Termination of Parental Rights

“Ellen’s trial is coming up,” Mary told me one day.

My wife, Mary, and I were fostering Ellen’s baby daughter, Augusta. We had high hopes that Ellen would get her child back. We had rooted for Ellen and tried out best to help her out. When Ellen was doing her program, getting clean results on drug tests, attending her parenting classes and spending extra time on visits with her daughter, Mary wrote a letter to the judge telling him how well she was doing. That was before the disappearance.

Ellen had fallen off the face of the earth. From what she had told us about her past, I expected she had abandoned her daughter to do some serious drugs. After several weeks without communication Ellen’s social worker contacted the court, and they set up a date for a TPR trial.

TPR—Termination of Parental Rights.

That meant Ellen would lose the chance to get her baby back. Without Ellen in Augusta’s life Augusta was starting to bloom. She went from blank expression to engaged and engaging. I began to suspect there hadn’t been much positive interaction on the independent visits other than teaching the baby to hold her own bottle when feeding. The less time with Ellen meant more time with us. Now, we are not perfect people, but we did spend time talking to Augusta, reading picture books to her, etc. Looking back we read between the lines regarding some of the things Ellen told us. She had talked about how Augusta often slept most of the time she was with her for her unsupervised visits. Those times were not her usual nap times. What did she do? Put her in the crib and ignore her? I’ll never know, but something didn’t add up. Shortly after Ellen fell out of Augusta’s life, Augusta’s IQ seemed to jump ten points.

Augusta was at that magical age. She was starting to crawl and make noises like words. Some of the noises really were words. She knew some sign language: MORE and I love you. She held her arms out wide when Mary or I said, “So big!” Her infectious grin had magical powers.

I had been trying to get Augusta to call me papa, but she would only call me da-da.

Mary and I started talking, having more intense discussions about the baby, only now we were talking about adopting her. This was scary and exciting at the same time.

I have jumbled memories of multiple court visits, and they all smorgasbord together in my mind. The spectacle of people outside the courtroom, in the hallways and the waiting room, stands out.

In this world the toughest, most posturing of men is generally muted and somber. It’s hard to be self-assured when you are awaiting the outcome of your child’s custody trial. The women’s grief is generally too extreme—they are beyond tired, beyond pain, beyond panic. The little kids seem oblivious to the enormity of what goes on, and the teens are more morose, more blank than even their parents. The hallway conversations with the attorneys are quick and intensely time sensitive, punctuated with an occasional bland smile from the lawyer who usually gives the stunned parents a quick rundown of what just happened or is about to take place.

I was expecting the rapid-fire treatment—a quick blur, flash across the sky affair, something like a trapeze artist somersaulting through the air.

The whole cast of characters was waiting: Ellen sat near her mother, Linda. Linda might have been chosen to foster Augusta. She had done kinship care for Augusta’s older siblings. Then, the authorities discovered Linda was hiding the fact that she married an accused child molester, and the children were removed from her care. Wait, there’s more! (As the commercials used to say). Linda also seduced Ellen’s ex-husband. Ellen came home one evening to find her man and her mom in bed together. Police were called to break them apart and to pry Ellen’s fingers away from her mom’s throat. The paternal side grandmother, Louise, was in court as well. Her son, Randy (Augusta’s Dad), sat near her. He had already signed away his parental rights voluntarily. Randy had been dancing with drug addiction and waltzing in and out of jail. Ellen also had a restraining order against him, something about a black eye. I like to think that he knew he wasn’t good parent material and wasn’t going to screw up his daughter’s life trying to prove otherwise.

There was nothing I could do to affect the outcome. I wasn’t scheduled to speak— just to be there. I know that when faced with something I have no control over I should be patient, and I’m not the expert on that.

The bailiff called in a monotone bored voice, “The case of Augusta Evans,” and the concerned parties shuffled in slowly, robotically, a dull layer of fear over them—everyone except me and the star attraction Augusta. She was in my pouch. I was going to stay outside in the foyer and hold the baby.

Since courts are so hectic I fully expected the trial to be a quick rapid-fire affair, the hare, not the tortoise. I figured after five minutes tops everybody would be walking out of the courtroom, stunned, not quite sure what had just happened. Five minutes passed, and then another five minutes and another. Lots of five minutes passed, or so it seemed to me. I had already fed the baby, changed her, read to her and played with her. I was pacing back and forth with Augusta in the pouch, and I was getting worried, weary and worked-up. Had the entire courtroom been sent off to Siberia for contempt or something? After a while I was mentally quite busy paranoiding and half-expecting the worst.

That’s when the door opened.

Grandma Louise, the good grandmother (the one who hadn’t married an accused child molester and didn’t sleep with Ellen’s significant others), walked out, approached me calmly and told me she would be taking the baby. Uncomprehendingly I stared at her. Did she mean she was getting custody? “I’ll take her while you go in the courtroom. I think you should see this.” No, she wasn’t getting custody.

A tough looking female deputy gave me a sympathetic look when I walked in the room. She quickly ushered me to a seat right beside Mary. Randy was sitting next to his lawyer, Ellen was sitting next to her lawyer. There was also a lawyer for the county sitting next to the social worker. Augusta had her lawyer too.

Linda, the grandmother, was testifying. It gave me the creeps to listen to her talk and for more than one reason. One reason was the way she, allegedly, exposed her other granddaughters to an accused molester. The other reason was testimony she gave in a previous trial. She tried to make Augusta, a blonde with blue eyes, out to be ethnic Cherokee. “She has a Dawes’ Number,” asserted Linda. This would make her an official member of the Cherokee tribe and eligible for “extradition” to a Cherokee home in a distant locale. Dawes Number? For this blonde haired, blue-eyed girl? I guess there’s a strain of blonde Cherokees out there because a group of Leif Erickson’s Vikings fought their way down to Cherokeelandia and settled among the tribe, establishing a tradition of racial purity in order to bequeath a legacy of Nordic Native Americans. The blonde tribe.

Later—we found out she never had a Dawes number. The Child Protective Services attorney said something like: A lot of nutcases try that--don’t worry, but I worried.

Today Linda was not plunging into Native American heritage fantasyland. Today she had enough to do discussing why Ellen couldn’t come to visits because of a huge abscess in the bend of her arm, a sign of possible needle use.

Next, it was time for Ellen to talk. The attorney for the county stood up, whispered something to the social worker, glanced at his notes and went to work.

He started out with the positive, probably so that Ellen’s attorney couldn’t make a huge deal about it. “From April until December, did you attend your drug classes?” Yes, she had. “And from April to December did you pass your drug tests?”

Yes. “Were you meeting all visits with your daughter between April and December…

Did you go along with the foster parents to medical visits… And were you having unsupervised visits in your apartment… And how did these go… Did the foster parents trust you sufficiently to have you in their home… So, you were working your court ordered program successfully…”

The answers were all positive. So far so good. Lawyers get the good stuff out of the way first.

Then he started asking about the abscess she had on her arm and the bandage that was covering it up—how did she get it? She was using heroin. She met a man. The new Mr. Wonderful was a heroin user.

“Why did you have to experiment with heroin too?”

“I always wanted to try it,” she said. “I was curious.”

She talked about how she became a habitual user. I don’t recall anyone ever using the word addicted, but it sounded like a full-time project. The attorney kept up his questions: Why didn’t you call about your child? Why didn’t you go see your child? Weren’t you worried about your baby? All her answers came back to her drug use. Drugs trumped motherhood.

The judge didn’t look happy. He didn’t look angry. Rather he seemed like a man who didn’t like having to do this, but knew what he had to say.

Parenthood, he explained, was not like a sprint, it was more like a marathon. You have to stick with it, not take vacations for prolonged drug use. The kids have to come first.

The judge terminated Ellen’s parental rights.

We walked out of the courtroom, dazed by the verdict even though it was the one we wanted and expected. The county attorney took us aside saying, “It will take a letter from Jesus for Ellen to get her parental rights back.”

We all met in the foyer. Ellen held the baby for a moment and gave her something to eat. Augusta started choking. I maneuvered in and snatched the infant away. No need for the Heimlich, I opened Augusta’s mouth, and with a crooked finger, pulled a half-eaten piece of banana out. I sighed with a safe, warm rush of relief and put the baby back in her pouch, right next to me.

Ellen and Randy were now parents in a biological but not a legal sense. They started talking in the foyer—this was against the restraining order, but what the hell did I know? The next thing I knew, Randy and Ellen were walking out the door together. Uhhh… you got a restraining order against the guy! And now you’re leaving with him? They drove off together. It would be the last time we saw Ellen.

The next day I was back in my routine at work. After the school day was over I had to lead an in-service with my fellow teachers, and teachers can be the worst students. I got a call from Mary:

Her voice was strained. I could tell she was struggling with tears and losing the battle. It took an awful moment of silence before she could choke out the words, “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” I said uncomprehendingly.

“Who?”

“Ellen.”

That sinking feeling. The stone dropping down, down, down into the pit of my soul. The overwhelming numb feeling. Time for some strong denial.

“She can’t be dead… She was just…” I didn’t finish the sentence. Half-knowing the answer I asked, “How did it happen?”

“Overdose… “ Having a specific question helped Mary pull her shattered gumption endorphins together for a major stand. “She and Randy went to a park down in Riverton. It’s sketchy. I think what happened is that he got her some drugs—some heroin… she already had some pills, and she overdosed in the car. He left for a minute, and then when he came back, she was…”

Was it only an overdose? Was it suicide? I’d have bet my money on self-destruction. Ellen knew about drugs and had been… well, accustomed to heroin for a while. The timing was too odd. Overdosing the very day after she lost all parental rights seemed like too much of a coincidence.

I thought about the in-service I would have to teach. I decided to hell with the PowerPoint presentation. To hell with any introductory jokes. I would just submit the material, talk about it and go from there. If anyone made any bitchy remarks I’d try really hard not to snap. Take it easy, I selfwarned. You’re not going to be yourself today. Go numb.

Half an hour later I’m giving my spiel about advance organizers, a teaching strategy where you prep the kids for a lesson by telling/showing them a brief story, skimming the text or reviewing a graphic organizer first, and then you deliver the lesson. Not all kids benefit equally from this kind of technique. Who will benefit and get their bang for their buck from this kind of strategy? Kids from lower Socio-economic families. Why was that important? Because at my school, 86 % of our students lived below the poverty line. Unfortunately, when I talked about what benefited our students, teachers often thought in terms of what benefited their own socio-economic group. Sure enough, five minutes into the presentation a teacher started talking about how she never needed her teachers to do stunts like this back when she was a student. She always liked school and always loved reading, math, etc. I started daydreaming about Ellen, a bright girl with a high IQ from a really screwed up family. I tried not to imagine Ellen’s body: lips blue, room temperature, lying in the morgue, awaiting autopsy.

I suppose I should have gone into the statistics regarding advance organizers and exhorted my colleagues to touch the future with innovative teaching techniques designed to best meet the needs of our student population, etc. etc. etc.

That particular day I didn’t have the strength. I waited for her to stop, thinking shut the hell up, and then I finished what I had to say.

For weeks after that day I would have “Ellen sightings.” Sometimes when I was driving or in a store I would see a young lady who looked like her, had the same build, the same color hair. For a flash of a moment, I would experience that temporarily frozen, gut clenching sensation, then feel my muscles releasing from overwhelm and tension. I would slowly exhale and move on with the day.