Life has been a little crazy by my standards in recent days. I was in Denver three days last week, and I'm spending most of this week in Orlando. Apparently, this is the time of year for big child welfare conferences, and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to attend, to learn, and to share.
Last week was a group of kids in foster care, kids who've aged out of foster care, and professionals who work with this population of youth. This week is the big statewide dependency summit that we have in Florida every year.
Yesterday, I was part of a small team who presented some information to a large group of Florida judges--talk about an intimidating crowd! But they were attentive and had thoughtful comments and questions--not a heckler in the bunch--and I was fortunate to be presenting alongside some wonderful people, including my colleague and friend, Jen Behnam, who gave a TED talk on the value of permanency, which nearly knocked my socks off. Jen and people like her are why I get up every day and head to the office with a positive attitude.
So, because I have been out of my beloved routine, I've struggled to find time for my blog. I've got a bunch of ideas floating around in my head and notes scribbled on paper, but I don't know when I'll have time to develop them into something worth reading. Therefore, I will go to my fall back position and share with you a piece that I wrote a few years ago after reading a book that continues to resonate with me today...
Jeanette Walls’ memoir, “
The Glass Castle,” is a study in
contrasts.
The writing is both raw and
beautiful, and Walls pulls no punches as she describes her childhood—one of
grinding poverty and unbelievable neglect, as well as undeniable examples of an
at times almost magical existence with truly unique parents, who although
limited by their personal struggles with alcoholism and mental illness, also
encouraged in their children incredible spirit, intelligence, strength, and
love.
“The Glass Castle”
contains a valuable message for the child welfare world: We should never become so committed to our
particular system of care that it causes us to overlook the individuality of
each child and family and the importance of sibling and family bonds. Even when a child’s experience includes terrible
neglect, those experiences belong to the child, contribute to her individuality
and strength, and often exist side by side with other experiences that can be
quite lovely.
Jeannette
Walls grew up with her brother and two sisters, the children of an artistic
mother struggling with mental illness and a brilliant father struggling with
alcoholism. Walls’ earliest memory is from
when she was just three years old. She
suffered severe burns as the result of her clothes catching on fire while she
was going through her usual routine of preparing hotdogs for herself:
I’d put a chair next to the sink,
climb up and fill a glass, then stand on a chair by the stove and pour the
water into the pan. I did that over and
over again until the pan held enough water.
Then I’d turn on the stove and when the water was boiling, I’d drop in
the hot dogs. ‘Mom says I’m mature for my age,’ I told [the doctors and nurses
at the hospital], ‘and she lets me cook for myself a lot.’
This type
of extreme inadequate supervision, while shocking, does not tell the whole
story of this family. Although Walls’
parents had some questionable ideas about child rearing, they loved their
children and sometimes showed that love in startlingly beautiful ways. One Christmas, although the family had no
money for presents, their father “took each of us kids out into the desert
night one by one” and allowed each child to pick out a star as a present. When it was Walls’ turn, the “star” she chose
turned out to be a planet, and her father responded, “It’s Christmas. You can have a planet if you want.” Walls marveled, “And he gave me Venus.” Later, the children “laughed about all the
kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch
of cheap plastic toys. ‘Years from now,
when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,’ Dad said, ‘you’ll
still have your stars.’”
Later in
the book, as her parents struggle to support their family, Walls draws a stark
contrast between the hardships in her house and those of a troubled boy in the
neighborhood. Billy is emotionally disturbed
and in many ways is much worse off than Walls and her siblings:
The funny thing Billy wanted to
show me was in his house, which was dark inside and smelled like pee, and was
even messier than our house, although in a different way. Our house was filled with stuff: papers, books, tools, lumber, paintings, art
supplies, and statues of Venus de Milo painted in different colors. There was hardly anything in Billy’s
house. No furniture…It had only one room
with two mattresses on the floor next to a TV. There was nothing on the walls,
not a single painting or drawing. A
naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, right next to three or four dangling spiral
strips of flypaper so thick with flies that you couldn’t see the sticky yellow
surface underneath. Empty beer cans and
whiskey bottles and a few half-eaten tins of Vienna sausages littered the floor. On one of the mattresses, Billy’s father was
snoring unevenly. His mouth hung open,
and flies were gathered in the stubble of his beard. A wet stain had darkened his pants nearly to
his knees.
When Walls shares this with her family, her mother takes the
opportunity to talk to her daughter about compassion: “She told me I should try
to be nice to Billy. ‘He doesn’t have
all the advantages you kids do.’”
Like many
people, Walls’ mother taught her children to be wary of the government. When Walls approached her after having had
nothing to eat for three days but popcorn, her mother refused any suggestion of
signing up for benefits such as food stamps:
Mom wouldn’t hear of it. Welfare, she said, would cause irreparable
psychological damage to us kids. ‘You
can be hungry every now and then, but once you eat, you’re okay,’ she
said. ‘And you can get cold for awhile,
but you always warm up. Once you go on
welfare, it changes you. Even if you get
off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You’re scarred for life.
At only one
point in Walls’ childhood does a child welfare worker show up to check on the
family, and Walls, although living in deplorable conditions in a decrepit house
without heat, running water, or indoor plumbing, has nothing but fear for what
this might mean:
If the child-welfare man got it
into his head that we were an unfit family, we’d have no way to drive him
off. He’d launch an investigation and
end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different
families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn’t let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and
Maureen.
As they
grow up, Walls and her siblings help each other find ways out of the unstable
life of poverty and neglect they have led.
Their parents taught them to think for themselves, and ironically this
ultimately leads them to leave their parents and their unstable lifestyle
behind. Sadly, their parents continued
to live in the same manner they always had—ending up virtually homeless in New York City, rejecting
all offers of assistance by their children.
“The Glass Castle”
is an excellent book that everyone should read just because it is so good. However, for those of us in the child welfare
arena, there are important messages that should inform the work we do every day. All families are not alike, and we must
approach each with respect and compassion.
One size does not fit all, and determining what will work best for a
particular family requires true collaboration, creativity, and open-mindedness. Additionally, just like the Walls family,
many are distrustful of the child welfare system and have strong views about
what it means to accept help. A
strength-based and family-centered approach is a must. Of course, this is not always easy and rarely
happens overnight. Finally, we need to
really see our kids and hear what they are telling us. The bonds they have with their brothers and
sisters often represent the most important thing in their lives and absent
significant evidence to the contrary should be treated as sacred. We cannot just say these things, we have to
recommit ourselves to these principles and find creative ways to fundamentally
change our system to embody them.
