2UnclesAndABaby
Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)?
Louisiana
So my husband and I have been taking care of our one year old nephew full-time for the last two months while his mother (my husbands sister) has been in and out of a psychiatric hospital twice in 6 weeks.
The mother has borderline personality disorder and history of substance abuse issues. She has struggled with mental illness and addiction for the last ten years. Last month she had to be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital due to being a danger to others and herself. She then spent six weeks in a hospital that deals with dual diagnosis and was released last weekend after being there for the maximum amount of time they allow at the hospital. As soon as she was released she stopped taking her medication and almost immediately became manic and within two days had the police called on her and is now back in the psych ward and we still have our nephew. It's now becoming even more apparent that she is most likely going to continue to struggle at not only parenting, but keeping a hold on reality and that is not going to be fixed anytime soon and we need to look at parenting our nephew in a long-term situation
The father is around and is a good guy, but only knew my sister in-law for a very small amount of time before she got pregnant and he chose to end the relationship months ago due to her mental illness. He has three children from a previous marriage and is simply is not interested in parenting our nephew and is very much into us taking care of our him. We've been trying to encourage him to obtain sole custody while she gets treatment even temporarily, but he's all talk and hasn't been proactive at all in doing this even though he agrees it would be in our nephews best interests. For him this is something that can be put on the back burner.
Our fear now is that we're terrified my sister in-law will just show up randomly since she hasn't given any of her family permission to know about her treatment or length of stay at the hospital and disappear with our nephew which everyone in our family would agree would be a really bad situation for his safety. She obviously can do this since she's still has custody of him.
My question is how can best protect our nephew in this situation while his mom decides to get help or not? Should we try to obtain custody temporarily so he's protected while this plays out with his mom ir would that be really difficult? There's various police and CPS reports showing her mental instability and neglect of her son and we can also show that we've been his sole providers for almost two months now and have always had a close relationship with him. Or if we can get the father to obtain custody, could he give us guardianship? Although I hate this could play a factor in court, we're two married men in New Orleans LA and even though NOLA is pretty liberal, I'm not sure how much of a role that would play in court here? It is 2016, right?
Any advice is very much appreciated!!! Thank y'all for any and all help!!
Louisiana
So my husband and I have been taking care of our one year old nephew full-time for the last two months while his mother (my husbands sister) has been in and out of a psychiatric hospital twice in 6 weeks.
The mother has borderline personality disorder and history of substance abuse issues. She has struggled with mental illness and addiction for the last ten years. Last month she had to be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital due to being a danger to others and herself. She then spent six weeks in a hospital that deals with dual diagnosis and was released last weekend after being there for the maximum amount of time they allow at the hospital. As soon as she was released she stopped taking her medication and almost immediately became manic and within two days had the police called on her and is now back in the psych ward and we still have our nephew. It's now becoming even more apparent that she is most likely going to continue to struggle at not only parenting, but keeping a hold on reality and that is not going to be fixed anytime soon and we need to look at parenting our nephew in a long-term situation
The father is around and is a good guy, but only knew my sister in-law for a very small amount of time before she got pregnant and he chose to end the relationship months ago due to her mental illness. He has three children from a previous marriage and is simply is not interested in parenting our nephew and is very much into us taking care of our him. We've been trying to encourage him to obtain sole custody while she gets treatment even temporarily, but he's all talk and hasn't been proactive at all in doing this even though he agrees it would be in our nephews best interests. For him this is something that can be put on the back burner.
Our fear now is that we're terrified my sister in-law will just show up randomly since she hasn't given any of her family permission to know about her treatment or length of stay at the hospital and disappear with our nephew which everyone in our family would agree would be a really bad situation for his safety. She obviously can do this since she's still has custody of him.
My question is how can best protect our nephew in this situation while his mom decides to get help or not? Should we try to obtain custody temporarily so he's protected while this plays out with his mom ir would that be really difficult? There's various police and CPS reports showing her mental instability and neglect of her son and we can also show that we've been his sole providers for almost two months now and have always had a close relationship with him. Or if we can get the father to obtain custody, could he give us guardianship? Although I hate this could play a factor in court, we're two married men in New Orleans LA and even though NOLA is pretty liberal, I'm not sure how much of a role that would play in court here? It is 2016, right?
Any advice is very much appreciated!!! Thank y'all for any and all help!!
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