Netflix’s latest documentary, Take Care of Maya follows the harrowing true story of a Floridian family’s struggle to get their daughter back from the state custody after they’re blamed for child abuse.
Story
In 2015, Jack and Beata Kowalski’s daughter of ten years old, Maya, begins to suffer from an array of ailments. As they go from doctor to doctor, they are repeatedly let down as no definite diagnosis seems to surface until it does.
Maya is diagnosed with an advanced case of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, or CRPS in short. She’s prescribed the Ketamine dosages as part of her treatment, which eventually shows results too, but after a while, Maya relapses.
She’s taken to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, where the nurses, doctors, and social workers feel that Maya’s direct mother is actually abusing her daughter and the Child Protective Investigator Sally Smith rules that this is a case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
Maya is separated from her parents and put under state custody. And so begins the Kowalskis’ battle to get their daughter back, while Maya’s condition worsens according to her parents and attorneys, and improves according to Sally Smith and the doctors.
Failing to get a chance to meet her daughter or even hug her after a judge’s decision, Beata loses all hope and commits suicide. Jack is allowed to take Maya to a specialist who confirms she suffers from CRPS, following which she’s handed to him.
Devastated and angry, Jack decides to pursue justice as the story of their family is picked up by a reporter. Their attorneys move to get punitive damages from Sally Smith and Suncoast, as they also file a lawsuit against the hospital, but the hospital’s legal team keeps getting the trial postponed.
Take Care of Maya ends with the Kowalskis getting no closure although the trial regarding the punitive damages is allowed to go on. Many other families like them also come forward and share similar experiences with Sally Smith, the hospital, as well as the child welfare system across America.
Positives
Take Care of Maya is a comprehensive documentary and largely thanks to the late Beata Kowalski’s tendency to document every little detail and development related to her daughter’s medical struggles, there is just an abundance of material to work with.
Although dramatic and emotionally rendered, the documentary does well to swerve away from overtly kitschy representations and recreations of the true events, which are far too common with documentaries such as this.
The documentary succeeds in showcasing competently, the damage that a flawed system can have on people, young or old, as families are torn apart, split up, separated, parents go to jail, and worst of all, die — all because of a know-it-all and lousy employee of the privatized child welfare industry thought the parents are abusers.
Negatives
There are times when the documentary seems to deliver visuals and audio that conflict with each other and defy the Kowalskis’ account of what actually transpired at the hospital when Maya was under state custody.
This becomes especially infuriating when one factor in the fact that the documentary really reaches the very intimate sections of the Kowalski family and shows them at their most vulnerable and traumatized. To not convey properly the side you take in this narrative is to do a disservice to the titular girl and her family.
Verdict
Take Care of Maya is a heart-wrenching document of a family’s years-long pain, suffering, and loss at the hands of a cruel, incompetent, and ignorant system that actively works, in a concerningly large number of cases, to defy its very own objectives.
Also Read: Our Planet II review: Breathtaking docuseries is ultimately bleak
