In 2016 I was at a Panera store in Virginia, near DC. I and intended to work on my book, “Listening to Babies” while I was waiting for my daughter. I had settled in and then a couple and a woman sat down next to me. The couple was on my side and the woman across from me, barely three feet between us. They began to have a very private and loud conversation that was impossible to ignore.

The woman was a foster care worker doing an intake with a couple wanting to foster. I could not believe it. The lack of regard for privacy. I could not believe the questions.

In order to be quiet, I had to get out my sketch book and do a Soul Portrait here above. The pain of all of the people who have been impacted by this system that purports to support families.

The foster care system is a very dysfunctional system, with little oversight. It is also in the business of separating mothers and children under the quise of help - the obstetric model of birth initiates the first separations of mother-baby.

This is a well-balanced article in The Atlantic that describes the problem of Child Protective Services in every one of the five states I’ve worked in:

The CPS system needs some sensible checks to protect the innocent. “When in doubt, call the hotline” inevitably leads to unnecessary stress for wrongly accused families. Unless there’s reason to fear imminent harm to a child, a medical review for “reasonable suspicion” should precede rather than follow the decision to place a call. States need to use neutral decision makers. Relatedly, doctors who work directly with the state need to disclose their roles so that parents have a genuine and fair choice about how to respond to allegations against them; parents shouldn’t mistake physicians tasked with evaluating the merits of a hotline call for members of their child’s medical-care team. Finally, long delays in concluding investigations, especially where evidence of wrongdoing by parents has not been uncovered, should no longer be tolerated.

I brought home a girl in my kindergarten class to live at my house because she said she didn’t want to go home - because she was being abused.

Everything I do has grown out of that. I remember when she left my house. Someone had come to get her. My mother and father did nothing memorable but the next day at school my teacher did.

It was nap time. My school was a large old brick building. The ceilings were tall. The lights were off and there were shadows. I was laying on my mat. Mrs. Knight squatted down by me. I remember being shocked and scared when she hissed her angry coffee breath at me: “You were a bad girl. You scared everyone” by doing what I did.

I was so not a bad girl. Decades later when escavating my early wounds in search of my purpose I revisited that moment - as defining for me. Mrs. Knight pissed me off; questioning my goodness, my truth, and my actions to help an abused child. The image of her large angry frame looming over me, the shadows in the large room, her misplaced anger - the adult at the child - defined my journey through life to stop abuse of children.

She abused me psychologically and emotionally for supporting a peer - I was six years old. She was the adult. But she represented to me the SYSTEM, the self-serving, self-preserving, egotistical, child-abusing for-profit system. I learned forty years later why I was in the state of NY directing a project - my dream job - to “make the system family supportive.” And, it was Mrs. Knight to the tenth power.

I left that job in 1999 as a whistleblower, and after three months in the desert, it lead me to infant massage training and craniosacral training. I was going to teach mothers how to do infant massage “to keep them out of the system in the first place.”

My husband was also by then an obstetric resident in the Chicago area. Back in Illinois, I was doing craniosacral-based birth trauma with new moms and babies, and decided I would train as a doula to “prevent it.” Wow, what a joke.

I quickly was aware of my own birth trauma as a baby and a mother. I realized that rather than getting out of the fray of the work of “helping women and children” systems, I was out of the proverbial frying pan and in the fire. Separation of mother-baby at birth is an fundamental issue in our culture. CPS is not the answer to that problem but simply part of the conveyor belt of Limbic Capitalism in our culture. Dysfunction, disorder and disease are a result of the infliction of ritualized, routine separation practices of the mother-baby at birth and at every opportunity.

I did a two-year intense specialized training in resolving birth trauma.

Minnesota Parents are Suing CPS

CPS is a direct result of the profit-based, misogynist, mother-baby disrupting obstetric model of birth that routinely and ritually separates mothers and babies from the first moment.

I believe the research that shows that spanking is detrimental to the baby's emotional and brain development. I believe that there is no reason whatsoever for an adult person to hit or spank a child. Whenever a child is misbehaving to the point where an adult feels like they need to hit that child, it is the adults responsibility to stop and redirect. And to deal with her own out-of-control emotions.

That said, Child Protective Services has no business taking children who've been spanked from their parents and putting them into a system where 60% of sex trafficked children are from a CPS. Where those same children are more likely to be sexually abused and physically abused and emotionally abused, and killed.

Support and #fundmothering.

Financially support babies to have their mother or a family member who loves them for the first year of life, minimum.

Protect women's education, jobs, and career progress for 1-3 years while she continues the process of building a thriving, compassionate, and connected human.

Stop saying - in words, actions, laws, and programs - that it's okay for women to get paid caring for a child as long as it's not her child.