Last Chance Statements: When Patterns Resurface - Part 2
When the system praises progress without remembering the damage that led us here.
This week’s hearing unfolded mostly as we expected, until it didn’t.
Before the hearing, we believed the plan moving forward was for summer parenting time to be equal, followed by a return to the next school-year where we’d have the majority schedule. That’s what we understood. But at the end of the hearing, the judge clarified something very different: he intends for parenting time to remain equal even during the school year.
That felt like the biggest blow.
Not just because of the miscommunication, but because we’re already seeing signs of regression. The same patterns we worked so hard to unravel over the past year are starting to return. And instead of taking that seriously, the court brushed it off as "expected bumps in the road."
There were other changes, too. They no longer have to use the communication app with our stepdaughter, though we still monitor her phone activity using a parental control application, Bark. Unfortunately, Apple’s latest privacy and security updates have made this increasingly difficult. For us, Android has always offered more flexibility with parental controls, so this shift has been frustrating. But her mother prefers Apple, and so my stepdaughter sees it as the superior choice.
One positive change is that her mother is now allowed to speak directly with the therapist, a shift from what began as reunification therapy focused on repairing the relationship between my husband and his daughter. Now, the therapist wants to better understand the full dynamic between my stepdaughter and both of her parents. Thankfully, she’s still prohibited from filing grievances.
We had hoped the judge would recognize what’s really happening. That he might scale back the plan or express concern about our stepdaughter’s emotional state. Instead, he praised her mother for her behavior during the hearings, for how she “handled” things. As if they’ve forgotten the contempt findings. As if they’ve forgotten that she was caught lying to the court on multiple occasions. As if they’ve forgotten what she did to our stepdaughter, and how serious it got, serious enough that she threatened to hurt herself.
That kind of pain doesn’t just disappear because someone shows up calm in a courtroom.
What seems crazy to me is that the Child Representative seemed to criticize our home. They implied my husband is too strict. But we’re not a strict household. Sure, we have rules, chores, some structure and consistency, but nothing extreme. The kids get an allowance, we have family dinners, we support their interests, and give them all the love and stability they deserve. We aren’t harsh. We’re just present.
It feels like we’re being compared to a household with very few boundaries, except when it comes to our stepdaughter being expected to care for her mom. Let’s call it what it is: parentification. It’s not freedom, it’s a responsibility no child should bear. We even had text messages from our stepdaughter saying her mom wasn’t doing well and that she was once again managing the house. Yet the court dismissed this as just an excuse for her to spend more time with her mom and “love on her.”
This dynamic has been ongoing for years. And it’s hard to understand how it continues to be ignored.
Even though this was all hard to hear, all we can do now is move forward. We have to. With the court declaring this the final status conference, and with no financial, emotional, or mental reserves left to keep fighting, we’re choosing to focus on what we can do. We’ll do our best to remain steady, supportive, and loving. To be a constant presence for her, even when her mom isn’t. Her mom may appear consistent to the outside world, attending hearings, keeping appointments, but she’s far from steady. Her moods fluctuate, her mental health remains unstable, and the emotional parentification continues, even if it’s more subtle than before. She may not be openly disparaging or lying to our stepdaughter the way she once did, but the undermining hasn’t stopped—it’s simply become more covert, more calculated. It’s just changed form. And we’ll keep hoping what we are doing at home is enough: enough to keep her grounded, and enough to resist the influence that pulled her away from us two years ago, when the lies began.
Because her mother didn’t do this to help her daughter. She did it to hurt us. And in the end, she hurt our child most of all.
So we move forward not because we feel peace, but because we must. Because despite everything, our love for her hasn’t changed. And maybe, just maybe, that love will be the thing she remembers when things don’t makes sense to her anymore.