Speaking to the Reddit community, a woman wanted to know if she was wrong to contact child services after a mother of six dropped her children off on her doorstep and said she would be back by Sunday.
The OP explained that the children’s mother has an amazing knack of persuading neighbours to babysit, and although she is the type of person who refuses to care for other people’s children, she has also been tricked into babysitting in the past.
‘Yesterday she knocked on my door again. I pretended I was not at home. She kept knocking harder and harder and I thought she was about to pull the letterbox. So I went to answer it. She quickly said a few phrases I didn’t quite understand and said she would be back on Sunday,’ the OP wrote in her post. ‘She has 6 kids ranging in age from 6 months to 7 years old. I told her I couldn’t and she replied that there was a black taxi waiting for her. I tried to grab her arm to stop her from leaving but I told her I couldn’t and she ran off and got into the taxi.’
OP was suddenly left with the children she had invited into her home. Not knowing what to do, she sent a text message to the mother saying that she expected her to return in the next 40 minutes to collect the children or she would have to call children’s services. When she did not respond to the message, the OP tried to call her and said the same thing. The mother, however, said she had already left town and could not return on such short notice.
She also said that if OP could not take care of them, she could give them to another neighbour, Jennifer, who was 68 years old and in fragile health.
‘I reiterated that if she wasn’t here at 10 o’clock, she could take them to the local council if they decided she was a fit enough mother. She said some bad words and said I would never do that. I did, as at that point I felt like she was putting me up to it. After calling Children’s Services, I sent her a text message saying it was done. She called me back and said she was halfway to Blackpool and that she would kill me if it was true. I sent her a video of when they were picked up by child services. The police were also there, who they said often accompany the pick-up of abandoned children if something criminal had happened, and they asked lots of questions about the mother,’ the OP wrote.
Although OP was sure she had done the right thing, her husband, who had been in foster care as a child, was outraged by her action. He accused her of separating the mother from the children and that she had not given the mother enough time to come and get her children before informing child services.
He said she should not have taken the children into the house but should have put them in a taxi or left them at Jennifer’s as their mum had instructed.
‘He told me that whatever happens to these children in care will be on my conscience and then went on to talk about what he himself had experienced and what he knew other children in care had experienced,’ the OP wrote and added: ‘I haven’t slept and my husband left for work without talking to me. I’m wondering if I should go back to foster care and say I overreacted or that it was a misunderstanding and find a way to make it up to the kids and take it from there. I didn’t know foster care was that bad,’ she finished her story.
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