Then how do you justify that Kim says she doesn't think Jeff is safe to be with Jax and she leaves him with Jeff and not with his grandparents or someone safe? If he is an acholic as she claims and drinks until he passes out as she claims he is not safe to be with a toddler and she left her child in harms way.

Melinda left to be with a guy but once again if you listen to Melinda she isn't compentent to be a parent, she should have left Kim at social services but she didn't because Melinda lacked the tools to do so. Whether she went off with boyfriend or stayed she lacked the tools to be a parent and didn't have the intelligence to know what to do with Kim. Who's to say if she had dropped her of at DSS that they wouldn't have awarded custody to the Dad but Melinda wasn't smart enough to even think of trying. She was a broken person.

What I find interesting though is she takes all the blame for being broken and Dad time after time the man who may very well have broken Mom gets the free ticket. Melinda may very well have had previous abuse to have attracted her to Dad to begin with although that part was never explored. She was obviously mentally and physically abused by Dad and was unable to function appropriately as mother when she left. Kim gets many free passes because of the abuse her father did to her but nobody considers the damage done to Melinda by Dad. She just may not think and act clearly anymore. When she sat listening to Kim speak it as if she could hear and understand but that it didn't quite penatrate her shell.

What Melinda did was wrong. However, Dad was the abuser not Mom. Dad used the belt and the words. Mom was broken and abandoned her. Dad decided to hurt her. Kim may think she's fixed to go home and work on Jeff and Jax, somehow I think she's got too much of Mom and Dad inside her to make that happen.