by Anne Moody
There were scary moments, however. One of my first home visits was to see three young children who had recently been returned to their mother’s care. They lived in a ramshackle row house, on the upper level. The street level had a narrow porch across the front of the building, and I could see about eight men sitting along it and on the stairs up to the second level as I approached. I wondered for a moment if it would be wise to go up those stairs, then decided just to act confident and hope for the best. Halfway up, I heard one of the men say, “Let’s get her.” The woman upstairs opened her door quickly, so I never found out whether they were serious. I did think later, though, that if something had happened to me it would have been more than reasonable for people to wonder about my stupidity in blithely walking into that situation.
When I came back down the stairs, the men were gone, and I was with an eight-year-old girl, Missy, a wispy, white-blond child who appeared to have found her way out of a photograph of a hollow-eyed family in Depression-era Appalachia. She seemed smart and feisty, though, and very much in charge of her two younger brothers—and even of her mother, who had a hapless, beaten-down demeanor. I was taking Missy to the doctor because her eczema was so severe that she had clawed bloody wounds into her hands and arms. The poor child had no medicine to relieve the itching, and it was obvious that the skin was now infected. Getting her medical care wasn’t going to solve the problem of the filthy apartment where she and her little brothers slept on stained mattresses without bedding. It didn’t address the problem of the mom who had let the eczema get so out of hand even though the child had state-provided medical coverage that would have paid for treatment. I wanted to take care of that child in so many ways, but I had to content myself with the idea that I could at least get her some medical attention.
I took Missy to the nearest walk-in clinic. Since I was only twenty-five, I thought it seemed obvious that I wasn’t the mother of this child. I also thought that my business attire and general level of grooming made it clear that I wasn’t the sort of person who would allow a child in her care to be so grubby and thoroughly neglected. So I was startled when a young doctor assumed I was the parent and started questioning me about Missy’s condition, with obvious dislike of me and distaste for the task. For a moment, I realized what it must be like for Missy’s mother to be on the receiving end of a doctor’s frustration and scorn—another surprising discovery.
It turned out that Missy had impetigo as well as eczema and needed various medications regularly administered along with showers, clean clothes, and clean sheets. Of course the likelihood that she would actually get any of these things was nil.
This was my first lesson in accepting the reality and futility of child welfare work. I don’t remember exactly why Missy’s mother had lost custody of her three children for a while. I think she was just incapable of maintaining a reasonably safe and healthy home, probably because she had never lived in that sort of home as a child herself. But despite the risk to her children, Missy’s mother’s inadequacy in this area didn’t constitute grounds for permanently removing them from her care. She couldn’t be compelled to upgrade her standards and she wasn’t amenable to encouragement, particularly since she didn’t even recognize that there was a problem in the way she cared for her children—or for herself. She wasn’t at all interested in my explanations about how to tend to her daughter’s wounds, but she did seem to think it was nice that I had taken Missy on a four-hour outing.
Not long after that visit, the mother regained full custody, and her children were removed from my caseload. It was frustrating to have been able to do so little to improve those lives. But it wasn’t a hard call for the judge to decide it was time to close their case; despite what we might want for children like Missy, their parents have the legal right to raise them in squalor and deprive them of non-urgent medical care. I needed to understand that while it’s hard for kids to grow up in these conditions, it’s not as hard on them as being separated from their parents.
Fortunately for me, there were no immediate crises when I started my job, and I wasn’t suddenly faced with making life-altering decisions. I had a little time to get my bearings before any really hard decisions came my way. But not everyone in my position was so lucky.
Consider what happened to Miles, a friend of mine from graduate school. Hired as a caseworker immediately after getting his bachelor’s degree, he was smart, conscientious, and ethical, and would go on to be highly successful and well-respected in his long career. He was an earnest, idealistic twenty-three-year-old when he was sent out to complete a home study for a young woman new to the area who was hoping to regain custody of her three-year-old daughter. The child was in foster care in another state, and Miles was able to get only minimal information from the social workers there who were handling her case. There was no mention of child abuse or neglect in their reports, and it appeared that the child had been removed from the mother’s care primarily because of a lack of family support—misfortune, in other words, rather than cruelty. Miles went to the woman’s home, saw that she met the basic home study requirements, and found no grounds for denying the return of her child. When the little girl did return to her mother’s care a short time later, Miles was assigned responsibility for supervising them. Things seemed fine for a while, but then the child was admitted to a hospital with scald burns that the mother reported as accidental. After a short period of treatment, the little girl was released and returned to her mother’s care. Within a few days, she was readmitted with what was diagnosed as a subdural hematoma; she died of this injury.
Miles was responsible for investigating the death for his agency, while the local police department investigated it as a possible homicide. The mother insisted that her daughter had been injured while in the care of a friend/babysitter. Miles recalled that on his first visit to the home after the child had died, he arrived just as two police detectives were leaving. He later realized that they must have lingered by the front door, because they apparently heard him tell the woman that she might want to consider getting a lawyer. When the case became a high-profile matter in the press, the detectives told the reporter that this statement indicated to them that Miles seemed to be more concerned about the mother than the child. The tragedy was top-story news for a number of weeks, and Miles figured prominently in the reports and subsequent investigation. The newspaper coverage was so negative toward Miles that it prompted one woman to write a letter to the editor comparing him to Hitler. The hospital spokesman made things worse by telling the reporter that they had sent Miles a letter expressing concern about the child’s safety. In fact, Miles had received no communication from the hospital until more than a week after the child’s death and days after the spokesman’s statement had been reported in the paper, when a letter with neither stamp nor postmark mysteriously appeared on Mile’s chair at work one morning. At about the same time, Miles spoke with an intern who had seen the child during the first hospitalization. He told Miles that he had observed symptoms consistent with a subdural hematoma at that time but that the doctor in charge had dismissed his concerns. It seemed that the hospital was worried about its possible culpability in not paying proper attention to the intern. The creation of the letter, after the fact, was probably not so much an effort to discredit Miles as to distract from the fact that the hospital might have missed the child’s most significant injury and consequently missed the opportunity to save her life.
To complicate matters for Miles, he was not allowed to speak with reporters for several weeks, so the stories kept running without his input. After he was finally interviewed, the reporter concluded that he had an admirable command of the facts, and she said she was sorry that she hadn’t spoken with him earlier. Of course, this was after weeks of vilification; there were no subsequent stories exonerating Miles or clarifying the difficulty of his position. Fortunately, he had great support from his family and friends. And he certainly had the understanding of his colleagues,
some of whom expressed amazement that he didn’t quit his job. They all must have realized that it was just blind luck that separated them from Miles, and that this sort of tragedy could hit any of them at any time.
I vividly remember when Miles first told me this story. I was rendered speechless—a rare condition for me—as I took in the enormity of the tragedy to the little girl and the injustice to him. I couldn’t imagine a way to offer comfort or make sense of any of it. But I could easily understand the media reaction. When bad things happen, we want clear explanations and someone to blame. How quick and convenient to conclude that Miles was negligent and that children wouldn’t die in these circumstances if caseworkers weren’t so inattentive.
The mother was ultimately found guilty of manslaughter, and Miles recalls the judge saying something to the effect of “someone has to be held responsible” for this child’s death.
I had remembered Miles during my interview with Charles, the social services director. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he had been working to reunite the family. And I wondered why I wanted this job.
2
Service Plans
The combination of human misery and mind-numbing bureaucracy can quickly render people who work in places like operating rooms, police stations, and child welfare offices depressed and ineffectual if they don’t find a way to cope. To a certain extent, you have to harden yourself to the reality around you in order to simply get through the day without being overwhelmed by sadness and frustration. Gallows humor prevails in these settings—as it did in our office. We worked in a large, open room with short partitions between the desks. Consequently, we all knew a lot about each other’s cases, and our secretary, Joyce, who typed up all our case narratives, knew everything about everyone. We all came and went to and from the office frequently, but Jim, our supervisor, was usually there along with at least two or three other caseworkers at a time, and there were frequent informal discussions about our cases.
There were always people to turn to when one of us needed advice or emotional support or just needed to vent about the latest frustration in working with a client. I remember one conversation with two other caseworkers, all of us female and in our mid-twenties, about a call one of us had received from a foster mother who was fed up with repeatedly finding all the family’s towels stuffed under the bed in her thirteen-year-old foster son’s room. She wanted my colleague to come out and tell the kid that masturbating was fine and his own business, but that the disappearance of all the household’s towels created a problem for everyone else. So the poor caseworker, Connie, was trying to gather information about the etiquette of teenage male masturbation from people who—like her—had never been a son or had a son and certainly hadn’t learned anything about this subject in graduate school. We heartily sympathized, though, and tried to suggest alternatives (washcloths? socks? doing his own laundry? more uninterrupted time in the bathroom?) that were by turns serious and frivolous. After about thirty minutes of uninformed speculation, we heard Jim laughing in his office and realized we should have turned to him for advice. In the end, he was the one who had a talk with the boy, which solved the problem of the missing towels and preserved Connie’s ability to work with him without crippling embarrassment for both of them.
Interactions of this sort took place in our office practically every day, so it didn’t take long to establish close bonds and a feeling of camaraderie between us all. It also wasn’t long before we started socializing. My husband, being a writer, was especially fond of gatherings of social workers, all of whom had stories (non-identifying, of course) that could command any room.
There were innumerable discouraging aspects to our job, yet things often would start off on a quasi-optimistic note, with clients seeming to have a glimmer of understanding about what they needed to do to regain custody of their children. This was when the “service plan,” with its detailed instructions for improvement, would come into play. At the outset, parents might do something, such as attend an AA meeting or two or show up for visitation with the children a few times, just as called for in the service plan. But then, for many, all forward progress would stop and we wouldn’t hear from them or be able to reach them for weeks or months. When we did finally manage to connect, we would hear a string of excuses, and new promises would be made, only to be broken again—usually immediately. Typically, about two weeks before the next review hearing was scheduled, the parents’ attorney would swing into action and get his or her client back on track enough to show up for a visit or attend an anger-management class. Sometimes the attorney would only be able to make contact with the client at the courthouse moments before the hearing and would then extract a promise to make the necessary changes in the future. This feat was accomplished just in time for the attorney to be able to tell the judge with a straight face that the parent had seen the error of his or her ways and was once again committed to regaining custody. I saw this routine repeated every three to six months for years, while the parents changed nothing and the children grew older and more disillusioned.
So, where’s the gallows humor in all this? It was often provided by Mike, a good-humored, good-looking caseworker who got along famously with almost all his clients—particularly the women. He was funny and approachable and seemed softhearted and even a little self-deprecating. One of his best stories was about the day he and a female caseworker were sent out to a sketchy neighborhood in Detroit to investigate an abuse allegation. They were greeted at the door by a man with a shotgun, and Mike and his companion responded by repeatedly jumping behind one another until they both fell off the porch. They then took off running without a backward glance.
No one held Mike’s lack of chivalry against him—particularly since he generally told this story at his own expense.
Mike had been on the job for a while when I joined the department, and he had developed substantial self-protective cynicism. This was particularly evident when he came back from visits with his most trying client—an obnoxious, belligerent, abusive single father of six bedraggled children. This man found Mike to be not at all charming, and he regularly threatened to treat him the way he treated his children. These poor kids ranged in age from grade school to high school; they had all been in and out of foster care repeatedly, and it was abundantly clear that their father was never going to change his ways. The family home was what we called a “pee house”; the stench of urine hit you the minute you walked in the door. (I had the misfortune of having several clients with “pee houses,” whom I had to visit regularly. In one, I had been trying to act nonchalant and not breath too deeply while sitting on the edge of a decrepit, overstuffed armchair when a four-year-old boy walked up to it and peed into the arm.) Mike had been working with this particular man for several years, and despite numerous service plans, there was no discernible improvement of any kind. The children always did well when they were in foster care, but things would fall apart as soon as they were returned to their father. The oldest daughter, who was about sixteen, wanted out but felt responsible for all the younger siblings since their mom was long gone. She knew she couldn’t leave them alone with Dad. And Dad knew exactly how far he could take his abuse without giving Mike grounds to terminate his parental rights. (The bar for removal of children from an abusive home was criminally high.) So Mike was confronted with a stalemate in which there was virtually nothing he could do in his dealings with this cunning man to ease the suffering of the children. His only recourse was to concoct ever-more-fanciful “secret service plans” as a way of taking refuge in his imagination from the anger and hopelessness he faced whenever he thought of this family.
I remember my husband telling me that my coworkers and I were like the cops in a Joseph Wambaugh novel, constantly getting together outside of work to drink and commiserate because no one else understood what they went through on the job. It was at one of these frequent nights out with my colleagues that Mike, a gifted storyteller, was venting
to my husband, who could never hear enough of these stories. Mike had blazing blue eyes that grew brighter and brighter beer by beer. He’d knocked back quite a few by the time he got around to talking about the man who made him so frustrated. “My secret service plan, next time the kids are in foster care, is to go over and blow up this guy’s house.”
As it happens, I had a case where a father actually did disappear (unharmed) at an opportune moment. There were two tremendously appealing children, Cori and Sam, on my caseload. Nine-year-old Cori was a lanky little chatterbox with a sometimes disarmingly straightforward, though always well-intentioned, manner. She was bright and sensitive and worried a lot about her mother, Madeline, who was a drug addict and couldn’t provide a safe home for her kids. Madeline’s failings had led to Cori being sexually abused by at least one male acquaintance, and she and five-year-old Sam had been put into foster care about a year before I met them. Since there were no similar allegations of abuse involving Sam, he had been returned to his mother’s care about six months before their case was turned over to me. This added immeasurably to Cori’s distress, and she alternated between agonizing over what might be happening to Sam and wondering why he got to be with mom and she didn’t.
I certainly didn’t have any reassuring answers. Fortunately, Cori’s foster family consisted of a genuinely nice young couple with two kids, a boy and a girl, who both really liked Cori, and she responded well to the family’s honest and uncomplicated desire to take care of her. She was clearly suffering emotionally, but on a scale of one to ten, Cori’s foster home was a nine (they lacked the horse that would have made it a true ten in Cori’s eyes), and I think she genuinely appreciated the lack of drama in her new life.
