in a three-county area of rural Coalton are contracted to work with the state to place children in therapeutic care; in urban areas, that number climbs. Many of these agencies deal with regular placements as well, which still cost the state more because they involve a fee for the agency to have trained and prepared the parents. DSS policy is to start with its own office’s lists to find parents available for regular care, but often the social workers wind up calling private agencies.
There’s no real rhyme or reason to how those calls go out. The DSS social worker puts the fishhooks in the water, describing the children as best she can to her counterpart at the agency. The private agency’s social worker looks over his list of available homes and starts making phone calls. The first one to call back gets the kids.
“It’s just about what you could imagine,” says Cody, a director of one of those private agencies. “A friend at DSS called me last week at midnight; had three-year-old twin boys in her backseat . . .” Cody launches into a story.
The boys had been chewing on wood in their home because they were suffering from pica—a nutritional deficiency that causes people to eat nonfood items—and acute malnutrition. That “behavioral problem” made the twins eligible for placement via therapeutic foster care. Cody placed them within the hour, and a day later he got a call from another friend at a different agency.
“He says to me, ‘We wanted them! We’ve had parents waiting a long time!’”
Around the room, social workers roll their eyes, look away, shake their heads, throw loaded facial expressions Cody’s way; one gives a snort that might be interpreted as The only reason you’re getting away with telling that story is you’re the supervisor.
Cody notices. “Yeah, it’s a little unseemly how that part goes. Because that sibling group of three and the oldest one’s a teenager? Yeah. They’re gonna get split up.” Workers nod, sigh, and refill their soda glasses.
From here, the process can turn murky. If the parents follow the family management plan put in place to help things at home—running water is installed, Uncle Bobby’s put on a restraining order, Stepdad goes back to counseling, and the therapist cites progress—the kids might be returned. If Mom goes into drug treatment and the extended family have custody, the kids will go back after Mom gets out. If the state has the kids during that time, Mom is supposed to pass a drug test and appear in court. When all goes according to protocol, should she lose her sobriety later, the kids will be taken again for temporary placement until she gets clean. This is often how bouncing through the system begins for the kids.
Things happen in the order they’re supposed to, or they don’t. People do their jobs, or they don’t. Parents get clean and stay that way, or they don’t. Children go to a foster home, back to Mom, to a foster home, and back to Mom in stretches lasting three months to a year, depending on the family court’s availability, Mom’s progress, and the attention of the guardian ad litems and caseworkers to the nonstop flow of documents across their desk. (A guardian ad litem is someone appointed by the court to represent the legal interests of the children; sometimes they are therapists or other professionals, and sometimes Child Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA volunteers.)
There’s nothing to stop the ebb and flow of returns and removals except a somewhat fluid set of court expectations or the advocacy of the ad litems. In the states within the Coalton area, a third party’s being prepared to step in as parent can facilitate the termination of parental rights (voluntary or involuntary). Judges by far prefer seeing proof that adoption is imminent to making a child a ward of the state for any lengthy period.
The involuntary termination of parental rights requires proof that a parent has abused or neglected his or her child(ren) sufficiently to endanger the child’s life and health, and that “reasonable efforts” to resolve these parental problems have failed. Each court visit tends to have deadlines attached to it, and the United States has a twenty-four-month deadline for enacting termination—but when the clock starts on that deadline can vary by judge. One of the stories in this book involves an involuntary termination that occurred within two months. Another took six years.
Dale, who was not at the “pizza meeting,” later pointed out one reason for such variations. “Drug addicts lose their ability to provide a safe home for their children, not their wish to provide it. They’ll fight. They’ll try to get clean. They’ll either make it, or they’ll relapse. Which means the whole thing starts again.”
It’s a hard dance to watch under any circumstances, but when the clock is ticking toward the point when adoption is allowed, the waiting is the worst part for the child in question, her family, and her caseworkers.
“Once they realize Mom or Dad is never going to get it together, these kids long to be adopted. They want stability. And they know the older they get, the less likely adoption’s going to take place. Once they hit double digits, their chances are melting away, and they’re very aware of this, so they put on this hard veneer, act out trying to push people away, but you can see it. They’re desperate to belong in a family before it’s too late.” Cody shakes his head in frustration.
Cami agrees. She’s an eighteen-year-old college student who hit the foster care system at the age of four. She came to my bookstore to talk about the journey she and her younger sister, Debbie, began when Deb’s biological father overdosed in front of them.
The girls, their mother, Bonnie, and Deb’s dad, Al, lived in Troutdale, a town of one thousand residents that can really only be described as “dying.” Their small cinderblock apartment sat in the middle of a row of three jutting over a flowing mountain stream, with upmarket fishing cabins dotting the hill on the other side. Troutdale hoped to save itself with sport tourism, but the cabins are owned mostly by local lawyers or bank managers.
Bonnie and her husband were frequent drug users. One day, Al fell without warning onto the kitchen floor. Cami’s mother dropped to her knees and shook him, shouting, “Wake up. Al, wake up!”
Likely, these shouts-turned-to-screams alerted neighbors to phone the police; Cami doesn’t remember anyone in their apartment making the call that brought sirens. Two or three ambulance people rushed into the room, while a large policeman grabbed Deb and Cami, one under each arm, hauling them outside.
Did that frighten her, you wonder?
“No, I was used to policemen coming to our apartment. They’d always been nice to us, just yelled at Mom and Dad a bit. What scared me was, I looked over his shoulder and saw them giving Al mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I don’t think I knew what it was then, but it scared me. I could tell it was something awful. Final.”
The girls rode in the ambulance beside comatose Al and their sobbing mother. The mask on Al’s face in the ambulance (one assumes it was for oxygen) had impressed both girls, so while they sat in the waiting room, they tried to make one from magazine pages.
Without warning, the police stormed in, heading straight for Bonnie with an unequivocal (and loud) message: she wasn’t fit to be a mother; they were taking her children; she deserved to lose them. Bonnie cried, the hospital staff stared, and the police yelled. Cami and Deb forgot their paper masks and sat down, making no noise or movement. Experience had taught them that when adults were screaming, invisibility worked best.
But the instant the cops turned toward the girls, Deb went from wide-eyed silence to the kind of shriek only a toddler can produce. She ran from the officer, toward her family. (Cami is certain that no social worker was there, and she doesn’t know why; that’s not how these things are meant to go, according to social workers.) The police reassured both girls that it was okay, that they were taking them to a safe place. The officer tried to hold Debbie safely yet securely as he carried her
