I Speak For This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate (65 page)

Nicole was a natural student and she breezed through high school while working part-time for an outpatient surgical center. Nicole turned eighteen in February of her senior year and on that date she set up housekeeping with Pedro, the coach of the local soccer team. Her grades had won her a partial state scholarship and if she continued with her job she would qualify for a medical scholarship at the end of a year. She still needed about a thousand dollars for fees and books, but the same anonymous source who had sent funds for her sister set aside the same amount for her.

I was thrilled when she started community college that summer. Every few weeks I called to see how her courses were going. I had high hopes that she would do well enough to transfer to a university nursing program. One afternoon I passed right by her apartment and saw her car in the driveway. She was usually either at school or work at that hour so I wondered whether she was ill.

Pedro answered and let me in. Nicole stumbled into the room wearing a ratty robe. She had bleached her hair blonde, shaved her eyebrows, and she reeked of tobacco. I noticed some marijuana roaches in an ashtray.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I sleep in the afternoons,” she said.

“I thought you went to school in the morning and worked at the surgery center afterward.”

“I couldn’t do both. So I didn’t finish the semester.”

“What about the scholarship from the church patron?”

“I spent it,” she said in a challenging voice.

“On what?”

“Clothes for my new job,” she admitted.

“You’re not working at the surgery center anymore?”

“I’m got sick of killing myself for minimum wage when I can make more than a week’s salary in a night.”

“Don’t tell me you’re lap dancing?”

She shrugged and I walked out, slamming her door behind me.

She called me—who else?—when she was arrested for prostitution, but denied the charge. “They’re harassing me. I never had sex with any of my clients.”

“What do you expect me to do about it?” I asked in frustration.

The next call came after Stew, who owned the club where she danced, smacked her around. Nicole refused my advice to contact the shelter for abused women.

She called me again when she was released from the hospital after a bad reaction to crack cocaine. “My heart went crazy I thought I was going to die!”

Then one rainy day she came by the house with Julie. Nicole was wearing pants made from a slippery fabric and appeared twenty pounds underweight. Her eyes were sunken and there were bruises on her arms. “Julie’s been suspended from school,” she said. “Can you talk some sense into her?”

I looked from one to the other and sighed. “You have two sisters as role models.” I said to Julie. “Pick which one you want to emulate.”

Nicole phoned a few months later to announce her pregnancy. She vowed she was giving up drugs and she would be a good mother.

The Slaters stepped up to the plate and became exemplary grandparents. They virtually raised baby Delilah while Nicole went back to school and became a medical technician. A few years later she married another man and had a son. Nicole has struggled, but has managed to lead an ordinary, yet fulfilling life. After many years of avoiding me, she reconnected through Facebook and I’ve entertained her charming children at Christmas.

When Julie turned eighteen, she still had two more years of high school to complete. Just like her sisters, she was unwilling to follow the Slaters’ strict house rules and moved in with a friend. She called in a panic because her friend had tossed her out. The Slaters were bitter at the way she had left and suggested I take her in to see what she was really like. I’d learned my lesson with Lydia but agreed to make some calls on her behalf.

After hanging up from one discouraging conversation, my housekeeper, Martha, came into the room. “Who needs a home?” she asked. I told her about Julie. “Since my mother died, we’ve always made our spare room available to people in need. We took care of one elderly man after his surgery, and I’ve been praying for the Lord to send us the right person. Maybe it’s Julie.”

Julie lived with Martha until she graduated high school then joined a youth missionary program where she met the man she married. They did well for a while. She held a good job; they bought a house, and were expecting a baby. After Julie had a miscarriage, she became suicidal and pushed her husband away. Eventually they divorced. Julie and I stay in touch through e-mail and I monitor her Facebook postings for signs of worsening depression. Sometimes we talk. She claims it helps.

Sharonda James
is the African-American young woman who was told by her caseworker to get pregnant if she wanted medical care and economic services—and followed her advice. She gave birth to her first son Za’quelle before her seventeenth birthday and was pregnant again by her eighteenth. Za’quelle’s father went to prison for attempted murder.

Sharonda is the unluckiest person I’ve ever met. Her mother was killed in front of her when she was a young child, her father has been in prison most of her life, and she lived with her blind great-grandmother who needed the child as her eyes. Even though Sharonda had been placed in foster care since the age of ten, she had never spent more than a few weeks in a foster home. She had been allowed to “scrounge” (the caseworker’s term) between the homes of relatives in a crime-ridden neighborhood of welfare mothers and cocaine dealers. She often missed school and never completed high school.

One day, while standing on a street corner, the new girlfriend of her expected baby’s father drove past and shouted, “He’s mine now!”

Furious, Sharonda tossed a beer bottle at the car. The bottle bounced off the side view mirror into the open window and split the girl’s forehead leaving a large, bloody gash. Sharonda was convicted for assault with a deadly weapon and resisting an officer with violence. A cousin took custody of Za’quelle when his mother went to prison.

I offered to meet Sharonda at the hospital when she went into labor with her second child. However the prison matron didn’t call me until after the baby was born. I arrived when Sharonda’s second son, Benny, was a few hours old. Sharonda had one arm shackled to the bed rail, making it difficult for her to hold him during the twenty-four-hour period that she could be with him. I stayed with her until she was wheeled away screaming and crying for her baby and Benny was turned over to his father’s mother.

When Sharonda turned eighteen in prison, I made my last court appearance on her behalf. I had been her Guardian ad Litem for almost four years and nothing I had ever tried for her had made a difference. I felt like an utter failure and said so in my report to the judge.

“What should we have done differently?” he asked.

“No effort was made to find her a permanent, loving home. Her caseworker said she had known Sharonda’s family since she was a small child and could have predicted the outcome. If that was so, then why didn’t she try to prevent it?”

“Why do you think?” he said, putting me on the spot.

“Because this community did not take the legal steps to free her for adoption since they believed nobody would giver her a permanent home due to her age and race.”

The judge asked the clerk to call the jail. With Sharonda on speakerphone, he said, “I have been your judge for three years and I am here to apologize to you. I’ve asked for various services for you, but my orders have never been carried out. I don’t know what else I could have done, but obviously I have failed you or you would not be where you are. You came to us a neglected child and we did not meet your needs. You have reason to be angry, but you still can get your life together. When you come out, my door is open to you and I’ll help you if I can.” Overcome with feelings of sadness, he recessed the court.

After Sharonda served her sentence, she returned to her old neighborhood and lived with a cousin who was also raising two children. She called me when she was in labor with her third child and I made it in time to cut her daughter Ra’quelle’s cord. Shortly after this baby turned two, Sharonda called me crying hysterically. “They took my baby!” Sharonda admitted to light spankings, but I learned that the child had many old scars. Sharonda had many excuses and explanations; but I didn’t buy them, and she knew it.

Sharonda had never been parented adequately thus she could not nurture another life. Just like Lydia, who had vowed not to treat her child the way she had been treated and Alicia who lost her children to the foster care system, Sharonda was locked into the abusive cycle. A few months after her daughter was removed from her custody, I had a series of collect calls from Sharonda in yet another jail—and she was expecting her fourth child.

I still hear from Sharonda. The older boys live with the cousin and grandmother who raised them; the girls are sometimes with their mother and sometimes with their great-grandmother. They all live a few blocks apart in a small southern town in a neighborhood segregated by tradition rather than law.

Sandra Shepherd King
joined Dirk in military service. She was trained in search and rescue and gave birth to a daughter after two years of marriage. Rudolph Grover served less than three years in a state prison, where his health—unlike that of Humbert Humbert—dramatically improved. I was notified of his release by the Department of Corrections, as was Sandra. He moved back in with Florence and resided in our community, where he was listed as a sexual perpetrator on all databases and websites. His name is now missing so he has either moved or is deceased.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

—George Bernard Shaw

Abuse. Neglect. Abandonment. Foster care. Aging out of the system without a family to call your own. Few of the children in this book escaped lifelong handicaps from the injuries their parents inflicted and the system did little more than patch them up and send them out as walking wounded. Even worse, they sadly fulfilled the expectation that they would do the same to their own children. I knew the answer: either get the children back with their family of origin quickly and offer supports to that family or find the children a loving permanent home.

There have been many changes in both the Guardian ad Litem program in Florida and the social service agencies. The guardian program is no longer under the court system and is centrally controlled from Tallahassee. There are some negatives to this system, but the majority of dependent children in Florida have a guardian. Every so often the legislature threatens to lighten its budget by cutting back this sometimes misunderstood program—which gives the state probably its biggest bang for its buck since the myriad creative ways volunteers meet their children’s needs saves millions of dollars per year. Plus there is no price tag for getting children permanency more quickly. One negative change, in my opinion, is the rule against guardians driving children in their cars. Many relationship were cemented and secrets confessed in this private setting or over a sandwich or walk in a park. In our rural counties, developing relationships away from foster parents, family members, or school authorities is now more difficult, especially with teens.