FYI: This was original The Harder Question of the Day for 23 January 2010, which is why there are already comments on the post.

My Question of the Day: Reflecting on the tremendous number of children who have been orphaned by natural and man-made disasters, what are your thoughts about children being adopted by parents of another race/ethnicity/faith?

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My Question of the Day:

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My Question of the Day: Sabina’s 15-year-old daughter, Cassidy, gets pregnant, and Sabina refuses to allow her to have an abortion. Cassidy is adamant that she will not mother the child, and she won’t even tell Sabina who the father is.

Sabina would love to raise the baby herself, but she’s a widow with four small children of her own, limited in her mobility by the same car accident that claimed her husband’s life.

Sabina’s younger sister, Daphne, and her husband, Darryl, stop by very often to help Sabina with the household responsibilities and the children. Daphne and Darryl would love to have children of their own, but they’ve been trying unsuccessfully for years. When they find out about Cassidy’s pregnancy and Sabina’s and Cassidy’s  stalemate, they ask Sabina if they can take the baby when s/he is born and raise him/her as their own. Sabina immediately agrees to this solution.

For five years, Daphne and Darryl raise their niece, Asha, in a loving and comfortable home. They spend a lot of time with Sabina and her children, and Cassidy calls Asha her cousin.

Everything changes, however, when Cassidy turns 21 and moves out of her mother’s house. On the day she is to remove the last of her things to her new place, Cassidy comes over to find Daphne, Darryl and Asha visiting Sabina. Asha is playing with her aunts and uncles, and Cassidy steps into the living room, where the adults are watching television. She tells her mother, her aunt and her uncle that she wants her daughter back.

Daphne and Darryl are stunned, and Sabina is beside herself with anger. The idea of uprooting and traumatizing her granddaughter fills Sabina with fear and rage, especially when she thinks back to how totally unbending Cassidy was about raising Asha when she was pregnant with her. With her mother, aunt and uncle ranting and raving at her, calling her selfish and questioning her love for her daughter, Cassidy says nothing but allows them to tire themselves out and dissolve into tears.

Cassidy very calmly says that Asha is her child, that she never signed away her parental rights, that Sabina, not she, made the arrangements with Daphne and Darryl, and that they can hand Asha over peacefully or she will get a lawyer and fight them for as long as it takes to get her daughter back. When she’s done speaking, Cassidy picks up her purse, goes out the front door, walks to her friend’s car and they drive away. Daphne, Darryl and Sabina stare blankly at one another.

What do you think Daphne and Darryl should do?

My 2 Cents: Something similar to this happened in my family, and the family member who’d cared for the child allowed the child to go back to the birth mother without a fight, but there were many, many tears and hard feelings, for sure.

It’s hard for me to say I’d battle with family in a situation like this, but it’s hard to say I’d allow a child I’ve bonded with for five years to go without at least attempting to fight for him/her.

I’d first try to reason with my niece; try to come to some sort of compromise to make sure we stayed in Asha’s life. If that failed, I’d like to believe I’d get legal counsel and attempt to keep Asha right where she’s been since her birth; in our loving and comfortable home.

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The commentary doesn’t have to end!

Please feel free to continue to add your comments below.

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RULES FOR COMMENTS

1. DO NOT include links in your post. There is a place for you to include one link when you’re filling out the Name/Email/Website information. Comments that include links will be deleted.

2. If your post is obviously irrelevant to the question at hand, it will be deleted. This is a tactic spammers use to simply show up on blogs.

3. Please keep your comments respectful. We can agree to disagree without attacking each other.

My Question of the Day: Douglas and Howard adopted an eight-year-old girl, Shelisa, who got caught up in the foster-care system a year before after her horribly, abusive biological father, Ernest, beat Shelisa’s mother to death and left Shelisa duct taped to a heating unit and fled.

Although Shelisa was not beaten, it was two weeks before anyone found her or her mother. During those two weeks, the heating unit would burn Shelisa’s back each time it came on. Her muffled screams are what saved her life. A gas company employee was passing by the window to disconnect the heat for nonpayment and heard Shelisa trying to yell through the duct tape on her mouth. He looked through the crack in the curtains and immediately dialed 911.

By the time Shelisa was adopted, Ernest still hadn’t been caught.

Howard is at work and he gets a call from Shelisa’s school that there is an emergency and he and/or Douglas needs to come right away. Howard isn’t able to leave work, so he calls Douglas, a work-from-home web designer, and tells him to get to the school immediately and to call him as soon as Douglas knows what’s going on. Douglas sprints out of the house and down the street to the school, which is in walking distance from their home.

When Douglas gets to the school, he dials Howard at work and puts him on speakerphone, and the principal explains what’s so urgent. During recess, Shelisa was approached by Ernest when she went to the fence to retrieve a ball. She got close enough to the fence for Ernest to grab her sleeve and refuse to let go until Shelisa told him where she lived and who she lived with. When Shelisa told him her two daddies were very nice and loved her, Ernest became enraged and started yelling obscenities at the little girl. This is when one of the teachers was alerted to what was happening at the fence, and she fast-walked toward Shelisa and Ernest, getting to Shelisa just as Ernest let her go and bolted down the street.

The police were called and they took a statement, but they said the city didn’t have the manpower or resources to put a 24 hours patrol on the family. One officer suggested they hire a private body guard, but Douglas knew they couldn’t afford that.

When Howard got home that evening, Shelisa was already sleeping and he asked Douglas to join him in the kitchen. On the table sat a black case, and Howard instructed Douglas to open it. When Douglas opened the case, he was surprised to see a .9mm Glock staring up at him. There ensued a heated argument between Howard and Douglas. Howard was opposed to keeping the gun in the house with their child, but Douglas argued that he could protect them if the gun was nearby. They argued late into the night about the pros and cons of keeping the gun in the house, but they could reach no agreement. That night, Howard relented and took the gun outside and put it in the trunk of their car.

Who do you think is right?

My 2 Cents: I’m with Douglas, y’all. No guns in the house. At least, that’s how I feel now until someone threatens me or mine. Mess with my family, and I will most likely have a whole ‘nother outlook on that “gun in the house” thing. I’m just saying.

It’s kind of like not believing in the death penalty until a murderer kills someone you love deeply. You may find your center somewhere down the road, but often the first reaction is to want to reciprocate in kind.

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The commentary doesn’t have to end!

Please feel free to continue to add your comments below.

———-

RULES FOR COMMENTS

1. DO NOT include links in your post. There is a place for you to include one link when you’re filling out the Name/Email/Website information. Comments that include links will be deleted.

2. If your post is obviously irrelevant to the question at hand, it will be deleted. This is a tactic spammers use to simply show up on blogs.

3. Please keep your comments respectful. We can agree to disagree without attacking each other.