She’ll wake you up at 6 a.m. Chuck a sippy cup your way. Insist you play with her until, well, you play with her. Those tendencies have earned the three-year-old a nickname, says her mother, Doshia Givens: Crazy Horse.
“She knows she’s loved, she knows she’s spoiled,” Doshia tells Rolling Stone. “She’s in her villain era.”
In moments when the last thing Doshia wants to do is build another block tower or yield the computer keyboard to Selah’s furious typing, she can’t resist. “The smile on her face lights up a room,” Doshia says. It can brighten the gloomiest of days, she adds, even ones when her life as a single mom in Cleveland feels just impossible.
That’s why Doshia was devastated when Selah was taken.
Days after the horrific car accident that mangled Doshia’s bone and tore through her muscle — and days after the numerous surgeries required to hammer and nail her skeleton back in place — the crippling pain persisted. Doshia was prescribed heavy-hitting narcotics, oxycodone and Vicodin among them. But she was terrified of becoming addicted: Since 2014, Ohio has had one of the highest opiate death rates in the country; about one out of 150 Clevelanders has died of opiate-related causes during that period.
So, with her doctor’s blessing, Doshia says, she started smoking weed. She’d asked if it would impair her breastfeeding. No, she recalls him saying. A lot of patients do it, she remembers a different doctor telling her. Nothing to worry about.
Over the next couple of months, things were fairly normal. Doshia got a little better each day. Selah, who’d started daycare by then, came home early a couple of times; a little vomit and diarrhea, an occasional fever. Nothing extraordinary, Doshia says, but concerning enough to get her checked out.
So, in January of 2023, Selah’s father took her to the emergency room. Within a few hours, a blood test for tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — a byproduct of cannabis — came back positive. Due to that result, Doshia posed an “imminent risk of serious harm to her daughter,” according to Ohio Department of Job and Family Services protocol.
H/T: www.rollingstone.com
