Phone Time

We have an interesting contrast at our home. We have to restrict phone time. Not in the way you might expect, based on previous blog entries, though. You see, we have teenagers. They'd be glad to camp on the phone constantly, so we have made a rule of ten minutes off for every twenty minutes on, to show some mercy toward those who are trying to call our house.

Now contrast this with the phone calls to and from the non-custodial parents of our four kids-in-care. Over the past year they've averaged a phone call every week or two, with more than that toward the end of the year during the holiday season from Thanksgiving to Christmas. The kids will occasionally get onto a kick of calling them, but it can be discouraging to them when they always get the voice mail, and don't always get a return call.

It's also difficult when the parents have been through no less than six different phone numbers over the past half year or so. They will usually tell us something about losing the phone, having it stolen, or something else about how the phone was not working. It really makes little difference why the phone situation is so unstable, whether due to finances, theft, damage or plain old bad reception. The kids know the numbers keep changing, but don't know why. They just know it won't be the same for long, so there's not a lot of point to memorizing the phone number.

It's important that the kids know that we don't discourage the contact. It's important for them to talk to their parents. These kids will always love their parents unconditionally, as they should. It's important that contact is available, even if it's not used regularly, sort of like knowing the fire department is there for emergencies, should one come up.

We can't dictate the stability of their phones, but we can control the stability of our own (and control usage as necessary from our end as I mentioned earlier). We don't have any formal visitation arrangements, and haven't had any reason to set up anything formally at this point. Things are much easier for us in many ways than they are for divorced parents. We don't have any of those ex-spouse-visiting issues or discomfort. Our only real issues with visits are that they give us enough warning to make sure we're available, and so long as the parents are drug addicts, we supervise contact with their children. The purpose of guardians is to guard, after all.

Planning for the Future

About a year ago I told my sister-in-law and her husband that I'd talk to them about how they were doing at the end of the year. These are the parents of the four children of which we have legal custody. That means it's about meeting time. My goal in doing that was to add a little bit of evaluating and reporting to their lives outside of court. Maybe they would change their behavior knowing that they would be responsible to talk about it later. They had asked at Christmas time if we could delay for a month and talk things over at the end of January, so I agreed to their request.

The reason for the review is that we'd seen them struggle over the previous 18 months or so that we'd had their children living with us. They'd split up, gotten back together, been deep into the drug scene, been homeless, wrecked the vehicle they'd neglected to insure, and who knows what else. I wasn't documenting things as well back then.

I'd hoped to give them another reason to do better, but the truth is that nothing significant seems to have changed this past year. Maybe they're keeping some big success story back so they can spring it on me and say "See? I won the lottery," or something like that, but I doubt it. The mom has shown some effort starting rehab again this month, but she's done that before too.

So how do you go about planning for the future when you have no idea what's coming down the road next? The only way we've found that works is to assume that the parents will take care of themselves for good or ill, and plan as if we will have custody of the children until they are adults.

Given this viewpoint, what happens if we're wrong and the parents straighten out, solving all their legal, moral and financial issues, and become paragons of virtue and pillars of society? Everyone is happy, we have a big family reunion, fill out any necessary paperwork, and Bam. Happy families for everyone.

So, what happens if we're right and progress is insufficient? The parents keep on doing whatever it is that they do, and we keep on planning for school activities, summer vacations, piano lessons, church, and all the other things that make up our normal lives. No waiting, no hanging out in the breeze until something happens. No second guessing. Life is consistent, and often very good to us.

I'm sure you've heard the expression "Pray as if everything depends on God, and work as if everything depends on you." We've taken that to heart, and plan our lives with our expanded collection of children as if this is normal life, and by doing so it really becomes normal life. Oh, and we won't stop praying for their parents either.

My Halo is held up by Horns

A couple things happen when people learn that I am raising three nieces and a nephew as well as my own five children. First they are amazed that I could do it. They feel that they could never do something like that. Then they tell me what a good person I am for taking them into my home.

In each response I shake my head. I have had friends who have taken total strangers into their homes through foster care and taken care of them as their own. I always said that I could never do that. It was one thing to take care of my own children day after day, but I was always glad when parents came to get their children after a day of just tending them.

I learned a valuable lesson about stewardship. When I was merely tending children for the day or a couple hours I did not have much control over the things they were taught when they were not with me. Parents do not always, in fact they rarely do, have the same set of rules as we might have.

While a child is under our temporary care we may have to remind them of the rules of our house. They may or may not like your rules and if they don’t, there isn’t much you can do about it.

The other thing about this is that you don’t have access to all their toys and other belongings. They are left to figure out how to keep themselves entertained with the things you have around your house.

When children come into your home to live rather than just to visit, a new world of authority opens up and discipline can be a lot easier. This is not to say that it is perfect…just easier. It took us a few weeks to establish a few ground rules, but once those rules were established and they felt that my home was their home, things got a lot easier to manage.

I have also developed a great response to those who think that I am so wonderful to take these children in. I have a halo and it is held up by horns.

To those on the outside I sometimes look like a saint. On the inside I am dealing with some youngsters who really want to live with their mom and dad, but because of the actions of those parents, cannot. There have been tantrums—not just from the children. There have been times when I have been overwhelmed when I didn’t have the answers. There were times when I really wanted to run away myself.

But there have also been times, many of them, when little rewards sneak up and give you a big hug. This morning I walked through my bedroom doorway and noticed a little note written by my five year old niece. She had written our names at the top alongside hers and said, “I love you two.” She had misspelled ‘love’, but what was written on her heart was spelled correctly.

Being the favorite aunt and being the worst aunt all in the same day is a lot of work. But the rewards for being favorite aunt far out weigh the heart ache of being the worst.

Document Everything

The parents of the child you care for will have troubled lives. That is a given, because you wouldn't have to care for the child otherwise. Identifying exactly how troubled is really quite impossible without spending every moment with them, which is completely impractical. Still, it is critical to have as much of a record as you can manage detailing how things are going.

We've come up with a novel way of tracking how the parents of our kids-in-care are doing. Whenever either my wife's sister or her husband have a court date, I put it onto a calendar. Whenever they make a phone call, that also goes onto the calendar along with a description of the call. When one of them is arrested or released due to either bail or overcrowding, that goes on just like everything else.

Any medium will do. You can use a pad of paper, an email program with calendaring, or any of the many web calendaring tools like those at Google or Yahoo. The method isn't nearly as important as the content. My personal preference at the moment is Google, because it allows me to easily share the calendar with other family members who share our interest.

In our case, the troubles are not just social, but legal as well. What if I want to count how many days they were in jail last year? Break out the calendar. How many times did they call in January? Look it up. What if I can't remember the ID number for that Identity Theft case? Look that up too.

That leads to another area of information that is really useful. Some jails have online access to bookings, releases and occupancy. Check your county lockup to see if they do. If they have one, that web interface can give you a lot of information so you know what's going on in their life. Many courts also publish calendars online, and you can sometimes even look up warrant information. My wife and I have collected a great set of links for the Salt Lake City area. Here's a sampling:

Salt Lake County Jail
Utah District Court Calendars
Davis County Sheriff
Salt Lake County District Attorney Active Cases

A lot of cities do not have electronic interfaces to their court calendars, warrants, or citations. That means it will take plain old phone calling to look things up with those smaller jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions are perfectly willing to share information if you can document that you have a reason to be interested, or if you already have case numbers.

The more information you have on what they're doing, where they're living, when they call, where they are working and everything else, the better armed you will be to either support their claim of being recovered and reformed, or to support protecting their children from them, depending on the path they take.

Insurance Issues

When we picked up four kids-in-care, we hadn't considered everything that we would need to arrange to properly see to their needs. We knew that they needed a home, food and schooling, but beyond that we hadn't really thought about it. There's a limit to what you can do on a single day's notice.

One of the issues we hadn't thought much about in advance was insurance. I have my family insured through my employer. The family policy covers medical and dental insurance as most similar plans do. The children arrived uninsured, since neither parent had a job with insurance benefits. They'd been on state aid for a while, but that's all we had record of.

I approached the Human Resources department at work to see what would be necessary to add the new kids to the insurance plan. They told me that the kids could not be added to the policy. In order to add them, I would need custody of the kids to be formally given to me through the courts.

At this point the parents hadn't yet shown signs of serious drug addiction. I don't even know if they were regular drug abusers at that point. All I knew was that the kids were going to be with us for a while while the parents were fighting, and that the parents could not insure them. It's a scary feeling to be financially exposed like that. What if one of the kids needed surgery or hospitalization for some other reason? Whose obligation would it be to pay?

A little study showed me that it was still the parent's responsibility to support their children, even after custody changes. That did me little good, since I knew they had nothing to pay in case of emergency. That all lead to a real soul-searching conversation with the parents. I told them that to properly care for their children, they needed insurance. Since the parents couldn't provide it, there weren't really many options.

I could insure them, but only if I had custody. There may have been some form of state aid available without the formal change in custody, but I wasn't familiar with what agencies to contact at that point. The parents decided with us that it was best to sign over custody, so we went through all the paperwork. Utah has a convenient Internet-based system called OCAP (Online Court Assistance Program) for uncontested cases where you can represent yourself and pay greatly reduced court fees.

We filled out the paperwork, got the required signatures, and got a court date. We were there, both parents were there, and my wife's mother was there together in the courtroom. After a few tears and no objections, we had been given full custody, which allowed us to insure the children through my work policy. All I needed was to take to our Human Resources department an original stamped version of the court order along with all the birthdates and social security numbers of the children. It was easy, since the custody paperwork had required all that information anyway.

I've changed jobs since then, but it's been the same routine. Get a certificate of creditable coverage for everyone in the family, and take the original custody form to prove that they should be allowed on the insurance policy.

Now that we have custody, it is the parent's responsibility to demonstrate to us at some point in the future that they can once again care for the children. They're back together now, and have at least a desire to get clean. We play it month by month and year by year, always making sure the children know they are welcome and can plan to be with us forever if necessary.

Those of you with a court-ordered custody cases rather than voluntary cases have different rules and requirements, and quite likely a deadline after which the state proceeds to adoption rather than reunification. Those of you with no custody arrangement at all should examine the possibilities closely and do what you can to best care for the children.

For us, it was a poignant but necessary step in giving the children the care they needed. Will it work out that way for you? I couldn't possibly predict that because I don't know your unique situation. I'm simply sharing one case of how things turned out, and hoping to have shared some possibilities that will be useful with you.

Enabling

We all face tough choices. When an addict comes to me for help, what do I do? It depends on a lot of things. Do I have the means to help? Do I have the time to help? Will what they are asking actually help them? The last question has to do with the concept of enabling.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'll define enabling for you:

Actions or lack of action that encourage or promote continued or worsened bad
behavior.

Now for some examples. Some of these are tough calls, and I don't even pretend to know the right answers in everyone's special conditions.

"Can you help me with rent? They're going to evict me if I don't pay by Tuesday."

Sorry, but paying the rent means that what was supposed to go to rent ends up going to drugs. This is tough. It may end up with them on the street, or hanging with friends. It may end up that they have nowhere to go but your living room couch. Despite all this, the hard lesson is that their responsibilities don't go away when ignored.

"I need some cash for a bus pass so I can get to work."

This is actually a bit misleading. They don't need the cash, really. (See the rent response.) What they need is a bus pass. The response here depends on how desperate they are. From what I've seen personally, buying the pass has been useful. It's helped to get them to both work and court appearances. The tough part is to keep it from being a new monthly expense on your part, so it needs to come with restrictions that you will stick to. It could be something like "I can get you a pass for this month, but next month is entirely your job." Then do not give in next month or you will have turned into their monthly transportation supplier.

"I can't get to work until my car has (new brakes/headlights/gas/whatever)."

Can you afford the expense? Let's assume yes. Is it your responsibility? Not likely. Can you do it as an act of compassion? So long as it doesn't involve the addict handling any cash. Will it help? It depends on the situation. If it's really a crisis they couldn't have avoided, I'm more likely to side with mercy. If it's something they could have done, but blew the cash on a high, then I'm inclinded to let justice rule.

You've probably noticed a theme here. Addicts are poor handlers of cash. Money in the hand tends to turn quickly into a high rather than going toward rent, food, auto repairs, or child care. Will they pitch a fit when you don't hand over what they want? Of course they will. You need to be strong and realize they will do almost anything and say almost anything to get what they think they need.

You will be called heartless. You will likely be sworn at. They may cry and tell you that you're the only thing keeping them from death in a gutter on some forgotten street. They may even threaten suicide. If you buckle and give them what they want instead of what they need, nothing will change. Learning that actions result in consequences is something everyone should learn as a child simply because it's so painful to learn it as an adult. It looks to me like it's even worse to learn about consequences as a drug addicted adult.

Their responses will tell you a lot about what they really need. It could be that they need jail, therapy, intervention, rehabilitation, or even just a bus pass. Every case is different, and you need to be aware of how your assistance will be used in order to know if it's the right thing to do.

Until you see them managing their own money successfully and paying their bills with money earned through their job, don't even consider sending cash their way. Once they are managing their own accounts, they won't need cash assistance for anything but emergencies.

We must all be compassionate and care for those who cannot care for themselves, but please never get confused between acts of compassion and enabling the destruction of another human being. Do what you can to help them to recover. That's quite often different from what they want.

Success Stories

It's amazing how well children can do when put into an environment where they have structure, rules, and most importantly love. My own story includes my lovely wife, our five children ranging from sixteen to ten year old twins, along with three nieces and a nephew who range from ten to five. Their parents have a long history of both legal and drug abuse issues. They seemed to have mostly gotten over things for a while, but there was a major relapse. We were asked if we could take the kids for a while since they were seperated, barely scraping by, and couldn't give the kids the care they needed.

We've had legal custody of them now for over two years, and don't know if the parents will recover their lives or not. What matters most to us is that the kids now have a stable environment in which to thrive, and thrive they have. They're doing great in school and church. They have friends. Not to mention never a dull moment with a total of nine kids in the house.

Sure, it's hectic. Sure, it's tough sometimes. Sure, life would have been simpler with just our own five kids. But what would you have done if you knew that you were the last line of defense, the last shot for four children to have a shot at a fairly normal life? The rewards are worth every minute of it. We share. We help each other. We teach each other. I wouldn't ever wish to go back and change that choice to take in four children who needed help.

Personal successes keep us going. Sharing those successes are what keep others going in the face of adversity and trial. Do you have a success to share about raising children of addicts, or with addiction itself? Please share so we can all benefit.

Drug Addiction Recovery Resources

If you know of a good web resource for drug addiction recovery, foster children, or kin care, post a reply here and let us all know what you've found and why it has helped you. Between us, we'll do a lot better job of locating all those useful bits of the Internet. I know that I certainly haven't found all the useful stuff out there.

Just include a URL, the name, and why you think it was useful.