My husband and I received a child several years ago from his sister. She was a young mother of 5 already and did not want her sixth child. My husband and I were unable to have children and she asked us to take her child once it was born and raise the child as our own. We did just that and he will be 4 years old in January 2003. We have suported this child ourselves and have had no help from either parent. The father of this child has seen him once when he was three months old and that is as active as he has ever been with our child. The mother has been in and out of our childs life since birth but I would not say she has been active. She has gone weeks and months sometimes without seeing him. They have never contributed to his daycare, doctors care, etc.... We have never asked them too. They have never offered. But now the mother has been making us uneasy with comments about how she has some regrets etc..
She has decided that she want's to become more active in his life. We know the mother has a drug addiction, and we are not willing to let our child go with her when we are aware of her problems. The only paperwork that we have is the original paperwork from the hospital that our son was born at were she has released her child to us as his adoptive parents. It states that she will no longer have access to her infant etc.. and that the adoptive parents will have custody of him from the moment she signed the paper. After her counseling session with the hospital and several witness of this she signed the paperwork. My question is really how legal is this paperwork. It is all we have and we want to know if that is enough. And if we should do something "more" legal what do we need to do? We want to insure that we are legally allowed to make all of the decisions for our son and that if we chose to not let the birth mother have visitation until she resolves her problems there is nothing she can do to us. Can you tell me a little about what rights we have as this childs "real" parents.
Thank you
