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A month after my youngest was born, I passed my dissertation prospectus to study twentieth-century literature and theology touching the Book of Job. I breastfed him through my defense. Two months later, social workers from the Department of Children and Families drove away with my kids locked in the backseat of their car at 2:30 on a Saturday morning. They gave no indication of where they were going or when I would see my boys again. 

There had been a rib fracture, roughly the size of a thumb print, probably caused by my mother-in-law when she squeezed the baby to prevent a fall when she’d nearly dropped him. He screamed but then calmed, so she didn’t think to tell us. Since we didn’t have any suitable explanation for the injury, the doctors called it a “non-accidental trauma,” indicative of abuse. So they sent the police.

Certain something illegal must be happening, we recorded the removal on our phones. You can hear about the lack of paperwork, our desperate questions about how they would feed our two highly allergic children — our youngest was exclusively breastfed at the time, and I had been on a restricted diet to accommodate his sensitivities. At the end you hear my gasping sobs. I was embarrassed by it the first time we watched the video. I wished I had stopped recording before I broke down into my neighbor’s arms.

But mostly what you hear is Clarence, our three-year-old. When it was clear we either give up our kids or allow the police to take them at gunpoint, I was tasked with waking the boys and surrendering them into the social worker’s car with a change of clothes, diapers, and a bag of breastmilk. I woke Clarence as gently as I could given the circumstances. I didn’t want my boy to be afraid. 

It didn’t work. His screams fill the recording as they spilled out into the street that night. 

“I don’t want to go. Don’t make me go. Not that car. Not by myself. Come with me. Mommy. Daddy.”

They shut the door, and the boys were gone.

 * * *

 One of the great evils twentieth-century thinkers observe in the story of Job is the denouement of retributive restoration. Having proven himself innocent of any moral failings that would warrant the inflicted suffering, God restores to Job all that was lost. His home was destroyed. God gives him a new one. Job’s lands were devastated. God grants him twice as many. His livestock perished. God raises him a herd twice as large. Job’s children died. God replaces them, times two.

It is in this plot point that the resolution takes a turn to the absurd, or, depending on who’s writing, the grotesque. As antitheodicists of the twentieth century were quick to condemn, and as is experientially, irrevocably true, the tragedy of losing one child is not compensated for in the birth of another. The joy of the second family does not redeem the unmitigated devastation of losing the first.

 Yet it is a grotesque substitution we attempt every day. Each year, more than 600,000 children find themselves in foster care in the U.S. Around 600 more are added every day — a bit more than 200,000 a year. Of these children, 16% are taken for charges of physical or sexual abuse. The other 84% are for neglect, an amorphous term usually synonymous to conditions of poverty (the family can’t afford a coat or daycare or food or a two-bedroom or a medical procedure). 

No matter the cause, with each removal, a first family perishes.

 * * *

March is calving season in southeast Idaho. Ranchers spend long days amongst their herd pulling calves stuck in the birth canal, matching calves to cows, tagging them accordingly, administering vaccines. Then they wake again at three in the morning to check on the herd. It’s a punishing schedule to herald in springtime.

But this year, spring did not come. A lingering and brutal winter compounded the difficulty of the birthing season and massively increased the mortality rate. Newborn calves froze to the ground. They fell through holes in the snow and died there. The abundance of carrion attracted the attention of coyotes, who ate the back and hind legs off a healthy three-day-old. The rancher found it still alive the next morning. Loss is inevitable during calving, but this year’s hit was more than three times the average. Ranchers wept at church as they recounted their losses.

 It’s brutal justice out here. You lose an animal, you take care of it. Hitch it to your truck and drag it up the hill, far away from the herd for the coyotes to find.

 When a cow loses a calf, ranchers look for a replacement. Maybe another cow has twins. Maybe, for whatever reason, a mother rejects her calf. Sometimes a cow can die in labor. Her calf, if it survives, is an option for grafting — moving it to a new mother. Failing available calves within the herd, ranchers will visit local dairies, paying comparatively low prices for newborn male calves to graft onto a bereft mother.

 I saw a grafting. A cow had rolled over her calf, smothering it as it slept. After two days of nuzzling, prodding, and standing vigil over the corpse, the cow was lulled into the corral by towing the body of the calf out of the pasture behind an ATV. The rancher brought the dead calf into the barn and skinned it. I watched, fascinated. It was grueling. He stumbled back a few times, out of breath and dizzy. But when it was done, he had a full pelt with four holes pierced into the front and sides for the twine to run through.

 He tied the skin over the top of a calf he had purchased from the dairy that morning. Gray legs and head flashed under the black coat. He brought the cow into the pen. The hope was she would recognize the smell of her own offspring literally cloaking the strange calf and accept the spare as her own. A successful grafting would resolve in the calf nursing on the cow without danger.

 It didn’t work. The cow trampled over the calf and rammed it and the rancher into the pen wall. There was a horrifying moment when the newborn appeared trapped under her hooves, the full force of the cow’s 1,100 pound body threatening just above. The calf brayed and then was silent, crumpled on the hay. Miraculously, it survived unscathed.

 The rancher left them both in the barn overnight with a wire gate between them. He thought time and proximity might firm up the connection.

 * * *

I never did learn exactly where my boys were in the intervening sixteen-and-a-half hours between the removal and my in-laws obtaining temporary guardianship. According to the record, they were taken to a foster mom who was told she could have the kids call us in the morning.

 She didn’t. Who knows why. Maybe she misunderstood. Maybe she couldn’t hear over my boy’s screaming, which the report says continued until past 4:30. Maybe she didn’t think we deserved it. I can’t say. I wasn’t there. Wherever there was.

 We’ve asked Clarence about that night. He doesn’t seem to remember it in any clear way. But every night for months after the kids were returned on conditional custody (about a month after the removal), my boy would wake screaming at night, thrashing in his bed like a caged animal. I held him, his arms a windmill against me. “Clarence, you are home. You are safe,” I would say. He would gaze at me in terrified unrecognition and scream.

 * * *

 In his study on Job and its resonances, Gustavo Gutierrez describes Christ’s lament “Father, why hast thou forsaken me” as the cry which “renders more audible and more penetrating the cries of all the Jobs, individual and collective, of human history.” It is the cantus firmus, the leading voice to which the voices of all the suffering innocent are joined in a continuous wail of anguish and abandonment. Like Joseph, taken by the Ishmaelites. Like Rachel, dying to deliver her boy. Like all the children of Israel dragged from their homes in Ramah to Babylon. It is the ancient cry: Where are you, father? Where are you, mother? Where is my child? And where am I?

 * * *

Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams were driving to a funeral in Chicago on February 17 of this year when they were stopped in Tennessee for having tinted windows. An unused blunt was discovered in their vehicle. All five children were placed in foster care in Tennessee. The family lives in Georgia.

 Fearful of losing her milk and struggling to afford (or find) formula during the national shortage, Talya insisted on breastfeeding her baby while she was held in the NICU. The pediatrician disagreed. A report was filed. Talya lost custody and was escorted from the hospital.

 Twenty-two days after her son was released from NICU, Toia Potts observed her child twitching. She rushed him to the hospital. An X-ray revealed her child had multiple fractures ranging from birth to a few weeks prior. She was arrested and both of her sons were moved to foster care. Her parental rights were terminated in 2018, and the children were placed for adoption.

 Two Florida parents got caught in traffic in 2015 and couldn’t get their eleven-year-old the key to the house. So he played basketball in the backyard for ninety minutes while he waited for them, drinking water from the hose. By the time the parents got home, CPS had arrived with the police. The parents were strip searched, finger printed, and jailed. Their two boys were placed in foster care.

 In 2021, after a year of sobriety and steady employment, Sylvia and Brandon Cunningham’s parental rights to their five-year-old son were terminated, and the boy was placed for adoption on the ground that the family had failed to reimburse the government for the cost of foster care.

 A mother in North Carolina checked herself and her two children into a shelter for domestic violence victims in 2019. The shelter made a report. The woman had allowed her children to be exposed to domestic violence and now had no suitable housing. Both children were removed to foster care, where they remain. Her current visitation is one hour supervised, once a week.

In 2017, Vanessa Peoples was enjoying an evening at the park with her two boys and husband. Her two-year-old ran ahead of her to their car. Before Vanessa could reach him, a woman passing by grabbed the boy by the arm and called the police. Vanessa was arrested, and both boys were placed in foster care.

In 2021, Tyron Deener and Syesha Mercado brought their 13-month-old to the hospital. Pregnant at the time, Mercado had been struggling to transition her child to a fully solid diet, and the toddler became dehydrated. The child was removed from their custody. When their daughter was born shortly thereafter, that baby, too, was removed, just days after her birth.

 All five of Cleo’s children were removed when she reported her abusive partner to the police. Then they were all adopted to separate families on account of the mother’s failure to pay for the foster care. Cleo is an immigrant, speaks limited English, was rarely provided with a translator, and, according to court documents, was never given a bill nor told to pay.

In 2019, a Pennsylvania school district instituted a policy of reporting parents to CPS for unpaid school lunch bills. They sent a letter home with the children: pay up or face foster care.

* * * 

My husband’s aunt was in the front office of her school when a visibly shaken father with a thick accent entered the office and requested to speak with the school counselor. 

“Did you report us to CPS?” he asked. The counselor would not confirm or deny. Those reports are anonymous, the counselor explained. The father wept as he pleaded they talk with him first before reporting his family. There are reasons for missing lunches that don’t always amount to bad parenting.

As he turned to leave, the school counselor called out to him, “You know, CPS is just there to help.”

* * *

As frequent as removals are, it’s unlikely you would have seen one because they tend to happen in the dead of night. This serves two purposes: at one a.m., the family and children are most likely home, and the streets are most likely empty. You won’t make a scene taking kids at midnight the way you might at nine in the morning.

 That is, the kids are more likely to scream, their terror at being moved to a strange place with strange people amplified in the late hour. The parents may yell. Things may escalate. But. The neighbors are probably asleep. So there won’t be a scene.

 * * *

The cow’s revulsion to the new calf cooled significantly by the morning. The rancher opened the gate. The calf approached timidly, falteringly. The cow leaned down, sniffing his back and rump. She turned her head. Another step. Then the calf drank its full. A successful graft. The rancher slipped off the skin and turned the pair out to pasture.

 The skinned corpse of the other calf was thrown out onto a frozen hillside away from the herd, a patch of pink in the snow.

 * * *

A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.

Sarah Perkins is a writer and filmmaker living in rural Idaho with her family. | Instagram @sarahsabes