. 
  Know that when you get your children back, you won’t have time to yourself again, so do something to make yourself happy. 
• Talk to your support people.
  Make sure your support people understand your fear and not to believe what other people might be saying.  The systems that are supposed to be there to support you, might try to destroy your networks of support to bring you down.  No matter how much you don’t want to talk about it because you think it will affect other people, make sure you do talk to your support people. 
• If someone offers you help, take it. 
  If it’s a hot meal or anything, even the smallest things can help. 
• Keep memories of your child close by.
  Maybe set up a new room for your child, keep their toys nearby, something that will give you hope to keep going.  It’s so important you don’t lose the attachment.  In contact visits, take things that your child is familiar with from home, anything that means something to them. 
• Keep showing up for contact visits.
  You have to keep fighting to work for that outcome.  If you give up, you’ll regret it.  It’s not going to get better; things will remain the same.  Know that you’re not alone.  It’s hard when people are making you out to be something that you’re not.  Just don’t forget who you are yourself. 
• Keep in contact with your children as much as you can.
  Call your children to hear their voice.  Listen to your children.  Help them with whatever it is from a distance, any small thing, even if it’s an assignment they’re struggling with.
• Know that you are not a bad parent.
  Think of all the things that you’ve done for your children throughout their lives, think of the hopes and dreams you’ve had for them, and you’ll realise you’re not a bad parent. 

An Invitation to Connect

After reading Rowena’s story, perhaps you’d like to go back to the beginning and re-read what her hopes were in sharing this document.  Then we invite you to write a message to send back to Rowena.  Here are some questions to guide your response.

1. As you read Rowena’s story, were there any words of strength that caught your attention?  Which words?
2. When you read these words, what pictures came to your mind about Rowena and what is important to her (i.e.. hopes, dreams, values and beliefs)?  Can you describe that picture?
3. Is there something about your own life that helps you connect with this part of the story?  Can you share a story from your own experience that shows why this part of the story meant something to you?
4. So what does it mean for you now, having read Rowena’s story?  How have you been moved?  Where has this experience taken you to?

Please send your message to Lucy Van Sambeek via our Contact Page

If you would like to connect with others who are touched by the experience of child removal, please join us on our closed Facebook Group