This story reveals the harsh reality faced by a mother struggling with addiction and mental health challenges within a rigid system that demands perfection. Despite her efforts and love for her children, stigma and systemic failures overshadowed her humanity, reducing her to a case file and labeling her unfit. The narrative exposes how recovery is nonlinear and complex, yet the system punishes symptoms rather than addressing root causes. Ultimately, it is a powerful call to recognize the humanity of parents like her and to challenge the stigma embedded in policies that continue to break families.
They said she “failed to comply.”
That phrase followed her everywhere—courtrooms, case plans, supervised visits where she tried to keep her voice steady so her children wouldn’t hear the tremble.
But the truth was heavier, quieter, and far more human: she was a parent navigating addiction and mental health challenges inside a system that only understood perfection.
The system didn’t ask why she struggled.
It asked why she wasn’t better yet.
When she relapsed after months of sobriety, the tone around her changed.
The relapse wasn’t treated as a symptom of a chronic condition.
It was treated as a choice.
And stigma was right there, whispering its favorite lines:
“You’re not trying hard enough to get your kids back.”
“What kind of mother chooses drugs over her children.”
Those words didn’t just wound her.
They rewrote her in the eyes of the people who held power over her.
No one asked about the trauma she experienced.
No one asked about the therapy waitlist.
No one asked how she was supposed to heal without childcare, transportation, or support.
Instead, they asked why she didn’t “try harder.”
In court, her life was flattened into bullet points.
Her humanity was edited out.
No one saw the mother who packed lunches before school.
No one saw the parent who laid with her kids every night because they didn’t want to be alone.
No one saw the way she fought to stay alive.
They saw a file.
A diagnosis.
A relapse.
The state argued the children needed stability.
As if she didn’t.
The system loved a certain kind of recovery story—the tidy one, the linear one, the one that never slipped or grieved or broke down.
She wasn’t that story.
She was real.
And real healing is never linear.
The day her parental rights were terminated, something inside her collapsed.
Not because she didn’t love her children.
But because she did—and the system treated that love as irrelevant.
They called her “unfit.”
They called her “unstable.”
They called her “a risk.”
But what they meant was:
We don’t know how to support a mother who struggles.
We don’t know how to hold complexity.
We don’t know how to believe in someone who isn’t perfect.
She didn’t lose her children because of addiction.
She didn’t lose them because of mental health challenges.
She lost them because stigma was built into policy.
Because the system punished symptoms instead of treating causes.
Because the people in power believed the worst version of her story—and the worst version always wins when no one fights for the truth.
Years later, she still keeps the letters she wrote.
She still attends meetings.
She still takes her medication.
She still wakes up every day trying to build a life no one thought she deserved.
And she tells her story now—not for pity, but for change.
Because the system didn’t fail her alone.
It fails parents like her every day.
And until stigma stops masquerading as “protection,”
Until recovery is understood as nonlinear,
Until parents are seen as human beings instead of case numbers, the system will keep breaking families and calling it justice.
Add comment
Comments