Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Letter for my Brother, Part Two

My name is Myama Myowne Boone, and I am choosing to fight for my brother’s right to be a father. I am fighting for the 14th Amendment to apply to him – in this country where he willingly pays his taxes, his child support, and now is being stuck with a $14,000 bill which is steadily increasing each day his daughter remains in care.

I am also most importantly a member of the Body of Christ, hoping to change the world one family at a time starting at home, and then in the communities where I grew up, in the lives of the families I work with and advocate for daily, and in the hearts of the children and teens that are desperately hungry for love, family, and acceptance. I am a member of Christ’s Body, and I am demanding change.

Communities begin with families. The brokenness we see everyday is the result of broken families. But some families like mine are splintered because of many factors that feed the fragmentation. The problem is when a ruling entity determines protocol, laws and standards of procedures, it fosters rebellion and anarchy form the top down when those statues are deemed negotiable on a case-by-case basis.

Why in some cases and not in others does the Michigan Absent Parent Protocol become changeable and flexible? Why, in my brother’s case, is it okay for the state of Michigan to ignore his rights and/or demand that he agree that foster care is in the best interest of his child when he is a ready and willing father? Is it because of his race or his socioeconomic class? Or is it because the foster family seems to be more likely able to give her an upper middle class lifestyle? Or is it because the system has a habit of giving men a bad rap when it comes to deciding custody for their children?

I am writing not simply to foster outrage at the way the law bends, changes shape, and metamorphoses into a different organism altogether when race, poverty, and classism intermingle and explode. I am not simply writing just to remind you of what you may already know. I am writing to remind the Body of Christ that we all have a greater responsibility to care expressly for the disenfranchised and marginalized, even if the disenfranchised and marginalized is my brother, your sister, my neighbor, your cousin, the man down the street, or the children sitting in our pews every Sunday.

We must not stand back and allow the fathers that are returning to or attempting to maintain their rightful places in their children’s lives to be trod upon in the name of mammon and enterprise. We must not allow children to be monopolized by a moneymaking infrastructure that is slowly becoming something not structured to help heal broken families and lives as it was meant to at its inception. We must not allow mothers who need help raising their children to be pawns in the destruction of their own offspring. And most importantly we must not allow our families to become even more fractured than they already are.

Are we helping heal the family unit? Is there a cause for our intervention? Can we demand of the government to change with the times? Should we stand up for righteousness in our society and call the lawmakers and policyholders to task on the areas where we see families and children headed on a downward spiral further into fragmentation and poverty when there are clearly other alternatives?

I say yes.

We, as the Body of Christ, see the grand finale of familial breakdown. We try our best to fix the broken places. We speak to families, proclaiming God’s healing and intervention. We develop programs and methods and ministries to minister to the whole person (and it is wonderful to the purpose of God for our individual houses of worship). But how can any of our plans be effective when our parishioners walk back into the worlds from whence they come, battling with the powers-that-be, which seem determined to undo the work of Christ in their lives?

My brother, like so many fathers out here, is not perfect. His anger and frustration at the rejection of his paternal attempts at reunifying with his daughter may be raw, fresh, and I fear, used against him. When he tells the caseworker that he wants his daughter and she comes up with some new idea to keep her in the system longer, he seems to be at the breaking point. His questions may be intrusive to a system that refuses to answer. His determination to hold fast to that indefinable other called “parental rights” may be maddeningly frustrating to that same caseworker, to the attorney assigned to his case, to the judge sitting on the bench in Family Circuit Court, and even to the biological mother, whom while she may not be any closer to receiving all her children back home, does not want any of the fathers to exercise their rights at all.

But the truth is, despite the appearances, he is a father. He is one of many.
For so long society has complained about the absence of fathers in the homes of our communities. I have been one of the loudest voices, having grown up without mine and watching the eventual destruction a parent’s continued absence causes in their children’s lives. In fact, my brother struggled with always being present in all his children’s lives but he has never been untouchable. They know their father; they love him though it has not always been easy, and no, he has not been the model parent. But as stated earlier that has no bearing on whether he should be allowed to parent his child when she is in trouble.

As I have witnessed the phenomenon of parental absence and neglect perpetuated sometimes by outside forces instead of being curtailed (as the Michigan Protocol was designed to do), I have wondered if there is indeed more to the story. I have wondered if we can make a blanket resolution that all non-custodial parents and specifically fathers do not care about their children. I have wondered what the church’s response should be.

I am writing to you, our leaders and pastors, because I believe the cries of our families and the fathers of those families (children) are demanding a response from us. I believe with my whole heart that God Himself is allowing some things to be uncovered so we will know how to pray and respond. I have sensed for a long time that God the Father is not simply unhappy that fathers are missing from the homes, but that He is unhappy that there are certain systems of thought and social policy that are feeding the spirit of absenteeism that seems so pervasive. I have prayed about how to encourage the fathers to return to their children and not to leave them struggling alone. But then the question was raised that what if some fathers want to return to caring for their children but are being prevented by various legal sources? What if they want to have a more permanent voice in their children’s lives but outside entities are stifling the power of their presence and the way has not been made?

I am not in any way defending single parenthood or the conception of children out of wedlock. I am in no way defending men that parent children and then just leave them. I will not condone any parent, male or female, birthing children into this generation haphazardly. But what I am bringing to your attention is that parental separation happens for a variety of reasons, but children should never be denied the opportunity to have their natural parents, who are willing to fulfill their role, in their lives and given the opportunity to do so.

I am writing this because my brother daily wrestles with giving up his parental rights, which is what some others have insinuated would be the best thing. I am writing because we have demanded that men in our communities “do everything right” but when the procedures are followed, when those who are willing put their independence on the shelf in support of the greater good of their children, and when they try to stand up instead of sitting back, there is still no guarantee that “everything” is “right” because whether those in authority want to admit it or not, the rules to the game do change halfway through the process.

I am writing because my brother has chosen to stand instead of bow to the pressure. His daughter, whom has stated many times that she wishes her father had been more present when she was younger, has even tried to dissuade him from his goal of caring for and protecting her. I am writing because if my brother does not hold unto his rights to his daughter, no one else will make sure his rights are protected. Or so it would seem.

My petition to you today is simply yet profoundly this:

Be the Body of Christ with me for my brother and those other non-custodial parents (primarily fathers) that are being denied their God-given and constitutional right not to give up their children to the foster care system unnecessarily and who truly love and want to care for them.

Be the Body of Christ with me to broken and splintered families both within the church walls and in the milieu of our world’s highways and byways.

Be the Body of Christ with me, agents of change and mission, demanding that the laws set in our world are fairly and uniformly honored and adhered to by our governmental officials and agencies.

Be the Body of Christ with me most importantly in the prayer and supplication needed on behalf of our children, on behalf of our families in our communities, and for men like my brother. Some are indeed standing up, and we need to help strengthen their legs and hold up their arms. That is what my family is attempting to do for my brother but we are finding that we cannot do it alone.

Please join us in prayer during these next two months. On May 14, we will return to court for yet another court hearing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My brother will be traveling from San Antonio, Texas to demand that his parental rights be finally honored and he be given custody of his daughter. That is the work only he alone can do.

Non-custodial parents, men or women separated from the other parent of their child(ren) have the right by state law and a duty to protect and care for their children themselves. Judicially no one has the right to forcibly seize or terminate a parent’s rights without due process. Once that parent has been cleared for possible placement of their children should the other parent lose custody for any reason (and specifically, in my brother’s case, to the foster care system) that parent has the right to petition the court for full and permanent custody.

I am requesting the spiritual assistance of the leaders of the Body of Christ at this time – not only for my brother but for the many men that are losing their children everyday unfairly. Please put this cause on your church’s or ministry’s intercession list. We so desperately need your prayers.

I will close this letter with a final thought.

When the prophet Malachi spoke of the coming of the spirit of the prophet Elijah in the Book of Malachi, I always wondered if the continued meaning of that passage was only exclusively referring to the coming of John the Baptist in the New Testament. I always wondered if there was another meaning equally as symbolic. Did the Word given by God elude to another clarion call?

In Malachi 4:5, I began questioning if God was simply referring to a spiritual return of the fathers to the children as witnessed in the coming of John paving the way for Christ. Or was He also signifying of another day? More literally, in our times, would there be a physical return of fathers to their children? And then, I began to wonder if there is something pivotal the Body of Christ can do to help influence this return by bringing a deeper awareness to our local government, with the intent that ultimately children are indeed returned to their fathers.

Clearly every story is different. There can be no across-the-board uniformity because these are personal situations, but in my study of the research and my reading of some recent treatises and reports, I have had to realize that what my brother is going through right now is not unique. Some of the things I have looked at and the stories I have heard first hand implies that time and again men like my brother can be railroaded into giving up their constitutional rights, threatened with false allegations, and forced to pay for many years for the care of their children when their children would have been better served with their fathers, despite the assumptions made.

My niece will be 18 next year, but by the time her father finishes paying for an unnecessary stay in a foster home, she will be an adult. The truth is it is highly unlikely that he would ever be able to simply pay $600/month for her to live in someone else’s home. That is an unfair request to ask of a father that wants his child in his own home.

Thank you for your prayerful attention in this matter.

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