What Carter Told the Judge
Let me tell you what I did not say in that courtroom.
Because there is the version I told Judge Miller, which is the true version, and then there is everything underneath it, the part that I had been turning over for three weeks and that I was still figuring out how to put into words when the state’s attorney finished his summary and the room went quiet and the judge leaned over his bench and looked at me with the specific expression of a man who has been doing this for a long time and has developed the ability to tell the difference between people who are sincere and people who are performing sincerity.
My name is Carter. I am twenty nine years old and I am a single man who lives in a three-bedroom house in a mid-size city in Ohio that I have been paying a mortgage on for two years. I work as a licensed electrician, which means I have a trade that pays decently, that I can schedule somewhat on my own terms, that will not go anywhere in an economic downturn, and that I am good at in the specific way of someone who likes to understand how systems work. I make a reasonable living. Not a comfortable one, not the kind that leaves much room for emergencies, but a living.
Three weeks before the courtroom, I had savings.
I want to be clear about what I had before, because the state’s attorney was not wrong that I had spent it. I had twenty two thousand dollars in a savings account that I had been building for four years toward the down payment on a larger property, maybe something with land, eventually. Twenty two thousand dollars is not nothing. It is also not what most people picture when they think of the financial profile of a prospective adoptive parent.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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