The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  After meeting and being charmed by Cori, I got down to the work of figuring out what to do for her. It seemed obvious that her mother’s most immediate problem was drugs. Sometimes when I spoke with her on the phone, Madeline was alert and engaging and could make reasonable plans regarding Cori; but far more often, she couldn’t manage to drawl out more than a couple of disjointed sentences before nodding off for a while.

  Clearly, my service plan needed to address this issue. But I couldn’t get anyone to even acknowledge that Madeline was using drugs, let alone convince her to get treatment. She denied having any sort of problem, and both her doctor and her therapist refused to provide me with any information. After my first visit with a groggy Madeline in the basement room of the seedy Detroit hotel where she and Sam were living, it became head-thumpingly clear that he was not safe with her. And even in her drugged state, Madeline apparently realized that she had not made a good impression; while I was busy obtaining a court order to have Sam join Cori at the foster home, she vanished with him.

  Six months later, a policewoman in Las Vegas called to tell me that Madeline was dead. The officer told me that Madeline had been in a crowd of people waiting to cross a busy street, had stepped out into traffic, and was killed instantly. The policewoman had gotten my name from Madeline’s mother and was calling to tell me that they had Sam in custody and wanted to know what they should do with him.

  These days, most people know much more about drug users and the fact that dying a violent, early death is a distinct possibility for them, but we weren’t as knowledgeable or as jaded back then, and the news of Madeline’s death stunned me. I was sad for her and for the kids, and depressed about the life she had been leading. But amid all this horror, I was also aware of how relatively easy it had suddenly become for me to create a long-term plan for Cori and Sam.

  The most pressing concerns were to get Sam back to Michigan and to tell Cori about her mother’s death. I cringe when I think about how totally inadequate I was to the task of telling Cori, but I managed to stumble through it, and then she and her foster mother and I sat there talking and crying for a long time. Cori was a smart, strong little girl who, unlike many abused and neglected kids, hadn’t shut down emotionally. I knew she had been slowly losing faith in her mother over the past year and a half, but like a lot of kids in foster care, Cori had held on to a certain bravado regarding her mom, and now that been abruptly stripped away.

  There was one bit of good news, though: Cori now believed that Sam was safe and would be coming to live with her.

  When I got back to my office, I had another call from the policewoman, this time informing me that Sam was now in the custody of his father, who had somehow gotten word of Madeline’s death. The father, Dan, said that he had flown to Las Vegas immediately upon hearing the news about Madeline. Dan told the policewoman that he hadn’t taken Sam earlier because he hadn’t known about the problems Madeline was having.

  Of course I knew that many efforts had been made to find Dan, all of which had been unsuccessful. The speed with which he suddenly appeared was perplexing, to say the least. I could never tell if Madeline and other family members were trying to protect Dan from my office by not revealing his whereabouts or if they had just given up on him. But I knew that he had been absent from his children’s lives for a long time, long enough that Sam probably barely remembered who he was.

  Fortunately, Dan’s plan included bringing Sam to Madeline’s funeral. After that, the policewoman told me, Dan had mentioned that he might take Sam to live with him. He hadn’t said anything about plans for Cori.

  My single-minded focus at that point became getting Sam and Cori together. I knew that Cori was counting the minutes until she saw Sam, and I felt that she would be the best person in the world to give him comfort. They were both so fragile; they needed each other so badly, and any delay in getting them together seemed unconscionable. I decided to appeal to a judge who—thank goodness—agreed with me and gave me a court order to take custody of Sam. So with paper in hand, I met Dan and Sam that night at the Detroit airport as they got off their plane. In appearance and manner, Dan evoked a taller and handsomer “Man in Black” Johnny Cash—definitely intimidating. He was clearly displeased to see me, but with the help of airport security, he eventually seemed to grasp the idea that the kids really wanted and needed each other. Poor Sam was stunned and exhausted, but he perked up at the idea of being with Cori, and Dan finally conceded that I could take him to her.

  Seeing the two children together an hour later was an overwhelming combination of heartbreaking and heartwarming. Cori immediately turned into exhausted little Sam’s proud and protective big sister, and he clung to her. The kids both kept breaking into grins of delight as they shyly sized each other up after their long separation. But I feared their happiness would be short-lived. I knew that Dan would get custody of Sam if he pursued it, and he had said that that was what he intended to do. None of Dan’s failings as a father—knowing of Madeline’s problems, knowing that his kids were in and out of foster care, refusing to provide any sort of financial or emotional support for them, failing even to make contact—would be enough to deny him custody. I knew that the courts and I would soon lose control of this situation, and how likely it was that Sam would be taken away and Cori would feel devastated and abandoned once again.

  The funeral and wake were held the next day, and I stayed away in the hopes of not further agitating Dan. My information about what happened that day came from Cori’s foster parents and from Lou Ann, the caseworker who had worked with Cori and Sam before I did. Lou Ann had established a good relationship with Madeline’s mother and stepfather, and had a level of insight and street smarts about the situation that I lacked. Madeline’s parents lived in an upscale community in the same town as Cori’s foster family but had minimal contact with Cori. They told me they were happy that she wasn’t with Madeline and they acknowledged that Madeline “had problems,” although they wouldn’t get specific about her drug use. Much of their anger was focused on Dan, whose lifestyle they felt had been a bad influence on Madeline and had led directly to all of her difficulties. I got to know these grandparents a bit when I did a sort of mini–home study so that they could be approved for a weekend visit with Cori. I remember being surprised by the discrepancy between their reported income and their relatively lavish lifestyle and complimenting them (with stunning naïveté, in retrospect) on their money-management skills. It turns out there was a whole lot of unreported income—supposedly from consistent good luck at the racetrack.

  I spent that day dreading the call informing me that there had been a confrontation at the wake. I couldn’t imagine that Dan would give up easily.

  I was caught completely by surprise by the calls I finally received from Cori’s foster mother and Lou Ann. They told me about the scene at the cemetery, where Dan had appeared to be inconsolable in his grief. Then came the subsequent scene at the wake, held in a private room at a local restaurant: Dan was sitting at a table socializing along with everyone else when suddenly a group of older men walked in and surrounded his chair. There was a brief, inaudible discussion, after which Dan rose and was escorted out the back door. A short time later, the group returned with Dan, took him past his table without anyone saying a word, and went out through the front door. At which point, Madeline’s stepfather turned to Lou Ann and said, “He won’t be giving you any more trouble.”

  Dan called me the next day to say that he had reconsidered and now felt that both children would be better off with the foster family. I tried to start a conversation about plans for the future and he cut me off with, “I’d talk more but I have to run—my flight’s about to take off.” It was the last time I ever heard from him.

  I had stumbled upon a “secret service plan” that was every bit as effective (and almost as troubling) as the one Mike fantasized about. Although there was much speculation in the office after that about how u
seful the grandfather and his friends could be to us, no one asked for his contact information.

  3

  Who Are These Parents and Children?

  My clients (the parents) generally fell into one of three categories, the first two of which made up only about one-third of my caseload but took up most of my time. Those two categories were (1) people who were seriously mentally ill and/or thoroughly drug or alcohol addicted, refused any sort of treatment, and consequently were disconnected from reality much of the time; and (2) people who were severely antisocial (sadistically abusive, sexually abusive, violently criminal). A small but insidious hybrid of these two groups consisted of “religious” fanatics who appeared to function normally most of the time but genuinely believed that God called them to regularly beat the devil out of their children.

  There were varying degrees of dysfunction in these groups, but you could hold out hope for only a few of them, which made our mandate to work to reunite the family particularly unrealistic.

  The third and largest group consisted of people who were abusive and/or extremely neglectful but who showed potential for improvement. Some had problems with substance abuse and anger management but at least understood that hurting children was wrong. Others were women who weren’t ready to end a relationship with men who had abused their children. Still others were parents who had grown up in such deprived environments themselves that they had never learned even the most basic child-rearing skills necessary to protect children from injury and illness. These people weren’t necessarily easy to work with, but there was a much larger degree of hope for them.

  The most typical storyline would begin with a child spending time in foster care after an incident of abuse. Rarely was this the first incident of abuse; it was just the first time the child’s plight had come to the attention of child protective services. While the child got settled into the foster home, the parent and caseworker would begin working on improving things enough to warrant a try at bringing him or her back home. The goal was to make this happen quickly, but I had lots of kids on my caseload who had lingered in foster care for years. Their parents’ problems proved serious enough to keep the children in foster care but not serious enough for the courts to terminate the parents’ rights and free the children for adoption. The ensuing stalemate had these kids essentially growing up in foster care.

  This would have been somewhat less damaging if the children had been able to stay in the same foster home. But often, there were numerous moves and changes, with the children cycling not only between home and foster care but between foster homes as well. Even after a child had been in foster care for years and it became clear that he or she would never be returning home to live, there was still no assurance of living in the same foster home throughout childhood. It was depressingly common to get calls from long-term foster parents asking that the kids be moved when they hit puberty and became more difficult to live with. While it was hard to blame the foster parents for needing respite when the children’s problems were extreme, the consequences of a move were devastating to these already damaged children. Another upheaval in their lives thoroughly undermined the normal adolescent effort to gain independence by testing parental limits. Instead of achieving the desired independence and maturity that adolescence was supposed to bring about, another move would plunge these children back into insecurity and chaos, further reducing their chances of ever being able to form normal attachments. The world just continued to prove to them that it wasn’t safe to let yourself care about or depend upon other people.

  For some reason, most of my clients didn’t elicit the expected anger from me when I dealt with them directly. While I was tremendously angry about whatever they had done that warranted putting their children in foster care, I couldn’t help but see that many of them simply had no concept of what it meant to be a decent parent. Their own parents had been abusive, and no one had ever stepped in to put a stop to it or even let them know that this wasn’t normal. Now, as parents themselves, these people probably knew intellectually that children shouldn’t be abused, but emotionally they struggled to come up with a different response when they were angry or frustrated, as they often were.

  Many of my clients elicited outright sympathy. One woman I expected to loathe had lost custody after she began disciplining her three children by biting them on the cheeks. When I first read her case file, I was horrified. I expected her to be a monster, but when I went out to meet her, I found Deirdre to be a highly intelligent woman and—even more incredibly—a loving parent who (through no fault of her own) was mentally ill. The children were two somber little girls and a seemingly happy toddler boy. After they were removed from their home, the children were placed with their paternal grandparents. They were well cared for and attached to their grandparents, but it was evident that the girls, at least, missed their mother terribly. Deirdre appeared to have been a good and devoted parent most of the time, and there was no question that the children loved her and that she loved them. But it was also probably true that she was not going to get well enough to be a reliable caretaker any time soon. Her service plan called for her to go to counseling and take her medication, but these steps, if they were being taken, didn’t appear to be having any beneficial effect. She frequently stopped by my office in an effort to convince me that she didn’t need treatment, and she would talk circles around anything I said to try to convince her otherwise. Deirdre was extremely articulate and pretty and could seem quite normal—even convincing—for a while. She could engage me in conversations that held out no hope for resolution. Reasoning with her was like trying to reason with a drunk. She exhausted me and frustrated me practically to the point of tears, but she didn’t make me angry; she was far too sad for that.

  In general, it was hard to know what sort of relationship to establish with my clients. I tried to seem friendly and helpful most of the time, but every three to six months, the inevitable court hearing would come at which I would have to recommend whether the child should stay in foster care. Most of the time I was recommending against a child returning home, and my clients were unhappy about that, but it didn’t take long for them to resume acting friendly toward me. It was as though we had an understanding that, while they really did want their child back, they wouldn’t actually be expected to live up to their part of the bargain by changing their behavior quite yet, and therefore I couldn’t be expected to recommend the return of their children.

  I did have one client who didn’t follow this depressing pattern. She was a young mother of three- and four-year-old sons and a thirteen-month-old daughter; and as is all too common, her boyfriend, who was not their father, had abused the children. They were placed in foster care, and Darcy—the mother—remained with the boyfriend. When I was assigned the case, the boys were in one foster home and the little girl, Shelby, in another, and Darcy had been told that she needed to find a safe place to live without the boyfriend if she wanted to get her children back. I got to know her and the kids as I supervised their weekly visitation.

  The routine for these visits was always the same. I would first pick Shelby up at her foster home, where she lived with a pleasant couple in their sixties. She was adorable and easygoing and didn’t seem to be suffering any obvious ill effects from either the abuse or the separation from her family. (Of course, she really was suffering terribly; it just wasn’t obvious to her inexperienced caseworker, who knew so little about children at that point.) Next we would drive to the home where her brothers were living, and Shelby always reacted with excitement when they got into the car with us. During the visits, she clung to Darcy.

  This pattern of visitation went on for several months while Darcy extricated herself from the relationship and living situation with her boyfriend and waited for a spot in low-income housing to become available. Finally she called me with the news that an apartment in an approved building had opened up, but she needed a $400 deposit within twenty-four hours in order t
o hold it for her family.

  I decided to just go ahead and ask for the $400, and a tremendous uproar made its way up the chain of command in my office. It seemed obvious to me that keeping the three young children of a mother who had lived up to her end of the service plan bargain in foster care simply because she was jobless and couldn’t come up with the money for a deposit made no moral, psychological, or common sense. Her service plan assignment had been to extricate herself from her abusive boyfriend and to find adequate, safe housing for her family, and she had done that. To deny her access to her children at that point was tantamount to finding her guilty of—and deserving punishment for—poverty. And the children were being punished as well.

  I also thought it made financial sense in this situation for the state to just give Darcy $400 instead of continuing to spend more than that every month to keep the three children in foster care. But when I pled her case to our assistant director, he told me that there was no precedent for this sort of payment and that therefore it couldn’t be done. He did allow me to talk with Charles about it, though, and Charles (who was so committed to reuniting families) finally agreed that we could, just this once, dip into an emergency fund and gamble on this woman. But both men made it clear that I was “overinvolved” in this case, and that they fully expected that Darcy would soon be in financial trouble again and would feel entitled to keep coming back to ask for money.

  Indeed, Darcy did continue to struggle financially. One day when I visited, she told me that she had only a few diapers left and joked that she needed to start toilet training Shelby. Safely out of sight of my supervisors, I spent a whopping eight dollars of my own money (1975 money) on a case of diapers.