Kids Deserve Better

Having been a Process Server for over 30 years, I've had the (sometimes) pleasure of serving incarcerated individuals. I've served short timers and lifers, including thugs, brutes and creeps whose crimes were so heinous I thought they should have been on death row. Fortunately, my trips to the prisons and jails are relatively short, but sometimes bittersweet. I serve inmates and convicts with protective orders, termination of parental rights, divorce petitions, and other papers, including such disgusting characters as convicted child and spousal abusers face to face.

Recently, I had the displeasure of serving a heroin addicted gang banger with a voluntary consent for his child to be adopted by the mother's husband. This loser hasn't seen his kid since he was ten months old, hasn't contributed to the kid's well being and hasn’t cleaned up his own act. He was a loser when the kid was born, abusive, into drugs and malfeasant activity, and the (unwed) mother took flight with the kid two years later to escape getting dragged into his downhill slide.

Predictably, this inmate was incensed at the nerve of the mother to ask him to sign the consent. Furious, he refused to sign the document and while handcuffed (for good reason) adamantly told me that she had no right to take his kid away. Needless to say, I told him I'm not the judge and not the person he should be telling his woes to. He went off on the ex, agitated that she could "do this" to him, as if he didn't bear some responsibility.

I have no sympathy for this clown. Fathers (and mothers) who abandon their children deserve to lose their parental rights. A parent's first and utmost responsibility is to their child. Kids deserve two parent, loving, nurturing households. When the custodial parent finds a better fit to replace the absent parent, there isn't any reason for a parent who has had no contact with their child to step aside and give that kid the chance they deserve. 

Our kids are our future, growing here and now. Kids deserve better.