Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Call it a mother’s intuition.
“I know this might sound ridiculous to some, but when I first met him, I just knew,” Marquessa Callaghan said. “I knew in my heart there was nothing wrong with him. I knew this kid was just fine.”
Some other people weren’t so sure about the little boy who’d been born to a mother with an ongoing drug problem that she had passed onto her newborn child.
“He was born tox positive,” Marquessa said. “He had illegal substances in his system, so he had to detox as a baby. And based on the fact of his birth mother’s history, they terminated her parental rights. So when he finally left the hospital, he went into foster care.”
He first ended up with another family who kept him for a short while, but, when he was about five months old, she said: “They noticed he wasn’t developing as he should. He’d hit a certain point that was typical and then start to regress and that can be an indicator of mental or physical abnormalities.”
In some cases, those can be quite severe and when that first family gave him up, he bounced back into the purview of children’s services.
