Today is the day of the last visitation between Rebecca and her biological mother. Thanks to a successful mediation she has agreed to relinquish her parental rights in return for written updates on all three of her children each quarter, a picture and video of the kids once a year. We offered her the opportunity to make a video for the children to watch when they got older.
We had hoped this video will allow her to tell the kids about herself. We thought it would be a great gift for the kids when they got older. They would have a chance to see and hear what their biological mother was like. We were thinking the video would include information about her childhood, her family and hopefully the kids’ biological fathers. We brought our video camera and tripod to the visitation for her to use.
When her visitation with Rebecca was over I went in and set up the video camera, got her all in focus and told her to take as much time as she wanted. We brought a 4 hour video tape so she had lots of time to say whatever she wanted to say to the kids. I hit record and walked out of the room. I was back in the room for no more than 2 minutes when she knocked on the window and said that she was done! Two minutes really!!! It would have taken me more time than that just to say hi and what my name was. I told her it was no rush to take her time and she said that she said what she wanted to and that she was done.
I really was puzzled by this, for someone who tried to keep custody of Rebecca and was upset over losing custody of Steve and George I would have expected a little more from her. When she left we watched the video to see what was on it. Now if you remember George is a biracial child so if you remember that her statement may make sense to you.
The whole video is this “Hi George I did not get rid of you because you are black.” That was it.
I did not think that was a video that the children should see. How could I explain that one? Hey kids your tummy mom could have told you she loved you and all about her but instead she said this. We chose to not keep the tape, that may have been wrong but I did not see anything positive coming out of that.