Fighting the System
A Foster Mother's JournalBy Lilly StarAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Lilly Star
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4520-1283-4Contents
1. The Decision to Foster Children.............................................................12. Austin, Belinda and Foster Children – The Early Years..................................53. Austin, Surgeries and Sammy..................................................................94. Mental Illness and Power Hungry Workers......................................................135. Schools, Law Enforcement and Witchcraft......................................................236. Sex, Alcoholism and Court....................................................................317. Infidelity, a Dream and a Tattoo.............................................................398. From Depression to Anticipation..............................................................459. David, Drugs, and Finding a Placement for Austin.............................................5110. Austin's Removal, Sammy's Regression, and The Agency's Decision..............................7711. Deaths, Thefts and Visitation Danger.........................................................9512. Silver Things, Prison and an Overdose........................................................10513. Group Homes, Molly and Jeff..................................................................12314. A Drunk, Austin's Release and Fighting the System for Caleb..................................12915. Annie........................................................................................13516. Inhalants, Dishonest Power People and Teachers of Confusion..................................14117. Fighting for Sammy's Education and Mr. Andrew's Car..........................................15118. Fighting for Transportation, Education and Adoption..........................................15919. Church Camp, Incompetent Teachers and Injustice to Sammy.....................................16720. The Betrayal Begins, Exposing the Teacher and Investigations.................................18121. New Friends, Fighting to Keep Sammy, Traitors in the Midst and the Trial.....................18922. Accusations..................................................................................20123. Graduation, Manipulation and Clarence........................................................20924. Unqualified Power People, and Inaccurate Reports.............................................22125. Exposing Pearl and Matthew and The Children's Removal........................................22726. Credible Liars, Grandchildren and Clarence's Arrest..........................................237
Chapter One
The Decision to Foster Children
Candy had been raised with a strong sense of family values and convictions. Her grandparents had played a big part in her life. When she was very young, she had a major illness that left her heart weak. For a year, she had to be flat on her back in bed. Because there were other children at her maternal parent's home, and Candy needed to have total quiet bed rest, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents.
Although the illness was at such a young age, Candy's body never quite completely recovered, and she required continual attention throughout her life. Candy had to undergo several surgeries. Her organs seemed to be weaker than most people, and wore out a lot sooner. Her aunt and uncles gave her lots of attention and she was pretty much raised as a single child with importance put on putting God first, and that nothing was really as bad as it seemed. By the time she started Kindergarten, she was living between her parent's and sibling's home and her grandparent's home. This arrangement continued until Candy graduated from high school.
The family had a lot of humor and always made the best of a bad situation. They were taught to show kindness and respect to everyone, regardless of their social status. There were always extra people for special occasions such as birthdays and holidays and it was common practice to invite those who lived alone. With lots of loving people to be around, Candy was determined to teach her own children to care for and help others less fortunate than themselves.
When Candy first met Ben at her work place and they dated she had convinced herself that she could finally love someone she could spend the rest of her life with. Within six months they were engaged. The following summer they married.
They resided in a small neighborhood in Midwestern Ohio where both sets of their parents lived only a few blocks away. They felt fortunate that their parents were able to play an important part raising their two children, Austin and Belinda. Their family was involved in church, and they sent their kids to a private school.
* * *
The longer they were married, the more Ben seemed to pull away from Candy and the children, paying less and less attention to any of them. Candy could recall that when their daughter Belinda was born, Ben had told Candy that he was disappointed that Belinda was not a boy.
Belinda was a lot like Candy: calm, intelligent, happy, and helpful. But the child was asthmatic, and allergic to plastic. Cardboard and paper sacks caused a reaction immediately when they came in contact with her skin. Pets, like cats and dogs, were not allowed.
Belinda was a couple of years older than Austin. Even when Austin was born, Ben didn't seem to want to spend time with him either.
Austin had been a very active loving child. It seemed that every time Candy turned around, she had to take him to the emergency room for stitches. Cursed with sleep walking, Candy kept a continual ear opened, to times he might walk outside.
It was around the age of four that Austin's personality; his love for adventure and his rebel attitude for life seemed to develop. He wanted to play outside for hours. He went through a phase where he threw bricks through windows. Not just his house windows and garage, he even managed to break the neighbor's windows too. He liked hearing glass break. Twice he was hit by a car and twice he had nearly drowned. It seemed like he was a walking disaster.
Austin wore glasses that were guaranteed for a year. However, the fourteenth time Candy took his broken glasses in to get a new pair, the doctor finally told her that he could no longer replace the glasses for free.
The older he got, the harder it was to find a sitter for him. Even his grandparents went through periods of time when they just had to say no when Candy would ask one of them to watch him for a while. When he walked into a room, everybody would leave.
Candy could remember the day in August when Austin was diagnosed with diabetes. He was only seven years old. Ben had spent the entire day in the garage crying, because he had become a diabetic a couple of years earlier, and he blamed himself for Austin's illness. It seemed that after this, Ben almost hated his son. There was little interaction between them. To Austin it seemed like he couldn't please his father, no matter how hard he tried, and Candy was the only one who accepted his hyperactive behaviors. It was at this time that Candy decided that God had chosen her to be a solo parent for Austin.
Grandma Bertha, Ben's mother, was always a respite. Her youngest child Mary was the only girl, and only two years older than Belinda. Mary and Belinda and Austin grew up as siblings and spent a lot of time together.
* * *
Throughout high school Candy had a girlfriend, Grace, and they remained friends well after the two of them graduated. Grace had a sister named Trudy and the three girls spent a lot of time together. When Grace got married she and her husband found out that they could not have children, so they adopted a girl named Allison. Allison was a Downs syndrome baby who had a few other medical problems, including a bad heart and a weak immune system. Candy became her godmother. Several times a year Allison was a patient in the intensive care unit at their local hospital. The year that Belinda was born, Grace became pregnant. Six weeks after Grace delivered a healthy daughter, she found out she was pregnant again. Thus, she had two babies ten months apart while Allison continued to require constant medical attention. Candy and Grace continued their friendship and spent a lot of time together with their own children. After Austin was born, Grace didn't mind watching him from time to time, though she was honest enough to admit he required extra supervision. When their sons reached eight years of age, Grace's sister passed away from cancer.
Although there had been several children in Grace and Trudy's biological family, those children had all been adopted out. Trudy and Grace were the only ones who were kept together. Grace was at a loss without Trudy, as well as Trudy's two daughters and a son. Their biological father didn't live with the children. When Grace attempted to take the three children, she realized that her hands were full with her own children. When things became more and more stressful, Trudy's son ran away.
It was apparent that Grace needed help. With six children, Grace had no time to grieve, especially since one of them was a special needs child. Social Services called and asked Ben and Candy to take the son until they could find a suitable foster home for him. After he stayed with Candy and Ben for two weeks, and because they did not have a foster license, the boy was removed and placed in a foster home. It was hard for Candy and Ben to see the boy suffer placement in the hands of strangers and without the support or contact of his biological family. Candy's heart went out to him. She knew Trudy would have shed oceans of tears if she had known that her son was living apart from his biological relatives.
The loneliness and sadness was almost too much for the boy to carry. Candy thought that the social worker cared and his behavior was simply a result of hopelessness and frustration.
When his older sister ended up in the psych ward at the local hospital, their maternal grandmother called Candy and asked if she and Ben would take her because Grace had too many responsibilities, and needed some support. After some deliberation Candy and Ben decided to take the older sister, Kate, who was a senior in high school.
During this time, Ben was laid off from work and there wasn't enough money to pay the bills, let alone add another person to the family. Candy called Social Services to see if there was any kind of financial support they could receive and found out you had to have a foster care license first. It was a struggle, but they made it to graduation and Kate moved in with her girlfriend. By summer's end, Candy and Ben had spent a lot of time thinking about what they wanted to do to help kids who needed a family. Candy thought that she wanted her children to have a good home if something ever happened to her and Ben. So they decided to apply for a foster care license. However, they found themselves caring for foster children before Social Services even contacted them to attend the training. This began Candy's twenty years of taking in children and working with people from the state system.
People say that life begins at conception. Candy believed that to be true. However, the beginning of her unpredictable life began much later. The day she and Ben signed their names to be foster parents, they entered a lifetime of mountains and valleys, tragedies and blessings.
Chapter Two
Austin, Belinda and Foster Children – The Early Years
From the very beginning, Candy felt that every child who came through their door was meant to be there. She quickly learned the workers whom they worked best with and only took in children who were recommended by them. They also learned what a great benefit it was to them and the child, if they worked with the parents. And, if visitation had to be supervised, what better place than at church? She felt this would give the parents and child more time together.
Candy and Ben's first two placements were teenagers, Jane and Kevin. This was definitely a learning experience because neither Austin nor Belinda had reached adolescence yet. One night, while she stood at the kitchen sink, Austin came running into the house with a lit cigarette in his hand. He was all excited. He had found a cigarette. Candy asked him where he had found it and he said it just "fell out of the sky". Now to a parent, this might sound like a "Chicken Little" story and Candy asked him where he had been at the time it landed beside him. He told his mother that he had been below Belinda's window. Candy speculated it had come out of the screen on the upstairs window, from Belinda's room. When Candy called her into the house and asked her, she told her mother to go look under her foster sister's mattress where the girl had put out several cigarettes.
Since this was their first foster child, and since they had not been able to receive training yet, they were unprepared for the `fantasizing" that goes along with the grief process when a child is taken from a family and placed in the home of strangers. Jane told them that every December she and her family went to Hawaii, and had a horse that they paid a stable $2000 a year to keep for them. Truth be known, they were nearly penniless. Though they worked their hardest to help their children, it just wasn't good enough at times.
Jane's parents lived across town. Candy and Ben were warned about Jane's father. Social Services called him cantankerous and said he was going to school to become a social worker so that he could show them how to do their jobs. Candy and Ben didn't seem to have a problem, with the parents. The mother rode with them to church on Sunday and often Candy and Ben would stop in and have coffee with Jane and her parents. After Jane returned home, her father passed away.
Their first foster boy had the downstairs bedroom and made holes in the window screens in order to throw his cigarettes butts out of the window. This would be the first interaction they had with a teenager who had different sexual preferences. Kevin had a stuffed teddy bear that he dressed exactly like himself, and the worker made a comment that he was trying to decide what sex he wanted to be. Ben expressed his opinion that there should not even be a question, that he was a male. Much later in Candy's quest to help the children, she would find that foster parents were expected to accept the `other' way of life. She had to admit that the life style she had grown up with, was no longer the majority view of today's society. Kevin did not have any parents. They had abandoned him months before and moved out of state, and left him to sleep on park benches and under bridges. He was the first to teach Candy about hoarding food. Because Kevin worried about not having food for his next meal, he stole snacks from the kitchen. Once he had eaten them, he would hide the wrappers under his mattress. Eventually, he worked his way up to supervised living. His positive and negative behaviors got him his own place.
One night when Candy had been working late, Austin called her. He was very upset because Kevin had shoved him down on the bed and stuck his hands down his pants. The next afternoon, Candy and Ben helped Kevin move out.
Months later he called from another state and was crying because he was standing outside of Liberace's home and Liberace was dying. He added that he was living in California with a pimp who had given him a phone card in exchange for sexual services rendered. They never heard from Kevin again.
Candy had been working full time as a secretary while Belinda watched Austin in the summer while school was out. With both sets of grandparents close by, they managed to get through the long summers. But, that did not mean that they made it through without adventures. On her noon hour Candy drove home to check on the kids.
Once when she came home, Austin came out of the kitchen with his hand behind his back. "Now promise you won't get mad," he said, "You have to promise." Candy asked to see what he was hiding. Austin showed her his hand he had wrapped in a dishtowel.
After a pause, he explained that he and the neighbor boy had been playing army on top of the neighbor's roof. Austin had a butcher knife and when he attempted to cut a branch off of a tree he sliced open his hand. Candy returned back to work late that day, having spent her noon hour at the emergency room. Stitches were all too common at their house.
Chapter Three
Austin, Surgeries and Sammy
As time went on, Candy and Ben received more and more placements. Among them were three siblings who never used dishes. When they lived with their mom all the food was served on the tabletop. They only ended up staying with Ben and Candy for a month before they were placed in a new home.
By fall, it was time for Candy to have surgery and take time off work to have a hysterectomy. Though the surgery itself went well, a few days later she was still suffering from severe back pain-the surgeon had put a stitch through one of Candy's ureters. So, in order for it to heal, Candy had to have a nephrostomy tube inserted through her back that went into her kidney and she had to wear a bag on her leg for four months. Inserting the tube was one of the most painful things Candy ever felt. Since her urine bag was basically designed for patients who were not ambulatory, several times when Candy would stand up or sit down, the cap would pop off the end of the bag and she would urinate her pants form the knee down.
Five years before, when Candy had gallbladder surgery, she woke up with a broken tailbone, and no one had any idea how it happened. To add insult to injury there was nothing wrong with her gallbladder-the doctor had misdiagnosed a hiatal hernia. A year later, Candy had the hernia repaired. That time the surgeon wrapped her esophagus around her stomach to prevent it from tearing, to keep her from throwing up and tearing her esophagus.
The following year, when Candy had a D & C, she woke up in the recovery room very nauseous. Even though she had hand carried her doctor's orders to the hospital, telling the staff that she could not vomit and instructing them to give her medication for nausea the moment she woke up, these orders were ignored and Candy became very sick. Several times she asked for a shot so she wouldn't vomit, but the nurses insisted that she could throw up. However, her mother-in-law Bertha was with her, and she went to the nurses station and phoned Candy's doctor, Candy was given medication immediately. The next week she was back in the hospital with pancreatitis. Her doctor told her that because she had been allowed to throw up, it jostled her insides around and now she had to be in the hospital another week.
* * *
The next child Candy and Ben took in was an autistic boy, who would walk on the kitchen table and counters and refused to eat with the rest of his previous foster family. The foster parents would sit down on either side of Davy to feed him. He would scream for hours at a time. They had asked that he be moved because he was so hard to handle. Though he had grandparents who had tried to take care of him, they were mildly retarded and Davy was more than they could handle. On several occasions the police had found Davy playing in the street at midnight. He had one of the biggest smiles Candy had ever seen.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting the Systemby Lilly Star Copyright © 2010 by Lilly Star. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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