I don’t normally do this in fact I am rather embarrassed, but back in 2021-2022 my husband and I decided we wanted to help a child out and try to adopt a teenager from foster care. Before this we was saving for a down payment on a house… had no debt and all our credit cards were at a 0 balance. We were ready to buy a home… but we also wanted to be parents. We both had good paying jobs and lived comfortably. We are not rich, but we made enough money to do what we wanted to.
We brought a child in from foster care. She was 14, everything was going fine. until 2 days before the actual adoption. All my family came up to Ohio from Florida trust me that is a lot of people big Italian family… but then out of the blue the case workers showed up then the police…. We never had issues with the police, so we had no clue what was going on… come to find out the child made false allegations against my husband and me.
The case workers never talked to us about what was said before all this happened. The child had a history of lying and telling stories, but the case workers took whatever she said as fact. They then told us what she said, we were totally floored by the news. My husband was so upset that he needed to go outside… while I stayed inside to get all the story.
Shortly after my husband ran to the front door telling me to call 911 that he thinks he was having a heart attack. So, I dropped everything and did just that, the ambulance arrived and found out he was having a panic attack, so he went to the hospital. I had no clue what happened, all I knew was he was gone, and I was alone to handle everything…. Shortly after he left a detective showed up and asked me a lot of questions, but I was so traumatized I did not hear him. All I did was sit there staring.
One thing led to another, and we had to spend all the money we had saved up and maxed out all my credit cards to fight these allegations. We won of course and the charges were dropped. But I still had a massive amount of debt to pay…. after my husband got out of the hospital and started to go back to work, he started to have panic attacks every day… and I went back to work, and I did as well thinking someone was going to show up at my job unexpectedly… so we both decided to leave our jobs and move…. We did get other jobs where we ended up, but they paid much less than we were getting paid. So, bills started to add up and we had to start maxing out his cards…. eventually we got it even but are living paycheck to paycheck. We both now have mental issues because of this but are healing slowly. I relive that day every time I see how high our bills have gotten after being debt free… We need some help to make some headway in this and get our lives back on track.