Never Too Late by Amber Portwood, Beth Roeser

together. But we’re so scared of going back to that low point we went to, we’re probably never going to be able to give each other a chance to try again.
    Those scenes on
Teen Mom
of me beating up on Leah’s dad don’t really leave any room for doubt about how completely destroyed we were at that point. How do you come back from that? I was wrong to get violent with him. Even back then, I never would have said behavior like that was okay, especially in a family. I know it was despicable and I take full responsibility. And there’s no “but” about that, just the added fact that even if he forgave me for what I did to him, there was a whole lot still left between us that couldn’t be forgiven. There was nothing we could think of to repair how bad things had gotten.
    And once it was over, when I had given up and truly wasn’t with him anymore, I just started going haywire.
    By the way, he and I never forgot about Leah. We love our daughter and we would never forget what that meant. Nothing that’s happened between us ever stopped us from caring about our daughter and the life we were giving her. We lost control of our relationship with each other, and what we’d had together ended up smashed to pieces, but that didn’t mean we ever forgot our child in our home. You have to remember we had come from growing up in messed up homes ourselves, and we knew what it was like to live with parents who were screaming and fighting and getting physical. It’s devastating that we let that happen to us as a couple, as a family, and I wish more than anything we hadn’t ended up that way. Things were just really hard, and we couldn’t handle it. The stress and anxiety and anger and hurt were just filling up that house no matter how hard we tried to fight it back, to the point where I was feeling like I lost my mind.
    We weren’t holding up the routine anymore, and it’s not like this was happening behind closed doors. And all of a sudden, we weren’t the only ones worried about our child. When the show aired and everybody saw the footage of me beating up on him, there was a lot more scrutiny coming from all directions on how all this was affecting Leah. Obviously the most important place it came from was Child Protective Services.
    After I hit Leah’s dad on TV, CPS started a file on us and wound up monitoring us for six months. That put even more pressure on us, because we never wanted to get in trouble with them. To make it even worse, the court picked up the case and they brought battery charges against me. That brought along a no-contact order, which was absolutely devastating.
    The no-contact order meant that he and I weren’t allowed to be around each other with Leah. We weren’t even allowed to call each other on the phone. Now, how was that supposed to work when we had a kid together? We still had our child, and the court pretty much made it impossible to co-parent while they stayed on our asses with their investigation. The restrictions combined with our problems getting along added up to a completely impossible situation.
    Then, in another charming twist on my fame experience, my house got vandalized and trashed. Because of that, CPS decided it wasn’t safe for Leah to stay with me overnight. So before I even knew it, I lost a lot of control over the time I spent with her. Since she was with her father every morning and every night, I had to count on him or the people around him to communicate with me for everything in between. That didn’t always work out so well. As a mom, pretty much the bare minimum you can ask for is the ability to know where your little girl is at any given time. But whether it was on purpose or not, there were many times when my calls went unanswered and there was nothing I could do to see or talk to my daughter.
    He and I fought to have the no-contact order removed so that we could handle things better and have a better parenting situation for Leah. The judge finally agreed to modify