“The Kids Were My Drive”: Shattered Families, Moral Striving, and the Loss of Parental Selves in the Wake of Homelessness

In this article, I theorize a form of madness induced by state intervention to terminate parental rights in the wake of homelessness and mental illness in Vermont. This argument is grounded in the experiences of two families unfolding over the course of five years, when they were participants in a longitudinal study of rural homelessness. Homelessness renders families vulnerable to the gaze of social workers, health professionals, law enforcement, and other “helping” professions. As parents interface with professionals to meet survival needs, they risk having their economic insecurity and often‐fragile mental health call into question their adequacy as parents. Through close ethnographic attention to two families, I trace the devastating subjective effects of losing children to state custody. The traumatic rupture of intersubjective familial ties produces tectonic shifts in parents' needs and ways of being‐in‐the‐world. The unraveling of family life results in the gradual erosion, and eventual loss, of parental selves.