Raising One More Child

Carol Burt
7 min readMay 30, 2021
Photo by Garrett Jackson on Unsplash

Thoughts about our grandson.

For reasons I don’t want to go into here, my husband and I found out early in 2013 that we would have to take over the raising of our oldest grandson. There was no choice except to let him go into foster care. And with the shortage of foster homes in our area, we were assured he would probably end up in a group home.

We couldn’t let that happen. We got an attorney, who filed an emergency Order of Guardianship and we took him home with us. We were still in shock as to the reasons we needed to take him and the dark and drastic turn our lives had taken. We hoped it would be short term and that his parent would soon be able to take him back, care for him, and provide a safe and secure home for him. That was not to happen.

At one point, we thought things had become once again normal in his family and let him go back to live with his parent. At that time, that’s what he wanted most — and what most children want most — was to be with their parent.

Guardianship became permanent,

That lasted only a few weeks until the situation became worse than it was when we first took guardianship. So, back to court we went, this time smarter and able to navigate the necessary action without an attorney. We asked for and got another Order of Guardianship from…

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Carol Burt

Former print journalist, former mayor, retired law enforcement officer. Writing about politics, government, and personal essays. Actually member since 2019.