When “Best Interests” Becomes a Weapon: Abigaile and Natascha
I found Paris Golec’s story the way I find too many of these stories now, not through a press conference or a court notice, not through an agency that claims it protects children, but through a document shared person to person, survivor to survivor, advocate to advocate. Shannon Henderson sent me a compiled case file that looks like what it really is: a ledger of pain that somebody had to sit with long enough to organize. I want to thank Shannon, and everyone who helped compile and maintain that record. I know what it costs to read case after case, to keep going when your stomach turns, to keep formatting names and dates while imagining the faces behind them. If it is hard for me to read, I cannot pretend to understand the weight of compiling it.
In that document, I saw the names Abigaile and Natascha, the year 2017, Florida, and a blunt description that stopped me cold. It was one of those lines that forces you to choose. You either scroll past it like the system hopes you will, or you dig until you cannot dig anymore.
So I dug.
I found Paris’s blog, Abigaile’s Story, and I read every post. I also tried to contact Paris directly, because if you are going to publish someone’s nightmare, the least you can do is offer them the chance to clarify, correct, or expand. I have not heard back. I am still leaving that door open. But her blog is already a public record of her perspective, written in real time, over years, with details that do not read like performance. They read like a mother trying to keep her child alive, then trying to keep her child’s name alive after the system moved in and began rearranging her life through paperwork.
Paris’s story does not start in a courtroom. It starts in the kind of panic most people never experience, watching an infant seize and realizing you are standing at the edge of a life that will never be normal again. In her account, Abigaile’s first medical crisis came early, fast, and violently. Paris writes about uncontrollable crying, strange eye movements, swelling, and a seizure that lasted nearly an hour. She writes about an emergency room encounter that left her feeling dismissed at the exact moment she needed urgency. She writes about the terror of being sent home with a baby who was not stable. She writes about the turn that followed, getting to specialists, getting imaging and testing, getting admitted, being thrown into the world of neurology and metabolic workups and therapies that are not optional when your child’s brain is under attack.
She also writes something else, something that becomes a theme, not just medically but legally. She writes that people around her recognized the timing and asked the question that nobody wanted to answer directly. She describes being treated like she was asking for something forbidden when she asked for official reporting. Whatever a reader believes about the cause, the larger point is unavoidable: when a parent is forced to become the investigator, the archivist, the care coordinator, and the watchdog all at once, it changes them. It makes them relentless, and it makes them dangerous to institutions that depend on a parent eventually getting tired.
From there, her blog becomes a portrait of long rehabilitation. Not inspirational poster rehabilitation, not a clean montage. The kind that turns your kitchen into a medical station and your calendar into a therapy grid and your nervous system into a permanent state of alert. Paris describes a child with intense sensitivities, a child whose stability depends on routines and protections most outsiders do not respect. She describes a life narrowed down to what prevents seizures, what prevents regression, what preserves skill gains, what avoids triggers, what keeps Abigaile safe.
That matters because the system that later interferes with her life does not treat that kind of mothering as evidence of competence. Too often, it treats it as inconvenience. Too often, it treats it as “controlling.” Too often, it treats a medically complex child like a bargaining chip in an adult dispute, as if consistency of care is just a preference and not the difference between progress and deterioration.
Then we arrive at the date Paris returns to again and again: May 21, 2017. In her telling, that is the day both of her daughters were taken from her. She describes it as an abduction, not a misunderstanding, not a custody mix-up. She places the event in Texas, in Arlington, and she details that Natascha was taken in Grapevine. She writes that she reported it immediately to law enforcement, that she filed reports, that she reached out across agencies because that is what you do when your children are gone.
And what happened next, in her telling, is the nightmare that repeats across America with different names and different counties. The moment you ask the system to treat your child as endangered, the system shrugs and re-labels the crisis as “civil.” Once that label appears, urgency dies. Once that label appears, the clock becomes a weapon. Days pass, then weeks, then months, and every day the child is away becomes an argument the other side can use to keep the child away. The system does not have to announce it is choosing a winner. It can simply refuse to intervene in time for truth to matter.
Paris says her daughters were hidden from her for 19 months without contact. Then she describes the first time she was allowed to speak with Abigaile again, and she writes something that should haunt anyone who has ever claimed to care about child welfare. She says Abigaile did not recognize her voice.
Read that again and sit with it. A mother says her disabled daughter was kept away so long that when contact was finally allowed, the bond had been attacked at the most basic level of recognition. If that is true, it is not a family court problem. It is not “co-parenting conflict.” It is psychological harm delivered through administrative delay.
This is where Paris’s story stops being just her story, because the structure of what she describes is systemic. It is the architecture of how children disappear in plain sight in America. Not always into vans and dark alleys, but into dockets, filings, sealed proceedings, and interstate jurisdiction traps. They disappear behind the language of “best interests,” even when the child’s best interests obviously require stability, access to both parents, and continuity of medical care.
Paris describes a legal maze that crosses state lines and court types. Florida becomes a central battlefield in her narrative, including family court proceedings and then, more alarmingly, probate and guardianship proceedings. Guardianship is the system’s quiet power. It is the lever that can turn a parent into an observer, and it is frequently wrapped in language that sounds neutral but carries life-altering force. Paris describes Arkansas probate actions tied to Abigaile’s estate and guardianship, and she describes guardianship authority being shifted away from her. She describes Florida probate proceedings in Citrus County and names a judge. She describes remote hearings where she says she was muted, threatened with contempt, and placed into a waiting room while others spoke. Whether a reader has ever been in court or not, they understand the core injustice of that image. A parent has access, but no voice. A parent “attends,” but is removed when she tries to speak. A parent is told the process is fair while the microphone is taken away.
If you want to know why families believe the system is designed to silence them, you do not need conspiracy theories. You only need simple mechanics. Silence the parent, or exhaust the parent, or confuse the parent, or keep the parent chasing paperwork across three states, and you can create an outcome that looks lawful while feeling like a human rights violation.
Paris’s blog repeatedly connects Abigaile’s disability to the legal maneuvering. That is not incidental. Disability changes everything in court because it changes the vocabulary. It introduces assessments, guardians, “ward” status, medical decision control, travel restrictions, supervised contact, and a set of professionalized proxies who can speak over the parent while claiming to speak for the child. Paris writes that Abigaile became, in effect, controlled by a system that restricts where she can go and who gets to decide. She writes about limited contact, about calls controlled at someone else’s discretion, about communication disrupted. She describes phone time that should be sacred being turned into a battlefield where a mother is kept from having a clean, uninterrupted conversation with her own child.
And she also keeps Natascha present in the narrative, not as an accessory but as evidence. Two daughters taken on the same date. Two daughters whose lives are altered by the same act. Two daughters whose connection to their mother is narrowed and then managed. When a system does that, it does not just remove children, it fractures a family’s memory, their rituals, their grief, their sense of self. It creates a new reality, then insists that reality is normal.
Here is the truth that is hardest for the public to accept because it is so ugly. Systems that claim to protect children can become systems that enable harm, simply by choosing process over people and closure over truth. It does not require every individual inside the system to be evil. It only requires incentives that reward speed, compliance, and “settled” outcomes. It only requires a culture that treats parents who fight back as problems. It only requires courts that are comfortable making life-changing decisions behind layers of procedure a regular person cannot penetrate.
Child protective services, family courts, and guardianship structures form an ecosystem. They overlap. They refer to one another. They validate one another’s narratives. And when that ecosystem decides a parent is “the issue,” it can grind them down with delays, barriers, and discretion until the parent’s voice is reduced to blog posts and public pleas.
That is what makes Paris’s writing so important, and so threatening to the system. She wrote it down. She kept dates. She kept names. She described what she saw, what she believes, and what she says happened when she tried to participate. She did what families are told to do, advocate, document, stay calm, follow procedure. And in her narrative, procedure did not save her family. Procedure was the weapon used to reshape her family.
People will argue about labels. Some will flinch at the words Paris uses. They will demand “proof” while ignoring that the system often hides the very records that would prove or disprove a mother’s claims. They will tell her to trust the courts while the courts mute her on Zoom. They will tell her to work with agencies while the agencies retreat behind jurisdictional boundaries. They will tell her to be patient while time erases her child’s recognition of her own voice.
If you take nothing else from Paris’s story, take this. When a system can treat a child’s disappearance as “civil,” when it can allow time to become custody, when it can restrict a parent’s voice in hearings that determine a child’s life, and when it can convert disability into a justification for lifelong control, that is not protection. That is power.
The child welfare system in America constantly asks the public for trust. Trust our investigators. Trust our courts. Trust our guardians. Trust our processes. But the families living inside it keep documenting the same experience, and Paris’s blog is one more piece of that pattern: when the system is wrong, it does not correct itself. When the system is challenged, it closes ranks. When the system is forced into daylight, it calls the daylight “harassment” and the parent “unstable.”
I am upset because no mother should have to become a one-woman archive to keep her children from vanishing into bureaucracy. No disabled child should have her bond with her primary caregiver severed and then treated like collateral damage. No sister should be pulled into the same rupture and then treated like she is simply “not communicating.” No family should have to beg for basic accountability while agencies hide behind jurisdiction and courts hide behind sealed processes.
Paris may never email me back. She may be exhausted beyond what outsiders can imagine. She may be protecting herself. She may be protecting her daughters. But her blog already did a brave thing, it refused to let this story be buried. So I am doing what I can do with what is already public and already written, I am putting her story where it belongs, in front of people who still believe this system cannot possibly do what families keep describing.
If child protective services and the courts want less anger, they can start with less secrecy. If they want less public outrage, they can start with transparency that does not require a mother to fight for every scrap of information about her own child. If they want trust, they can begin by making it impossible for an American child, especially a medically complex child, to be erased by paperwork while everyone insists it was handled properly.
Paris Golec wrote her daughters’ names into the record because the system was comfortable letting those names fade into case numbers and closed files. Abigaile. Natascha. A mother should not have to shout those names into the void. A nation that claims it protects children should not require that kind of shouting to begin with.
