Wednesday Weirdness-Adult Adoption After CPS Kicked Him Out of Foster Home

 

Welcome to Wednesday Weirdness, a recurring theme where we post something truly weird and wacky in adoption or child welfare.

This one has a nice ending to a bad decision two decades ago by California CPS. Social Networking helped this reunion.

I was adopted by my foster mother… aged THIRTY TWO: Man removed from care as a boy because family spanked him spends ten years tracking down ‘his mom’ [Daily Mail 3/15/13 by Hugo Gye] says “A 32-year-old man has been adopted by his former foster mother after being reunited with her following a decade-long separation.

Maurice Griffin was removed from his foster family at the age of 13, but never found a permanent home and longed to return to them.

And today the burly adult will officially be adopted by Lisa Godbold, who took him into her California home in the 1980s.
Mr Griffin was a young child when he was spotted by Ms Godbold and her husband Charles at an orphanage, according to CNN.

They agreed to foster him at their home near Sacramento – partly because they were an interracial couple and the boy was mixed race.

‘Interracial relationships weren’t as common or accepted as they are today, and the fact that Maurice was biracial and we were a biracial family made us a great “profile”,’ Ms Godbold said.

The youngster also got on well with his younger foster brothers, Gideon and Spencer, whom he described as his ‘best friends’.

The family was planning to adopt their newest addition, but when he was 13 child welfare authorities intervened.

Maurice was removed from his foster parents when officials discovered that they had been spanking him when he misbehaved, as they did with their other sons.

‘We wanted him to feel like the rest of our kids,’ Ms Gobold said. ‘And there was a difference of opinion with some of the supervisors.’

Although the couple fought fiercely to keep the boy, they were forced to give up when they were threatened with losing their biological children too.

Maurice spent the rest of his childhood moving from one foster home to another, and says he never found the same connection with a family again.

‘I couldn’t talk to anybody about it because nobody was there,’ he told CNN. ‘I couldn’t call somebody – there was just a void in me.’

With the rise of social networking, Mr Griffin saw the opportunity to re-connect with his would-be relatives.

However, Ms Godbold’s husband had died in 1998, and she had subsequently changed her name after remarrying, which complicated the search.

In 2007, the foster mother and son made contact via MySpace – and then Ms Godbold decided to phone Mr Griffin.

‘She said, “Hey baby” – and I said, “I got to call you back,”‘ he said as he recalled how he was overcome with emotion.

They have now decided to ‘make it official’, and on Friday they are heading to a courtroom to apply for Mr Griffin to be adopted by Ms Godbold.

‘It has to happen,’ he told CNN. ‘I didn’t fight for all those years for no reason.'”