Tuesday, September 15, 2009

 

Josh with Amanda's son Aydn.

Rear left, Jennifer and her daughter, Krystal Bree, who is now 13. Amanda found her on MySpace, having looked for Jennifer all these years.

All the kids are of age now, so I can use their real names. Ben is Jerry Kirkpatrick, 27, married with a lovely wife and a dog, a five-year-plan, and loans and scholarships to go to college at last. Prison totally straightened him out; he never really belonged there and once he came out he determined he was never going to go back and has acted accordingly.

Angie is Amanda, 24, a single mom of Aydn, a toddler, for whom she wants a better life. Amanda never went back to school and is a shift supervisor at Starbucks, where she has worked  on and off since age 16. She still hasn't gotten a GED, but wants to do that, because becoming a mother has turned her life around.

Before her pregnancy, she smoked dope, lied, stole my credit cards, walked on all her apartment leases, and shoplifted.  Although she never went to prison, she did get caught and put on probation.  When she got pregnant and realized she was going to have the family that eluded her throughout her childhood, she straightened right out almost over night. She's paying restitution, supporting her son, and has been working the same job for over a year. It's amazing how she has grown up.

Bobby, or Josh, is 20. He was in what I thought was the most stable environment.  When Gerry was dying and we had to give him up, he went to a foster home where he stayed until age 18, although that family went through its own divorce. However, as soon as he aged out of the system, his foster dad delivered him to my house, because Josh told me he wanted to go to college.

I had always promised the kids that if they wanted to go to college I'd pay for it and they could live with me.  Indeed, Jerry and his fiancee did live with me for a year. So did Amanda on and off when she was on a positive path. So it was only natural for me to take in Josh.

Unfortunately, Josh didn't complete his classes and was fired from several jobs, ultimately ending up doing nothing.  I showed him some tough love, and kicked him out.  He hasn't really worked or gone to school since.  He's a sweet kid, but has no ambition or drive, and lives with Amanda, trading our rent for some help with Adyn.

And Ann (Jennifer), who vanished so many years ago? Well, last Sunday I got a call from Jerry telling me Amanda had located her at long last.  Amanda had never stopped looking for her older sister, who had taken care of her as a baby. Amanda's strong maternal instinct has helped her try to bring her family back together, and she finally found Krystal Bree on MySpace, and located Jennifer.

Jennifer wasn't sure I wanted to see her, but I told Jerry I would be right over.

Of course I wanted to see her.  I had made a vow to keep their family together, and I had tried as hard as I could to remain a still point in their turning world -- there when they needed me, though not to be taken advantage of if they indulged in counterproductive activities. Jennifer was the missing piece in my own puzzle as well.

I showered, dressed, and ran over to Amanda's.  They were all there!  There was an adult Jennifer with a teen-aged daughter (and two younger children she'd left in Tucson for the weekend). Although overweight, she looked healthy, resilient, strong.

But then I noticed that the rail-thin woman sitting glumly on the couch staring at the TV was their birth mom,  as angry as ever that someone might be a friend to her children. She refused to speak to me, barking only monosyllabic answers to my polite questions.  Nothing, she said repeatedly, was any of the kids' business. I asked after her boyfriend, whom Jerry had told me already was dying of cancer. "He's good," she said. "You know that's not true," Jerry said to her. "It's none of your damned business anything in my life," she barked. She got up and left the room.

The kids were ashamed of her, and angry at her rudeness to me.  By now, they know who I am and despite their various degrees of PTSD and attachment disorder, I know they all love me. They deal with her in their lives, but they are still very angry at the way she uses them when she wants a feeling of family, still tries to borrow money from them, and pretends she was not derelict as a mom when they needed her.

It was a pretty awkward meeting. At one point, Jerry and Amanda suggested we all go outside (although it was 105 degrees) so we could talk freely. That's when I took the photos.

How did I feel? I was really happy for them. I brought them a bottle of champagne so they could celebrate.  They have found each other at last. They are struggling as young people with their lives, but they are all trying to succeed, each in his or her different way. And they're a family, which is very important both to them and to me.

I think they are sorry now that they didn't get more education, yet the only one really trying to do that is Jerry, the one who originally sought me out as a mentor and spent the most time in my home.  But as Jennifer said, wisely, to me "the past is the past, and now we're in the present."

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 4:50 AM

Monday, December 12, 2005

 

Jerry is about to come out of prison. I have bought a home in California and am away for the summer. When he comes out, I will take him again into my home to help him transition back into society. It's not easy for a released felon to re-adjust.

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 3:56 PM

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

 

Where Has Everybody Gone?
By Jerry Kirkpatrick, ADOC #165203

It all started when my father killed himself when I was nine years old.

Our family was living in west Phoenix when it happened. I was totally shocked when I was awakened by the Phoenix police telling my mother that my father had killed himself.

I didn’t know what to think of it. I did, however, know my life was changed forever. After that, my older sister dropped out of school, and I simply stopped going altogether.

Until I met a lady named Francine Hardaway. She was the lady who at the time was mentoring my sister Jennifer, who was going to North High School. When Jennifer dropped out of school, Francine told me and my younger sister Amanda that if we wanted help with school, all we had to do was call and ask.

Six months later, we wound up in downtown Phoenix on 2nd Avenue where my mother had started doing drugs openly in front of us. I was in the sixth grade, ready to graduate. When I graduated into the next grade, 7th, I really needed clothes and shoes with no one else to turn to. I then called Francine Hardaway and set up a time for me to meet her at her office in central Phoenix to task for some assistance. I received it.

During that next summer, I had to start doing things I really didn’t enjoy doing, but I had no choice because my mother was not able to feed us. She was spending my father’s Social Security checks on drugs with her boyfriend.

That summer finally ended, and I started the 7th grade with all my new clothes and shoes. I was just making it by when somebody disagreed with the way my mother was doing things and called Child Protective Services. When they came out and made a home visit to the house where we were living, the social worker didn’t approve of with what she had seen. In fact, she gave my mother a fifteen-day limit to get things together: “clean the house and put food in the refrigerator,” or she was losing her children for good.

My mother then decided that the whole world was against her, and nothing that was happening was her fault that things ended up the way they did and there was nothing she could do to change it. She disappeared into the closet for a little “time out” with her friends.

By the end of the fifteen days, I had tried my hardest to straighten things up around the house and put some food in the refrigerator, but it didn’t work. CPS came to my mother’s house and told her that she needed to give her kids to be cared for while she checked herself into a rehab.

My mom of coursed disagreed, and ran with us kids, only during this time Francine was willing to take me into her home and care for me.

About two months later, I was sitting at my tutor’s house studying when the phone rang. Francine called to speak to me, and I instantly knew what was wrong.

Francine had called to tell me that CPS had shown up at my little sister and brothers” school and remanded them into the custody of the state of Arizona. When that happened, I knew then that the rest of my life wasn’t worth a damn, and I didn’t know what to do.

At the time everybody started to notice that I was very depressed and though I should seek some professional help. So I started counseling at Terros. When I started my counseling I felt it was going to be easy, but of course it was not. So I instantly rejected it. I didn’t know how to accept it, or maybe I didn’t want to, but at the time I didn’t know what was the easiest thing to to. So I showed up willing, and soon found out, while on anti-depressant drugs, that the only reason I wouldn’t accept help was because I didn’t trust the person I was about to express all my life’s past to. I learned that trust was something that had to be built upon by both me and the counselor.

One I started gaining trust, I also started doing better, and accepting the fact that my life was going to be led by only one person – and you guessed it, that person was going to be me. But only being twelve years old, I didn’t really know what the hell to do.

I was going to junior high school and doing well, except I found it was hard to learn and fight at the same time, so Francine took me out and put me into a public charter high school called IntelliSchool, skipping my eighth grade year altogether. In IntelliSchool, I found it was easier to learn in a more secure surrounding. Once that was done, my grades made a really big improvement.

At the same time, I was still going to Terros for help, and accepting the fact that the things that happened in my life were not my fault, but just happened. Things in life always happen for a reason, only I couldnpt accept the fact that the reason given to me for my life was that my parents could not care for me the way they intended to.

Amazingly, I graduated from 9th grade with the help of tutoring and counseling. When that happened, everything was good. I went to camp that summer and returned a certified snorkeler, which was the second certificate I had ever received. My first certificate was my certification as a soccer referee, which I held for three straight seasons. I earned $9.00/hr at the age of thirteen!

The summer finally lapsed, and I was ready for the tenth grade.

When I started the next year, it was still at IntelliSchool but at a different location, which would have been fine if it had not been right next door to a mall. I was always leaving school early every day until a call was made to Francine and a school meeting was set.

When the meeting was over, the conclusion was not one I was happy with, until I met with my counselor and she explained to me that maybe it was a good idea. I listened to her, and started a new school the next year – one that was more controlling of me and my time.

When the school year was almost over, one morning my foster father dropped me off and informed me he was on his way to the hospital. He was convinced that he needed to be there, which he wasn’t willing to admit easily because he was an MD himself.
When he checked himself in, he never left, because he had cancer that was not stoppable at all.

After the second funeral in my life, I was again scared and didn’t know what to do. But ironically, after the funeral of my foster father my life really started going well. Francine and I moved from the current residence into a new home in north Phoenix.

I was still attending school and counseling. For fun I was racing BMX and on the skate team for online skating on the weekends.

After about a year more of counseling I quite after five years of attending, because I felt I had overcome all the grief I had been feeling.

So there I was in tenth grade, at the age of 15, thinking everything was fine, when Francine was told that I was not going to be allowed to return because my GPA was not high enough.

I was looking for another school while during the summer I was in contact wth one of the teachers to who taught at my previous school; he told me there was a new charter school opening, and he was going to be working at it. When Francine found out, she enrolled me for the 11th grade.

When the next school year started, I had a friend named David, whom I’ve known all my life, move in with Francine and me. He also enrolled in the same school.

When David and I started school we went, but little did I know everything was going to go to hell for selling drugs. Four months later, David was kicked out of school. When that happened, I felt it was my fault.

Knowing from the start the chances both Francine and I were taking with David, we wre very sad about him leaving, because I had a part in it all. But I kept moving forward doing what I was doing – selling drugs.

Two months later, I transferred to Gateway Community High School, where I could earn college credits and high school credits at the same time.

I started leaving school early to do the things I was doing at the other school, only this time I was also using the drugs I was selling, at the age of nearly seventeen years old. I was not showing up at school at all. I finally got caught in a drug raid at the age of seventeen and was kicked out of that school, too.

When the happened, I was accepted back into IntelliSchool, but about two months into the school year I was kicked out of Francine’s house and into a foster group home.

When that happened, I knew it was all over and started using drugs alll the time, until I ran away from the group home to do what I wanted to do.

Shortly aftward I turned eighteen, after returning downtown doing the very same thing I disposed of at the age of eleven. I started smoking cocaine, and thieving with my mother to support my habit. Shortly after that, I wound up in the county jail, facing three months for shoplifting liquor.

When I was returned back to the city streets, I was right back to the same thing I was arrested for, only much worse. I was in and out of jail for the following six months, until I was arrested on March 18, 2001 for aggravated burglary and sentenced to nine months in the county jail with seven years of I.P. S. probation.

I was released to a rahab on November 11, but it didn’t work out at all, so I returned to the streets a few days later.

I was again back on the streets with yet another rampage of smoking drugs and burglarizing people’s things, until I was in a high speed chase through the city sreets on January 3, 2002 with three new charges – burglary, burglary tools, and criminal damage. I was sentenced to 1.5 years of Department of Corrections time with a release date of April 28, 2003 with six months parole.

My life has always been a life of wondering whether or not I would wake up every day to face the next bunch of tasks, since I was nine years old. But I now know if I do wake up the next day, the only person who can make a difference in that next day is me, but only willingly.

The only question I ask is when and what will life allow me to expect of it. My love and heart goes out to Francine Hardaway wwith these next lines.
Love always, LJ

Misery

Cruel is the life and misery of the street
I’m never knowing whom next I will meet
Or what evil fate awaits me this day.
Full of hatred and deceit,
This forever I shall reap
If I go on living life this way.

Summoned by an evil lore,
I’m led blindly through the dope house door.
I’m seeking the black death that will deaden my pain
I’m a pool of foul reeking blood on the floor
A dying fetus will never know more
As the mother cries out in the rain.

When I awoke I was still lying in my hell
My soul I could not even sell
For I truly wanted to die.
On me damnation has fell
This is only one day, to those who will listen I will tell
I still ask myself – why?
Why didn’t I die?

--Jerry Reed Kirkpatrick, 2002

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 5:16 AM

Friday, January 17, 2003

 

CHAPTER 22
While Ben was in camp, something even more disconcerting than his unhappiness happened. Jose called, thinking Ben was already home. When he heard that Ben had two more weeks of camp, he was sad enough to let it show in his voice. I asked him whether he had been back to see the principal of IntelliSchool about being re-admitted. He told me that principal had advised him to go to the Job Corps.
"Doesn't he know I'm only fourteen?" Joe asked. "You can't get into Job Corps until your're sixteen." I was saddened. Absolutely nobody was concentrating on this child - not even to the extent of remembering how old he was. He had already been dumped on the bone pile of kids who couldn't be educated or helped. And he wasn't even fifteen years old. Clearly, he was crying for help. I couldn't take another child. What was the answer?
Who would step in and save Jose? And was it really possible to save any of these kids? After three years of interacting with Ben and his family, I still had more questions than answers.
I called IntelliSchool to see if I could get Jose re-admitted. The principal, who just loved Ben, had thrown Jose out in the middle of the previous year. She wasn't optimistic about letting him back in. When I told her he was always a good guest in my house, she wasn't surprised. She told me he was well-developed in his social skills, but just enough to survive. She said that after a while, he would push the boundaries as far as he could, until he forced the system to react. As she spoke, I realized that she was probably correct: and that was why he had been thrown out by his mother, his godmother, and his father. Little Ben had some of these tendencies himself, and that was what gave him trouble in his new relationships.
I decided I had to concentrate on Ben and not try to help the world. I called his counselor and told her what was happening to him in camp. Then I called his social worker. At about the same time I was worrying about his adjustment to camp, Angie called me wondering if Ben was home yet. When I told her he would be away for another two weeks, she was upset. When I asked her what was the matter, she told me Ann had decided to move out on her grandmother with the baby. Angie was afraid she would never get to see Ann again. I promised Angie I would try to find out what was happening, and I gave her Ben's address. I wanted her to write him a letter so he would get some mail at camp and be motivated to write her back. I was still upset by the fact that he could not address an envelope at fourteen years of age, and I realized he needed to catch up fast.
When I called the grandmother, however, she told me Ann and she had patched up their differences and Ann was going to stay. I was relieved, because as inept and frail as the grandmother seemed, at least she could watch the baby while Ann delivered the flyers. And the property manager, Lucille, kept a watchful eye on the whole family.
Instead of talking to Angie when I called back, I spoke to Jan, her foster mom. Jan was a veteran at foster parenting. She had been licensed for fifteen years, and had had nineteen foster kids. Some of her foster children were already adults and parents themselves. But Jan was not hopeful about the foster parent system. Of her nineteen kids, several had been to jail after they left her, and only one was not on welfare. The rest seemed to go right back where they had been, into dysfunctional families. As Jan said, "I never knew anyone who killed anybody. Now I do. I never knew anyone who had been to jail. Now I do. Now I know people who have done almost everything."
I asked Jan what she thought was the problem with foster parenting. She felt the kids weren't in the foster home for long enough. Most of her kids had spent several months or several years with her while their parents were in jail. When the parents got out, they took the kids back and the problems started all over again. Jan had spent most of her adult life trying to demonstrate a functional family life to needy children, who then rejected her model. She was telling me exactly what Sean had told me: seven years in an upper middle class foster home hadn't been enough to prevent him from reverting back to his former life and dropping out of high school.
When she seemed to have such a poor result, why didn't Jan give up being a foster parent? "At least I help these kids for a small part of their lives," she said. "And then I think there's another kid out there who needs me, who needs a place to go that's safe for a few months or a few years." Jan was burned out, but still trying. Little Bobby's foster parents had just begun. Bobby was their first foster child, and they had no children of their own. He was only eight, and they were still in their twenties. I suspected that they would want to adopt him sooner or later, as soon as the case plan made it possible.
I knew there was another hearing coming up for Ben, Angie, and Bobby in September. At this hearing, the court was to decide whether the case plan was still to return the children to their mother, or to seek more permanent placement. I was sure the court would decide on permanent placement, because Marilyn had hardly been heard from since she had checked out of the drug treatment facility in early May.
The goal of the system seemed to be to try to keep kids with their families. This, Jan insisted, meant that many children lived with families who either didn't want them or couldn't afford them or couldn't teach them how to be responsible members of society. It also meant that many children were bounced from foster home to foster home before being placed permanently, waiting for drug-addicted parents to get their acts together. Or worse, not being placed at all.
I wondered what would happen to Ben if the case plan changed. Although we were willing to be his foster parents, and willing to care for him as long as he was willing to stay in school, what if he dropped out? What if the court required that we adopt him? Both Gerry and I had decided that it was too dangerous to adopt Ben. Although we had known him for three years, we really didn't know everything about him, and we didn't know how he would weather the storms of adolescence. We had a lot of faith in ourselves as parents and as role models, but even the best situations sometimes produce violent, drug-related, or criminal behavior. For all intents and purposes, Ben was just going into high school. This would be a rough four years. If he actually graduated, he'd be the first member of his family ever to have a high school diploma.
Even with a high school diploma his chances for a job that paid well enough for him to support a family were slim; he needed a college degree. We had started a college fund for him so if he got to college he would have some money to fall back on. But there was no guarantee he would get there.
We were quite sure he wouldn't be allowed to go "home," because there was no home for him to go to. And we had purposely become licensed to provide more permanence for him. We had sacrificed a lot of time, money, privacy and freedom to become foster parents. But as foster parents, we actually had very little say in the case plan. We foster parents were like a warehouse for the state of Arizona, which had temporarily stored Ben with us until they had found him a permanent home. Most older kids never do find permanent homes, and stay in foster care or group homes until adulthood. For the younger kids, like little Bobby, adoption was a possibility. But no one would want Ben or Angie.

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 7:26 AM

 

CHAPTER 23
When we picked Ben up in California after camp, we were pleasantly surprised. After three weeks of worry about how he adjusted, he got off the airplane with his diving gear and two certifications. Proudly, he told Gerry and me that he had never gotten a certificate for anything before in his life. He said he was already planning to go back next summer and become a certified Scuba diver, the next step. He seemed happy and excited. Most of all, he seemed articulate and more mature. If camp hadn't made him happy, it had made him more knowledgeable. His vocabulary was sprinkled with words I had never heard him use before - words like "agenda," and "critical," "oceanography" and "original." I had spent so much time talking to him that I recognized the new words as they came out. I was so proud of him! He had toughed it out and accomplished our purpose; he had learned something new.
When we asked him how it really was for him at camp, his answer made us laugh. "Except for the diving and the nearness of girls, it was just like jail," he said, drawing on the past experiences of his father and uncle.
But he was very happy to be home. In the car, he said to us "I've never been happy to go home before. When I lived with my mom I never wanted to go home because I didn't know if home would even be there. I'm so damned happy to be home." His pager was beeping madly with messages from his sister, his friends, everyone happy he was home.
We still don't really know what happened in camp. Apparently, when Conrad said his father must have been a loser to bring Ben up in such a bad environment, it triggered a deep depression that followed him all the rest of the way through camp. The camp personnel, unfamiliar with foster children, couldn't really help him. But his survival skills seemed to pull him through, and once he was out he was full of big plans. On a walk with me the first week-end he was home, Ben announced that this year he would challenge himself in school: "I'm going to start doing 20 lessons a day and work up to forty," he said. "I have three big goals. To go into the Navy, and to go into the Secret Service. Or to be a lawyer."
"Are you sure you want to go into the Navy?" I asked. "It's as much like a jail as camp."
"I heard you have to if you want to be in the Secret Service," he said. "But I'm gonna find out. I'm not going in if I don't have to." We walked a little further.
"I'm going to have a job for my whole life so I don't have to worry," he said. "So I'm going to finish school fast because I need a good alibi."
I was puzzled.
"Alibi?" I asked.
"Yeah, that piece of paper you need to get a job that tells what you did before."
Resume.
I never thought about their similarities before.
After the summer, there was a hearing and a new determination of the "case plan." The plan should have changed from temporary foster care to permanent foster care, but it didn’t. Permanent foster care would have meant that Bobby's foster parents would have been free to adopt him if they wished. Angie's wouldn't; they already had too many foster children and three children of their own.
Before the hearing, Marilyn resurfaced. Now that the hearing was coming up, she had gotten a job as a janitor in the public library; she worked from 6 AM to 10:30 AM. Although she had still not taken a drug test, she told the social worker she would like the children back if they would like her back. She seemed to invite rejection. But her calls to the social worker were enough to make the children uncomfortable again - the pot had been stirred.
Ann and Sean moved out on their own with the baby. The grandmother could no longer stand sleeping in her living room while Ann, Sean and the baby slept in the bedroom, and the dogs had peed on the rug once too many times. Lucille put her foot down and said the dogs had to go, and Ann went, too. Marilyn had been hanging around the grandmother and hanging out with Ann. Little Ben's theory was that Ann was giving or selling drugs to Marilyn, and that's why Marilyn had re-surfaced.
Three Years Later...

Almost three years later…

There was so much more to the story than I had ever guessed. Marilyn showed up at the hearing in a dress without underwear, farted and belched loudly, embarrassing Ben. She had not managed to get clean even temporarily, and the court lost hope. A reporter for a weekly newspaper began following our story and published it in the Christmas issue of his paper. The children were put into long term foster care. The caseworker we liked quit the agency, and we got a new caseworker whom we had to train. Things got more complex..
Ben went back into school that year and still had his difficulties. He plodded along, depressed and sometimes suicidal. Jose vanished for a while, and we heard he was out of school. We kept on trying new anti-depressants, lithium, and counseling. But it seemed as if Ben would never be happy; he was fearful and vigilant. And indeed, things didn’t go smoothly. He had a right to be worried. First, Bobby’s foster mom, who had wanted to adopt him, was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before Christmas. She had a mastectomy, and began an extensive course of chemotherapy. A bone marrow transplant was discussed. Gerry was pressed into service for his expert advice. Unfortunately, he believed she would die – not immediately, but before her time. Her cancer was very advanced, and because she smoked her recovery was slow and arduous. Because she and her husband were young and inexperienced, they immediately felt they had to simplify their lives by getting rid of Bobby.

Gerry thought keeping Bobby would have been the best thing for Kelly, but her husband was adamant. He couldn’t handle all the responsibility of his wife’s illness and a child in addition, he said. He was sad, but determined. Bobby was stunned when they announced they could no longer keep him. He had bonded to them, and now he was out in the cold again. Rather than see him go to a shelter again, Gerry and I took him in, This caused another sort of problem for Ben, because now he was a babysitter instead of a kid with his own issues. As he told us many times, “I already took care of my younger brother and sister once.” He argued with us when we kept him home at night on weekends to baby sit. But when push came to shove, he didn’t want us to give up Bobby and he did it. He was fourteen, but he
was a family man.
Having Bobby wasn’t like having Ben. Bobby had to be reminded to take a bath and told what to eat. He was nine, not a teenager. And because he had been in foster care for over a year, he didn’t have Ben’s survival skills. But he worshipped the ground Ben walked on and tried to emulate him. This was not always good, because Ben had some bad habits from his years on the street. Gerry had no idea how to take care of a child Bobby’s age. I now had a job at Intel that involved travelling to California once a week for a day-long meeting. One week, Ben told Gerry he wanted to go to Skate World on Friday night. He wanted to take Bobby with him. Another mother would drive.
Unbeknownst to me, Gerry gave his permission for Bobby to go, even though the other mom wouldn’t be picking up the boys until almost midnight. When I found out Gerry had given Bobby permission to skate until midnight, I freaked. “There will be an accident,” I said. “He’s too young to be at Skate World that late, and it’s all teenagers on Friday night. They’ll skate right over him.” Gerry looked at me with a benign, far-sighted radiologist’s stare. It was all beyond him. But it wasn’t beyond him when the manager of Skate World called after we were in bed and told us he was sending Bobby to the Emergency Room in an ambulance because he appeared to have broken his arm. Awakened from a sound sleep, Gerry refused to give his permission.
“I’m a doctor,” he said from his bed. “Let the other mother bring him home and I will take care of him.”
“We can’t do that,” replied the paramedic. “He needs an x-ray. We’re the paramedics.”
“ You’re the paramedics but I’m a radiologist,” my husband said angrily. “I’ll get him an x-ray in the morning.”
“We can’t release him,” said the paramedic.

Usually a soft-spoken, mild-mannered man, Gerry came unglued. “You will let him come home, or I will have your license in the morning,” he told the paramedic. Gerry won. A very scared and tired Bobby came home and went to bed in a temporary sling. The cast stayed on for two months.Gerry fell in love with Bobby. For all the hard work of caring for him, Gerry felt that Bobby had the best chance to be a normal kid, because he had been put in foster care early enough. He worried about Ben, who seemed to learn the same multiplication tables over and over. Bobby was at about the same academic level as Ben, and they were four and a half years apart. But Bobby, too, had that problem sitting still and staying on task; it was part of the family.

It didn’t make much sense for us to keep Bobby forever, even though we loved him. He needed a home with a father younger than Gerry was, and kids his own age. In March of 1997, a foster home came up that seemed ideal. There were three other kids, they lived on a large lot in Cave Creek, and there were animals. We sent him out there to take a look at the family, and he liked them. But he didn’t want to leave us. The day he went to his new home was awful. He went down to Gerry’s office to have his arm examined and his new family picked him up from there. He cried and screamed. We felt as if we had betrayed him by sending him to a
new family, even though we knew we were too old for him and not able to give him the attention a child his age required. It was heartbreaking; Gerry’s heart was the most broken. He wanted to be younger, he wanted to be healthier, he wanted to be a father to Bobby. But he was a realist. And it was a good thing he was.


This is not a story with a tidy ending. From day to day, the situation grows and develops. Ben is in prison, in a drug and alcohol treatment facility where they haven’t yet figured out that he’s bi-polar. He will come out in April, hopefully with a GED, but no place to live. After years in our home, Ben will probably go back to the inner city and live like his uncle or his father. Angie is in California, a high school dropout living with her boyfriend’s family and trying to find a job so she can go back to school. Only Bobby, now fourteen, is still in a stable environment – but just beginning to go through the teen years, the years that nearly destroyed his older siblings.
I also wonder what will become of all the other kids like Ben who are in the streets watching their parents commit slow suicide with alcohol or drugs, trying to feed themselves and grow up in a world that bears no relation to the one they have to survive in.
After eight years of trying to make a difference and not being sure we did, it's still my opinion that if middle class families do not each reach out to a child or two and try to help on a fairly intimate basis, the tens of thousands of children all over America who are living in poverty and neglect will have no role models and no way of learning what they will need to know in the 21st century. Uneducated and unloved, they hang around with each other, increasingly unprepared for a work environment that is highly specialized and technology dependent. Written off by their teachers, who often don't see them enough to get to know them before they are evicted and leave for another school district, they have no one who believes in them.
If they are placed in foster care, the foster care may be worse. The most disturbing thing about foster care is its impermanence. Although I suspected we would have Ben forever, most foster parents do not know the families their foster children come from, and have little idea how long the child will live with them. Thus, they do not get too attached to any single child in the procession that come through their homes. Foster homes are almost like hotels or rooming houses for these road warrior children. They're really not surrogate families. In Arizona, foster children stay in temporary care for nine months until there is a hearing to say whether their foster care will be permanent. Then there is another hearing after 18 months, after which the children can be adopted. The children live in limbo between hearings.
The other problem with foster care is that every foster child has an emotional problem, just by virtue of being separated from his or her family. Yet unless the foster parent is willing to commit to taking the child for counseling, most of the kids don't receive behavioral health support. And of course nobody really wants a problem child. Unless the child is so bad that he doesn't fit into the family, he probably gets no therapy. And if he is "bad," and the foster parent can't deal with him, he's thrown back like a too-small fish into a lake, or a bruised piece of fruit. Look at poor Jose, wandering from apartment to apartment belonging to different members of his extended family, with no accountability and no real home. Between the problems of the foster home and the problems that come from poor performance in school, these kids feel rejected all the time. Even little Ben, in a home where people loved him, in a situation we tried to make permanent, with powerful and resourceful foster parents, experienced rejection from his peers every day. And when Gerry died, another incredible loss.
At some point, all that rejection and loss results in anger, and the child turns around and in turn rejects the system that has rejected him.

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 7:26 AM

 

CHAPTER 21
And in fact, he began to reveal them to everyone. When Ben first came to live with me, he would never tell anyone about his family, saying it was none of their business. But an interesting phenomenon developed as he got to know the affluent kids more closely. Some of them actually began to envy his ghetto background, while others used it as an excuse to discriminate against him. Elton was one of the former, Kevin one of the latter. Kevin's father had custody of him, and had remarried a woman with an older daughter. The stepmom, whose southern family owned the beautiful homes Ben visited in Virginia and North Carolina, seemed a warm and understanding woman who committed herself to Kevin with full vigor. However, Kevin must have felt some psychological issues surrounding the departure of his real mother and the custody arrangement, because he was a demanding and unforgiving friend. Smart, good looking, and somewhat smug, he was immune to the lure of rap music, street language and gang signs, which were Ben's value-added in his friendships. While Elton responded with awe and admiration to stories of Ben's background, Kevin found them somewhat beneath him. It took me over six months to figure this out - six months in which Ben was unwittingly subjected to the inadvertent cruelty of adolescent insecurity.
Long before the neighbor children fully accepted Ben, I knew I had to plan in advance for his summer. I didn't want him roaming the streets as he had done in the past, and I asked the other moms in the Biltmore what they were doing with their children. The activity of choice was the Catalina Island Marine Institute camp, a windsurfing and scuba diving three weeks on Catalina Island off Los Angeles. The tab for this camp was $2200. Child Protective Services told me that there was money available for foster children to go to summer camp. The available funds were $550 per child - enough for one week at YMCA camp.
I had sent Ben to a nearby camp - the one other foster children went to -- for a week the summer before, and he was too old to go back. I decided to go with the CIMI camp. I rationalized it that Ben would get some science education from the diving and hiking. But I really just wanted him to go where everyone else was going. I felt it would give him a common bond with the kids his own age in the neighborhood.
All the boys had signed up to go to the camp together. Because they had signed up so long ago, when they were still friendly, Ben and Kevin had requested each other as roommates. The intervening time had not strengthened their friendship, and I was mindful of the problems of the trip to Virginia. Fortunately, in the days before they left, it seemed as if all three boys were getting along well, and I had high hopes for the success of the camp venture. Ben carefully wrote his name in all his belongings, and we bought him a sleeping bag of his very own. I also bought him a duffel bag just like the ones the other guys were carrying.
Because I wake up early in the morning anyway and the plane left at 8AM Sunday, I was the designated driver of all three boys to the airport on the day they left for camp. With Elton, Kevin, and all their luggage and sleeping bags piled into the Pathfinder, I made my way to the airport on Sunday morning, cutting through a bad neighborhood on a detour to the freeway. The neighborhood must have reminded Ben of his old life. Ben said, "guess what, Francine?"
I had no idea.
"Sean got shot yesterday. I called my grandma to say goodbye and she said Ann was with him."
The other boys whistled admiringly, and I realized Ben was no longer ashamed of his family, his status as a foster child, or his background. In fact, he seemed proud of them. He had experience none of them had. He had lived the life they all heard about on their rap music CDs, which they hid from their moms and played on their private Sony Discmen.
He was nervous getting on the airplane, but as I shepherded all three boys through the process of checking in, I could tell that even with his deprived background, he was already more resourceful as a traveler than they were. He understood all the procedures, and he kept a good eye on his ticket. He was used to relying on his own wit for survival in any given situation.
All the more reason I was surprised to hear from the camp nurse four days after he left. I had not heard from him, and I had been sending him faxes to the camp fax machine almost daily, so he wouldn't feel abandoned. This high tech camp was privileged adolescents did not permit the campers to call home except in emergencies, but it had a dedicated fax line for parents to use who wanted to communicate with their children. I guess they figured they could train the kids not be homesick, but they couldn't train the parents not to be lonesome.
Gerry got the phone call, which came before I arrived home from work. The camp nurse had received a visit from Ben, who complained of a stomach ache, but had nothing wrong with him that they could detect. The nurse was wondering whether he was depressed and needed his Zoloft, which he had ceased to take within the last sixty days. Gerry knew about Ben and his ways of getting attention, and he informed the nurse that Ben was somewhat hypochondriacal and had a tendency to complain of everything from blisters to paper cuts. He asked me to call the camp, however, and speak to the nurse myself.
I told her a little about Ben's background, and about how he used to go to the school nurse and sit in her office, and also how he complained to the social worker at IntelliSchool. The nurse replied that she knew he was unable to loosen up and have fun, and that he was different from the other children. She seemed to feel he was depressed, but on the other hand she had already experienced his tendency to see himself as a victim. I wondered if three generations of welfare had genetically imprinted him with the need to blame others for hs own failure to get along, and the inclination to lay blame and give up rather than to fight back or change his tack. The camp nurse allowed as how she didn't think he should come home. That had never occurred to me. Chelsea had been truly miserable her first summer at camp, had indeed written an angry letter to my mother that began "Dear Grandma Sybil, How could you have ever sent mommy to camp?" and ended, "don't send my birthday presents here, because I am planning ways to escape." Presented by my mother with a copy of that letter, I made the decision not to allow Chelsea to leave a camp I had spent my last pennies to pay for, and told her sternly to adjust. She did adjust, and in fact returned the following summer, while her sister who never complained never went back.
So it never occurred to me to allow Ben to come home. However, in the day following, I thought many times of the differences between my own children and Ben, and wondered if there was any validity in treating them all alike. After all, Ben had suffered so much loss. He was insecure, and for good reason. He might have thought camp, which I presented as a good opportunity to learn science and a fun experience, was just another disruption in a life full of disruptions. When I asked him if he wanted to go to camp with Kevin, he had no idea what camp was all about, nor had he ever been separated from me for three weeks or forced to live in a cabin with six other boys. The church camp he had gone to the previous year was carefully monitored by adults to provide religious instruction and a politically correct environment of tolerance for individual differences. Catalina Island Marine Institute, however, was a place for affluent kids to sail, dive and windsurf.
The next day, I received a call from another camp official. "It's no emergency, he said cheerfully, his voice that of the kindly older uncle. "Your son here told me you had Phoenix Suns tickets, so I just called you to tell you I was coming to Phoenix to see some games with you." After this falsely jovial beginning, he went on to tell me he had Ben with him, and Ben was still unhappy. He was thinking of changing Ben's cabin, and Ben wanted to talk to me. They were going to violate the camp rules by allowing us to speak. He referred to Ben's problem as homesickness, and told me Ben had told him that going to camp was my decision rather than his. I wondered whether there was any truth to the fact that Ben thought this, or whether he was just doing his "victim" thing. I also wondered at the idea of homesickness. I was pretty sure it was something else.
Sure enough, once Ben got on the phone, the truth came out. Kevin had brought another of his old friends with him to camp, and the two boys had deserted Ben after a day or so. The other three boys were strangers. Elton was in another cabin. The camp's plan was to change Ben into Elton's cabin. I thought that was a good idea, but I questioned Ben.
"Have you been sailing yet?"
"Yeah."
"How was it?"
"Fun."
"How about diving?"
"Fine. I'm going to be certified."
"Well, that's wonderful," I exclaimed. "So the reasons you went there are really going fine. And it's only Kevin who has dissed you."
"Yeah." "Well, then, don't let him ruin your good time. Tell him to take a hike and find yourself some new friends. He's not the only kid in camp. Is Elton treating you okay?"
"Yeah."
"Then hang around with him." I wondered how to inject self-esteem into little Ben, who for all his toughness was an emotional wreck. I wondered if all ghetto kids were like this when you peeled away the tough guy exterior and the gang connections. I now saw what the utility was of those mannerisms, and I began to respect their survival value in a world where not everybody had a foster mom to buck them up in the face of peer adversity. Once again, I was treating Ben like my own child, however - giving him the same advice I would have given Sam or Chelsea, who had come out of such dramatically different circumstances. I hoped it would all work out. I promised to call back, and when I hung up the phone I started to cry, overwhelmed by the impossibility of knowing whether I was making good or bad decisions for this child. For my own children, I was always confident that I knew; Ben was a horse of a different color. Worse, Gerry and I were leaving Phoenix for San Diego, to attend a family wedding and see Chelsea on her 23rd birthday. Ben could not get in touch with us if he needed us. I tried to call the camp from San Diego, but the woman who answered the phone didn't know who Ben was. She knew there was one homesick boy, and she assured me she thought he was all right.
But he really was not all right. The day we returned from San Diego, my mobile phone rang in the car. Only my husband and children call me in the car, so I was prepared for something from the family. Instead, a strange female voice began with the now-familiar caveat "this is Catalina Island camp, but it's not an emergency. Ben is just fine." The woman went on to tell me that Ben had run out of money in the camp store, and wished to know if I would send more. Since I had sent $75 and he had run out in one week, I wasn't sympathetic. I asked her for an accounting, thinking that perhaps he had needed some diving supplies that I hadn't paid for in advance. I needed more information to decide whether this was to be a lesson in budgeting for him, or an opportunity for me to Fed Ex more money to the camp.
He also wanted to know if I would be coming to Parents' Day. He was sitting in the secretary's office as she spoke to me. Since it was early morning, I guessed that he was missing a scheduled camp activity.
This reminded me of how Ben would sit in the nurse's office at the junior high or the social worker's office at IntelliSchool rather than participate in school. Now it seemed he wasn't participating in camp, either. He asked to speak to me.
"Have things gotten better?" I asked.
"They're fine."
"Did they change your cabin?"
"No. And Richard said something that made me feel very low," Ben said.
"Was that after you spoke to me last time, or before?" I asked, wondering whether the camp had intervened.
"After," he said.
"What was it?" I asked.
"I can't tell you now." Ben always said he couldn't tell me now. Then if I continued to ask, he would tell me anyway. I played the game.
"Tell me now. I need to know so I can tell what I have to do for you."
"Well, Richard threatened to kill me." This was very familiar. Other kids, including Angie and her foster sister, had threatened to kill him. And other kids had jumped him. Or so he said? What did he say or do to make these other kids threaten him? "And he said my dad must have not been any good because he couldn't take care of me. It made me feel very low."
The situation was complicated. Although I would never know what happened, I guessed that Ben had pushed and bullied the other child into making the threat. I had seen him operate over the telephone like that: "ask your mother if you can spend the night, dude. Ask her. Ask her now. Go on." The other child would often give in, or if he didn't, Ben would get even more insistent. I had no doubt Richard had said something rude to Ben that had hurt him, but because of the incident with the pager man, I knew that Ben had somehow provoked the response. He was not an innocent victim. But in his life, where people really did kill each other, these threats probably had deep meaning for Ben.
"Richard won't kill you. You don't have to worry about that. Find yourself some other friends. Hang around with Elton. It wasn't nice what he said, but he probably didn't mean it. Try to have a good time. And I'll send you more money if I find they have made a mistake in the camp store, but if you have truly spent $75 yourself, I won't. That's enough money for three weeks."
This situation occurred over and over with Ben. Things happened that he didn't believe were his fault; yet when I checked, I would find responsibility. It seemed as though he didn't really understand the consequences of his actions. He also was in the habit of failing to take responsibility. I attributed this to three generations of welfare, and the fact that he had his family's victim mentality. I had no respect for people who thought everything was done to them by others. I had repeatedly tried to show Ben how he was responsible for what happened around him, but I was walking a fine line. For some things, like the breakup of his family, he took too much responsibility. I wondered how I was going to teach him the subtle distinctions between things for which he could and should be responsible, like how he treated his friends and how much money he spent, and things that were out of his control, like his mother's addiction.
As usual, I discussed this with my friend Scott. Scott had also noticed Ben's tendency to lay blame, and shared my concern. He promised to have a talk with Ben when camp was over. He also told me that when he and Adam, one of Gerry's sons, had taken Ben golfing with them, Ben had arrived without money to pay for his fees or his clubs. "Francine gave you $20, didn't she?" Scott had asked. "Yes," Ben had said, "but I put it in the bank." Both Scott and Adam had been irritated by this. Ben still had the predisposition to take advantage of any situation.
When I checked again with the camp, they told me Ben still had $72 left in his store account. They surmised that he just wanted to talk to me, and had either misinterpreted or chosen to misinterpret the amount of money he had as an excuse to be able to call. During the following weeks, I spoke repeatedly with camp personnel, because Ben's situation varied dramatically from day to day. Some days he'd be fine, and then he would become lonely and depressed, left out of the other children's activities. On Parents' Day, when we didn't show up at the camp, they allowed him to call me.
"Are you having a good time," I asked?
"Yes," he said. "It's lots of fun. But I can't wait to get out of here."
"Why? " I wanted to know.
"Because I think differently about things from everybody here. We'll have lots to talk about when I get home."
I encouraged him to adjust. I sent him daily faxes about making the world the way you wanted it to be, and I stood firm in not letting him come home. But he was truly, if intermittently, miserable. A letter:
"Dear Francine, It's me Ben. It's a lot of fun here but I can't wait to get the hell out of here. I'm a certified diver. It's almost lunch now and I'm sitting next to Elton. He says hi. It was his birthday yesterday, he was 15. I'm not getting along with Kevin at all he keeps picking on me to get me kicked out of here but I'm ignoring him so I won't get kicked out. Say Hi to Mary and Scott. Good buy!"
This letter disturbed me for many reasons. One was its simple illiteracy, even after tutoring and IntelliSchool. Another was its similarity to so many of Ben's other social interactions. It was difficult for me to resist correcting the letter and mailing it back, or delivering another lecture on ignoring Kevin because he didn't do things on purpose, but I decided that it was most important that I remain supportive. However, I did call Ben's therapist and explain to her what had happened, so that she could discuss it with him when he came home. I was disappointed that the camp hadn't worked out better, although I knew it had still been valuable as a learning experience. He had had so few experiences compared to other kids his age, and he had little to offer besides his street wisdom. On Catalina Island, next to nature, his urban survival skills were irrelevant and his reputation as a thug was unknown. No one at Catalina Island Marine Institute really cared about the 9th Street gang or the Hollywood gang. He was having to learn a completely different skill set in order to make new friends. If nothing else, a knowledge of scuba diving and some instruction in oceanography could help him later at cocktail parties!

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 7:25 AM

 

CHAPTER 20
The boys around the Biltmore continued to make things difficult for Ben. Part of it was the normal course of being a fourteen year old, but I thought most of it was due to his being a foster child. Elton's new friend spent more and more time with him, and they excluded Ben. Ben told me that Elton's friend was from a bad part of town, but that Elton's mom didn't know it because they had met at church. The boy was sixteen, and wanted to hang out at the mall all day. I had seen newspaper articles about shootings at malls, and I wasn't anxious for Ben to go. Nor was he anxious to go. Because he knew so much more than Elton about gangs, he had a healthy respect for the boys who hung out at the mall. Elton's friend, trying to act like a big shot, had thrown around some gang signs the last time all three boys went to the mall. Ben knew what those signs meant, but Elton wouldn't listen to him. He was enamored of the older boy. Ben was dispirited over his loss of a companion.
I sat Ben down at the kitchen table. "You know that Elton will come back," I said. "Yeah," he answered, "but not until his mother finds out what that other boy is doing and busts them." The other boy smoked, and gave Elton cigarettes. Elton's mother was so busy with her own life that she couldn't control her son during his adolescence. She had no idea what he was doing, even though she tried to watch him. Ben's wisdom seemed to work against him. The experiments that other boys in the Biltmore were doing at fourteen, he had done at eight, nine, and ten. We sat for a long time at the table, while I tried to cheer him up about losing yet another new friend.
"You're just more experienced than they are," I said. "They don't know how good they have it."
"I know," he said. "I've never lived so good. I can remember when, right before you met us, we were all living in one room - my gramma, my uncle, my dad and mom, Angie, Ann and Bobby and Joe. There were twelve of us in a studio apartment. The bathroom sink was the kitchen sink, and the tub and bathroom were in one place. We slept on the floor."
"How long did you live like that,? " I asked. He must have been about ten years old.
"About two months, and then we moved into those apartments where you met us." That was the building I thought should have been condemned, but for Ben it had been a great step up. He told me that he used to wash cars at a car lot down the block and clean people's yards for money.
"What did you do with the money?" I asked.
"I bought food," he said. "That was the time my mom and dad decided they didn't want to do nothing anymore, so I had to start doing stuff. They sat around arguing all day about who was going to leave who, and then they smoked drugs. When I got money, I used it to buy food for everybody."
I reminded him about when we first met. He remembered sitting on the couch as I talked to his mother. I told him I remembered he wasn't in school.
"There were all those Afro-American kids at the school I went to then," he said. "They beat me up if I went to school. And the other families in the building were Afro-American also. That's why I stayed home."
"Were your parents on drugs then?" I asked.
" My dad wanted to get off. He was mad at my mom because she still wanted to do them. The first time you gave my mom money, she smoked it," he said. "That's how I know what they do to you."
He was morose, possessed of all this knowledge that only separated him from everybody else.
"Someday when we have a whole day to waste," he said, "I'll tell you about my whole life, back from when we were living in the projects in Avondale."
The projects in Avondale seemed to be an idyllic time in Ben's memory. His father had worked as a roofer, and the family had had a car. They had gone on camping trips, and had watched car races. Although Ben was little, he remembered it as the best time for his family. But it had come to an end because Marilyn's mother had gotten sick, and Marilyn wanted to move closer to her. At the same time, the real estate recession had taken its toll of construction jobs, and Leroy was out of work. Never wealthy, the family had soon become destitute after Phoenix's downturn in 1990. For over a year, there was almost no new construction, and therefore no obvious job for Leroy.
But something was out of kilter with Ben's memory and his story, because social workers had told me they had files on this family since 1985. The happy days that Ben remembered were probably figments of his imagination. I tried not to destroy them as I taught him how to look at some of the things that happened to him.
"Your grandmother couldn't have been that good a mother," I told him, "or her children would still be around her now. She doesn't even know where most of them are. Like, where's your uncle Jimmy?"
"My uncle Jimmy does well," he said. "Whenever we saw him he was well dressed and seemed to have money."
"Why don't you see him anymore," I asked. "Why doesn't he still come around."
Ben searched his memory. "I think because my mom once told him my grandma was dead, and he believed her," he said. Even he knew there was something very wrong about that story - either in the reality or in his memory, or perhaps both.
I was happy he would talk to me like this. But I felt sorry for him without friends his own age. When Jose called, I was actually relieved. Although I didn't want them to spend time together, I also wanted Ben to have some good times. "Invite him to spend the night," I said. Ben was thrilled. "Francine says you can spend the night," he said, "and that hardly ever happens so you better ask your Nina (godmother) if you can come!"
After all, Jose might not be moving along educationally, but he was a faithful friend, and he didn't seem to be in a gang at the moment. One by-product of his being shuffled from relative to relative had been to weaken those neighborhood-dependent ties. I was glad that he was willing to spend the night with Ben, taking the responsibility off me to entertain him and provide for his total happiness. It was an awesome task, and had to be at least partially done by peer relationships.
Several hours and busses later, Jose appeared at the house. His hair was dyed a bright apple green on top, above the black hair of the Hispanic man. I decided that with all the larger issues at stake, hair was a non-issue. "That looks great," I said. "Where did you get it in case Ben wants to do it." In the past, I had found that a little interest and understanding went a long way with adolescents. I was willing to bet that since I had not been disapproving or shocked, Ben would never die his hair green.
Jose and Ben spent a pleasant week-end together skating, biking and swimming. When Jose left, Ben told me that he was actually homeless, because he did not live permanently with any of his relatives. Sometimes he slept at his godmother's, and sometimes at his grandfather's with his father. His mother, who had three much younger children as well as two older children, was a drug user who had moved to the south side of Phoenix. Last year, Jose had missed almost the entire school semester, being kicked out of the district junior high for lack of a uniform and then kicked out of IntelliSchool for disobeying their rules. By the end of the semester, he was in the district's alternative school, where they put him in eighth grade without caring that his skill level was far lower. I wondered what to do.
"Should I call Child Protective Services?" I asked Ben.
"That's up to you." he said. "You have to do what you think is the best thing. I would never get involved with something like that."
I probed to see if Ben would tell me whether he was glad or sorry that he had become a ward of the state. "What if he goes to a home and I never see him again?" Ben asked. He was afraid to lose one of the last links to his past.
It worried me that Ben was so lonely. Elton hung around with his new friend, whom it turned out Jose's older brother knew from his grandfather's neighborhood. The sixteen-year-old wanted to go to the mall all day and pick fights with other kids. Ben went with them once, but they dissed him and he didn't seem anxious to go again. He told me that the new kid was persona non grata with the gang that controlled Jose's grandfather's neighborhood, and that the kid was using Elton because Elton's father gave him so much money. Kids were sure manipulative and cruel.
I thought back to when my daughters had been the age Ben was now. Although my older daughter, now a lawyer, spent most of her time reading until the age when she could drive, my younger daughter had been very frustrated by her need for a social life and her lack of transportation. As I remembered, she had been bored every day, and constantly looked for places to go and things to do, fought with her friends and changed alliances every few days. The similarities comforted me. I remembered that she had often taken the bus to that same mall, safer eight years ago than today, and that she was a regular with the AAA Cab Company, whose dispatchers and drivers propelled her around the city when I could not.
In all of this, my husband's and my lives went on, with all the other problems attendant upon middle age. When my husband's younger sister died during the spring, his ninety-year-old mother was not prepared. Janice, the ill sister, forbade Gerry and his other sister, Eileen, to tell their mother she had cancer. Only during the last week of her life did Janice ask to see her mother. By the time the mother could arrive, Janice was in a coma. As a result, Gerry's mother had no way to process her grief in advance. When the funeral was over, the hubub of relatives died down, and Gerry returned to Phoenix, his mother began telephoning him on an almost daily basis, screaming at him about the way his sister was treating her. Gerry was trapped in Phoenix on the telephone in a war between his older sister and his mother. As a trained physician, he recognized his mother's anger as a manifestation of vulnerability, powerlessness and grief. As a son, he was made miserable by his mother's misery. But there wasn't much he could do. He was still trying to deal with his own grief, and his sense that an essential "order of things" had been violated when his mother outlived her daughter.
Ben watched all this with empathy. Once he volunteered that Gerry was lucky, because he at least had time to prepare for his sister's death. Ben had had no forewarning of his father's death, and felt very much like Gerry's mother. With no time to process the grief, he had vacillated between denying it and being depressed until he was encouraged to go for counseling and deal with it.
In addition to Gerry's sister's death, Ben's first six months in our family were punctuated by all sorts of minor problems that usually crop up in families. One of Gerry's grandchildren did not begin to talk on time, and had numerous medical tests that made us all anxious. Gerry was involved in a lawsuit about an old auto accident that never seemed to settle. And changes in the health care system left him constantly struggling to keep ahead of the power curve in his own business. A man nearly the age of retirement, he worked regularly twelve hours a day five days a week, was on call all the time, and went to the office frequently on Sunday afternoon to read the films of a clinic that provided services on week-ends. He was busy.
In my own case, I had two children who still needed me. Not in the same ways as before, but my older daughter ran the Los Angeles marathon in the spring and I went over to run the last six miles with her. I also spent a great deal of time on the phone with her as she struggled to make large life decisions, such as where to live after law school, and whether actually to practice law or look for other employment since she had not been successful in being hired by a large law firm in San Francisco, where she wanted to move. My younger daughter was spending her first year at a full-time job, miles away in Chicago, and needed frequent advice on how to deal with office politics and the problems that come with being knowledgeable but too young to have any influence.
While none of this was earth-shattering, I also ran a small marketing company where I was the lead strategist. At any given time, I had fifteen clients, all in various stages of need, who ranged from small start-up companies to a major utility and a mining company. My life was not exactly empty, especially since I also had the responsibility of looking after Gerry's business interests and serving as his office manager. And there was the ever-present matter of Gerry's cancer, seemingly in remission but not cured, to dwell on if everything else seemed to be going well.
For me there was a constant balancing act: how could I give Ben what he needed and still fulfill all these other responsibilities? Were we the right foster home for a child who came out of a family where people often lived twelve to a room? Ben told me our house was so big it frightened him, and when Jose came to stay over, he said the same thing.
The social workers weren't really helpful on these "soft issues." They were charged with providing an environment of health and safety, and they became involved if there were behavior problems or school problems. But they didn't really address the happiness issues, the issues that almost can't be discussed. Certainly Ben didn't want to leave us, and he didn't want to go back to his mother, for whom he grew to have less and less respect, but that didn't mean he was really happy. He was just safe, well provided for, and grateful.
Once when our licensing worker came for a routine quarterly visit to our home, we got into a discussion of Ben and his siblings. For the first time, he volunteered that when they were all living together they had yelled at each other and then gone their separate ways, rather than discussing, compromising, or helping each other. By watching other, more functional families, Ben had quickly learned to put his own in perspective. He also told the social worker that his older sister had routinely given the younger children cigarettes and drugs, and that his own dislike for both habits had led him to argue with his older sister. Little by little, as he lived with us, he was able to reveal the negatives about his family life.

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 7:24 AM

 

CHAPTER 19
Ben never seemed to get over the split up of his family, and he tried repeatedly to find his grandparents on his father's side. Because he idolized the memory of his father, he thought his grandfather might want to know him. He seemed to think his grandfather owned a truck or a trucking company, somewhere in Colorado. He repeatedly asked Marilyn's mother if she knew where he was, but she did not. Only Marilyn had a telephone number, and she refused to give it up. Through Ann, who asked her, she told Ben not to bother. She said the grandfather had blown them off.
I knew someone representing Leroy's family had come to Phoenix for the funeral. I also knew someone had sent Marilyn some money. From the kids I gathered that Leroy's parents were divorced, and that his father had remarried and his mother had not. His mother had come to Phoenix for the funeral, with a girlfriend, but they had not stayed when they realized the conditions under which Marilyn and the kids were living. There was no place for them to stay - no beds, no room.
One hot summer afternoon, after Ben had mentioned his grandfather for about the tenth time, I decided to get on the Internet and look for him. I went to a Website called Switchboard, and typed in his name, which was the same as his son's. Sure enough, an address and telephone number came up. Excited, I called Ben over to see. "I found him," I said. "You can call him now." Because of my family background, I never stopped to think that Ben's grandfather would be anything but overjoyed to find him. I assumed that his lack of communication with the family was due to financial circumstances, and the fact that Marilyn often went months and years without a telephone.
The first time Ben called, there was no answer. He was very excited, and made me enter the address and phone number into his computerized address book. Because he had called on a Sunday afternoon, I thought it was not unusual for there to be no answer. There was also no answering machine, but I assumed that was also a matter of finances. Ben called back after dinner. I walked into the room as the short conversation was winding down. "My little brother and sister say hello," he was saying, and then quickly "goodbye." I sat down on his bed as he began to sob.
"He hung up on me," he cried. "He told me he had to go to bed because he had to go to work, but I know he hung up on me. He said he wanted nothing to do with us."
As I had been so many other times in dealing with Ben's family situation, I was stunned. I made up my mind not to let this go by. I reasoned that Ben probably had not been sharp enough to "give good phone" - to say enough key things quickly enough to captivate his grandfather. But I was in a form of telephone sales and considered myself a good communicator. I took it upon myself to call back the next day.
• A woman answered the phone. It was Betty, Leroy senior's second wife. When I asked for Leroy, I introduced myself as Ben's foster mother. Leroy declined to come to the phone. However, I was able to engage Betty in a conversation. First I assured her that I wasn't going to ask for money. I told her all the children except Ann were in foster care, and that Ann had had a daughter. I told her that Ben was fine, and was doing very well in school, but missed a sense of family and very much wanted to speak to his grandfather.
• "We only seen these kids once since they were born," she said. "We didn't even know some of these kids existed. And when Leroy died and she called us, we sent some money to cover the funeral and things. But when we called the funeral home they told us the state had paid for everything, so we knew she had kept the money. And then we kissed the whole thing off."
• Betty was sure Leroy had not committed suicide. I shared with her my husband's theory that he had been murdered by drug dealers. She told me her husband and she thought the same thing. She said, "Leroy just didn't have that in him. None of that."
• I told her my suspicion that her step-son had been a man with good values, because the kids had good values and must have been taught them somehow. She said "Leroy was a good man. He just went down the wrong road." After we both agreed that Marilyn was probably the wrong woman for him to have married, I made my pitch.
• "Do you think your husband would just write to the kids every once in a while, or let them call him?" I asked. Once again, I reiterated my position. "All their physical needs are met. They don't need any money. But they're all sad because their family is disintegrated, and it would be nice if they could have a sense of family history and some memories of their father to carry into adulthood with them."
• Betty asked for our address. She told me she couldn't promise anything, but she would ask her husband. I hung up the phone in a sweat, and turned around to contemplate the faces of my two employees, who were staring at me. Naturally, they had overheard the entire conversation.
• "That was awesome," they said. They had been through the last year with me, and had told me repeatedly how much they thought of what I was doing. Unfortunately, I knew I hadn't really succeeded. I might have gotten through to Betty, and convinced her, but I had no idea what influence she had on Leroy's dad. I thought we'd probably never hear from them again.
• Nevertheless, I reported the conversation to Ben, thinking it would relieve him a little bit to know I had actually pled his case to Betty.
• "The next time you talk to them, will you ask the name of my other grandma?" he said. He had ultimate faith that I would prevail, and he was bound and determined to put the pieces of his family together as best he could.
That first summer was really tough. Jose kept calling, trying to find ways to see Ben. One day, Ben asked me if he could go with Jose to see a movie. I gave my permission, only to find out they had gone to a mall instead. The mall was one noted for violent incidents involving teenagers, and I was not pleased. I didn't like it that Ben had disobeyed me, and I was always conscious of my responsibility as a foster parent to keep him safe. When he got home and I asked him how the movie was, he didn't lie. He told me he and Jose had gone to the mall. I explained my feelings.
"Ben, whenever you go with Jose, something happen that isn't supposed to happen," I said. I reminded him of the time I had to send a taxi to the skating rink to get them because they had missed the last bus home. I explained that Jose seemed to be a bad influence. But I was careful to say that I didn't dislike Jose; I just felt he was not the right companion for Ben at this time. Ben understood, but the loss of Jose left him without a companion when Elton was unavailable. And Elton was having his own problems.
His mother, over the initial sting of her divorce, had thrown herself into the dating scene. Almost every night, she had a dinner date with a man from her divorce recovery class. When she went out, she left Elton to baby sit for his younger sister, and she didn't allow any other kids in the house. Her rules were perfectly reasonable, but they were different from mine. Because Gerry and I had already raised five kids, we were a little less tense about what could happen in our absence. We also felt that Ben was responsible, both because he had been given so much responsibility for his younger siblings and because he knew that if he displeased us he really had no place to go. Gerry and I could always see the tension in his personality between what he really wanted to do and what he knew he had to do to keep his place in our home. It was an awesome challenge for a fourteen year old, but it meant that we could trust him more than Elton's mother, who had never raised a teen-ager before.
To complicate things further, Elton had gone to church camp while Ben was in Carolina and Virginia. When he came back, he was baptized with his friend from camp, and spent some time with that friend. Ben was crushed. He had been waiting for Elton to come home, bored and lonely without school. Angie and Bobby had gone away to a YMCA camp for foster kids, for which Ben was too old. All he did all day was go to tutoring, counseling, and try to get Elton to do something with him. After all the time they spent together before Ben had gone with Kevin, he was surprised that Elton didn't want to see more of him now. Because he had never had friendships that were interrupted and changed by new experiences, he wasn't ready to roll with the punches of changing relationships. He told me that Elton had offered to take him to be baptized.
"Why didn't you go?" I asked.
"I didn't think you would want me to," he said.
"Anything you want to do concerning religion, you are free to do," I said. "Your religion is your own decision."
Ben knew that Gerry and I were Jews, although he had never seen us observe any religion. The closest either of us came to revealing a religious preference was when Gerry's sister died, and he lit a candle for her memory every night got a few weeks. He explained to Ben why he was doing it, but he never gave it a religious association - more of a secular memorial. Yet Ben somehow grasped that he was different from us, and he was afraid that if he practiced the Christianity with which he was familiar, he would somehow alienate us.
Gerry seemed to think that Ben could wait until he grew up to choose a religious faith. However, because I had been close to him while he lived in the inner city with his real family, I knew that religion had played at least some part in his life. While Leroy was alive, he had taken the children to church on Sunday, at least until I moved them to the new neighborhood. They went to a predominantly black church, probably Baptist. And later, church busses had often come to Ben's neighborhood and picked up people on Wednesday or Sunday
to take them for basketball or Sunday school, followed by food. Ben and Jose had gone gladly to any church that came by with a bus. And after he moved to our house, Ben somehow contacted the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, which had supplied him with a free Book of Mormon and tried to contact him afterwards to get him further involved.
I felt all this was good, and I shared my feelings with Gerry. I felt Ben had a spiritual side that could and should be developed. Gerry responded in a surprising way. He arranged for Ben to go to church with a colleague of his who was a Seventh Day Adventist. The colleague had four children, and had invited Gerry to the church several times. Gerry came away thinking the services were child-oriented and accessible, and he decided they were good for Ben. So one Friday evening, he announced to Ben that Russ was going to pick him up the following morning at 9:30 AM, and would take him to church. Ben was stunned and frightened.
"Do I have to go alone?" he said.
"You're not going alone. You're going with Russ and his kids," Gerry replied. He didn't understand that when Ben said "alone," he meant without Gerry or me. Poor Ben, he gamely awoke early on Saturday morning, slicked his hair back, and trotted off with a bunch of strangers. For the past year, his life had been nothing but one unfamiliar experience after another. He learned, but he was never comfortable.
The worst part was that Elton's mom had invited him to go to church with her that same week-end, but on Sunday. The poor kid spent his entire week-end going to different churches. In all of our efforts to make him feel better, we were giving him a crash course in comparative religions!
Incidents like these just convinced me that foster parenting could never be perfect. It seemed as if Ben had three personalities. One was his idea of what we wanted him to be, one was what he thought other people wanted him to be, and one was himself. He was like a chameleon, trying to please everyone. For example, he would wake up in the morning and I would say, "what are you going to do today?" Because he knew I cared about reading, he would say, "I think I'll go to the library." If he was talking to someone his own age, he wouldn't mention the library, however. To them, he was a tough guy. When he got his pager and voicemail, his message began with a snippet of rap music or blues, followed by "hi, you've reached Benny Love, leave na message and I'll get back to you." Who was Benny Love? Certainly not the boy we knew. But also not the kid who cried when his sister accused him of breaking up the family.
Ben was an amalgam of the street smarts of his early life with his family and Jose, the good manners he had learned for the purposes of making the other mothers and his teachers like him, and the uncertainties that he shared with me and sometimes with his counselor. I worried about the fact that he didn't seem to be losing his tough guy attitude when he was away from us; I thought it was still possible for him to get in trouble somehow. But I also worried that he didn't seem to be losing his depression, either. And he was both a hypochondriac and a manipulator, though I'm not sure he was conscious of being either.
One day when Ben had nothing to do, Gerry took him to his office, to file x-rays. About two hours into the day, Ben called me. "I finished the work," he said. "How can that be?" I asked. Further questioning revealed that he had finished the part of the task he understood, and felt he couldn't go on. He asked if he could go home, and I said yes. But when I spoke to Gerry, he said there was plenty left to do. We tried it again several days later. This time, he called me four hours later. "I have to pick up my glasses," he said. "But I have no money for the bus." I asked him if the work was finished, and he said he was tired. "I have paper cuts," he said. "My fingers hurt. Those films are heavy."
"You're a wuss," I said. "Everyone has paper cuts. And you're a kid. You're supposed to be able to work hard." Nevertheless, I told Gerry's office manager to lend him a dollar for the bus, so he could pick up his glasses. When I got home that evening, I admired the new glasses, but I chided him for quitting the job. I explained to him that he had no work ethic, and then I realized that in his life there was no other example of someone who did a job to completion or had a career that lasted decades. Even his father had just worked odd jobs until he had enough money to buy what he wanted - a vcr or a Nintendo - and then had gone back on the dole.
I wondered whether we would ever be able to change Ben's ideas about the purpose of work. At present, he had no sense of career, and no pride in a job well done. If we couldn't impact those attitudes, he would be like his parents as soon as he left us. One of the big questions about foster parenting, I learned, was how much influence a foster family could have. Even with the best intentions and the strongest commitment, could we have an impact? Would he be delivering flyers like his older sister when he grew up? My mind was boggled by the differences between Ben's background and ours. Were we even the right foster parents for him, given our dramatically disparate lifestyle and beliefs?

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 7:24 AM

 

CHAPTERS 15-18
After a while, my message got through. To this day, I don't know where the pressure was applied, but we were finally granted a dispensation: we were treated as though we lived in a rural county. In the rural counties, there are no classes, because there aren't enough people who want to be foster parents in any one locations. In rural counties, a trainer comes to the home to deliver the classes. One day, after weeks of frustration, a cheerful trainer called us and said he could come to our home.
We chose a Saturday right before Easter, when it appeared that Gerry's practice might not interfere. In the meantime, we filled out 30 pages of documents each, asking us to talk about our theories of marriage and child raising, our financial statements, our physical and mental health, our previous marriages, and our other children. We dispatched forms to our children and our friends, searching for positive recommendations. We got fingerprinted, and the fingerprints were sent to the F.B.I. We bought anti-siphon nozzles and childproof locks. We were visited by the Water Department.
When it came time to face the 12 mandatory hours of training on Saturday, I became fearful that we couldn't do it. I called the trainer and asked him to bring his walking shoes, and asked him if it was all right if he delivered some of the instruction while taking a long walk - about five miles, the walk we usually took on a Saturday. He agreed to do it.
The actual training was much more interesting than I thought it would be. We did, indeed, go for a long walk in which my husband and I outwalked a man twenty-five years our junior. But we learned a lot about adolescent development in the process. We learned that we were supposed to be teaching Ben how to be independent, how to budget, look for a job, and manage anger. More important, we learned how to work the system to get him all the dollars that were really available to him: money for summer camp, school supplies, clothes, medical attention, birthday gifts, and emergencies. Apparently, there were little pots of money in addition to the monthly stipend that we could apply for. I also learned that your social worker was your teammate, and that many foster parents resented the lack of privacy that came with letting the social worker visit your home and letting the state's accountants examine your receipts. It was also a surprise to me that the state didn't want to bounce kids from foster home to foster home; if a kid fit into a family, he or she stayed until the birth family took him home. I had actually thought that the system purposely changed foster homes so the kids didn't get too attached.
The most rewarding part of the whole process of becoming a foster parent, however, was a fax I received one day from my younger daughter, who worked at a public relations agency in Chicago. She had received the recommendation form, and had taken a long time to think about filling it out. The fax was a copy of what she sent Child Protective Services. My eyes filled up as I read, ' the foster child that gets my mom is really lucky. My mom is the best mom in the world, the most supportive, the most intelligent, generous, and the most with it. The reason I think she will be a good foster mother is that she was such a wonderful real mother. In answer to a question on discipline methods, she said, "we were never disciplined. It was never necessary. My mom just talked to us. My mom takes children very seriously, and values their opinions. All my friends think of her as their confidant." I was more than flattered. Her words gave my whole life meaning. Although I had always been close to my children, and I suspected they loved me very much, I never knew she felt like that.




CHAPTER 16
We were immediately certified after the training, and now we were really foster parents. Of course it took the state 60 days to get us into its computer system, but they did send us our license. Ben was very happy, because he took that as a sign of commitment on our part. I don't think he wanted to face the thought of having to go back to his mother and her drug-addicted lifestyle, or get to know another set of foster parents. All that spring, as he struggled with the monumental adjustments to a new family, a new school, a new home and a new lifestyle, all dramatically different from anything in his past, his depression alternated with a newly-released sense of humor. At first, when he came to live with us, he never got any of Gerry's jokes, and Gerry was afraid he was dumb. But I knew better. Poor Ben just had no context into which to put the things we said. They were all so new to him that he could never tell when we were kidding or serious, and his horizons had been so limited that many of the vocabulary words we used were unfamiliar to him. While I had a good sense of the popular culture and could draw upon slang and idioms to make myself understood, Gerry faced the problem of his own erudition. He couldn't explain anything to Ben without a translator! And he never understood anything Ben said. As far as he was concerned, Ben never said anything except "Huh?"
A major moment in our lives together came when Ben, explaining why he didn't do something I asked him to do, told me it wasn't on his "agenda." I thrilled when I heard him use that word, which six months before he hadn't even understood. Likewise, he laughed when I learned to ask him, "wassup witchyou, dude?" We were all learning each other's language.
As weeks passed and the honeymoon period was over, Angie and Ben began arguing with each other, and Bobby moved away emotionally from both of them. Because he was so young, he adjusted more easily to his new circumstances. When Ben called him, he often hung up the phone quickly, saying that he had to watch TV. And he never initiated any phone calls. In fact, he didn't even want to go on the family visits to Ann and the grandmother that were arranged by Child Protective Services.
He didn't have the happy memories of his old family before they went on drugs, the way Ben did. Ben remembered his father as a god, who taught him everything he knew, and was goaded into taking his own life by an angry and vindictive Marilyn. Although he sometimes told me his dad had hit him with a strap when he was bad, he still idealized the tall thin ex-roofer who took him around everywhere with him. Angie wasn't as attached to Leroy, but she had been very close to Ann, and when the family split up she missed that aspect of the relationship. Interestingly, the kids seemed to miss their mother least of all. They missed each other, or they missed their father when they talked about missing anybody. Ben even missed several former dogs.
While Bobby moved away emotionally, Angie moved closer, probably because she had the least satisfactory foster care home, because there were so many other kids in the family. With five children, her foster mom couldn't give her much individual attention, although I admired Jan for her cheerful outlook and her endless willingness to serve as a chauffeur to take everyone to Skate World, MacDonald's, baseball and soccer games, and counseling appointments. I had several conversations with her on the telephone as she shared with me Angie's difficulties at school. Although Angie had ceased to ditch school, she had the same problems concentrating and the same hyperactivity as Ben. After some testing, Angie was given Ritalin, the drug I wouldn't let them give Ben. The drug at least allowed Angie to sit through her classes and try to learn. My husband speculated that perhaps all the kids had been born while their parents used drugs, because Bobby, too, had problems with self-control at school.
After a while, Ben became girl-friend/boyfriend with one of Angie's foster sisters, which created even more complications. As a pre-adolescent and a hyperactive child (whatever that means), Angie had some difficulties holding her temper. On more than one occasion, when she she lost it, she blamed Ben for leaving their family and causing it to disintegrate. She also threatened to kill him. Ben, who felt guilty enough about his role in the demise of the family, fell into depressions that lasted days and left him incapacitated. Even Zoloft didn't help. He would go to school and fall asleep on the couch in the lounge. The social worker at the school loved him, and every time he became despressed she would call me and tell me he wasn't going to get his assigned number of lessons done, but I shouldn't worry.
You bet I worried. I worried Ben would kill himself as his father had done. I worried that he wouldn't ever graduate high school at the rate he was going. I worried that Angie would turn rebellious and wild. I worried that Ann's baby would be born under the influence of drugs. By this time, I had been involved in this family for so long that they were like my own. This was not a foster parent situation like Jan's, who had had 15 foster children through her home in a ten-year period. Some of Jan's foster kids were themselves parents, and she had adjusted to all their comings and goings. Whereas I had taken to Ben the way you take to your own child.
I probably over-worried. While Ben had begun IntelliSchool at approximately the third grade level, he was clearly up to about seventh grade by the end of the spring semester. Once I pulled him out of the school where the gang members jumped him every day, he was content to go to school. In fact, he had never missed a day in the new school. Every week, the students printed out their diagnostic scores and brought them home to their parents. Ben seldom if ever printed his out and brought them home, but I had volunteered for the school board once he became a student there, and I had access to his records. He had gained three years in the course of six months! And he had done that while depressed. Somewhere during the first six months he lived with us, an intellectual light had come on for him. He began to understand not only what he was doing in school and in his tutoring, but why he was doing it. He began to count the credits toward high school graduation, and at the end of the year he actually had 1.5 credits toward the 20 he will need to graduate high school. For a child who was in seventh grade at the beginning of the school year, to be part way through ninth grade at the end was very encouraging. This kind of success went a long way toward relieving Ben's depression. I think he began to believe me that he could be a success. When I first met him, I used to tell him constantly that I thought he would be successful, hoping that would make him begin to see himself in a new light.
Elton helped, too. Although Kevin faded out of Ben's life that spring, Elton entered in a big way. He, too, went for tutoring. He, too, had family problems. And because he came from such a protected environment, he had none of Ben's resourcefulness. Quickly he became a fixture in our house, while his mother went to her divorce recovery groups and tried to sort out her own life. A tall, early-maturer, Elton was comically interested in girls. Although Ben was not girl-oriented when he first came to live with us, he had to become interested in order to keep up with Elton. Elton would come into our house and all he would say was, "these girls wanted to pick us up at the movies, and they kept on chasing us and they sat in back of us," and, and, and. The details of these encounters were of endless fascination to him. He was a warm and friendly kid, but almost a caricature of a fourteen-year-old boy. He never came home on time. He lent his bicycle to a friend who wrecked it, and then was afraid to tell his mother. He consistently did things to get "grounded," although he knew they were wrong. He stayed up late, slept in till noon, and made fun of his little sister. His mother found him a chore to control, but I really liked him. He was the perfect friend for Ben. He had a little rebelliousness in him, but not enough to be dangerous. And he lived in our neighborhood. It gave me enormous pleasure to watch Ben riding his bike or roller blading around the Biltmore with Elton. I felt that, at long last, he had the freedom to be a child. It was almost too late; his childhood was almost over, but at least he would have a small portion of it the way any normal kid would - biking, skating, going to the movies and summer camp.




CHAPTER 17
With all the kids but Ann in foster care, some problems were solved, but many new ones surfaced. Very quickly, the three siblings in foster care broadened their base of experience beyond Ann's. However, all of them remained attached to Ann, and even more attached to their grandmother. They each reacted differently to being separated. Bobby decided he really liked where he was, with the dogs, the pool and the mountain bike. He reacted to family contact with indifference, hanging up the phone on his brother and sisters, and initiating no conversations. His foster family, a young couple, made a determined effort to build a family around him, and he seemed to adjust quickly, despite some hyperactivity problems. Within 90 days, he had almost ceased contact with his birth family, except for the news of Ann's baby.
For Angie, things were far more difficult. Throughout the spring and summer, she continued to call Ann as often as her foster mom would allow her (once a week) and to call or page Ben relatively constantly. Yet whenever they spoke, they would fight; she would yell at him and he would emerge from the conversation in tears. Finally, he got to the point where he refused to speak to her, because she agitated him. Every time they had a fight, I made certain to remind him that she loved him, that she was only twelve, that this was temporary, and that she was angry at circumstances rather than at him. Because he had an excellent counselor, and had continued to go for counseling for a full year - albeit only every two weeks - he was developing some insight into her behavior. However, that didn't make him feel any better about it. During the summer, Angie slept at our house one night, and Ben decided to take her to counseling with him. He was very excited about the idea of family therapy. However, when she went home that evening, she told her foster family that Ben went to "the nut house" for therapy, and that he must be crazy because everyone at the counseling center seemed crazy. This bothered him no end.
Ben had the most difficult time being separated from his family. Half way through the spring, he bought himself a pager so he could have his own voicemail and be accessible to his family members. Before he committed his allowance to the pager, he made several visits to pager companies to find the best deal. What seemed best to him turned out to be a place around the corner from his school. I told him he would have to pay for the pager himself, and that it would be good experience to budget for it. I wanted to see how long he would have it before it was disconnected for non-payment, since he seemed constantly to be running out of money. He assured me he'd keep it up to date.
And he did. Every week he went into the pager place and paid part of the bill. When school was about to be over for the summer, he paid in advance until the end of June. He was very surprised when one Friday afternoon he found his pager turned off. I told him we would have to wait until after the week-end to find out what happened, but I suspected the pager company had gone out of business, since the market in Arizona was very competitive. I told him wisely, "a bargain isn't always a bargain. You get what you pay for." The school suggested he write a letter to the Better Business Bureau, and they explained to him what the Better Business Bureau was. He began to compose his letter.
But I was wrong again. On Monday, he found out the pager company was indeed still open. I told him to go in and ask why they had turned off his service. In distress, he called me and said, "the man said he didn't have to tell me why. He could refuse service to anyone. And he said he doesn't have to give me a refund." Super-mother to the rescue. I jumped in my car on the way to a lunch meeting and headed for the pager place. As luck would have it, Ben was waiting at the bus stop for the bus to his tutor when I pulled up in front of the store.
"Come in with me," I said. We walked in together, and I spoke to the woman at the counter.
"I'd like a refund for my son's pager," I began. A large black man emerged from the back of the store.
"I don't have to give refunds to anyone," he yelled. "I can refuse service to anyone. It says right here in the contract. And your son has a filthy mouth and I don't have to serve him."
I was caught unprepared. "What do you mean," I asked. "Can you tell me what he said?"
The man went ballistic. "You should know what he said. He's your son and you gave him this filthy mouth."
"Well, just give me an example so I can use this as a lesson," I pressed on calmly.
"This is a business, not a therapy session," he said. "You should have taught him these lessons long ago. He can't come in here and ask for help on his homework and rollerblade through my store and open his filthy mouth. I've got a business here."
"I'm sure you do, " I said. "But I would really appreciate a moment of your time. In fact, he's not my son, he's my foster child, and I haven't taught him all the words you say I have. But I'm trying to teach him now, and it would be very helpful if you would tell me what he said so I can help him."
Ben stood quietly by my side.
"Do you want to tell her what you said, or should I?" he asked. I could see that he was getting ready to cooperate. I was shocked, and I needed to find out what really happened so I could assess the severity of the problem.
"I don't remember what I said," he said.
"Your son and his friend came into my store on their rollerblades, asked me for help with his homework, drank my water, and when I asked them to leave they turned around and called me a monkeyass. I'm from south Florida, and I don't have to listen to that from a kid. That's when I turned off his pager. Then I was going to turn it back on, but he came in here yelling and screaming about the Better Business Bureau. I don't need no problems with the Better Business Bureau. Lady, you better teach him some better ways for grown-ups."
"I'm very sorry," I said. I was. I was also quite frightened, because I had a feeling Ben behaved one way with me and another with his friends in the world at large. "You are right. You don't need to deal with that. Ben, say you are sorry."
Obligingly, Ben said he was sorry. I shook hands with the pager man, left the pager place and piled Ben into my car, lunch meeting forgotten, to drive him to the tutor. The car was a good place to talk to him, because he would be trapped with me and forced to participate in the conversation. I first explained to him that people's places of business were not hangouts for schoolchildren, and that he had no business hanging around the pager place asking for help with his homework. Then I told him that racial slurs were never appropriate. Then I asked him why he had decided to say something like that.
His answer was simple: "I grew up that way, and I can't change everything about me overnight."
He was right.
He was learning at warp speed. No one in his family had ever worked. No one had any experience with a place of business, or with the rules of conduct. No one had explained the rights of customers or the rights of owners. And every time he got in a conflict situation, his tendency was to revert to his old "tough guy" survival habits: to threaten the pager man. Armed with his new knowledge about what the Better Business Bureau did, and feeling wronged, he hauled out his new weapon. It was the verbal equivalent of the assault rifle. And about calling the pager man "monkeyass," I'd bet he didn't remember saying it; the phrase was uttered more to impress Elton than anything else.
That was only one of dozens of experiences I had with Ben that spring, all of which served to underscore how deprived his upbringing had been. He had never been taught what foods to eat, or why people went to school. In fact, he had never been taught the value of work over a sustained period of time; everyone he knew worked only sporadically, using the money to buy luxuries not covered by the welfare system. The idea of a career, or a career path, was new to him. After we met Samantha in California, he went around saying he wanted to be a lawyer. However, when Vice President Gore visited his school and he saw the power of the Secret Service, he told me he wanted to be a bodyguard. At other times, wanting to make Gerry feel good, he told us he wanted to be a radiologist and read x-rays. We told him he didn't have to decide now, but he should look at what everyone else was doing and trying to decide which things he liked and which he didn't.
At about this same time, Joe came back into his life. Joe had been overwhelmed by Leroy' suicide, and had had his own drug problem. When the family became homeless the first time, he had checked into the men's shelter and entered a rehab program. When he came out, he was reunited with his own daughter in Los Angeles, and he took a job as a homeless outreach counselor. One day, he called me to get Ben's phone number. Although I was anxious to see Ben make new friends, I was mindful of what they had taught me in the foster parent training: do not separate the child from his customary culture or values. Joe was part of Ben's culture. He was black, but he had lived with the family. He had tried to serve as a father surrogate after Leroy died. And he was very worried that Ben might have already gotten into a gang or on drugs. I decided the best thing I could do was allow Ben to see Joe.
That was a good decision. I had been putting off getting Ben a bike because he had lost so many when he was living in his old neighborhood. I had told him he could have a bike when he learned to take care of things. Joe decided he would like to give Ben a bike for his birthday - a lowrider "trick" bike of the kind Ben really admired. Several weeks before his birthday, Joe sent Ben to the bike store to pick out the bike, which cost over $200. I prayed that Ben wouldn't be disappointed; I wasn't sure Joe could spare that much money. However, Ben must have been worth a lot to him, because on the very next pay day, as promised, he went in and paid for the bike so Joe could pick it up. Joe was ecstatic - and frankly, so was I, because we were having to pick up all the expenses of outfitting Ben for upper middle class life: rollerblades, new shoes, shorts and golf shirts, swim suits, underwear and socks. Ben had never really had socks before, and now he seemed to be eating them rather than wearing them. Package after package, they disappeared. Almost every week, he told me he had no socks, and I bought them by the six-pack. And then Gerry's socks began to disappear as well. Gerry and I were consumed by the mystery of the disappearing socks. Where could they have all gone?
And then one day, when Ben was in school and I was at home, I found the answer. I went into his room, which was a mess. The clothing he wore every day was on the floor. In the closet was more clothing, none of it hung on hangers. Piles of shorts, shirts and socks were on the closet floor. Every time I had told him to clean his room, he had shoved things into the closet. Now they were hidden under each other and behind the door. Worse, when I opened his drawers, I found three entire drawers full of socks - each drawer with a few t-shirts over the socks to hide them. Ben never looked for clothes in his closets or drawers, because he had never had closets or drawers before. When he took his socks out of the dryer and put them in a drawer, he forgot about them and never found them again. We had to teach him how to set up a chest of drawers with socks, underwear, shirts and pants separated. It was a hard lesson, never completely learned.
We had similar problems with chores. Although the chores repeated themselves every week, Ben never could remember them. He would do anything I asked him to do, but nothing on his own. Finally, I devised a system: I made a computerized list of chores and printed it out every week. I posted it on the door of his room. Then we told him to check it every day.
The most difficult issue we had was with homework. The woman who tutored Ben was doing it as a volunteer, out of friendship for me. She purposely gave Ben homework, because she wanted him to learn good work habits. However, no matter what homework she gave him, he failed to do it. If she lent him a book, he lost it. If she gave him an assignment, he didn't complete it. Her frustration grew. She didn't feel as if she was getting anywhere. Most of the time they spent together, she was feeding him lunch, counseling him, or waiting out his depression. He tried as hard as he could to do nothing when he went to her house. She felt he was using a lot of excuses, everything from his sister upsetting him to his glasses not being the correct prescription. And whenever he could, he brought a friend with him, which further limited his concentration. Finally she told me, "you have to get involved. You must check his homework every night, to give him the idea that it is important to do it. Otherwise, I quit."
I was not in the mood to check homework. My business was very busy, I got home late at night, and I was tired. But her comments hit home, and I didn't want her to quit, because I felt she was a link to what a child Ben's age should know. At IntelliSchool, where he was allowed to go at his own pace, he was still adding and subtracting. She was trying to get him to multiply and divide, to prepare him for pre-algebra. She was worried that if he kept going at the pace he was going, he'd never finish high school.
I gritted my teeth and began to check the homework. The difference was astounding. All of a sudden, Ben began to move ahead. Not only did he begin doing the homework ( and getting the pager man and everyone else at school to help), but he began to type the final drafts after I made corrections. That caused him to care about what he was doing, and toward the end of the spring he began to make real progress.
I was learning a big lesson, so simple that it was often overlooked: children are waiting to be told what to do, and they want to be good! They just need someone who cares.

CHAPTER 18
Another force for good in Ben's life was my friend Scott. A single man with two grown children, Scott led an artist's existence, playing folk music in coffee shops and supporting himself through a combination of massage therapy, car shopping for inexperienced women, house sitting, and other odd jobs. He and my friend who was tutoring Ben were part of a group who ran five miles together several times a week. At 5:30 in the morning, when we met to run, we always talked about Ben. At first, Scott was reluctant to get involved, because he didn't want to go into Ben's neighborhood. But when Ben moved in with us, Scott decided he would be one of Ben's male role models.
Ben could talk to Scott about things he couldn't mention to me. Better still, he could talk to Scott about me. Scott formed a habit of picking up Ben at school once a week, taking him to lunch and dropping him at home or at the tutor. Ben grew dependent on Scott's companionship. Among other things, Scott began to teach Ben to drive, something Gerry never would have found time to do. And Scott had a buddy who owned an auto body shop, an occupation that was fun for Ben to watch. The existence of the tutor, Scott, Gerry and me in his life finally began to make Ben feel as if he had a network, or a support group. We were adults, but we were there for him. We fed him, clothed him, soothed him and comforted him as he gradually got used to being separated from his family. As a group, we agreed never to try to remove him from contact with his real family, or to try to change essentials like his religious beliefs. We did, however, try to instill an agreed-upon set of values. This was an interesting task, because the three of us were very different from each other. What we had in common was more a matter of friendship and interest in jogging than shared values. Scott and I had been roommates for a year in between my marriages. The woman who tutored Ben was a Catholic mother who ran an exercise program for senior adults. She had been my running buddy for over twenty years. Her oldest child was already married, but her youngest was the age of Angie. She was an unglamorous workaholic who spent her spare time visiting sick people, gardening, and working on her house. I, on the other hand, was a Jewess from New York in the public relations business and married to the last of several husbands. And Scott was a grown-up hippie who preferred the lure of the music business and the freedom of small entrepreneurial enterprises to the 9-to-5 routine. Scott had been around the world, but he didn't have health insurance.
When Ben entered my life, he quickly became a topic for discussion as we ran - ever more slowly - our morning five mile route. While we often argued questions of religion and politics, we buried our different backgrounds and came together in the effort to make a success out of little Ben. It was good for all of us.
In the meantime, Marilyn dropped further and further out of the picture. Although Ben spoke regularly to Ann and his grandmother, often they had not seen her, or if they had it was only on the street in passing. Ann was getting closer and closer to having the baby. Marilyn was getting closer to being a grandmother. She had stopped Ann from marrying Sean by refusing to sign the papers, but she wasn't willing to be active in helping her daughter learn to be a mother.
Ann was having a hard time of it. Half way through her pregnancy, she found out Sean had gotten yet another girl pregnant. Furious, she threw something at him on the job, which caused her to lose the job delivering flyers. It also caused her to lose her place living with Sean's parents, and back she came to her grandmother's house. For most of the pregnancy it appeared that Ann would be a single parent and the baby would not know its dad. Since Sean also sold drugs, a fact Ben admitted to me one day during our frequent conversations, I thought it might be better if he stayed out of the way.
One night I overheard Ben on the phone to his sister. She was thinking of running away, perhaps to California. "No, that's not what round-trip means," he said. "Round-trip means you come back to the place you started from. But first you land there and do what you want. It's like when Francine took you to San Diego."
I was touched. He was three years her junior, but his association with us had already taught him more than she knew. He was offering her his knowledge to help her. He had precious little, but it was already more than she had, mired in the day-to-day routine of pregnancy and poverty, not yet seventeen years old.
Kevin's mom had invited Ben to go with them on their family vacation. Although between the time she invited him and the time for the vacation itself Kevin and Ben became less friendly, he decided to go anyway. The family was going to a family wedding in Virginia, and then to a beach house in North Carolina. I thought this would be wonderful for Ben, who would get to see different parts of the country. It would also help teach him about the difference between cities and states, as well as the role of oceans in the world. He was sadly lacking in information for a child his age, despite his ability to tell Ann what a round trip ticket was.
He was terrified before he left. The plane trip was seven hours, and he had never flown more than one hour from Arizona to California. And he had never flown without me. In addition, we had to buy him a suit to wear to the family wedding. We bought him a glen plaid double-breasted suit, which he wore with a white t-shirt. Although my husband said he looked like Nathan Detroit, he and I thought he looked wonderful. He borrowed a pair of Gerry's loafers, and he was off. Fortunately, I had put in an 800 number to my office years before, when my own children left for college. I found that a free call meant I would always be notified if someone needed me. Sure enough, I call a call from little Ben on the same day he took off.
"Guess where I am?" he asked. "New -Ark." There were those new reading skills! He sounded happy. "Oh, Newark," I said. "That's near New York. I was born near there. Get a map and take a look." A moment later, the truth came out. He had been sick on the plane, but he was better now. I cheered him on and encouraged him to call every day. I realized that he had had so much loss in his life that he probably was afraid that somehow he'd never see me again.
Only after he came home did I learn that Kevin and he had had a fight in the airport before they even took off from Phoenix, during which Kevin accused Ben of inviting himself along and told him he had no place with his family. Although they made up, Kevin must have told people in Virginia about Ben, because one little girl came up to him and told him to go home. She said, "you're only here because your family is falling apart. You should leave."
Ben tried to blow all this off, as I had told him to do.
He took photos of the family's large Virginia farm and California beach house, and he had someone else photograph him in his new suit at the wedding. He rode a bike on Cape Hatteras, and he learned how to read a map and describe where he had been. His progress, which had been slow intellectually, was speeding up. By the time he came home, he was doing something we never thought he would do: reading for pleasure. I was impressed by his ability to shrug off the rudeness of the other children and continue to enjoy himself. Although by the end of the week he was away I could hear his anticipation about coming home in his voice, he never complained of having a bad time.
And while he was away, he became an uncle. Ann, who would not be seventeen herself until July 9, gave birth to a little girl on July 1. The baby weighed 6 pounds, thirteen ounces, but had to stay in the hospital for a few extra days. Ann seemed happy to have her ordeal over with, and was at least momentarily reunited with the child's father. They were both planning to live with the grandma. When I heard the baby had been born, I called Ann. She was most concerned that Child Protective Services not come take the baby away. She told me she had seen her mother, and informed her she was a grandmother, but her mother had not yet seen the baby because it was still in the hospital. Apparently, Marilyn made no real moves to assume her role of grandmother.
As soon as Ben came home from Virginia and Carolina, I took him and Angie down to see their new niece. It was nearly 110 degrees in Phoenix, and the humidity was on the rise. It was late in the afternoon, coming up on dinner time. Ben's grandma lived in an apartment complex that seemed to be tenanted by either pregnant women or the elderly. I hadn't been there in a while, and I had forgotten how dismal it was, its stucco painted half a sickly olive green color and half a pinky-beige. As I parked my new Mercedes in the unpaved lot next door, I felt as though I were giving a signal to everyone in the area: someone strange is here.
Ann and Sean were living in the single bedroom of the apartment, while the grandmother was sleeping on a bed in the living room. Two dogs also occupied the apartment, which couldn't have been larger than 400 square feet. The only cooling was from two large fans, one in each room. The door to the apartment was open, with a low wooden expanding gate to keep the dogs from getting out.
The baby was thin and somewhat quiet, perhaps because she was new. I hoped she was healthy, but I wasn't sure. Ben held her for a while, then gave her to Angie. I looked at the old family pictures in the apartment, memories of a happier time when Uncle Paul wasn't in prison and Leroy was still alive. I noticed Marilyn was much heavier in all the photos; her slender recent appearance must have been due to the drugs.
Grandma pointed proudly to a vase of satin roses. "Paul made these for me in prison," she said, sounding as though everyone's son were in prison and proud of his accomplishments. She was clearly happy to have her grandchildren around her, and seemed happy to have Ann and the baby rooming in. During that visit, she told me that she had given birth to thirteen children. She had no idea where most of them were. Back east, she thought, or California. Only Marilyn was in Phoenix, and Paul and one other son. To me, it was very strange to have all those children and not keep track of them. I wondered why they had all left her, why they didn't stay in touch with her, and what their family life had been like when all the kids were at home. I suspected that Marilyn had been the baby of the family, since the grandmother told me her oldest child was 53. That was almost my age. While my own mother was eighty-three, Marilyn's mom was not even seventy. She had given birth to her first daughter at 16. Marilyn had had Ann at sixteen. And now Ann had had a baby at sixteen. Three generations of white women in twentieth-century urban America who had become teenage mothers. Obviously, no one for three generations had seen the value of either education or career. And my question was, what sort of upward mobility can you have if your mother doesn't know anything, had her own education truncated at age sixteen by motherhood, and can't teach you anything?
Sean had mounted about fifty stuffed animals on the bedroom wall, in honor of the baby. There was a cradle and a changing table, but I could see there was still a need for a stroller, a crib, and later a high chair. I made a mental note to call one of the social workers at CPS and ask if they had anything they could give Ann.
I had planned to meet Gerry at a restaurant for dinner and bring Angie and Ben. "Let's go," I said, "we're late for dinner." I slipped Ann twenty dollars, and said "buy some diapers for the baby." Angie hung back to stay with Ann and the baby, but Ben was out of there like a blue streak.
"It's hot in there," he said. "And it smells from the dogs."
He was used to cleaner, cooler surroundings, and he found it hard to go back even for his beloved grandmother. Never really close to Ann, he distrusted her ability to take care of the baby. "I hope she doesn't take that twenty dollars and smoke it," he told me. "You shouldn't have given her cash." From my previous experience with the family, I knew he was probably right, but I had not had time to stop to buy the diapers myself on the way down. I would just have to trust that Ann and Sean, now that they had a baby, would make a serious effort to keep it alive. I knew Child Protective Services was just waiting for someone to call them with a "referral," - some information that the child was abused or neglected - and I also knew that Lucille could be trusted to make the call if the situation warranted it. But at present, they looked like a family unit.

posted by Francine Hardaway, Ph.D 6:59 AM