Full of Woe
The Wednesday’s Child up for adoption on TV may be the answer to your prayers. Then again, the darling you take home may be a ticking time bomb, a former ward of the state so abused and so volatile that your family will never know what hit it.
(Page 2 of 4)
The first indication the Richardses had that Mark’s problems were more severe than bed-wetting occurred one evening not long after he came to live with them. It was M.L.’s turn to supervise Mark’s bath, and the new father hustled his son toward the bathroom. The moment M.L. peeled off Mark’s clothes, Mark tried to fondle his father’s penis. “It was obviously an instinctive response,” recalls Diane. “Someone had taught Mark to do that.” The problems became more severe. Mark set his first fire when he was eleven and continued to set fires both in his room and in the back yard for the next two years. It got to the point that Mark simply couldn’t control himself at all. Once, Diane found forty pairs of women’s underwear hidden away in Mark’s closet; Mark had used them for masturbation. Next, a younger adopted brother confided to his mother that Mark had forced him to commit oral sex at knife-point. One Christmas Eve Mark took a knife from the kitchen and ran through the house, threatening to kill his younger brother and the rest of the family. Diane says she remembers thinking, “When is this going to stop?”
Life for the Richards family became an endless game of musical therapy. First, Mark was sent to a psychologist who specialized in play therapy to find the source of Mark’s problems. Then they tried individual therapy, and finally Diane and M.L. went with Mark to talk to a family therapist. All of the counseling was paid for on M.L.’s salary and insurance benefits as a lineman for the Lower Colorado River Authority. None of the therapy helped. Finally, one psychiatrist told the Richardses that their son is a borderline personality—a violent person who has an inability to form social relationships—and both Diane and M.L. knew they had reached the end of the road. The Richardses found themselves trapped in a single line of a nursery rhyme—“Wednesday’s child is full of woe”—with no way to get to Thursday. Last October they took Mark to a private mental hospital in San Marcos, at a cost of nearly $15,000 a month. M.L.’s insurance company is picking up the tab. But the family is facing another crisis: M.L.’s insurance is running out.
When they committed Mark to the hospital, the Richardses obtained a copy of some of his files and learned that Mark had been diagnosed as mentally ill before his adoption. His prognosis for recovery in 1981, a year before he came into the Richardses’ home, was described as poor. They also read about their son’s first years: His mother had starved him, and from an early age, Mark had displayed symptoms of a child who had been sexually molested. Whatever his parents had done to him, they had done it from birth to almost three years old, when he was placed in a foster home. In the files the Richardses discovered why Mark’s left forefinger was missing: his biological father had bitten it off.
“I’m suing the state because I don’t know what else to do,” says Diane, sitting on her couch with her feet tucked beneath her legs. She looks like a shell-shocked veteran of an awful private war. “It’s too late for Mark. If they ever let him out of the hospital, he will kill us or kill somebody else. I’m certain of it,” she says. Diane and M.L. have investigated the possibility of relinquishing custody of Mark, but they have been told that most judges in Texas view adoption as forever.
Do Diane and M.L. still love him? Diane’s brown eyes become two pools of tears. “There’s a part of Mark we love,” Diane says, “and there’s a part of him we loathe.”
Bait and Switch
On a Wednesday in June 1984, Lynn and John Davis were sitting in the living room of their home in Dallas, watching the news on Channel 8. Midway through the broadcast, the face of a young black child named Michael appeared on the screen. Both Lynn and John felt an overpowering urge to reach through the television set and bring four-year-old Michael to the safety of their bosoms.
“I’d always watched ‘Wednesday’s Child’ on TV,” recalls Lynn, “but that night both of us really felt we’d love to have Michael as our son.” Lynn had two daughters from a previous marriage, and she and John had often discussed adopting a child. Before the broadcast was finished, Lynn telephoned the number on the screen and told the operator who answered that she and John wanted Michael as their own.
That televised glimpse was the last they saw of Michael. Instead of giving them their dream child, the DHS placed four troubled black siblings with the Davises. From the bureaucracy’s point of view, the Davises are a spectacular success story—the caseworker relieved himself of four problems at once by placing the children with a solidly middle-class couple. But the DHS’s success was the Davises’ nightmare.
The fault really isn’t the caseworker’s. Caseworkers are simply cogs in an unworkable system. The bureaucratic imperative is to make these kids someone else’s problems so that taxpayers won’t have to provide for them. Child-welfare experts have a name for this type of bait and switch—“stretching.” To facilitate a placement, a caseworker “stretches” a family to take on more children and more problems than they had bargained for. The truth also gets stretched when caseworkers minimize the level of abuse a child has suffered in order to persuade parents to adopt the child.
The Davises’ caseworker, Jim Baldwin, had more on his mind than Michael. He had the responsibility for placing four brutally abused siblings, and he wanted to find one home for all of them. To him, the Davises seemed like the perfect solution. Verbally and in written reports, Baldwin told Lynn and John Davis that the children had been taken away from their biological mother in 1983 because of “extreme neglect.” The only reliable water source in their mother’s apartment was the commode. All of the children had swollen stomachs from malnutrition.
Every word Lynn and John Davis read about the horrible conditions the children had endured made them want to adopt them more. “I just felt that they had never been filled with food and love and that if we could show them that, they wouldn’t ever have to be hungry again—everything would be all right,” Lynn says. The most disturbing material Baldwin gave the Davises was found on page three of a rambling psychological report on one of the daughters. “Sex is a very predominant issue for this child,” wrote the psychologist. “If she was not herself a victim of sexual molestation, then she undoubtedly was a direct observer.” Lynn said she questioned Baldwin about exactly what the psychologist’s report meant; he minimized her anxiety by saying the girl may have only watched other people engage in sex.
Baldwin arranged for the Davises to be paid a subsidy of $225 a month for each of the four children, and the children came to live with the Davises in July 1985. The next March, Lynn got a telephone call from one of the boys’ teachers. He had been caught fondling a female classmate’s genitals. The calls occurred more frequently. Once, Lynn was called because he was exposing himself in the school bathroom. Next, he took another little girl behind a cabinet at school, removed her underpants, and tried to have sex with her. One afternoon Lynn walked into one of the bedrooms of her apartment and saw her seven-year-old son lying on top of his eight-year-old sister. The sight of children trying to complete the sexual act sickened Lynn. She felt totally defeated.
She quit her $17,000-a-year job as a quality-control worker at a manufacturing company and now spends all of her time trying to keep her four adopted children from sexually abusing one another or innocent strangers. The family now survives on John’s $28,000-a-year job as a supervisor for Honeywell. “Our life is a living hell,” Lynn says. The Davises’ marriage has suffered because of the problems with the children. When the trouble started, John didn’t believe the situation could possibly be as bad as Lynn described it every night when he came home from work. “I felt Lynn was picking on the kids. Later I realized they were manipulating us,” John says.
The Davises regularly see Barbara Rila, a psychologist who specializes in adoption-related problems. Even though the DHS recommended Dr. Rila to the Davises, Rila says the state should never have placed all four of the children in the Davis home. “These children have been so abused that their internal core has been shredded,” says Rila. “Parenting one of them would be an incredible challenge; four is impossible.”
Despite all that has happened, the Davises are trying to keep the children together. Their living room is crowded with family photos, and the coffee table is crammed with soccer trophies. “If I had known what to expect, I wouldn’t have adopted all four of them. But now that I have them, what am I supposed to do? Throw them out on the street? Not on your life,” Lynn says. Still, Michael is a mythical space in her marriage. Lynn and John often wonder about him and dream about how nice it would have been to have just one son.
Group Night
Every two weeks five couples meet in the cozy library of the Highlands Christian Church in northeast Dallas. The night is devoted to therapy—not for the adopted children of the couples, but for the couples themselves. It was here that the couples first shared their war stories and discovered their common problem. They, as much as their disturbed children, are victims of the system. It was here that the lawsuit against he DHS first took form. They learned that their problems weren’t isolated, and they filed the lawsuit to force an overhaul of the public adoption system in Texas.
None of the couples in the room can bear to watch the weekly “Wednesday’s Child” feature on Channel 8. Despite the love and hope they have offered their children, each couple has at least one adopted child whose troubles are so severe that the entire family is caught in the vortex. A few of the couples are ex-hippies who thought they were helping to save the world by adopting many disadvantaged children. One couple adopted ten DHS children; others have four and five.
My Library
