Chapter 25
Katy Speaks
Miss Helen was my very best friend while I was at Children’s Garden and for a year or-so after I went to live with my family. She became a very important person in my life, and one with whom I would connect off and on for many years to come.
Miss Helen moved with her husband and family “back east,” as she called it. Now, having lived in Connecticut for a few years as I got my law degree, I know where “back east” is. I didn’t know then, and it seemed to me, then only ten years old, that it must be so far away I’d never see Miss Helen again.
Miss Helen knew from me some things about those years in-between ten and grown up when I returned to the San Francisco Bay area, but she didn’t know it all. I want to tell you in my own voice what some of those experiences were really like.
I don’t believe any adult raised in a good family, a family that did not abuse their children and who loved and cared for and respected them as they grew, can ever really know the depth of agony, pain and self recrimination that the abused child does – or at least I did. Perhaps you can try to imagine being both delightfully stimulated in places on your body where it feels really wonderful and then experiencing at the same time horrible pain, stabbing, hurtful, making you want to shriek and run, but you know you cannot shriek or run because you will be hurt even more. Or if you are a young baby, say just three months old, you don’t have knowledge about not screaming or running away, so you scream because it hurts -- and then you are hit, slammed against a wall. Your bones are broken, your spirit as well. You know even then you are not worth anything; that you must be “bad.” You hear that word over and over for years every single day several times a day, and you very well know by the time you are five that you are an evil, BAD child that no one really wants, that there is no hope for you.
Foster Care
By the time I arrived at Children’s Garden, I had been in foster care for almost seven years and had learned from foster homes, all nine of them except for the last one, that I was a no-good, evil, bad seed. While I didn’t know what a “bad seed” was, it was surely horrid and I was it. So I deserved the slaps on my face, the verbal hurts and strapping blows to my backside. I remember feeling so alone as a baby. I’m told now I must have been between three and four months old when I was placed in a crib in a darkened room and left. I howled and howled. I was wet and hungry and mad and no one came to hold me, to change me, to cuddle me in a soft blanket. That was the beginning of a sad and frightening existence in foster care. It never got better until I was six. I went from home to home, always with a social worker from the “County.” I learned to hate social workers: they were always speaking kindly, “making nice,” then dumping me in yet another household of nasty kids, abusing parents who continued to call me bad names, to tell me I was evil, to bat me around like a baseball.
I remember when I decided it was really true so I might as well really behave like the evil brat that I was – they clearly knew it. I’d better live up to it. I was almost four, and I decided then and there to brutalize anything smaller than me and to lie, cheat and steal from anyone as big as or bigger than me. It was a very conscious decision, and I worked hard to be the “baddest” I could be. Of course, I suffered the consequences of all that acting out -- my rebellion against a world I had learned to hate. It only made me hate more and act out more. I didn’t know much else: though as I look back now, I think there were a few genuinely caring people who tried to help. I know now they didn’t know how to help: they were as confused about my “badness” as I was about being labeled as a “bad seed.”
Then, when I was nearly seven, I got a family, a new Mom and Dad (they all wanted to be called my mother and father) who really were special.
Becca and Steve lived in Carmel and were wonderful to me. I was the only child in their home. They never hit or hurt me in any way, and when I tried to steal from them or hurt them in some way, they’d hold me and tell me they loved me too much to let me behave that way. They were a lot like the people at Children’s Garden and I began to really care about them, and to believe I might have a kernel of goodness somewhere deep inside. Steve, the dad, always said I could reach way down deep inside me and I’d find a wonderful good person inside me. He and Becca were always hugging each other and me. I loved the warm, safe loving feelings I felt with Steve and Becca. It was a wonderful home, and the one I wanted to stay in forever.
However, it was not to be. I learned in later years that the Department of Social Services in charge of my State of California wardship strongly believed in those days that a child who was “even a tenth black” should be placed in a black family. Consequently although Becca and Steve had wanted to adopt me, they could not. They were both white and I was from a black mother and a white father, making me, I thought “brownish”: I didn’t know the word “biracial” then. The world said I was a black child. Consequently, according to Social Services, I had to be adopted by a black family.
The social worker came again and told me she had a wonderful new Mom and Dad who were “black like me, and that I would be their child forever. Wasn’t that nice?” It was the worst time in my life. I got my horrid kid out again and I let those people know I wasn’t like them and I didn’t want to be black and live in a black neighborhood. I had grown up that far in white families, in white neighborhoods and with white upper class family values, and I could not relate to these people at all. I remember feeling really horrible about calling the new couple bad names and acting out every day, running away, even when they took me to Hawaii with them. I hated the whole thing. I hated them, everything they stood for, everything they were or wanted in life and I let them know it every chance I got. They figured it out within a couple weeks of my most nasty self and took me back! I was delighted not to be with them, but totally afraid of what would be next. I wanted desperately to go back to Steve and Becca in Carmel where I had felt belonging and love, but the social worker said I couldn’t go there ever again. I know now that I had begun to attach to Steve and Becca, and this was yet another broken attachment which would make it hard for me to ever trust again.
I was in a detention warehouse place for awhile, and that was no picnic, either. Basically, it was a young juvenile jail. We had our own small rooms with a cot, a small dresser and a tiny barrel window. We were on a schedule daily for eating, going to the bathroom, and having “recess”. Recess was walking around the yard outside with adults who made sure we didn’t get too close to another kid. If we were “good” and got three stars on our charts, we got to see a movie with the other kids on Friday night. Big deal. That place was hell and I cried myself to sleep every night, wondering if I’d ever get out and plotting what I’d do if I could figure out a way to escape.
On to Children’s Garden
After a few weeks, the social worker came again, told me to pack my few belongings, and that I was being taken to Children’s Garden. She said it was a beautiful place where they would try to find out why I was so bad and help me to learn to be a good person instead. I remember thinking to myself (I had learned not to verbalize my feelings by now) “Oh yeah? We’ll show them!”
So I did. As soon as I saw that goldfish in the bowl and that radiator near it, I knew this was my opportunity to let them that I could hurt them worse than they could hurt me. To my surprise they didn’t react much when I burned the goldfish on the radiator. “Hmm… maybe they are as evil as I,” I thought. Now that was a scary feeling. It was the first time I hadn’t been hit for a “bad thing to do” in years.
Helen seemed to understand I was scared, but she didn’t really know the depth of that fear for a very long time, if ever. Here she was - a nice white lady social worker again. I knew that if I didn’t please her, there’d really be hell to pay. So for a long time I did what she said and played up to her. But it wasn’t long before I began to feel genuine warm safe feelings with her. When she hugged me c
lose, I could feel something warm and wonderful inside me begin to melt. It was a strange feeling and it scared me. I got the same feelings from my “housemother,” Marci, and later even from the teacher at the Children’s Garden school. I had to see a psychiatrist, Doctor Bob, every week for a very long time. I developed a crush on him in my early teens. I just loved it when he hugged me, and I remember trying to get him to touch me more, but he never did. Dr. Bob also became a wonderful friend and ally as I grew up and I still occasionally seek his advice. Today, as a child advocate attorney, I often use him as an expert witness in court cases where I am a child’s advocate. Beyond his extensive knowledge of children, he’s a warm and caring human being that judges tend to trust, as I do.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
When Helen told me I was to have a real family of my own, all I could really think about at first (but never say) was “NOT AGAIN!” I had learned the game of being “good” however, and acted as though I was really happy about it. At another deeper level, I was happy and frightened of yet another failure. I was scared to death. I remember feeling so conflicted that I actually felt that I was split in two as I talked to myself. I remember calling my inner “real self” Nutmeg, and my “other self” Katy, which was what the world called me now. My inner conversations went something like this:”
Nutmeg: Oh no, here they go again. Just when I get safe and comfy they go and move me into another family again ... and with another kid. Dammit! Why can’t I stay at Children’s Garden forever? I like it here. They don’t hurt me and I get to do nice things, and have nice clothes and my own room. I don’t want to go!”
Katy: “But maybe this time will be good. You trust Miss Helen and Children’s Garden. They wouldn’t put you in a bad place like the social workers at the County do.”
Nutmeg: How do you know? They can’t keep me here at Children’s Garden. It’s too expensive. And I’m not worth the money to be allowed to stay here.”
Katy: Now Stop that. You know what Dr. Bob says. When you have those bad feelings about yourself, you have to just stop and tell yourself you’re a kind and wonderful girl and you deserve to have the best.”
Nutmeg: Will I be able to see Dr. Bob when I go to my new family?”
Those conversations went on every night in the solitude of my bedroom at Children’s Garden. Many nights I’d just hug my pillow and my teddy bear as hard as I could and cry myself to sleep. It wasn’t until I had had many sleepovers with my new family and a lot of heart-to-heart talks with Dr. Bob that I began to feel some sense of caring and safety with my new parents and sister. But you know this story from Helen’s telling. I just want to say that I experienced something incredible for the first time in my life at that courthouse during the adoption. Everyone was, so far as I could tell, on my side, approving of me and my family. Everything was right. My heart was so full of joy I thought it would burst. I’d never had that feeling before and while I loved it, it also frightened me. Was it too good to last? Would this really be my home forever?