KEY POINTS:
Something very strange is happening in quiet, unassuming Nebraska.
After a new law recently passed, parents of 34 children so far have driven their child up to the doors of Nebraska hospitals and abandoned them, sometimes arriving from hundreds of kilometres away.
These parents are literally walking away from their son or daughter with the intention of legally leaving them forever.
These are no scared teenage mothers with newborns that are being abandoned. Surprisingly, most of the children are pre-teen or teenagers. Some have arrived from as far away as Michigan, Florida and Georgia.
What started out as a safe haven law to protect unwanted infants from being dumped in trash bins or other dangerous places has now confounded Nebraskan authorities. It seems they forgot one small detail: they failed to put an age restriction on the legislation.
In a strange case of a law peeling away an entirely different desperate social need, parents of older children who fear their child is in imminent danger or can no longer cope have found a last, tragic answer.
Of the 34 children left so far, the statistics tell the story: 90 per cent of the children have been previously treated for mental health issues and 57 per cent have been wards of the state at one time, 28 of the 34 children come from single-parent homes, and 22 children had a parent with a history of incarceration. Not one has been a newborn.
Tysheema Brown drove over a thousand miles from Georgia to leave her troubled 12-year-old son at an Omaha hospital, "Do not judge me as a parent. I've done my all. I love my son and my son knows that. There is just no help. They don't care."
Even as lawmakers were meeting to correct the loophole, a 5-year-old was dropped off last week.
Many of the children have not been told why they have been left. One bereft widower left nine of his children at a hospital, ranging in ages from 1 to 17.
In a comment that says more about lawmakers' tragic inability to understand the complexities of how a system can fail a parent,
Nebraskan Governor Dave Heineman told CNN, "Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska. Think of what you are saying. You are saying you no longer support them. You no longer love them."
In another astounding commentary that ignores the elephant in the room, State Senator Arnie Stuthman told the Associated Press, "People are leaving them off just because they can't control them. They're probably in no real danger, so it's an easy way out for the caretaker."
Easy? You tell me. For any of us who have had children, no matter how untenable or awful the situation, how easy would it be to come to the decision that you never want that child in your life again? The child you carried, the child you woke up with every day for a dozen years or more of your life?
Do you imagine that each one of those parents walked back into their car and told themselves they left that child forever because they didn't love them? Or because this was the easiest choice? Is that really how these state senators and governors see what's in front of them?
We are not all equally strong. Just because you became a parent doesn't mean you have the innate ability to withstand the heartbreak of debilitating mental illness or dysfunction in your child, especially if your own life is severely troubled.
But that's not where this story goes. It seems to sit in this sad place between unfair judgment of a desperation we can barely imagine, and shoving society's dirt back under the rug.
Last week Nebraskan legislators had to call a special session, scrambling to restrict the age limit to newborn babies, in line with many other state laws.
They plugged the hole, and sent many of the children back to their home states with a renewed effort to get them the services they need.
But for every parent who has felt the heartbreak of realising they are overwhelmed with trying to get the help they need for either themselves or their child, this strange window into their unforgiving world feels like their tragic coda.
We don't often get to see the exact snapshot of where the seams unravel in a life. But we saw it for 34 lives in a handful of weeks in Nebraska.
Tysheema Brown said, "I ran out of fight. I ran out of hope. But I never ran out of love for my child."
There but for the grace of you go us all.
