Show notes
Last winter I made a show about working for the Department of Children and Families and I’d promised to make a show about what it’s like to be a parent whose had to work with this state agency, which is responsible for the safety of Vermont children. It’s no secret that DCF is currently understaffed and overworked. The opiate epidemic is one major factor in the growing number of kids taken into temporary custody by the state, and the growing number of TPR’S, or terminations of parental rights. This show offers a close look at what it’s like to be a parent inside the DCF system. To have your choices, your lifestyle, your living circumstances under the microscope of a state agency that’s capable of taking away your children. DCF is an intensely private agency, and there’s no way to corroborate the details of these cases. The truth about these cases is always elusive and complicated. And I’m not looking for good guys or bad guys here. This is a show about six parents with six very different stories from all over the state of Vermont. There is a transcript below, thanks to Jennifer Jorgenson at UVM!! Credit and Gratitude Music by Marie Helene Belanger and Isha Love. My thanks to all the parents who shared their stories with me by phone, email, and in person. Thanks to all the DCF caseworkers who have spoken with me over these months. Thanks to Mark Johnson, Bess O’Brien, Elsa Ingpen, Michael Chorney, Diane Zeigler, Mark Davis, Dillon Burns, the Aldrich Public Library and the Milton Public Library. Show Reviews: Kudos from 7 on 7 for 5/28/2016 SHOW TRANSCRIPT Speaker 1: Having to prove to DCF that you are good enough to be a parent is definitely a very challenging thing. Erica Heilman: I’m Erica Heilman. This is Rumble Strip, Vermont. Last winter, I made a show about people who work for the Department of Children and Families and I promised to make a show about what it’s like to be a parent [00:00:30] who’s had to work with this state agency, which is responsible for the safety of Vermont children. It’s no secret that DCF is currently understaffed and overworked. The opioid epidemic is one major factor in the growing number of kids taken into temporary custody by the state and the growing number of TPRs or terminations of parental rights. Addiction, multi-generational abuse, lack of education problems with housing, and transportation, and maybe the mother of all problems, [00:01:00] poverty. If you ask any DCF case worker, they’ll tell you the source of the problems is way upstream from where they work and this isn’t a show that’s going to solve any of those problems. What this show does do, is give you a very close look at what it’s like to be on the wrong side of DCF as a parent, to have your choices, your life of style, your living circumstances under the microscope of a state agency, that’s capable of taking away your children. [00:01:30] DCF is an intensely private agency and there’s no way to corroborate the details of these cases. The truth about these cases is always elusive and always complicated and I’m not looking for good guys or bad guys here. This is a show about six parents with six very different stories from all over the State of Vermont. Fair warning, there’s graphic language and descriptions of violence in this show. Welcome. Speaker 3: My memories of parenting [00:02:00] Brianna was that, “I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to talk to you. I have an education, so I will be able to teach you things.” Whereas compared to my mother, who was always working and then having a father who liked girls, I’m just going to say. They were both alcoholics, came from a family of alcoholics. Very uneducated, did not graduate high school either one of them. So [00:02:30] my thought was I was not going to put her in that situation, it was going to be, I was going to be the mom that I didn’t have or we’ll have the family that I was supposed to have. Erica Heilman:What did your home look like? Where? What [crosstalk 00:02:45]- Speaker 3:It was look like where, what I lived in a trailer park across from what used to be Jennifer’s restaurant. There was a little tiny trailer park there, trailer was very nice, very well maintained and I had one of the very last trailers in the park. So behind [00:03:00] the trailer was a really cute clothes line for clothes to hang out clothes, because it did come with a washer and the previous tenants had left a swing set there and there was a big, large field behind it. I think she was probably a or old when she knew all of her ABCs, probably at a year and a half was when she was starting to learn Spanish, because we would watch Nickelodeon Dora The Explorer. So she [00:03:30] could say five or six colors in Spanish and count to 10 in Spanish. And I knew it was because of me being there with her and being present with her, not putting her off a playpen, like I used to with my other kids and go outside and smoke pot with my friends. But I started using again. I thought I am a much better parent than what I was the first time around. And I’m like, “So now I know what I can’t do,” and basically it came into me just using when she was sleeping is what [00:04:00] I thought and how I tried to justify it, “I’m only doing it when she’s sleeping.” And then of course addiction, it progresses. It was her birthday. I wanted to go. I was planning on having a part of the next day for her. So I had brought her to the neighbor’s house where I got my drugs and left her with them. I borrowed their car and I went to the store to buy her birthday stuff. And when I’d come back, she was in this [inaudible 00:04:28] of the trailer and [00:04:30] Brianna had a little baggy in her hand, which I knew was the corner from a cocaine bag, what they sold. So I took her home. It wasn’t into till the next day when they all came over for the party and we had the kids playing in the other room, windows were open and we were smoking drugs and we thought that that was okay. That later on that afternoon, evening she began to get sick, could barely stay awake. So I brought her to the emergency room and [00:05:00] she tested positive for her cocaine. I knew, I said, “Yeah. It’s bad. I said, “I’m not going to get her back.” I was in a room talking with them, I want to say it was a state trooper. So Brianna was in her room and they said, “Yeah. We’re going to have a foster family come.” So we have that conversation and I go into the room and Brianna was already gone, so I did not get to see her. [00:05:30] Yeah. That was awful to me. So it’s hard. Speaker 1: Well, when I got pregnant, I found out the night before my high school graduation, it was totally not planned at all. It was a difficult pregnancy. I gained a lot of weight and had a lot of health problems. Everything was good for a little while and then the domestic [00:06:00] happened. It started, I think the week before I had my first child. I was 39 weeks pregnant and my boyfriend at the time called me a fat whore, pushed me down on the bed. That was when it started. And then, we ended up having a child together years later down the road and that is what [00:06:30] now resulted in my DCF case. Definitely one of the hardest parts of a domestic is the actual act of leaving the domestic. There’s control over what you’re doing, who you’re with, who you’re talking to, where you’ve been, how long you’ve been gone, there can be control issues over money and finances. When a child is involved, it’s not your safety, it’s [00:07:00] your children’s safety. When you leave, a lot of times you leave with none of your belongings, you pretty much escape whenever you feel you have a safe time to get out and then having to deal with DCF after getting up the courage to leave the abusive situation. In a lot of cases, DCF doesn’t understand what it does to [00:07:30] a mother or a parent if they leave a domestic that takes a lot out of them and then to take their child, the whole reason of why they left was to protect the child that they no longer can protect. Speaker 4: They end up showing up at my door. My living situation wasn’t appropriate, which I knew ahead of time anyways. [00:08:00] But we were living in the camper because the housing that we had ended up being condemned, so we had to move and we had really nowhere to go and it was towards the winter time and whatnot, so we technically shouldn’t have been in the camper with two children. So then they showed up, they said that there was allegations of abuse towards my children. And when they looked into it, it came to be the children’s father. They found out that their father was unsafe [00:08:30] to be around them because he was an alcoholic and abusive towards me verbally and physically, so then they helped me. Basically, they gave me an ultimatum to either lose my children or move with my children. And I ended up finding housing in Wilder and for me and my children and then I found out in 2009, that I was pregnant again. So then, I ended up with three children and I had their father [00:09:00] move back in with me through the housing unit that I was in and DCF was still involved. Erica Heilman: Same father for all three? Speaker 4:Yes. Same father for all four, actually. But we were good for a little while, even though DCF was involved, my daughter then was born in 2011 and I actually filed for a divorce in 2012 and kicked him out. So it took a while, but I ended up divorcing him and whatnot because I mean, beforehand [00:09:30] DCF was telling me, “Oh, you can’t get married. You shouldn’t marry him. You should separate from him. He shouldn’t be around the kids. He’s not safe, he’s not fit.” And it felt like I was being told how to live my life and they weren’t living my life, so that’s why I pretty much was going against them because it just didn’t feel right. But I understand now because I’ve gone through some counseling with my children and I’ve also had testing done on one of my children [00:10:00] and it opened my eyes the most, because it was based on children with abusive homes and whatnot to see where their brain actually lies and growth. And a lot of stuff that I was doing wrong really affected one of my children and his brain growth, so he’s having a lot of difficulties and behavior issues due to that. He is showing through a violent behaviors, he’s showing through lack [00:10:30] of sleeping, so there’s a lot of different areas that are not where he should be as far as his age. Erica Heilman: Is that something you feel responsible for? Speaker 4:Some of it, yes, it does follow me because I didn’t see the wrongs that were occurring in that time. Speaker 5: I got pregnant very young. I had my kids at 18, so I was young to have children of my own at that age. And [00:11:00] then when my son was 3-months-old, I started hanging out with friends and that’s where my addiction started. I think I was just trying to escape what had gone on between the father of my children and I, and he had ended up going to jail for a domestic on me when I was pregnant with my son. And when the dad got out of jail, I ended up going back. We got back together. No one knew outside of my mom that I had a problem, [00:11:30] but it got to a point that when their father came back from jail, she came over to the house and he had hit me before she had come in, my nose wasn’t broken, but he had hit me in the nose, so I had had my son in my arms and I was hurt, I was injured and she could tell and she had had enough. And so she took him home and called DCF at that point. [00:12:00] I was very angry. I was so pissed. I drove over to her house and tried to get in. I knew what was coming, but you try to not have that happen and the cops met me when I got there and said, “You need to go to rehab, you need to do something because he’s not coming back.” And [00:12:30] my addiction went from bad to 10 times worse at that point. I had nothing. I felt like I had lost the purpose for getting up. So you go and there’s three judges. You’ve got the state’s attorney, you’ve got DCF, you’ve got a guardian ad litem and my mom and they talk about what brought you in. You’re listening to this woman who [00:13:00] you’ve never met, explain how you’re a drug addict and you can’t care for your child and that there needs to be custody taken. And it’s out of your control, you have no control at this point. You met your attorney for the first time five minutes ago. He has no idea what’s going on and all you can do is sit and listen, I knew I had a drug problem and it wasn’t affecting my son, that’s how I looked at it because I was still doing what I needed to do to take care of my son. [00:13:30] Not understanding at the time that being abused in front of my child was neglectful, that’s something that you see later on. So the court hearing happened, my mom got temporary guardianship of him at that point and I then met the case worker. Speaker 6: DCF has been involved in our life two times and while in both cases, the claims were found not to be [00:14:00] true. That process of having the claims found to be untrue is something that I get the impression and so [inaudible 00:14:07], but I get the impression happens much quicker for certain kinds of families. And in our case, these things were very drawn out and very horrible. I don’t know if there’s a better word, but in public when you’re talking about it with friends or family, it’s your very indignant about it and you know, “Oh my gosh, how could they treat us this way? Or, or think this about us as parents,” but in the moment [00:14:30] when you’re in it, it’s really fucking scary. This is an agency that can physically take my children away from on me. And that is you’re acting like you’re indignant, but really you’re facing losing the most important thing in your entire universe. And between us as a couple, it was really stressful, but I don’t think either of us really wanted to reveal our fear to the other one because we’re trying to be strong for each other, so that’s just an emotion that I think we each [00:15:00] carried separately knowing the other one had it through the whole thing, just being scared and really sad, really sad that this is happening, that there is this threat, this possibility looming out there. The moment that I’m most ashamed of as a mother is I remember being on the phone with the case worker when she was needing to get me to agree to the safety plan. [00:15:30] For them, while an investigation is open, they have to have a safety plan in place and I just remember trying to say to her, “Well, I don’t agree with this plan. I don’t think this plan is necessary. This is not a safety plan for my family. This isn’t what’s [inaudible 00:15:45],” because they were asking that that my husband not be alone with the children at all while the investigation was pending, which of course is not logistically feasible for any family, either, for me to have done all the daycare pickups [00:16:00] and drop offs, it just, it wouldn’t have worked for our family, but more importantly, it just, it wasn’t necessary. And I just remember trying to be assertive and to say, “This isn’t okay. I don’t agree with this,” and saying, “Well, what are my rights? Do I have to agree to this?” And she said, “Well, if you don’t, then we have the right to remove the children from the home.” And that’s when I crumbled and let them put my name on the line and I wish I hadn’t done that. I really wish I had just said, ” [00:16:30] No.” Speaker 7:I got the impression that they already had me pegged as the abusive stepfather. Mom doesn’t know how to choose a mate that is safe for her family, so she chose me and I’m coming in here and all I do is abuse her, beat the kids and everything else. That’s exactly lead impression I got from the intake supervisor. I felt that once again, because of my size and being in this neighborhood, [00:17:00] in this part of the country and not being of the general makeup of the populati…
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