by Gay Courter
Before the first visit, I had sent the doctor a letter outlining the past and present situations of these girls and the possibilities for the future and enclosed my court order that allowed me to share files and consult with her.
After her first meetings, the psychologist reviewed the case with me and said, “The Colby sisters have the most potential for change I’ve ever seen in kids with their disastrous background.”
At the same time I was trying to prepare the Colby parents for the termination of parental rights on an entirely voluntary basis. As soon as Mr. Colby was released from jail, Julie wondered whether she could contact him. I told her that would be a fine idea, and offered to supervise the visit.
Buddy Colby asked to have the children at his home for a barbecue. Julie wanted to go, but the others balked. I told Nicole and Simone I would not force them, but asked, “Do you want your father to terminate his rights?”
“Yes,” Simone said loudly, and Nicole agreed. Julie wasn’t so sure.
“But wouldn’t you like to remain friends with him whatever happens?”
Julie nodded. “If I could still see him, I’d rather have someone else as my parent.”
I looked at Simone and Nicole. “Someday you might also want him to be involved in your life, to come to your concerts and school events, to have meals with you, to talk on the phone, and stay friends even when you are older with families of your own. If he can see that might happen easiest if he gives up some legal rights, he might go along with the plan.”
“You don’t know my father,” Simone added ominously.
I realized she was right. I had talked to Buddy Colby a few times on the phone trying to make arrangements, but had only seen him briefly in court. “We can fight him, but then he’s likely to want to fight us back. That will take time, energy, and make everyone sad in the end. Let’s try to be friends and see if that works. If it doesn’t, we can always go into combat later. But if we argue first, it will be almost impossible to put the pieces back together.”
Nicole was trembling. “What if he’s drinking or gets out his gun?”
“Does he have a gun?”
“Lots of them,” Julie said, piping up. “He chased an HRS lady away with one once.”
“Then I had better remind him I’m not with HRS,” I said with a forced laugh. “But seriously, if anyone feels uncomfortable, let’s have a signal and we’ll leave at once.”
We decided that if anyone was upset, they’d refer to having a stomachache and we’d go home without another word.
Julie sat in the front seat and directed me to her father’s home. After a few turns down sandy roads in the pine forest, she pointed out the traditional “cracker” house with a tin roof and wraparound porch. Although quite old, it was in good repair, and except for needing a coat of paint, was immaculate inside and out. The porch had a swing and some willow rocking chairs. In the back garden there was a dilapidated lean-to on stilts that Julie called her playhouse. I knew that Buddy Colby was the grandson of the founder of the Colby Roofing Company, a well-known firm, but the girls said that an uncle ran the business and wouldn’t give Buddy a position unless he cleaned up his drinking problem. Apparently he lived on handouts from his mother and part-time work when the crews were short.
I took a tour of the house with Julie so the others could have some privacy, then asked Nicole to show me the playhouse, so Julie could spend time with her father. When we were alone, I asked Nicole if she wanted to leave, but she said it was going better than expected.
Mr. Colby served up spicy broiled chicken, coleslaw, potato salad, rolls and butter, and offered sweet ice tea and coffee. The kitchen was clean and perfectly organized, and Mr. Colby reminded the girls that the utensils were in the places they remembered and they were to put them back that way.
When everyone had just about finished the meal, I brought Mr. Colby up-to-date on the legal situation. I stated why I wanted the girls to go into foster care and move in with the Slaters. “This way your daughters will have every financial advantage. Because they will qualify for a subsidized adoption, there will be health insurance and several hundred dollars a month per child for other expenses.”
“Nobody ever offered me no money to care for the girls.” I explained that able-bodied parents did not receive subsidies for their own children. Then he launched into his ex-wife’s failure to support the children and recounted her deceptions and lies. The sisters were uneasy with this turn in the conversation, so I attempted to steer it back to the issue at hand.
“Mr. Colby, you have wonderful daughters, who care about you, but under the circumstances, they cannot live with you. There is no reason why you can’t contact them by phone or see them at any convenient time as long as the visits are supervised.”
“I ain’t never going to HRS again. Those people have done me dirty.”
“If you prefer, I’ll be available. I want you to be informed about everything that happens. Nobody wants to exclude you from their lives.”
He looked at me warily. “And nobody is going to stop me from seeing my flesh and blood.”
“I’m trying to make that as easy as possible.”
“Nicole and Simone didn’t want to come here at first, but Gay talked them into it,” Julie said in a burst.
Buddy Colby began to cry. I gathered my purse and car keys and told the girls I’d back the car around while they said good-bye. From a distance I watched the hugs and farewells. Simone’s and Nicole’s were perfunctory, while Julie’s lingered the longest.
In the car Simone took the front seat. “Did you know my father was drinking booze the whole time you were there?”
“No,” I admitted.
“He tricked you,” Nicole added. “Remember when he brought you that photo album? That’s when he went over to the liquor cabinet, pulled out some whiskey, and dumped it in his coffee cup.”
“You saw him pour it?”
“Yes,” Nicole said.
“Does he drink a lot?”
Simone groaned as if this was the most obvious question in the world. “At least we got out of there in time. In another hour he’d be either cussing or praying. Trouble is, we never knew which it would be.”
Jeanne Slater and I discussed how to best approach Lottie Hunt. I knew the woman still resented me because of what I said about her in the report. Jeanne said that so far she had developed a good relationship with Lottie regarding Nicole. So it was decided that Jeanne would be the liaison to Lottie Hunt and would make her feel included in all the developments regarding her children. She told her about the foster parent classes, the fire inspection, and when she finally asked whether Mrs. Hunt might allow someone to adopt her three daughters, Lottie had said that she would consider it if the Slaters were the family, and nobody else.
After Jeanne reported this conversation, I asked her to see whether Mrs. Hunt would be receptive to officially terminate parental rights. Jeanne called back to let me know that Mrs. Hunt consented to sign the papers “any time it was convenient.”
I knew we were jumping the gun because the Slaters were not even officially foster parents, but it was important to have at least one parent agreeable, especially Mrs. Hunt. Although the children had been abused in her care, she had not been the perpetrator and the culprits were no longer in her life. Even if she had psychologically injured them or had failed to provide for them adequately, it would be almost impossible to get a court to terminate her rights involuntarily. Mr. Colby, on the other hand, had been the abuser, and we had documented proof, police reports, and children who feared living with him. There might be a case to get his rights revoked, but it would be a long, messy, Gregory K.-style fight. Still, I felt we might win his cooperation if he was approached correctly.
The next hurdle was the adoption department at HRS. Nancy had set up the meeting with the district head of adoptions, the adoptions caseworker assigned to our county, and the attorney who handled these cases. Iris Quinones was also invited. We had done m
uch preliminary work and had the promise of one termination, so I expected the adoptions unit would be receptive to a favorable ending to a complicated case.
Adoption seemed the best solution, for only with adoption did children receive a guarantee of permanency. Otherwise they lived in the limbo of foster care, never trusting that they wouldn’t be moved, thrown out, or returned to a natural parent in the next court proceeding. The cost to the federal government for foster care is 2.3 billion dollars annually. Of that, only 1.4 billion goes to the children’s maintenance, while the other billion is used to administer the funding. That does not include the dollars added in to support foster children at the state and local level. These numbers add up to a sizeable industry with the foster care children being commodities. Obviously some people have a vested interest in making sure that children remain in foster care or they will lose their jobs. This situation is compounded in areas where foster care is contracted to private child welfare agencies—agencies that would go out of business if these children magically disappeared into adoptive homes or were returned to their families. Even worse, foster care is a growth industry. The foster care population increased from 269,000 in the mid 1980s to 460,000 in 1992. At the same time, the number of children freed for adoption has stayed constant in the 30,000 to 40,000 range. About 100,000 additional children have adoption as their long-term plan, but most of these children never find permanent homes.
Why? Is it true that nobody will take these hard-to-place children? In the 1950s and 1960s the point of adoption was to provide babies to infertile families based on matching characteristics including appearance, religion, background. These days, when there are far more people who want to adopt than children, the affinity is based on tolerance. What behaviors might parents abide? Might they accept a hyperactive child? A child with a learning disability? A child of a different race? A child with a physical handicap? Would they take a sexually abused child? A child who has committed a crime?
If you get a group of adoption advocates together, they soon get into a game of one-upmanship describing their least adoptable case. The most recent prize story was about a child who had been in an automobile accident that severed her spine from the neck down. She was a quadriplegic who could neither control her bodily functions nor speak. The biological family had long ago signed their daughter over to the state because they could not afford her medical costs. They had stopped their visits because they thought the child did not know them anyway and they couldn’t deal with their pain. The practical nurse discovered that the child could signal with blinks and eye movements. This breakthrough in communication bonded the child to the nurse, and soon the nurse was inquiring about adopting the child. She was told she was crazy to accept this massive responsibility for a child who would never recover any further functions, but the nurse persisted. Eventually the nurse became this very disabled child’s foster parent, and later her adoptive parent, with a state subsidy for her home medical care, which was tens of thousands of dollars a year cheaper than nursing home living. If this impossible-to-place child had found a permanent home, surely there were many more families willing to take other children with complications.
One distressing statistic is that the younger the age of a child entering the foster care system, the longer he stays a foster child. Fifty-three percent of the children who come into foster care remain without a permanent home for over four years. Doesn’t it seem more likely that the cute infants would be the most adoptable? It would, except most are not available for adoption. Family preservation is the hallmark of the “modern” social services approach. Foster care and protective services caseworkers are supposed to use their best efforts to reunite families. (The former work with the children who are already court-placed in foster homes; the latter work with children who are merely being supervised either in their own homes or in some temporary informal placement.) Caseworkers might allow a drug-addicted mother a year or more to get her life together or give a young teen mother a chance to mature, not considering that a two-year-old, who has spent a year in foster care, has lived half his life being parented by someone else. When a caseworker finally accepts that parental rights must be terminated, the attorney for the agency often looks at the case and says he cannot win it because some steps haven’t been covered to document parental neglect, thus the process is delayed yet again. If, for instance, the child’s mother is chemically dependent and the goal was to get her into treatment and reunite the family, but the agency did not have the resources to help the mother, the mother’s lawyer can probably get a continuance in the case, leaving the child in limbo even longer—years longer.
My mother, who was a social worker and now lives nearby in Florida, also became a Guardian ad Litem, and we enjoy having this in common. One of her cases was a baby abandoned by both parents at the age of six months. The relative who had been stuck with the infant turned her over to foster care. Her first foster mother adored the child and immediately applied to adopt her. But as soon as the process began, the missing natural mother showed up—or at least her attorney made a court appearance—and claimed the mother wanted her baby back. Visitations were begun, with the mother only showing up for one out of five appointments, and then demonstrating very little interest in the child, who clung to her foster mother because she did not know her real mother. Finally, when the mother did not appear for two court hearings, termination of parental rights procedures were begun in preparation for the adoption. At the last minute a grandmother demanded custody of her granddaughter, and HRS changed the child’s plan from adoption to placement with a relative. My mother’s diligent investigation of this grandmother revealed she had given up three of her children to foster care and had lied about several other essential matters. After more than a year of constant prodding by the Guardian ad Litem, finally this little girl was adopted by her foster family, the only family she had ever known.
Sometimes the appeals process can last years and is definitely not in the best interests of children. Nancy had warned me that this delay would be the result if either Colby parent contested termination. By the time the appeals would be heard, Nicole and Simone could have turned eighteen, making the issue a moot point. This had given me the idea that termination of parental rights was not a permanent state, but a temporary one until the child was eighteen. Thus, after that age, a mother could continue a relationship with her child without anyone’s permission. Being a parent did not end at some magical birthday. When the Colby girls grew up and had families of their own, they might choose to socialize with their biological parents if a friendly relationship could be maintained. If I could help the Colby parents to see it in this light, perhaps they wouldn’t fight the adoption.
The problem was that what I had in mind was called an “open adoption,” in which the biological parents would be welcome to stay in touch with their offspring. But when parents signed the termination papers under Florida statutes, they had to agree to relinquish the child to HRS and consent to “give up all right to further information concerning the whereabouts of this child, or the identity or location of any adoptive parent of this child,” thus legally creating a “closed adoption” situation. For many years it was believed that it was in the best interests of the families involved to keep a child’s whereabouts secret, but in the United States there are more and more cases of “open adoptions” in which the mothers relinquishing newborns continue to have some knowledge of or contact with the adopting parents. This is due in part to the scarcity of babies for adoption, which leads to families meeting the birth mothers as a way to convince them they would be good adoptive parents for their children. Also, with less stigma attached to unwed mothers, the young mothers are not cloistered and do not feel the terrible shame that makes them refuse to reveal their identity. However, under the HRS adoption rules, nobody is allowed to promise parents that they can have continuing contact with their children. Even so, there was no way anyone could prevent the Colby children, who could use a telephone and soo
n would be driving, from contacting their parents. Also, the Slaters were not opposed to the children continuing whatever relationship with their parents that they desired.
I knew there was something wrong the minute I entered the HRS boardroom. Iris Quinones sat between Scott Keefer, the head of adoptions, and Dolly Lemoine, our county’s adoption caseworker. Nancy and I took the empty seats opposite, while the HRS adoption attorney, Myra Garland, stood at the head of the table. Nancy made the presentation of the Colby case, then asked me to fill in anything she had missed.
“We can’t do anything without signed terminations,” Myra Garland said.
“How are those coming, Gay?” Nancy asked me.
“Mrs. Hunt said she will sign any time it is appropriate and Mr. Colby hasn’t been approached directly yet.”
“They’ll never sign voluntarily,” Scott Keefer said emphatically. “How does it look for a court-ordered termination?”
“A very weak case,” Myra replied rapidly.
“The man just got out of jail,” I said.
“Not for hurting his kids,” Myra snapped.
“There are documented abuse reports.”
“They were a long time ago,” the lawyer said to prove she had read the file.
“The kids refuse to ever live there again.”
“Not true,” Scott said, flipping through one of Iris’s reports. “Julie says she would like to live with her dad.”
I shot a glance at Iris, who looked away. “When did she say that?”
“Last week.”
“After she was grounded by Mrs. Baldwin for refusing to help with chores?”
“These kids know the system and how to jerk everyone around,” Iris said.
“They’re in therapy to work on that, but they aren’t going to improve by staying in the system for the rest of their lives,” I added.
