melbear

I am looking for advice for a situation i am in. I am raising my neice who is 9 and her brother who is 6 years old. They have lived with us on and off for the past 7 years. This last bit has been for the past year. Both of there fathers are in jail and there mother is hooked on every drug under the sun. my brother is the father of the 9 year old. Both fathers talk to there kids every week and they both get to go see them every couple of months. My issue is with the mother of the kids. She wants the kids to stay with her for a weekend and this is the first time she has asked me for this in a very long time. Yesterday she found out she was pregnant again and i don't know if it is that or why she was requesting the kids to stay with her. So yesterday i agreed to give it a trial run and let the kids stay with her for the evening. I dropped them off at 3 and she was fine. When i came back at 7 she was high and had the kids helping lift the sof up to look for money she said she lost. one away from the kids she told me she was selling mthadone to make money and her friend took all the pills and her money. My husband and I do not have custody of the children. She agreed to let the kids stay with us till she got her act together and that was last january. The whole time she has been getting goverment housing and getting food stamps on the kids. Needless to say she sales them for cash. I think this would be only factor on why she would ever want the kids back full time is loosing all the benifits. I need advice on what to do because everytime my neice sees her she gets her heart broken again and again. And now I even see her trying to cover for her mom saying she wasn't feeling good thats why she was acting that way. I know them seeing her like this is out of the question so my mind is made up there. But my question is should we hire an attorney and try to get custody? Should I let the kids see there mom? I don't know what to do. I do not want to take away what little hope the mother has of cleaning up her life but I do not want these kids to have any part of that lifestyle. Please help with any advice that you can.

Thanks for reading
Mel

CoF1984

In my opinion, I think you should keep the kids safe first and foremost. Maybe you can find different options that the mother could use to clean up with and discuss them with her and find out if she'd agree to any of the options there are. While I don't know much about situations like this, I feel like the kids should be kept safe first and foremost, the kids love their mother no doubt, but they shouldn't be in a situation where it's possible anything could happen to them. Hopefully others will be here soon with more and better advice. All I really would know to do is keep the children safe. Keep reading and posting and you'll be able to find a lot of useful information. And welcome to SR.
Wes

parentrecovers

nice to meet you, melbear. my daughter is an alcoholic/addict and face to face alanon meetings really help my husband and i deal with it. there's a friends and family section here at sr, so be sure to do some reading and posting over there as well?

this is not a job for kids, so i'd do whatever you have to do to keep them safe. maybe an attorney or maybe even a private counselor to discuss it with, if you have insurance for that.

in my opinion, unsupervised visits with her are just asking for heartbreak and problems.

i'm grateful you and your husband are willing and able to protect those children - there's a lot of kids out there with no support or protection.

hope this helps. keep reaching out! hugs, k

mle-sober

Hey Mel,

I think you have a heart of gold. But I also think you are lacking boundaries. Taking care of and raising of your brother's child and her younger sibling is probably your "calling" in some way. And so that's why you are doing it. Because you know it's the right thing to do.

But in order to do this right and in order to raise the children properly, you need to get full custody legally. It doesn't make any sense to do it any other way.

I don't understand why you are taking any responsibility for this woman at all. She is not your responsibility and she's not going to get clean and sober until she's good and ready to do the long, hard work it takes. You doing or not doing anything (including keeping her kids from her) will make no difference.

In my opinion, one of the reasons to get it all legal is to protect the kids. She should only have supervised visits for short periods of time.

Also, the kids no doubt feel the instability of the current situation (are they or aren't they going to see their mom? is she doing drugs or not? etc) If you have a permanent arrangement, they feel that. They feel like they BELONG with you. Instead of feeling like they are in transition. I know about this personally.

And I have a question - Why would she lose her benefits if the kids were back with her full-time?

I know you are acting out of the goodness of your heart. But get it all legalized PLEASE so that you and the kids are not taken further advantage of and so you have some protection from this woman. They will also work out guidelines for visitation along the way.

You are being taken advantage of. Just because you're doing a good deed that you know in your heart is the right thing for you to do, doesn't mean that you automatically have to get taken advantage of. Set it all right legally and then you are still doing the good deed but you're also protecting yourself and the children.

Good luck. I hope I don't sound too harsh. I'm just in a hurry.