What Inspired “Its Almost Tuesday”

“It’s Almost Tuesday” is a fictional story based on true events, using a young child’s exact words when possible. I was approached by an advocate asking for me to write a poem for child abuse awareness month. I agreed and was happy to do so. I love to write. “Its Almost Tuesday” depicts true incidents reported within the Texas Foster Care System as I had researched on the Child Care lookup site for TDPRS’s required reporting of foster home incidents. While this story is fictional in the details of situations, those situations are based upon abuse that occur every day all over our country in foster homes. I took notes and pictures at the visits, and logged everything, and compared those notes to the visit recordings, and look up incidents online that were reported, in order to figure out what might be happening to my son in foster care.

My son was abused for months before it became too obvious for CPS to hide. The worst day of my life, seeing my son bloody and bruised, was the best day of his life during that time, because it got him out of foster care. The irony is sickening. He never did come home. I was placed under a gag order, my website shut down, and he was placed elsewhere, name changed, and location information sealed.

I miss my 8 year old boy who is 12 now, but in my memories, dreams and mind, he will always be 8 years old to me… I will never hear his child voice again say “I love you Mommy”, its gone. I never got to say goodbye. The incidents in the story are based on reports I had read and remembered. That time of my life terrorized and traumatized me as a mother feeling so helpless and so guilty for the mistakes I made. I spent a year trying to find out why my baby screamed until that day I heard the tape clearly.

That was the inspiration for my story.

When I was asked to write something, I had no problem coming up with ideas, the story was already written in my head. Within 3 hours, I had written, by hand, in a notebook and on scrap paper & napkins, the story “Its Almost Tuesday” with two alternate endings; and called her back to let her know it was finished. Other than a few minor changes and grammatical corrections, the story was final in its first raw draft. We chose an ending between the two I had written, and it was first posted on Child Abuse Awareness.com .

Foster homes are meant to be a placement of safety for children removed from their family homes due to abuse or neglect, and when other abuse occurs, statistically worse than before their removal, something is wrong.

The Story Behind The Story

If she left him, she would pay. That’s what Robbie would tell Mary in the mid-1990’s during their brief 2-3 year (abusive) marriage. If she left him, she would never see her son again. He had been physically abusive, involved in a cult-like group that has camps world-wide and he vowed to hide Mary’s son from her forever if she left.

She took the chance…and she left.

Mary moved several states away from Texas to escape domestic violence and spousal abuse from Robbie. She found her ’safe state’ in this new place and for nearly 6 years the mother and son had lived an abuse-free life. Mary had remarried, and begun a new life. She had obtained a domestic violence protective order after her divorce when he continued to stalk and abuse her, particularly when he found out she would be remarrying another man who would raise their son as his own.

For nearly 6 years Robbie remained quiet and began another relationship with a woman who had children from another relationship. Ironically her daughter was the same age as Mary’s daughter. Except for his attempts to contact her via email or phone on holidays and birthdays, he was quiet. Each violation Mary recorded in a log she kept, and reported to the police in her ’safe state’. But Robbie eluded law enforcement, and without violence or significant threats in his contacts, the violations were not severe enough to warrant an interstate investigation and arrest with extradition.

Getting away with minor violations made Robbie bolder as time went by. He racked up nearly $50,000.00 in unpaid child support as his lifestyle was deeply ingrained into Satanism and his occult group…secretly.

On the outside, he involved himself in the local Christian churches and Christian private schools. He was freely donating his time and services as a webmaster and giving the churches and schools free websites….this ultimately gave him credibility and witnesses that he had changed from his occultist ways. He did this planning to have a plan to dispute Mary’s allegation that he was involved in the ‘cult’, if he should ever need to.

It also gave him access to children…

He spent that time plotting … planning… and waiting for his chance to catch his prey, his ex-wife, and keep true to his vow if she left him… he would see to it that she pay.

In October 2003, Mary and her young 8 year old son reluctantly left their new ’safe’ state for an extended vacation to visit and receive help from her family in Texas. It was a difficult time because of marital problems between Mary and her new husband of 3 years, whom she married following her divorce from Robbie. The separation had a lot to do with the stress of the aftermath Mary suffered from her abusive marriage and living in constant fear. This time, though, Mary had become ill following a car accident. When the new couple separated, Mary was crushed and heartbroken. She was having great difficulty dealing with the separation and being thrown into single motherhood while suffering illnesses and living alone in her ’safe state’.

It eventually proved too much for her to handle, and after losing the marital home, she called on her family in Texas to help. With reassurances of love and protection from family, Mary reluctantly returned to Texas, and thought they would be all right for the couple of months they intended to stay. It was a fatal mistake.

Just after the holiday season, Mary’s former husband, abuser and alleged father of her young son began attempting to make contact with them to see the child, disregarding very specific Domestic Violence Court Protective Orders totally restricting contact and visitation between this abusive man and his ex-wife and her child. Mary reported his stalking behaviors to the police department of a suburb of Dallas/Ft.Worth Texas, whose response never erred on the side of caution. On at least 8 occasions, the Police refused to protect the mother and child and would not enforce the valid out-of-state order for such protection.

The alleged father began to conspire with Mary’s unstable and estranged biological mother in an effort to give the maternal grandmother custody of this beautiful child and to get the Texas Courts to grant visitation to the abusive father. He had managed to do and “get away” with much since his release from an prison in 1994. He knew that with the assistance of those Grandmommy rubbed shoulders with - the local Child Protective Services workers and police officers - allegations of severe abuses by Mary against her son would be their ticket to standing in family court. He had the criminal mind to create the plan and the Grandmother had the sympathy and reputation to carry it out. It was a perfect plan.

The abuses cited were abuses Grandmommy herself had levied against the child, the child’s older sister and against Mary herself; but somehow, despite outcries from the children, Grandmommy was never cited for abuse. They also accused Mary, a paralegal with no criminal record, of several drug trafficking and manufacturing allegations – using her history of addiction, which was over a decade before as a teenager. They even went so far as to accuse her of sexual abuse against the children which, ultimately, would be proven to be exactly what Robbie, himself, was committing against his new stepdaughter at home in a small town in Texas.

Child’s Sexual Abuse Ignored by CPS

Mary went with her daughter, a teenager, to counseling, where she made sexual abuse outcries against her ex-husband Robbie, of abuse that had occurred ten years before when she was only 4 or 5 years old. This was reported to the authorities, by the children’s therapist, and the school officials and CPS social workers were made aware. Oddly, despite informing the authorities of these outcries and despite photographic evidence of her ex-husband’s violations of her ’safe state’ issued protective order against domestic violence, the authorities repeatedly turned a deaf ear toward the concerns regarding the safety of Mary and her children; as well as the new stepdaughter living with Robbie.

The Department Child Protective Services caseworker and her superior “administratively closed” an investigation of sexual abuse against Robbie, despite a finding of risk that this man was, at the current time, living with and possibly abusing his stepdaughter. In the end, it was revealed that Robbie was, indeed, abusing his stepdaughter who might have escaped her tormenting abuser – at least for two years, had they done their job. If CPS had listened to Mary and her daughter’s outcries, rather than ignoring them, things might have been a lot different for these children.

By mid-spring in 2004 the allegations against Mary were dropped and she was cleared of any charges of abuse or neglect against her son. Life seemed quiet once again. Mary and her son needed to wrap up the last of the Court appearances and gather the remaining portion of their belongings for shipping home. For the most part, their nightmare was over….or so they thought.

Child Abduction, Theft & Fraudulent Mental Illness Warrant

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