April 5, 2026

I didn’t plan to become someone who writes publicly about her life.

I’m a mom. That’s the thing I have always been most, most completely, most proudly. My son Bennett — Rocky, he calls himself, after his favourite PAW Patrol character, and honestly, it fits — is seven years old. He is funny and stubborn and full of opinions. He knows exactly what he wants and is not shy about telling you. He loves dinosaurs and strawberries and his mom’s mashed potatoes. He will light up a room and exhaust you and make you laugh all in the same five minutes.

He also has complex support needs. He has diagnoses that shape how he experiences the world — how loud it is, how unpredictable, how hard it can be to communicate what’s happening inside when everything feels like too much. He needs support. Real, consistent, well-trained, around-him support. I have always known this. I have spent years learning everything I could about his needs, finding the right people, building the right team, fighting for the right resources.

That last part — fighting for resources — is where this story really begins.

For years before any of this became public, I was asking for help. Not vaguely, not passively — specifically and persistently. I knew what Bennett needed. I could describe it in detail. I had proposals, plans, documentation. I had people around me who understood his needs and were ready to provide support. What I didn’t have was the system’s agreement to fund it.

I want to be clear about something, because it matters for everything that follows: Bennett was not removed from my care because I harmed him. He was not removed because I neglected him or didn’t understand him or wasn’t fighting for him. A judge reviewed the evidence and found that the concerns used to justify his removal were largely unsubstantiated. The one remaining legal basis — the reason he is still not home — comes down to a finding that I was unable to care for him due to a lack of supports.

Not unwilling. Unable. Because the supports were not there.

Read that again. My son is not living with me because the system failed to provide what he needed — and then used that failure as grounds to remove him.

I am not writing this to be angry, although I have been angry. I am writing this because that reality — a parent losing their child not due to harm but due to systemic failure to provide support — deserves to be named. Loudly. Clearly. In words that anyone can read and understand.

Bennett has been in out-of-home care since mid-2025. He is placed in a residential resource. He is, by many accounts, doing well there — he is supported, he is connected to the staff, he goes to school.

And I am his mother, and he should be home.

Every week I fight for that. Every week I show up — to meetings, to visits, to conversations with social workers and advocates and legal counsel — and I make the case for my son to come home. I prepare. I document. I propose. I push back when I need to and I collaborate when I can and I try, every single time, to hold onto the belief that the system can do the right thing.

This blog is my record of that fight.

I am starting this series because I want there to be a public account of what this process is actually like — not a bureaucratic summary, not a file note, but the lived experience of a mother navigating a child welfare system with her child’s future on the line.

I want other parents who are in similar situations — parents of children with complex needs, parents who have been failed by the same systems they asked for help — to know they are not alone, and that it is possible to keep going.

I want the general public to understand that child protection involvement doesn’t always look the way people assume. It is not always about abuse or danger. Sometimes it is about a system that couldn’t or wouldn’t fund the support a family needed, and a parent left to fight for years to correct that.

And I want there to be a record. Because records matter. Because accountability matters. Because Bennett matters — not as a file number, not as a case, but as a seven-year-old boy who calls himself Rocky and loves dinosaurs and deserves to grow up at home with his mom.

I’ll be posting regularly as this process continues. Each post will cover a different stage of the journey — what happened, what it felt like, what I learned, what I’m still fighting for.

If you’re reading this and you recognize your own story in mine, I see you. If you’re reading this and this world is new to you, I’m glad you’re here. If you have resources, capacity, or simply the willingness to share — thank you.

We’re bringing Bennett home.

— Darian

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