I’d been in a wheelchair for eleven years, and during our custody hearing, my ex-husband’s attorney carefully avoided saying that I was an unfit mother. Instead, he talked about “practical realities” and what might happen “in an emergency.” Every word sounded reasonable enough that the judge wrote it down. I sat there listening to a man explain why my body supposedly made me a lesser parent, and I said nothing because I knew that if I cried, they would use that too.
My daughter was fourteen, and nobody had asked her what she wanted. She had watched everything from the back of the courtroom, completely silent. I tried not to look at her because I didn’t want her to feel responsible for defending me. Then the judge asked whether she wanted to speak. She stood up, reached into her pocket, and pulled out something she’d been carrying the entire time.
She walked to the front and handed it to the judge without saying a word. It was a folded piece of paper, but the judge didn’t immediately open it. He asked my daughter whether she’d written it herself. She said yes. Then he asked whether anyone had told her what to write. She shook her head.
The judge finally unfolded the paper and read it silently. His expression changed almost immediately. He looked toward my ex-husband, then back at my daughter, and asked her one question that made the entire courtroom go quiet. Because what she’d written wasn’t about my wheelchair at all — it was about what happened every time she went to her father’s house…
