My Dear Daughter

My Dear Daughter,

I know you’ll be much older before you ever read this (if you ever read this), but I wanted to tell you the story of how you came to be my daughter. I wanted to tell you the story of how you changed me as a person. I wanted to tell you the story of how much you are loved. You see, you did not grow in my tummy, nor are you my permanent, legal daughter. Instead you came to me because placement called me very early one Friday morning – 1:27 AM to be exact – asking if I could take you and your brother on an emergency, over-night basis until they could find you and your brothers a permanent foster home the next morning. I remember thinking about how tired I was because the week had been a very long week already since daddy had been gone and wondering how I was going to fare at work the next day. It seemed like it took the investigator forever to arrive with you guys in tow, but when he pulled into the driveway at 4:32 AM, I was wide awake from having been thinking about you for the previous few hours. All I knew was your names and ages. I hadn’t really asked very many questions because I was not in the habit of taking placement calls anymore so all of my “good” foster parent skills were rusty from disuse.

When Mr. Byron opened the car and got you out I remember noting how little you seemed, but my goodness you were so brave for such a little munchkin. You came right over to me with your half-eaten happy meal in hand and jumped into my arms. I asked you if you were sleepy though I didn’t really need you to answer as you were already asleep before your head touched my shoulder. Mr. Bryon bought your brother inside; I carried you. Since all the other kids were asleep, we put you both on the couch in the living room, toes to toes, covered you up with warm blankets, and neither of you moved a muscle until I had to wake you for court a few hours later. You were both so exhausted.

I didn’t realize the significance of that morning at the time, my love. I had no idea that you would end up occupying more space in my heart and life than just the tiny fraction of the couch your sleeping form covered, and I had no idea how deeply I would end up loving you or how fiercely I would have to fight to be sure the people charged with your care would make wise decisions for your life. All I knew at that particular moment was that you and your brother needed to sleep and that we would all be heading in to court in less than four hours.

After the judge made it clear that you and your brothers would need to stay in care, the case manager began telling me that they would start looking for a home for you but that since there weren’t homes available locally that you and your brother would likely have to be moved to the central part of the state. I knew what that would ultimately mean for you so I got on the phone and started calling my foster family friends who might be able to help. We were able to find a family locally that could take your two youngest brothers, your other brother would stay with the family who initially took him that night and you would stay with us – I couldn’t keep your brother with you because you guys didn’t all fit into my van and the other family couldn’t take you because they didn’t have space either. I knew I was going to have to do a lot of explaining to daddy. I also knew I couldn’t just let them ship you guys all over the state willy nilly, and I figured this would only be for a few days until the placement team would be able to find a home that could take all four of you together. Even before I knew I loved you, I knew I needed to protect you.

What started out as me loudly nagging everyone on the case to see if a home had come available to accommodate all four of you eventually turned into the quiet questions during our monthly visit with the case manager. Daddy and I were both very clear with all the players that we were a temporary stop because you needed to be with your brothers longer term, but along the way, everyday life was happening. We signed you up for taekwondo (which you were lukewarm about at best), swimming lessons, a music class on occasion, and got you set up with our regular pediatrician and dentist. We worked on learning everyday skills like recognizing letters and colors and numbers, and we started learning your food preferences (I should tell you now that you were a McDonald’s junkie, sweet girl, and that you could smell a French fry a mile away). We figured out that you needed a nap in the middle of the day or you would fall asleep in the middle of taking a bite of dinner and that you absolutely loved the song “Drinking Class” because you would belt out every single word at the top of your lungs when it came on the radio. You eventually slipped out of calling me and daddy Miss Heather and Mr. Evan and started calling us mommy and daddy, though that seemed to happen quietly and before we really knew it, and I even heard you and Warren referring to each other as sissy and bubba a time or two when you weren’t too busy arguing with each other.

You and Warren would fight like cats and dogs one minute, but then two seconds later you were thick as thieves plotting some mission of mischief – do you remember the time the two of you locked the babysitter out of the house? Liam, who almost never uses anyone’s real name, would run around screaming “Naaaaana” because he couldn’t pronounce your whole name – but he couldn’t stand not being in the same room with you and would search all over until he found you. You guys would fight over the Leappad in the car but would gang up on Warren if he tried to intervene at all. You and Elie had a more tumultuous relationship because you shared a room and she would regularly steal your toys, but even so, you guys would sing together at night when it was time for bed, and I could hear you telling her bedtime stories long after we had told you guys lights out and good night.

I think we got so caught up in the swing of everyday life that the passage of time slipped quietly by until we were reminded that summer was coming to a close and you would be starting kindergarten soon. Somewhere in all the craziness of these last few months you took up permanent residence in mine and daddy’s hearts, and the conversations he and I were having about the time when you would have to leave us became almost unbearable for either of us. I think both of us had privately entertained the idea that you could be with us forever, but as selfish as both of us can be on occasion we also knew that you deserved to be with your brothers. We knew that the home and love you had with us would never be able to overcome that deep connection siblings share – no matter how much we loved you and no matter how much we tried to change that. We knew that all of us were going to hurt and that you were probably not going to understand things initially, but we also knew that if we didn’t push the system to try to get you back with your brothers now it would never happen. So to keep you from having to change schools and to give you a chance at getting your brothers back, my voice to the case manager and placement team grew loud again. Baby girl, if you know nothing else about any this, I want you to know that I have fought for your long term life with your brothers tooth and nail. I have pushed people to think about the consequences of their actions to the point of even doubting myself and my own motivations at times. My only regret is that I didn’t stay as loud as I should have the entire time – though I know that if I had I wouldn’t have had your sweet smile, infectious laughter and mischievous spirit with me as long as I did – so I am torn as to whether I did right by you or not.

Long story short, the system was not able to find a home with enough space or resources to take all four of you – though I pushed everyone really hard to carefully consider the long term implications for you and your brothers if we didn’t work hard enough now to try to keep you guys together. I tried very hard to make everyone understand how the loss of a sibling can hurt deeply – even decades later – though I know I was preaching to the choir most days. I was angry – and frustrated – that it didn’t seem like the folks making the big decisions understood what I was talking about on a personal level though. There were so many people all trying to look out for what was best for you and your brothers so I want you to know that none of the decisions about your life were ever taken lightly. Ultimately, we had to compromise and agree that being with one brother was better than being with no brothers at all – though I am really sad – no, angry – that we have to make choices like this.

Up to this point in my life, I’ve never had to make the kind of decisions that I’ve had to make in the last few months. Yes, we have had many children come through our home, but you were the only child we ever took in who was old enough to know what was happening. You were the only child I’ve ever had to have adult-level conversations with about things that would make most adults cringe and run away crying. Sweet pea, you have handled all of this chaos in your short life like a little champ and have shown so much strength and resilience that I know you’ll end up changing the world someday. You have amazed me continually with your ability to heal and grow and your capacity for love and wonder. My sweet child, I am not your permanent, legal, forever mommy, but you will forever be my permanent and forever daughter even without the legal paperwork. You grew love in my heart almost without me even realizing it, and you changed the way I view the world because you forced me to recognize the places in this world where things need to change. But because of you, I am a stronger person with a renewed sense of passion for fixing what’s wrong with the system that brought you into my life.

You came into my life in an unconventional manner for certain, but you’ll be in my heart and mind forever.

Fostering Questions

I was asked some questions about why I decided to become a foster parent. Here are my answers!

Why did you become a foster parent?

I am an accidental foster parent actually. When my husband and I decided to start a family we ran into issues with fertility which meant that we were unable to have children biologically. We started looking into the process of adoption and decided to take the MAPP class to adopt from Children’s Home Society. My husband and I were originally only going to look into adoption when we decided to take the MAPP class, but once we got into the class and the instructors started talking about the desperate need for homes for children in care, it awakened a whole slew of feelings I had been carrying around underneath the surface about the events that unfolded in my own family. You see, while I am the only child of my mother and father, my mother had three other children in subsequent marriages – each of whom ultimately ended up in foster care themselves. Of my siblings, I alone escaped the chaos and destruction of our family and then the foster system relatively unscathed. Relatively being a subjective term here!

My husband and I committed to taking the MAPP class every Saturday for four weeks to learn what to expect from adoption and what kinds of behaviors and medical issues to expect from kids in state care. There was a lot of homework and forms to fill out, and it was a truly eye opening experience learning about the absolutely horrific things people can do to children and to each other. Much of what they discussed in class I had experienced myself in my own childhood as my mom and stepfather were abusive alcoholics, but the range of various abuse and neglect cases the instructors presented in class literally took my breath away. Aside from learning specific information about the types of trauma and abuse children who come into care suffer, we also had a lot of work to do personally by preparing ourselves to be able to handle the types of behaviors that may arise as a result of that trauma and abuse. This was also an exercise in strengthening our relationship because it forced me and Evan to deal with things about ourselves and our pasts that we would likely never have revisited if not forced to. I mean… my parents were a nightmare… and I would have been happy to leave things in the past, but we had to learn to deal with our own childhood issues to be able to help children that may be placed with us to deal with theirs.

After the second week of class, my husband and I decided that we would not simply go into the adoption track, but chose rather to become foster parents instead with the idea that if a child needed a secure home we would provide that. We also thought that if it was meant to be for a child to stay with us long term, that we had already decided we would be willing to adopt as well – and ultimately of the dozen children we’ve fostered in the last five years, we adopted three of them.

Tell us a moment in your life that led you to take part in foster care.

As my husband and I were going through licensing, we read more and more stories about the abuses children were experiencing. I had endured many of those same things myself and spent the majority of my adult life trying to work through the feelings of fear, worthlessness and anger that I felt as a result of how my parents behaved and treated me and my siblings. When I was an early teen, I finally got free of my mother and step father when my paternal grandmother and aunt stepped in to care for me. But my siblings were not so lucky and had to stay in the situation they were in. They were parentally kidnapped by their father and were missing for several years before ultimately being removed by DCF in another state some years later after my stepfather tried to murder my sister. I was still too young really to step in to try to save my siblings, but it didn’t mean that I didn’t want to. I was in my early twenties when my siblings came into the care of DCF in Massachusetts, and as a result of the abuse I had grown up in as well, I was not a mature twenty something – more like an angry teen. I was not equipped to handle the behaviors my siblings exhibited nor was I equipped to handle the emotional needs they had. I was not able to take them in or help them recover from their ordeal – but neither really was the system of care they were in. Both of them ended up in multiple foster homes and group home settings – and both of them ended up aging out of care with no safety net in place. My youngest sister ended up in the same situation as things between our mother and her father continued to deteriorate and DCF Massachusetts stepped in to remove her as well. After dealing with my own failure to help protect my own siblings, when faced with the idea that I could do something now to help keep this from happening to another child, I knew that we could help - even if we only ended up helping one child, I felt like it could help me heal some of the old wounds I still felt about my own siblings.

What do you think the state of the child welfare system says about Florida, and about the times we live in?

Anytime you deal with a vulnerable population and you fail to protect them, it says something very sad about your society. In Florida, we have not done even an adequate job of protecting our vulnerable populations – particularly our children. We’ve had an increase in the number of children and families on the radar of DCF yet we’ve not funded services to these children adequately. The staff charged with working these cases (whether CPIs, case managers, transporters, supervisors) are not trained very well, they do not have the tools necessary to do their jobs efficiently, and sometimes they cannot get to everything that needs to be done. As a result, what happens is we have this group of children and families on our radar who we know need help. We know they’re in danger. Yet we do not have the mechanisms in place to keep harm from coming to them. And I am not saying that money is the salvo to fix the problems here – it’s not. It’s about supporting the children and the families who care for them appropriately – which means supporting the people working in the system of care – all of the people working in the system of care, not just the child protective investigators (though that is a good start).

We also have a backwards mindset as a state when it comes to child welfare. We continue to see children as an extension of their parents – chattel almost – rather than seeing them as human beings who have rights themselves. So instead of working to do what is best for the children to help them grow up strong and healthy, we place the emphasis on keeping a family together – even if that means keeping a child in a situation that is dangerous or unhealthy. I hear judges and legislators talking about cases of termination of parental rights as the death penalty of child welfare cases, but these same judges and legislators do not live in the homes with the children and see the physical and psychological devastation the effects of a broken system of care have on their daily life and ultimately who they grow up to be. We know the research shows that exposure to violence and neglect have a detrimental effect on children, yet we somehow have come to the conclusion that we do more harm or damage by removing children from these situations – and I think we’re wrong about that in some cases. I’m not saying we should take all children away from all families – but I definitely think that the notion that some situations can be fixed by an inadequate safety plan is tantamount to sticking our heads in the sand to a real and dangerous situation – one that has lifelong, real life consequences!

I also think by not fully funding and fully supporting our system of child welfare that we’re re-victimizing the children we’re trying to protect. I’ve been the parent who had to comfort a child whose nervous system was shot from so much prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol that they could not adequately regulate basic life processes. Yet when that same set of parents had their sixth child (all five of the others were already in care), the state had to scramble and work really hard to prove to a judge that the situation this child came into was extremely dangerous for that child to go home to – and they almost we not able to remove her because the judge felt like the extreme history of drug and alcohol abuse, chronic homelessness, mental health issues and domestic violence were not a safety issue. I’ve had to pick the pieces up for an eight month old child after they’ve had to spend ten hours on the road to a visitation with a biological parent twice a week – only to not have their diapers changed but once and fed only four ounces in that time by the transporter, visitation supervisor, case manager and biological parent. When we fail to remove children from situations that are extremely volatile and dangerous and then fail to adequately service the ones we do remove, we re-victimize our children over and over again. This is how we have multiple generations of families with the repeated patterns of behavior that cause DCF involvement in the first place. My family is a prime example of this systematic breakdown of the system! I should have been taken from my family many, many times but never was and so I had to suffer the physical and mental abuses doled out by my mom and stepfather. My siblings should have been given stable placements and had case workers who supported them as they grew up, yet they were repeatedly moved from home to home to institutional setting instead. My middle sister is doing well now finally – after a lot of counseling and hard work on her part, my brother is really damaged and will likely not do much better – and my youngest sister had her own child removed by DCF and has only now been able to regain custody of her. I worry that my niece will end up repeating this pattern again someday.

It says to me that our state either does not care about the future of our children or that we’re too immersed in things that are of minor importance comparatively when we don’t do everything we can to protect our children.

How does putting the focus on case planning instead of the CPIs improve Florida's child welfare system?

It seems like the focus of child welfare policy lately has been on the up front battle of investigations and the supporting the child protective investigators. While this is a good start, if we logically think about what happens next, we must figure out that if we already do not have enough resources to care for the families in the system currently, that we’re not going to be able to handle the influx that will necessarily come when we bring more families into care. There needs to be a huge push to fully support the case managers and attorneys who handle the cases once they leave the investigative part of the process too. Otherwise, you bring families into a system that will only end up removing children but not putting mechanisms in place to help heal those families with no mechanisms in place to achieve permanency for those children. There should never be a case where a child has to linger in the system for years with no end in sight – either fix the situation that caused the removal and return the child or if the situation is not fixable or if the fix drags on and on and on because no one thinks progress is important – then move to permanency.

Part of the problem with child welfare as I’ve been witness to personally, is that the turn over for staff is so high and the burn out rate so great, that there’s no longevity for institutional knowledge. By the time a case manager is fully trained and has the ability to make excellent judgment calls on case planning, we’ve thrown such a high case load at them that they’re so overwhelmed and underpaid that they leave for less stress and more money. Understandably! If we focused on supporting the case management/legal aspect of the system as well as what’s been suggested for the investigative portion, then we may be able to have staff trained well enough to actually design case plan activities that would work to help change the unsafe behaviors. If the unsafe behaviors change, then the children get to go home. Having enough and well trained case managers and attorneys would also decrease the caseload of each individual case manager allowing them to be more supportive of the individuals in their care. A case manager with 30 or 40 kids on their case load cannot possibly know all of the details of each case and be alert to the behaviors that are sometimes subtle but indicative of dangerous things to come. They also cannot be as in tuned to the timeframes of the families on their caseload when they have to manage so many different families. Our two youngest children’s cases were complex and had so many chronic problems that the case manager literally had to send referrals out for services once a week. For the family associated with only two of the children on her caseload, I’m quite sure she had to spend at least five or six hours a week dedicated to that case alone – and she had at least thirty children on her load. That is simply too much for one person to manage adequately – though I will say she is one of the shining gold stars of case management in how dedicated she was!

We have to do better as a state – there’s no other way to put this! With our growing population and beautiful places to live, we’re going to always have people want to call Florida home. We need to be sure that we figure out a way to help make that paradise that so many people come here looking for isn’t just a shattered dream!