Family court turns on four words: the best interest of the child. Almost nobody can tell you what they actually mean. They have never been effectively defined, and too often they are not applied at all. Underneath that vagueness sits an incentive nobody says out loud. Conflict pays. Every motion, every continuance, every extra month costs a family more, and a case that drags is a case that earns. Meanwhile a child is waiting, through the exact years they are forming attachments and working out who is safe. Those years do not come back. That is the part the system has no column for.

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For nearly a decade I have watched this up close, and I have listened. To parents. To grandparents. To people who came out the other side changed. The listening is most of this work, and it is where everything I know came from.

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I've sat in courtrooms as a court watcher. I've worked on legislation, and I've sat down with legislators in Washington State and in Idaho. It is the same story in every state I look at. This is not an Oregon problem. It is a national one.

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I am not an attorney. I am a grandmother who kept notes, kept showing up, and stopped being polite about what I was seeing.