this woman’s work

When I first started working at the shelter I had a lot of big ideas and one of them was about how kids in abusive situations felt about their families.

Reading this reminds me of my big ideas.

I used to work the PM shift as the RA (resident assistant), which meant that I also staffed the crisis line from 5pm until I got off work at around midnight. If we had an empty bed I would screen for emergencies. Generally it was better to do a full intake during the day since our intake worker was there and she would have a better handle on who she was case managing via phone (she would work with women not in shelter to find housing or to take care of business — like getting sober or on meds — in order to be eligible for housing) and what plans she had for the shelter as clients turned over. So basically if I did an intake at night it was either set up for me by the regular intake worker or else it was an emergency situation where the cops were bringing someone in or the woman calling was in immediate physical danger.

One night a client called who had three kids with her (two or three were still at home) and amazingly, we had the big family room available. I said I would take her then went down to the lobby to tell Brett I’d be late. (He used to come to walk me home.) The woman arrived about midnight — small, slight, impossibly young-looking for such a big family — and her children. I can’t remember them all. I think there was a baby and a little girl. The one I remember was an angry boy, about six years old, fists clenched and scowling. I did her intake and finally sometime after 2am got to go home.

I always ended up working with the kids. Before I helped establish the family program (wrote the grants, designed the manuals and trainings and policy), I would come in as a volunteer to watch kids during shelter meetings. Sometimes I would also come by between classes so that I could hang in the playroom and give the moms time to make their phone calls or meet with their case managers. I got to know the boy better than the other two (three?) children in that family and he was telling me what his family looked like.

They lived way out in the boonies on some kind of farm. I’m not sure if their dad was a farmer or not but whatever he did, he was home an awful lot. His dad was typical with his abuse — beatings masked as discipline, waking kids up at night to make them do random chores and then “punishing” them when they didn’t do them right. But also there was some kind of s*e*x abuse going on and all I could tell is that there was a lot of forced nakedness and something to do with his teen-age sister and something to do with his dad roaming around outside the house with a shotgun looking for her while his mom stayed inside crying.

Our policy was to make a call to CPS whenever we found anything that looked like abuse. As someone providing childcare, I was a mandated reporter and the job often fell to me. But as I’ve mentioned in previous entries, CPS was so happy to see the kids supervised in shelter that very rarely did they intervene. In any case, I’m sure a call was made although I don’t remember making it.

Our biggest concerns were these: the other children still at home (at least one teen boy and one teen girl but maybe another one of each) and also the mother’s wavering commitment to getting out of the relationship. She missed her husband. She loved her husband. She didn’t feel capable of handling her angry son who, she told us frankly, needed to be hit pretty regularly. We tried to talk her out of it, we tried to talk to her about the risk to her kids and help her make a plan to get the others out but eventually we gave up. We knew that it takes the average woman seven attempts to leave before she can finally walk out for good. We knew that the odds were against this woman — her first time walking away, her conviction that her husband was a “good man” after all. So the case managers worked on helping her make a safety plan (how not to die next time he blows up) since she had decided to go back the next day and I sat down with our shelter director to figure out how to get the cops involved with the kids. (By the way, when asked about what her kids were saying, she would only smile and shake her head slightly. And she would repeat that her husband was a good man and the children did need discipline.)

Now the little boy had said enough that we were worried about everyone’s immediate safety and we were very worried about the teen daughter(s) still at home. Besides living way out away from neighbors, the kids were also homeschooled and that meant that no one ever saw them or knew what was going on. We decided that we would have to call the cops and have to get the little boy to say something because CPS was telling us that they didn’t have enough to remove the three children at shelter to prevent their going back. See, we figured that if he told the cops what he was telling us (the cops have to hear it from the kid or a CPS worker and it wasn’t enough of an emergency to get a CPS worker out that night), that maybe they wouldn’t have to go back there and then maybe someone could go out and see what was going on for the older kids.

This was a terrible plan and you know why? Because this was my first major case with a family at shelter and I didn’t know that much. I was sure that this little boy who seemed to like and trust me would believe that I really knew best how to keep him and his siblings safe and that he would betray his father because heck, his father beat him. Seemed obvious to me. But what happened is the cops came and the boy flipped out.

Turns out that he hated police officers. He hated them because periodically they would come and take his daddy away. He said cops were bad guys.* He screamed at this one, he tried to punch him, he succeeded in kicking him.

I was flabbergasted. I was so naive!

That night the family went home and we never heard from them again.

(In retrospect what we should have done is had CPS in earlier since we sensed she was thinking about going back. The boy might have disclosed more to a trained, sensitive, civilian-clad worker. Also we should have worked more on helping the children develop a safety plan, which became our policy. Although there is nothing more depressing than saying to a 3-year old, “Is there a place you can hide when daddy starts hitting mommy? Do you think you can help your little sister to get under the table with you?”)

Much much later I worked with an editor who used to do foster care and who wrote this article. And this is what she told me: Most foster kids love their families.

Crazy, huh? Ok, by the time I left shelter, I knew that. I knew it because I saw all those kids who missed their horrible, awful, abusive sonofabitch parents. But it was a long time before I understood emotionally (long after I understood intellectually) how deep familial love goes even when the family is a farce made up of sadistic cruelty.

But here’s the piece that clicked it for me. My friend told me that sometimes fostering isn’t about giving a child a new family, it’s about giving a child a safe place to stay. That’s it. Because sometimes foster children don’t want new families. Sometimes they want the one they got but they just want it different.

See, I read 0 to 5 and I see how much they get that and that’s when I know that I’d be a lousy foster parent. Because I don’t think I could be selfless enough to give the kids room not to love me. I don’t think I have the emotional maturity for it.

When that little boy wouldn’t talk to the police, I was angry with him. He let me down. (Get that? Let me down.) I may have grown a lot since then but I don’t know if I could ever shake off that feeling.

That’s why I (and not Brett but I have years to work on him) keep coming back to respite care. With short-term care, I think my expectations would be more reasonable and less potentially damaging for the children in my care.

*To this day, I don’t understand why it isn’t standard policy to have a police officer out of uniform come talk to children. Or maybe have a mixed pair and if the kid is going to respond to a uniform, you have one ready and if not, the other officer steps in.

p.s. I leave tonight and hopefully will have internet at the hotel but Brett’s not positive. If I do, I’ll update. If not, I’ll see you Tuesday.

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