Next-of-Kin

I’m usually one of those obnoxious Pollyanna people who drive other people crazy. But lately I find myself crying at the oddest moments in places like IHOP, Circle-K and the mall. The reason is I’ve been thinking a lot about Terri Schindler-Schiavo, my daughter Karyn, and June 11, 1996 - the day my vocabulary grew to include the terms brain injury, coma, and persistent vegetative state. Karyn, our first child, beautiful, brilliant, and opinionated, was 25.

I remember the screaming agony as we waited outside Emergency at Georgia Baptist Hospital for word, realizing as the hours crawled past that our baby must be seriously, desperately hurt. My body yearned, my loins ached to see her and touch her – to let her know I was there. And I still feel that frozen moment when the door finally swung open and a young doctor came out asking for our daughter’s next-of-kin, and it wasn’t me or her father, but a young man we barely knew – her husband.

He asked her husband if it was ok for him to speak freely in front of us before giving his report: I’m sorry. Karyn is dying. She has a traumatic brain injury with diffuse swelling throughout her brain. Her pupils are fixed and dilated. We will soon let you in to say goodbye to her – next-of-kin first.

As it turned out, the doctor was wrong. The doctor who later said that her next-of-kin should put Karyn in a nursing home and forget her was also wrong. The doctor who said Karyn would never wake from her coma was wrong. The one who said she might wake up, but be unable to see, hear, speak, or move was wrong. The one who said she would never learn anything new was wrong.

Thank God, Karyn’s next-of-kin didn’t listen to any of them. He prayed and worked selflessly, tirelessly, to bring his wife back and he allowed us to help him. And Karyn surprised her doctors by coming off the respirator, waking up, and relearning a lot, but not all, of the things the brain injury had taken from her. I never look at Karyn without wondering what would have happened if she had gone into that nursing home instead of the aggressive coma-stimulation and range-of-motion therapy her husband insisted upon.

One thing doctors told us, though, turned out to be correct. They all agreed that most marriages where one partner is brain-injured end in divorce; the numbers are even higher when the injured spouse is the wife. Five years after her accident, Karyn came home to us and we were, once again, her next-of-kin. None of us have the life we planned, but we have a lot of joy. Karyn is happy and so are we. We know we are blessed.

I don’t pretend to know what Terri would have wanted. But when I see her smiling face and twisted hands on television, I see our Karyn strapped upright in a wheelchair, and me - not her next-of-kin, but just her mother - dancing, singing, clapping, crying, praying – anything for one tiny smile or flash of recognition from my baby. I feel again the inexpressible joy when it finally came. I feel the grief and frustration of Terri’s mother and the desperation and impotence of her father.

I feel the death of their hope.

It's Not Easy Being Solomon

It's not news anymore. The juvenile court and foster care system is a mess, not just here in Georgia, but throughout the country and all over the world.

We've heard it said that to make decisions regarding the lives of innocent children, we must have the wisdom of Solomon. King Solomon was probably the best known, if not the first, documented case of "an outsider" being called upon to make a decision about the custody of a child.

In I Kings, Chapter Three, the Bible says that two women came before the king saying, "this child is mine". The two had lived together after giving birth to two baby boys, and one morning found one of the babies dead. Both demanded ownership of the living child. The idea that children are the property of their parents is still prevalent in many societies, including, in many cases, our own.

Solomon, after attempting to reason with the two women and cause them to come to some agreement, finally, in desperation and frustration, offered to cut the child in half and give half to one and half to the other. One woman agreed and the other refused, choosing instead to give up the child.

Solomon gave the child to the one who would save its life. A simple choice, life or death.

Today, when a child is brought into the legal system, he may spend endless months and years waiting while judges and social workers try to decide what to do with him. And unfortunately it's seldom clear where the best interests of the child lie.

We may laugh or rage at the intricacies of our legal system in the United States, obviously designed to never, ever reach a real conclusion. But when it comes to our children at risk, there is only a small window of time for each child that can make a difference in his whole lifetime. Who will raise a child is the biggest question mark in his life. Too often, the child languishes in a "temporary placement" - a foster or group home - while adults argue over who should have him, until time resolves the problem. He reaches the age of 18 and is suddenly cut loose and considered an adult.

Imagine living your whole childhood knowing that your home is only temporary and that at any moment you could be forced to leave the home you know and move to another, and having no control over it yourself. Your fate is in the hands of strangers who must decide where you live and who can have you.

But it's not easy being Solomon. There's nothing simple about the questions that must be answered to decide the fate of a child.

Most of us know instinctively what we believe to be adequate care and nurturing for a child. We certainly would know child neglect when we see it, wouldn't we?

Neglect is defined as a failure to offer the child adequate food, clothing, shelter and protection. How we quantify the first three is often dictated by our economic status. The truth is that many, many healthy, well‑adjusted, contributing adults grew up in abject poverty, with less than the care and nurturing we might prefer they have. Would it have benefited them to be removed from their parents in favor of a cleaner, nicer, more nurturing, more sanitary environment? Would it have been fair to the child or the parents?

The fourth, protection, may seem more black and white on the surface. We have a moral obligation to protect our children from anything that will hurt them. If you allow something to happen to your child, you haven't protected him, have you? But what about the working mother who leaves her 10‑year‑old alone after school? As long as nothing happens to him, many people wouldn't call that neglect by failure to protect the child. But what if something does happen?

What about not bothering to take the child for his immunizations? Not sending him to school every day? Or protection from the foul language and violence in the media? Or head lice? Or rusty nails? Or, here's a biggie: unwanted medical treatment? For some of us, failure to take our child for regular dental checkups would be unthinkable. And yet, we know that many well‑meaning parents choose, for reasons of their own, to withhold medical treatment from their child. Should they have the right to do that? Or should the government intervene?

Each of us has our own description of what constitutes protecting our child and what our child should be protected from.

Abuse of a child might be a little trickier to recognize at first. We've all seen how carefully abusers can cover up their dirty work. But once we find out, the answer is simple: get the child away from the abuser. Right?

By the time abuse of a child is noted by anyone in a position to do anything about it, it's often been going on for a long time. Too long. Children who have been abused, in all their beauty and innocence, may often be ticking time bombs no matter what the courts then decide about their placement. If the courts decide to terminate parental rights to the child, who will then raise him?

The sad fact is that many children, having had the parental rights of their biological parents terminated, are orphaned permanently because no one else is willing to take responsibility for them and adopt them. Has the court then done the child a favor? Some would argue that any parent is better than none.

The courts, with the help of peripheral experts, including doctors, psychologists, lawyers, social workers, foster parents, and volunteer community advocates, are called upon to make recommendations, and ultimately decisions that will be questioned forever. And given the culpability laid on the shoulders of those who must make decisions about the custody of children, it's no wonder there are so few people willing to stand up for the rights of children. Each and every time that child's behavior is ever noticed in his life, even when he's an adult, the decisions made by the system on his behalf will be blamed. If they (we) had left him in the home, would he have been okay? Happier? Mentally stable? If they (we) had removed him when we had the chance, would he have been alive today? Sober? A solid citizen?

From outside, the courts often appear to put the rights of the parents before the rights of the child. But it's not totally one‑sided. Unfortunately, some children will not adjust well to being removed from their parents. There is copious evidence that separating a child from his or her biological roots is harmful to the child. One has only to look at the tabloid accounts of adult adoptees who desperately seek their birth parents to see that it is a visceral need for most people to know where they came from. They need to be able to look into the face of the woman who bore them.

I can personally vouch for the fact that children of all ages who have spent any time with their biological parent will crave that parent no matter what their parent may have done to them. They don't have to be loved in return, either. Children will cry at night for the mother who beat them, the father who raped them.

Does that mean that children should be allowed to stay with their parents no matter what? Definitely not. For a responsible people to allow its community's children to be left in harm's way because that's what the child wants is unacceptable.

Children often crave things that will harm them. It's up to us, as caring adults, to keep them from those things... and those people. Even if they're their parents. Most people agree that the courts must err on the side of the safety of the child, just as Solomon did.

But no matter how liberally or conservatively a judge may interpret ambiguous child‑protection laws, there will be someone standing ready to take the opposing view, and lawyers to represent that person.

Since we don't have a crystal ball, there are no answers. Mistakes can and will be made. But the biggest error in judgment is no judgment at all.

As a foster parent, I've often raged at the people who make up "the system" when they've allowed a child of mine to suffer because of their indecision and the need to cover their own backsides. I do understand the legitimate fear that comes from not knowing the right thing to do, not being able to see into the future. Every parent does. Yet every day we have to make choices for our children. We do it, recognizing that we may live to regret the choice we made, but doing the best we can with what we have at the moment.

Seldom has a social worker or a juvenile court judge been forced to take the job. Instead, he or she actively seeks the responsibility and the respect due that position, perhaps even campaigning to win it. No one should want and seek that kind of power who is afraid to wield it.

Solomon, with all his God‑given wisdom, had no guarantees that he would not wake up at night wondering if he'd done the right thing. He had to make his best judgment and go with it. There's no excuse for a child being raised in a temporary placement because a judge was unwilling to take a chance on being criticized or reversed or a caseworker was afraid to ask. Get the case into court, hear the evidence, and for goodness sakes, make a decision. Nobody said it would be easy, but it must be done.

Children are waiting.