Legal Question in Family Law in Virginia

Seeking custody after 6-8 yr adoption

I gave my son up for adoption at the age of 2 to my grandmother, and now at the age of 10 I am worried about his upbringing. Now in her 70's, she doesn't have the patience or knowledge to go through school work with him. She becomes upset and proceeds to yell at him, calling him names like stupid, threatens to break his toys as revenge for assuming he broke something of hers (even though there were two other kids in the house at that time). My aunt had to move in with them for fear that my son's anger would end up hurting or killing my grandmother. My aunt has come to me on several occasions telling me that I need to take him from my grandmother before something happens or he ends up screwed up for the rest of his life. She won't allow him to do cub scouts b/c she thinks's they're all gay, she doesn't want him to have a Big Brother b/c she thinks they're all child molesters, she won't let him do karate b/c she thinks it will make his anger worse, and she won't allow me to help her by taking him every other weekend to give her a break b/c then she says he'll want to live w/ me. We've always had an open relationship and my son knows that I'm his mother. What can I do? How hard would it be to fight for custody on this issue?


Asked on 10/11/05, 1:02 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
Michael Hendrickson Law Office Michael E. Hendrickson

Re: Seeking custody after 6-8 yr adoption

If your son has been legally adopted by your grandmother, this means that your parental rights with respect to this child have been terminated. This also means that you have no meaningful legal standing to sue for custody.

It would appear that some kind of negotiated solution, perhaps, involving your grandmother agreeing to give guardianship of the child to some other family member, might well be the only reasonable solution to a problem that likely will only get worse in the absence of timely intervention.

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Answered on 10/11/05, 11:47 pm


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