I Speak For This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate (54 page)

“If I saw that she signed the papers first and that she couldn’t grab them back.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

“That still doesn’t mean I’ll give away my daughters.”

“I’m not going to try to talk you into it. You discuss it with the girls and then you pray about what you think will be best for them. I know you love them and because of that love you will do what is right for them.”

A week later I had a call at the Guardian ad Litem office to contact Mr. Colby. I reached him after dinner. His speech was slurred.

“Been thinking about what you said about my girls.”

“About what is best for them?”

“Yes.” There was a long pause. “I like you. You are the only one who ever seemed to really care about my children. Do you actually think it would be better for them to be adopted by strangers?”

“I think it would be best if they could live together with one of their parents, however they don’t want to go back to their mother.”

“I don’t want them to do that either.”

“And the court won’t send them back to you in the near future.”

“I know that.”

“If they stay in foster care, they could be moved around and separated. Adoption is the only possibility of permanence. Also, once they are adopted, HRS is out of the picture—and by the way, I am too. That means HRS won’t be able to control your access to them and you won’t have to answer to HRS.”

“I think I am going to do it.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, what you want me to do.”

“I want what is best for the girls.”

“I’ll do it, if they tell me that’s what they want.”

“Okay, we’ll talk again. Call me anytime.”

He hung up the phone and I held the dead receiver for several seconds, then threw the portable phone in the air. “Yes!” I said aloud. Then I dialed Vic Slater and told him the news.

A court date for the change of placement hearing was set. As soon as Calvin Reynolds heard the Slaters’ foster care license was in the mail, he filed the papers to order the Colby sisters into foster care. For once, HRS and the Guardian ad Litem office were in agreement. In preparing my report for the court, I took special pains to write complimentary words about the natural parents as well as the HRS workers.

Many departments of HRS, including foster care licensing, protective services, and adoptions have worked hard to facilitate this atypical case. Everyone, including the children themselves and their birth parents, cooperated to make this special placement work. Complex procedures were done rapidly and communication between everyone has been excellent, allowing this favorable outcome in a challenging situation.

 

The girls prepared to come to court because they wanted to tell the judge that this is what they desired. When I took them into the judge’s chambers, I said, “Usually ordering children into foster care is an admission that all other avenues have been blocked, and Your Honor’s decision is the least detrimental alternative. However, this is a happy day because foster care is merely a technical step on the way to an adoption and everyone present is in accord that this is the best course of action.”

Calvin Reynolds nodded. The lawyer for Mr. Colby, who was not present, and the lawyer for Mrs. Hunt, who was, stated they had no objections.

We were out of court in less than five minutes.

In the hallway, Calvin said, “What about the terminations? Who is handling those?”

“Send them to the parents’ lawyers. We’re ready to go.”

“Are you certain they will sign?”

I saw Mrs. Hunt coming out of the rest room and motioned for her to come over. “Mr. Reynolds wants to know if you are ready to sign the terminations.”

“I could do it now,” she said.

“Sorry, I don’t have the forms,” Calvin replied, a bit taken aback by her enthusiasm. “I’ll send them to your attorney tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Lottie,” I said. “Call me if you have any questions.”

“What about the father?” Calvin said after Lottie left.

“He’ll sign, but he wants to be certain their mother does it first, so this isn’t some sort of ploy for her to get them when he can’t.”

He pressed the elevator button. “Why don’t we bring them back to court and have them execute the consents simultaneously?”

“Mr. Colby doesn’t like coming here because the last time he was in shackles. Also, he hates to be in the same room as his ex-wife.”

“What if he doesn’t sign?”

“He’ll sign. He told me he would.”

Calvin shook his head in disbelief. “It never happens this easily.”

I headed for the parking lot where my car sizzled in the midday Florida summer sun.

The girls were waiting for me with their mother. “Want to join us for a burger?” I asked Mrs. Hunt. She beamed. “Who wants to ride with her mom?”

“I do,” Julie said.

“Okay, Nicole, you come with me and Julie and Simone go with your mother.”

In the restaurant everyone was cheerful. Simone talked about her summer job, Julie about taking horseback lessons, and Nicole about babysitting for Zane and Jared, who were “a pain” but it was worth it because of the money.

Lottie Hunt glanced at a newspaper that had been left on the next table with two headlines about custody cases. During the summer of 1993, there were several high-profile children’s rights cases: Baby Jessica, the two-year-old child, who the court in Iowa had demanded be returned to her biological father from her adopted parents in Michigan; and Kimberly Mays, the fourteen-year-old Florida girl who had been switched at birth. Kimberly was asking that her natural parents, the Twiggs, be restrained by the court from seeking custody of her.

“What do you think about those cases?” Lottie Hunt asked me.

I deflected the question. “What do you girls think?”

Nicole spoke up first. “I think Baby Jessica should go back to her birth mother.”

Lottie seemed surprised. “Why?”

“Her mother has been trying to get her back since she was a few weeks old and the courts have been holding it up. That wasn’t fair to either the real parents or the baby.”

“But the mother lied about who the father was,” Simone interjected.

“So, should the baby suffer for that?” Nicole countered.

I was surprised that the Colby sisters knew so many details about the case.

“What about Baby Jessica?” Lottie asked me. “Did she have a guardian?”

“Actually, I think she eventually was given one, but it wasn’t very meaningful. Her rights haven’t been considered. In law children are the property of their parents.”

“That’s not fair,” Julie said.

“If you were Baby Jessica’s guardian, what would you do?” I asked Julie.

“I would allow her to live with the people she knows but to visit her mother sometimes too.”

“I agree with Julie,” Lottie said. “You’ve got to think about the baby first.”

I popped some of Julie’s French fries in my mouth, thinking: I cannot believe this conversation. We’ve just taken this woman’s children and put them one more legal step beyond her reach, and she’s thinking about their needs rather than her own for a change. “What about Kimberly Mays?”

“That’s different,” Simone said. “She should visit her birth parents because none of this was their fault.”

“How can you force a fourteen-year-old to stay with people she doesn’t like?” I wondered.

“They could see her at someone like Dr. Abernathy’s office,” Julie said.

“What about Gregory K.?” Lottie Hunt asked me. “Do you think he had the right to divorce his parents?”

“All he wanted was termination of parental rights, the same paper you have agreed to sign.”

“I know. I didn’t want to put my kids through that. If Gregory’s mother had really cared about him, she would have done the same.”

“You really love your daughters, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Lottie answered steadily. “And I’m showing everyone you can do something like what Gregory K. wanted, and do it right.”

“We have a little problem,” Vic said three days later. “Julie wanted to stay overnight with a friend of hers, but we did not know the family and suggested that her friend could come to our house instead. She had a fit and cried and said we were being mean to her. Then, when we thought she was calling her friend, she phoned her father and told him she didn’t want to live here anymore and didn’t want to be adopted.”

“I guess she’d better talk to Dr. Abernathy about this. In the meantime, I’ll take Julie out for a while. Would tomorrow afternoon be all right?”

The next day Julie and I went for ice cream sundaes at Dairy Queen. “Complaint time,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Julie asked tensely.

“I bet you have a whole list of complaints. Lay it on me. That’s what I am here for.”

“Well, I hate it when Jared and Zane use the bathroom first. They leave a big mess and then I get blamed for their towels on the floor.”

“Yeah, and if you pick them up, they’ll expect you’ll do it every time and if you don’t, you get in trouble, right?” She nodded somberly. “What else?”

We went down the list. I made certain to reflect back Julie’s problems to demonstrate that I took them seriously. I didn’t consider them trivial and I didn’t blame her. After all, I was not her parent or her therapist, I was her voice, and what I was trying to do was to help her see ways she could deal with the complexities of her new family. I sympathized with the fact that she suddenly was the middle child, when up until then she had been the baby. She was also distressed because she was going to have to repeat sixth grade. I reminded her that the situation was hardly her fault and that she was young for sixth grade anyway and would be at the top of her class the next semester.

When we were back in the car, Julie said, “I thought you were going to be mad at me for calling my father.”

“You can phone him anytime you want.”

“What if I don’t want to be adopted?”

“Then you won’t be. Since you are over twelve, you have to go to court and sign your own adoption papers anyway. Nobody can force you to do it.”

“What if my sisters want it?”

“Then they will be. But you are an individual and you will do what is best for Julie and nobody else.”

“What if I don’t want to live with the Slaters anymore?”

“That’s a problem, but not an insurmountable one.” I then told Julie about some of the other foster homes and that she wouldn’t necessarily remain in the same school district or be near her sisters.

“I don’t want to leave the Slaters,” she said.

“Okay, so you won’t leave this week. Tell me how you feel next week.”

The next one to blow was Nicole.

Vic called and said, “I don’t know if we are going to be able to keep Nicole.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure, that’s the crazy part. Nicole had been folding laundry and putting it out on everyone’s beds like we do around here, when Jeanne told her she should also pick up the clothes that were draped across the furniture. She flew off the handle and tossed the boys’ clothes at Jeanne and began screaming at the top of her lungs, ‘You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.’ She turned purple and her whole face was twisted. She backed into a corner and crossed her hands over her face and kept screaming and screaming, then she ran into her room and didn’t come out for the rest of the night.”

“She needs to talk to Dr. Abernathy about this right away, but I’ll be seeing her tonight when we go to her father’s for a barbecue. Maybe she’ll have something to say about it then.”

“All right,” Vic said, “but we don’t know if we can take this. Jeanne was frightened and nobody could calm Nicole down.”

“You have to remember that Nicole has been the most brutally abused of the children. Maybe something that happened triggered a memory or maybe a lot of other tensions just built up and exploded. In a way this might be a compliment to you and Jeanne.”

“How could that be?”

“If she wasn’t beginning to feel secure in the relationship with you, she might not have felt she could let out her feelings of helplessness and rage.”

“She’s normally so sweet and helpful …”

“I know, Vic. She thinks she has to be that way or nobody will take care of her. This could be a breakthrough in your relationship.”

“Felt more like a breakup to me.”

“Why don’t you make an appointment with Dr. Abernathy too? She might have hints for how to deal with your confusion as well as how to manage these outbursts better.”

The next evening Nicole was in the front seat as the three sisters and I headed toward Buddy Colby’s house. I didn’t bring up Vic’s conversation, but Simone did.

“Now don’t you go telling Daddy about what happened with Jeanne,” Simone warned Nicole in her big sister tone. “Julie’s already caused enough trouble.”

“Simone, I know you want everything to work out with the Slaters,” I said, “but Julie and Nicole are separate individuals and each will make up her own mind.”

“It’s time they thought of someone else besides themselves. I left the Baldwins’ to be with them and what thanks do I get?”

“Would you rather be there still?”

“No, I like the Slaters. They are trying to do their best and they want us all to get along.”

“Why do you think the Slaters are doing this?”

“To show off,” Nicole responded snidely, “to get the precious Mother-of-the-Year award and prove they are so wonderful to everyone in church.”

“Why else?”

“For money?” Julie asked.

“No, definitely not for money. They haven’t even gotten the first foster care check and they’ve fed and clothed Nicole for months, and the rest of you for many weeks, not to mention the trips, church camp, riding lessons, and everything else. They’ve sold their house and are moving into an inconvenient rental so they can build a bigger house. They need to trade their compact car for a van.”

“They are doing it for God,” Simone explained matter-of-factly. “The Lord came to them and told them to take us even before they met us, so it is spiritual.”

“If that is true, why did Jeanne attack me last night?” Nicole snapped.

“She didn’t attack you,” Simone retorted. “You freaked out.”