With nervous expectation, I stepped from the cab in front of the dark Victorian home, now converted for use by a legal firm, located on the corner of a major thoroughfare and a quaint community street. It was only an hour before our scheduled court hearing, and I was to meet my lawyer to review, for the first time, the results of the assessment. I had been warned the timeframe for the release of the assessment before court would be tight, but this was cutting it close, and though I expected a positive report, a ominous feeling hung heavy in the air which I struggled to dismiss as I ascended the front porch steps. Hearing the hollow sound of ancient wood beneath my feet, I crossed the porch, turned the dented brass knob, and pushed open the door.
Upon my entrance, the receptionist phoned my lawyer who promptly descended from a narrow winding stairway near the front door. The constricted nature of this passageway was an indication that this was most likely the servant stairs, a remnant of earlier days still familiar in some of the older homes in Halifax. Clutched in her hands was the all important document.
"It is not good" were the only words she expressed as she stretched the 23 page document towards me. And the exhausted slumbering lamb that had crumpled into a deep sleep was suddenly jolted into an awareness of the realty of the surrounding danger. I was left alone on a bench in the open hallway that embraced the receptionist's office to digest this document by myself. I recall feeling abandoned, open, vulnerable and uncomfortable. What a place to read such a traumatic document! In hind sight, realizing now that my own lawyers were never working for me, perhaps it was hoped that I would display some inappropriate manifestation of emotion that could be witnessed by others.
Realizing that the relevant conclusions, the bottom line, would be at the end, I immediately flipped to the last page of the document.
I was stunned. The sense of agony, pain, and the fear of my grandson being given to strangers, never to see his family again, flooded my brain. How could such a conclusion have been reached? My first assumption was that there must have been some sort of misrepresentation of the test results from the 3 tests given me. After all, there was some very strange questions in those tests like “I have been around the world several times this week - True or False” or “I have been hearing voices - True or False”, etc. Then as I quickly scanned the entire document I was dumbfounded as I realized that not some but every statement I made during my many interviews during the assessment process was misrepresented.
Now I was a reasonable person, and even with such an important assessment, I could fathom one, two, or even three misunderstandings, but this was beyond comprehension! None, absolutely none, of my responses were correctly reproduced in this document. How could they, why would they so blatantly misrepresent me? But there they were. The lies, one after the other, splashed across the pages of this document. Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack! As I skimmed through the pages, each lie left its emotional blow and my heart was on the ground bleeding and wounded. No one, anywhere, at any time, had done such a vicious things against me before, and most incredulously the worst impressions of myself came from statements that they claimed I had made, myself!
One example of the misrepresentations that filled this document was my alleged response to them asking me how I felt about the fact that my daughter and I had not spoken with each other since my grandson had been taken into care. In the assessment, they stated that my answer to them had been that “it was the best thing for her” - period. With nothing more than this, one was left with the impression that I didn’t care about my daughter. But this was only the smallest sliver of my actual answer, and taken out of context, the accurate meaning of my response had been flipped around 180 degrees.
My answer, in its entirety, told a different story: I had stated that, previous to this, whenever my daughter and I had any falling out, she had always stayed in communication with me, and that this was the first time that this communication had discontinued. I went on to explain that my daughter never accepted responsibility for her actions, that she always tended to find a way to blame me for everything and that maybe, just maybe, this might turn out to be the best thing for her, because, no longer having me around to blame for everything, she might be forced to reflect upon herself and her own responsibilities, and maybe - just maybe - this might help her.
I was astounded that the authors of this assessment felt they could lie so boldly! How could anyone justify misrepresenting every statement I had said. Indeed, insanity was there but it did not lay with me! That feeling of shock, that would become so familiar, enveloped my body, and with it came the paralyzing feeling of helplessness. This was insane! Surely, I was reading the report of another person! This reality, my present reality, was sick and disturbing, and it seemed to float helplessly in a heavy numbing soup of unreality. I was trapped in a nightmare with no one to wake me up!
Eventually, my lawyer reappeared out of the darkness at the bottom of the stairway, calling me up to her office. As I followed her, up this winding narrow stairway, reminiscent of a castle tower staircase, the steps groaned and squeaked beneath my feet. Upon reaching the dimly lit landing, we turned abruptly to the right, following the banister that overlooked the stairway to the end of the hall. Here we entered her office, a room of frugal proportions, barely large enough to contain her desk, and a small cluttered bookshelf. As she squeezed behind her desk I settled into the remaining wooden chair perched near the door.
As I sat there listening to her, I can't say that I remember a single word she said. As she chattered on, I allowed myself to think about the discomfort of having to enter a court knowing that everyone there would have read the damning words in this document spoken against me. Would people believe this document? Would people believe me? These were professional people who wrote this document. Who am I next to them? Why would anyone believe me? How could such a thing happen? How can such a thing be true? So many questions were snapping through my mind. And then I thought, I am no one special. If they have been bold enough to use such deceitful tactics against me, surely this could not be the first time. But as this thought floated through my brain it seemed surreal. How could such things be true? This is Canada! This is Canada! Things like this are not suppose to happen in Canada!
In a few minutes, I would be whisked to the courthouse where I would stand before the justice of the court, a man who I respected. In respecting this justice, I felt shame and embarrassment that I would stand before this person knowing that he would have read this document that claimed me to be narcissistically self absorbed, and not worthy to raise my grandson. But, surely, I thought, this justice, whom I believed to be a good and honest person, in all his years on the bench, must have had enough previous experience with assessments to have at least some suspicions and concerns about their integrity. Maybe, I thought, when he hears the statements made against me, it will add to his accumulated knowledge, and my case might contribute to lifting the veil of ignorance surrounding this wrong. Naively I believed that the injustice would be so apparent that the justice would surely intervene in some way. Needless to say, I was still very ignorant of judicial procedure and I wrongly assumed that justices had more pre-trial power than they actually do.
It was then that I pulled in the strength of my spiritual faith. I would stand before this human judge knowing that he had read this document that brutally dammed me, but I knew that my God, the judge who knows all things, who knows my heart, my soul, and my mind, like no other human being possibly could, knew the person that I was.
Secure in this knowledge, I determined that I could stand before this human judge, for I had no reason to be humiliated. As my lawyer rambled on, I prayed: "God, You know the truth and in the end You are the only one who needs to know the truth. I can walk into that court and I can stand before all these lies because You know the truth. I stand before You as my judge and I submit myself into your hands"
When I walked into that court with this document speaking against me it was apparent that I was being dismissed by Children's Services like yesterdays newspaper, insignificantly thrown off to the sideline. The speech of their lawyer were nonchalant, like it was the norm, old hat to them. But, this was most significant to me and though my grandson was too young to realize it, it was most significant to him. Though, for the time being, I would still be allowed access to my grandson, they had cut me off at the knees. My hope for unsupervised access was now severely hampered, and more importantly, my bid to bring my grandson home had been strangled by this deceitful document.
I am sure many people assume that out legal system is civilized and appropriate. I used to think so. But these are the kinds of assumptions made by persons who have not experienced our legal system first hand. As a person represented by legal counsel, I did not have the ability to say anything in my own defense during pre-trial hearings unless the justice addressed me specifically - this is an extreme rarity. Time and time again I was frustrated as I was forced to sit dumbly by my lawyers. In these circumstances, not having the ability to speak for myself, I was at the mercy of my own lawyers, the very people who were suppose to be defending me. In time, I came to accept the fact that these lawyers were unfaithful and unimpassioned with my case. All I was to them, was coins jingling in their pockets, nothing more.
Though I had never believed those dehumanizing jokes about lawyers before, I now passionately believed them all, thinking myself quite the fool for being so naïve. Alas, I had been raised on Perry Mason, noble Perry Mason.
However, it does grieve my soul that I was wrong about lawyers. I wish I had experienced lawyers to be noble, really caring about truth and justice. But as I witnessed one person who was self-representing in court recently say, “ This is a court of law, not a court of truth.” He was right, truth, unfortunately, has no room in our courts today.
However, though the justice had only seen this document hours before court, it was apparent that he had done his homework. In reading through the assessment, he was concerned that there were a number of people (people who did not even know me, people who only repeated lies told them by my daughter) brought forth from the other side that contributed information for my assessment against me, yet only three people I had brought forward were included in this assessment. About this, the justice was concerned enough that he ordered the professionals responsible for this assessment to immediately give a written explanation for such methodology.
Their reply was incredulous: they felt no need to speak to the people I had brought forth because they assumed all they would do was support me. Does this make any logical sense? This was suppose to be an unbiased assessment. They had the ethical obligation to hear both sides of the story.
As it turned out, 2 of the 3 people, put forth by me, who were spoken to by the assessors were so concerned that they had been misrepresented in the assessment that one, herself, pushed to get the original copy made from her telephone interview and wrote a note to the court concerning this. The other person filed an affidavit voicing her concern about the way her interview had been done. In her affidavit she stating that she was disturbed by the assessors blatant push to get only negative information about me and that she was so concerned that they were dismissing what she did have to say about me that she found herself repeating the statements she had made.
After court I went home to study this document in detail. Upon inspection it became apparent that the assessment procedure was never fully explained to me. In fact, the information I was told was totally misleading, and many important details of the process did not become apparent to me until I actually read the report.
This assessment was mind boggling! As soon as I got home, I faxed the assessment to my uncle in Alberta and phoning him spoke with him at great length. Surely, I exclaimed, to have everything - absolutely everything - I said turned upside down, is evidence of deliberate misrepresentation. Concurring, my uncle pointed out that bias in the assessment was apparent to him by the "complete lack of anything positive" said about me. I remember being struck by this. What he said was true, but it took me some time to digest this. This was a significant observation. For this assessment to ring true shouldn’t there be some recognition of some positive qualities in me. After all, I had no police record, I had never done drugs, I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was an educated person with a recognized academic accomplishments. I had graduated as highest B.A. aggregate, attained a B.Ed. and I had maintained a perfect GPA of 4.00 while earning my M.Ed. In addition, I had been an active member in the community: a brownie leader, a Sunday school teacher, and a teacher in my community conducting programs not only for children but also for parents and children together .
But the professionals conducting this assessment twisted everything against me, even my education. Though 2 educated women were signatories to this pretense of professional composition, they stated in my assessment,
_____ is a 45 year old woman who works full-time and goes to school on a part time basis. She is hopeful of advancing in her career after completion of her Masters degree. The amount of time and energy that ______ would have for [her grandson], who is a very active child, has been questioned by [unnamed] collaterals sources.
To me, this was insane!
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