Rich in Love: When God Rescues Messy People (15 page)

Samantha’s inappropriate behavior and talk increased. I knew she was acting out as a result of her abuse, but I simply couldn’t have her openly acting out in this way in front of the other children.

Whenever foster children begin acting out, the social workers and psychologists will offer advice. As you can imagine, there is a lot of free thinking involved in the suggestions, and everyone seems to have a different opinion or solution. Most encouraged me to allow Samantha to share what she had seen and been involved in whenever and however she wanted. When we did this, though, she talked about these things
all the time.
It was clear I couldn’t listen to some of the advice I’d received. It simply wasn’t wise. I had to get Samantha to stop her inappropriate talk and behavior. And frankly, there were times when I was less than patient with her.

I went to my favorite place for wisdom. “Please, Lord,” I begged, “give me wisdom to handle this situation with Samantha. I don’t know what to do. You allowed it, and I’m stumped! You’ve got to help me.”

First, God gave me a different wisdom. He gently pointed out that Samantha was only behaving as she had been recently taught. She didn’t know any better. God was teaching me to be patient and to look at things from a different perspective by taking the blinders off my eyes. I felt so foolish for not looking outside my little box. I continued to pray for wisdom, and I was confident now that God would show me the right way to handle the situation.

Samantha was loving all the attention she was getting when she said or did these things, so no matter how much we tried to steer her in a different direction, she talked to anyone who would listen. Later that week, she began having one of these conversations with a friend of ours.

“Samantha,” I said, interrupting her, “I want you to go to your room.”

She went up the stairs, and I followed. I sat with her on her bed and began the conversation we’d had many times before. “Samantha, it’s okay to share those things with Papi and me. We will always listen. But it’s not appropriate for you to talk about those things with others.”

She sat, wide-eyed, listening, but she was so little. How could she really understand? And I didn’t want to tell her sex is bad; I just needed to teach her God’s view of it. So I said, “God wants only married people to talk about sexual things. And since Papi and I have asked you many times to stop talking about inappropriate things, perhaps it’s time for me to find you a husband so you can get married. We’ll miss you very much, but this way you will be able to talk about anything you want with him. I will go call the social worker to find you one. We are going to miss you so much.”

She cried, “Please, Mimi, I don’t want to get married. I promise I won’t talk about it to anyone except you.”

It worked. She stopped sharing things openly and came to me whenever she was struggling. Praise God once again for his wisdom!

chapter 15

the girls and the stories

June 2005

I didn’t have a lot of time to focus on Samantha’s new issue because it wasn’t more than a week later that we got a call about three girls who were being detained with their mom at the jail. You’d think that with Samantha’s struggles we wouldn’t want to take on more children. But without hesitation we said, “Of course.”

Within the hour the social worker pulled into our driveway. Two little girls got out of the car while the social worker unbuckled the third from a car seat.

All three girls were filthy. They wore no shoes, and their feet were black. The middle one’s hair smelled horrible and looked like it had never been combed. The baby was out of it, her eyes glazed over. The eldest walked by, seething. If she could have killed me with her eyes, she would have. The middle one was completely freaking out, flailing all over the place.

Kurt was in his room playing with his cars—he got nervous about kids coming—while George, Raymond, and Samantha watched from the staircase.

I took the limp and lethargic baby from the social worker, who told me that the baby’s name was Rose and she was sixteen months old. “The older one is Elaine. She’s five, almost six, and the middle one is Evelyn. She’s also five—her birthday was last month.”

“Hello, girls,” I said, trying to be soothing and safe for them. I walked the girls past George and wide-eyed Raymond and Samantha to get them into the tub while the social worker sat with Domingo in the kitchen.

I felt this unexplainable helplessness. These girls were babies who should be with their mama, not here with us. I wanted to scream and cry—this was so unbearable.
Why, Lord? Why should they be put through all of this? Why are innocent children treated so badly?

Then the thought came to me—these girls were the fortunate ones. They were getting a chance to escape.

After running the water, I washed and tried to soothe them. I want you to understand how terrified these kids must have been. I was a safe person, but they didn’t know that. What did they think about this woman, a complete stranger, asking them to take off their clothes?

Although Elaine didn’t take her eyes off her baby sister and watched every move I made, she was compliant and did everything I asked.

I wrestled with God.
Lord
,
I prayed silently,
I can’t do this task. I can’t bear this load any longer. My heart can’t take it. I’m too old for this.
Every part of me wanted to get out of the bathroom and run far away. Couldn’t God find someone else to do this job?
Please, Lord, fill me up. Take my burden and carry it.

Then I looked at Elaine. She had tears rolling down her face but said nothing as she reached over to help me wash the baby. I knew then I was doing what I needed to do and God would give me the strength to do it.

Elaine had the most stunning big brown eyes and rosy cheeks I had ever seen. Her lips seemed like they were perfectly sculpted and then painted a delicate shade of red. She looked like a porcelain doll that had been mistreated. It took only a moment to see that Elaine was tough and definitely in charge. She was only five, yet she seemed to have the weight of her sisters on her shoulders.

Evelyn, the middle girl, looked completely different from Elaine. She was dark haired and tall, quite striking with perfectly arched eyebrows and full pink lips.

The baby, Rose, on the other hand, was limp. Her eyes were empty like there was no life inside her.

Out of nowhere Evelyn began a high-pitched squeal, a sound that could shatter glass and peel the wallpaper right off the walls. It was so bad that Elaine broke her silence, turned around, and snapped, “Would you shut up! Just do what she says.”

Evelyn immediately stopped her squealing and did what I asked her to do.

I chuckled inside and hoped they didn’t notice my smile. I knew I needed to win Elaine over because she was clearly in charge.

Their hair was so tangled I had a tough time trying to wash it, and I couldn’t get a comb through it, much less get all the lice out. I gave up trying, and after drying the girls off, I put clean clothes on them.

I got the social worker’s permission to cut their hair, then took them to the garage, giving them each a bob cut. I felt bad but didn’t see any other way. When I was done, three absolutely stunning girls had emerged.

George came up and said, “Come on, girls, let’s go play on the trampoline.” And off the two older girls went while I put the baby to bed.

Raymond and Samantha’s story

Emotionally and physically weary, I went to sit down to talk with Domingo and the social worker. After we’d been officially introduced, she pointed to Samantha and Raymond. “Are those the Ross kids?”

“Yes,” we said.

“Those poor children.” She shook her head. Then, seeing the blank looks on our faces, she said, “Don’t you know what happened to them?”

“We’re waiting to find out,” Domingo said. “Do you know?”

She took a deep breath and fingered the mug of tea Domingo had gotten for her. “Okay, here’s what I know. We got a call about a family who lives up in the hills on a piece of property with several trailers on it. The property belongs to the grandmother of these kids. It’s a filthy place. Stuff everywhere. There was a meth raid, and the sheriff’s office called social services to come. It was very cold, in the twenties, and had snowed. We went into the trailer home, and the girl had on little clothing and was filthy. Mom fought the cop and got really mouthy, so they handcuffed her and put her in the patrol car. I took Samantha and put her in the social services car. The poor little girl started crying hysterically for her mom. We looked around but didn’t see the little guy.

“‘Where’s the boy?’ someone asked.

“‘He’s not here,’ the mom said with an attitude. ‘He’s with family and friends.’

“‘Are you sure?’

“Mom cussed everyone out, Samantha screamed louder, and everyone was ready to go. Except for Sheriff Bender. He wasn’t getting in his car. He kept scanning the area; you could tell he was uneasy. Then he said, ‘I have to go check the grounds one more time.’

“He looked around the property and found an old camper sitting on cinder blocks in a secluded area. As he got closer, he could smell the stench of feces and rotten food. He opened the camper door, and the stench blasted him. A toilet overflowed with excrement. Open cans of rotten food sat on the counter, garbage was strewn about, and animal feces were everywhere. In a corner he saw hundreds of flies. As he got closer, he saw a child lying there in the frigid temperatures, completely still, with nothing on but a soiled diaper. A baby bottle filled with rotten milk lay next to him. The baby’s eyes were open but not registering anything. Because of all the flies swirling around him and landing on him, the sheriff thought the baby was dead.

“We all heard him calling for help, and those who could went running. I had to stay with Samantha. Pretty soon an ambulance arrived to take the baby to the hospital. The sheriff was so angry, they had to restrain him from laying into the mother.

“They think the family knew the baby was in the camper and planned to send someone back to get him later. I wonder, though. Would they have even remembered? How long had he been there before the sheriff found him? I shudder to think of what those kids endured living there.”

After we heard the story, we understood what had caused the boils and why Raymond was angry much of the time. His anger demonstrated his strong will. I thanked God for it, believing that’s what had kept him alive. And I fully believe this little guy would have died if it hadn’t been for the sheriff. I was told the man was a Christian—and that something in his spirit had urged him to keep looking.

the girls’ story

We had barely finished hearing Raymond and Samantha’s devastating story when the social worker began to tell us what she knew about the girls I’d just bathed. My heart feared the truth about the extent of their pain—truth that would emerge slowly over the next months.

It had been 105 degrees in the city, and the girls were walking in the streets with their mother, barefoot and without access to food or water. Their mother was on meth, confused, dazed, paranoid, and not making much sense. She told her girls Grandma was poisoning them at home and they needed to get out. So they wandered. Their feet were black and sore, their tummies empty, their bodies dehydrated. At some point, while holding the baby, their mother pulled out her knife and tried to enter a car with people in it. Somehow the plan was thwarted, and the police came to handcuff her and take her away in a patrol car. The girls were put in a different patrol car and taken to the police station.

At the station, they put the girls and their mother together in a room with a video camera. The camera recorded Mom saying spine-chilling things to those little girls. “You’d better be careful,” she warned. “They’re going to take you away and put you with bad people. They’re going to torture you and kill you.”

The poor little girls were so terrified, they screamed and cried hysterically, “No! No!”

And then the social worker came and took them away.

“he will be yours”

I’m thankful that the girls came when they did and that I had to invest my time in them for a week, even though it was right in the middle of Samantha’s crisis. If they hadn’t been there, I would have obsessed about Samantha far more than would have been healthy for either of us. One reason we had to shift focus was because the baby, Rose, tested positive for meth. No wonder she had been so out of it! As she started going through withdrawals, she came alive—crazy alive. We had to walk the floor at night, holding her while she screamed. One night her breathing slowed so much, we almost took her to the ER, worried she might die. Whenever Domingo was home, he walked with her, never letting her out of his sight.

One day he looked at me while I was cuddling and rocking Raymond, and he said, “You’re going to spoil that boy, Irene.”

I laughed. “Look at you with that little girl! You’re just as bad as I am.”

The other two girls were crazy like little wildcats; Evelyn unnerved us all as she squealed for hours. The battle for Kurt was ongoing. We were fighting against visitation, and we wanted the father to be investigated for his abuse. Thankfully, George was doing well. Despite his family growing from one to six kids in a matter of months, he welcomed all his new siblings with an eagerness as well as tenderness. For years he had prayed earnestly for brothers and sisters, and these kids were God’s answers.

It wasn’t easy dealing with Samantha and Raymond’s visits with their mom after their traumatic Memorial Day weekend. She was still allowed one visit per week, but now the visits were supervised. It took days to get the kids back to normal, and since they saw their mom every week, “normal” didn’t happen very often. Samantha became clingy, and Raymond started his tantrums all over again, throwing himself on the floor, hitting his head hard on the tile. He frightened me. I thought he would crack his head in. Social services informed us that the paperwork was already in motion for their dad, who was being released from prison soon, to get full custody of the kids.

I couldn’t believe the system. No matter what the parents did, the system almost always leaned toward reunification. Even meth-addicted parents could get their kids back after six months if they followed the requirements the court placed on them.

We later learned that Raymond also had a horrific experience Memorial Day weekend. He came close to death, again, when he slipped into a river and was drowning. A young man saw him and ran over to pull him out of the river. It doesn’t surprise me that this little guy was not being supervised. So in one weekend, Samantha was abused and Raymond almost drowned. You can see why we were so upset at the thought of these kids going home with either parent.

One night I was so distraught over this, I couldn’t sleep, so I went and got Raymond and brought him to the rocking chair in our bedroom. I held him and cried. I was so angry at God. I kept asking, “Why, God? Why would you let these precious children go back to such a dangerous place?” God had turned the ugly little baby into a beautiful toddler with golden hair and big brown eyes. As I looked at his sweet, relaxed face as he slept, I realized I had fallen in love with this boy and wanted to protect him. But here I was, on the verge of having to give him and his sister back.

When I slowed my anger, God whispered in my ear, “Have faith, Irene. This boy is not going back. He will be yours.”

Peace filled me, and I put Raymond back in his crib. I went to bed and told Domingo what I’d heard, and he said, “You need to have faith, Irene, and believe what you heard.”

The court charged their mom with child endangerment. She skipped bail and disappeared, turning up on the FBI’s wanted list. Their dad came for his visit and brought Raymond a toy guitar and Samantha a toy piano. The visit seemed to go all right—and then no one ever saw him again.

girls

When the girls came, Samantha was excited to have sisters to share a room and play with. Elaine, in her self-assigned role as mother to all the little girls, immediately embraced Samantha, while Evelyn just put up with her.

Elaine and Evelyn seemed to be adjusting to their new environment. But they never asked about their mom, nor did they want to see her. This seemed peculiar to me. Most kids ask about Mom and Dad right away and would climb the highest mountain to visit their mom. Not these girls. They didn’t even like to say their mom’s name.

Although the baby started going through withdrawals and we couldn’t comfort her, we were happy that she had begun showing emotions after the flat personality she had come with. It killed us that this little one had meth in her system. At a seminar on meth we had learned that the addiction is powerful and difficult to cure. Once you’ve taken meth, your body is forever changed. I couldn’t fathom how a little baby was supposed to deal with this.

My anger started to grow until I hated their mom. Surely God didn’t want me to love the parents who had hurt the children he had placed in my care!