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.
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Couples who have adopted six or more children are often referred to at the DHS as “collector families.” Many caseworkers regard such couples with a mixture of awe and amusement. Caseworkers admire their tenacity and compassion but wonder how they can put up with so many heartbreaking problems each day. Collector families have more than a client relationship with the DHS. These couples find they become unpaid social workers. Since the state offers strictly limited services for families after adoptions are finalized, the couples often become unofficial counselors in emergencies. When DHS caseworkers receive telephone calls in the middle of the night from a Wednesday’s Child parent, they often refer the parent to someone more knowledgeable than they—another adoptive parent.
It takes only one disturbed child to transform ordinary parents into experts on troubled children. The Reverend Bob Chandler and his wife, Cherry, are not collectors; they have two biological sons and an adopted daughter. Bob is the pastor of the church where the therapy group meets. The Chandlers simply viewed adopted as a socially responsible way to build a family. “We thought we were pretty good parents and had something to give to a child,” says Cherry. “We weren’t out to save the world.”
When their daughter, Tina, came to live with the Chandlers in November 1978, they thought they had a perfectly normal three-year-old. Bob and Cherry picked her up from her foster home and were delighted because Tina didn’t shed a tear when she left her foster parents. Later they learned that this was the first sign of trouble. Tina is typical of many children who are abused and neglected during the first two years of life. The psychological label for these children is “unattached,” which means that they are incapable of forming intimate relationships and have severe behavioral problems. At one time child-welfare experts actually encouraged such emotional damage by advising fostercare parents not to become too close to the children, because it would then be too painful to give them up for adoption.
At first, Tina’s problems seemed harmless enough. The moment she walked through the door of the parsonage, she took markers and drew all over the carpet in the entry way. But as time passed, she seemed unable to tell the truth. At ten, she set fire to her brothers’ blue jeans. By then, she was also stealing—everything from her mother’s jewelry to $150 worth of merchandise from a drugstore. At eleven, she took a butcher knife and hacked several pieces of furniture in the living room. Later she threatened to kill her two brothers. “One psychiatrist told us Tina could kill us in the night and never shed a tear,” Cherry recalls.
Last February the Chandlers obtained some of Tina’s records from a lawyer. The Chandlers learned that Tina had been severely physically and sexually abused almost since birth. The records included copies of photographs of Tina’s bruised genitals. “I wanted to crawl off and die when I saw those photographs,” Cherry says.
Now twelve-year-old Tina is living in a private mental-health clinic in Evergreen, Colorado. She is being treated with a controversial technique called rage-reduction therapy, which uses confrontation to break down her defenses and trigger unremembered feelings of anger stored in her since infancy. Cherry and Bob have participated in Tina’s therapy. Near the end of one session Bob put his face close to Tina’s, as you would an infant in a crib, and talked to her lovingly. “After a while Tina crawled up into my lap, just like a baby,” says Bob. The two of them held each other and sobbed. It was the first time Bob had ever felt authentic feelings of love from his daughter. The last time Bob and Cherry visited Tina, they all went horseback riding and hiking in the mountains. For the first time in ten years the Chandlers feel hopeful about Tina. They are looking forward to her returning home.
Like the other parents in the group, the Chandlers have asked themselves whether they would have adopted their child if they had known about her past. All the parents find they can’t answer that question. Still, the Chandlers blame the DHS for not telling them about Tina’s past so they could have gotten help for her sooner. In their view, the DHS contributed to Tina’s suffering. As much as Bob believes that children like Tina need homes, he tells his friends not to adopt children from the DHS. “I hate to admit it, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone adopt a child from the State of Texas right now. These kids need more help than any one family can possibly provide,” he says.
Seated next to the Chandlers at the meeting are Bonnie and Jim Harlow, who have adopted five DHS children. All five have problems, but it was their first child, Chris, who motivated them to join the lawsuit.
Bonnie and Jim adopted Chris in 1978, when he was three. They knew he had been abused but were given no specifics. No one told them that abuse meant almost certain psychological damage. From the moment he came into their home, Chris exhibited classic warning signs of an abused child. He had difficulty in school and was diagnosed as having perceptual problems. He had unprovoked temper tantrums and would become so enraged that he could destroy Tonka trucks in his room. But Chris could be beguiling; in particular, he charmed strangers with his sweetness. The Harlows wish that they had known that this behavior was another bad sign. Trouble children often overcompensate with exaggerated charm.
When Chris hit puberty, all hell broke loose. He fondled a girl at school; he physically attacked his parents and showed no remorse. “Once, he hit me in the face and gave me a bloody nose and just stood there, laughing,” Bonnie recalls. Bonnie and Jim installed an alarm on his bedroom door and locked him in his room at night so they could get some sleep.
In desperation, Bonnie begged the DHS for access to Chris’s records. She was no longer a mother but a detective frantically searching for the missing pieces of her son’s life. The DHS refused. But Bonnie tracked Chris’s records to New York. Social workers there informed her that both of his parents were mentally ill and that his father had been diagnosed as a schizoid personality, a personality disorder similar to but less severe than schizophrenia.
In December 1986 Chris tried to kill himself by swallowing all of the aspirin in the Harlows’ medicine cabinet. His behavior continued to deteriorate, and in August 1987 Jim and Bonnie took him first to a private psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis: schizophrenia. The Harlows were told schizophrenia has a strong genetic link—Chris’s background put him at extremely high risk for mental illness. There is no cure for schizophrenia, although the violent behavior that often accompanies it can be treated with drugs. Chris is now thirteen and lives behind the locked gates of the Terrell State Hospital.
There are twelve boys on Chris’s ward. Four are children who were adopted from the DHS. Even though the hospital is a public facility, Chris’s treatment costs $5,000 a month. Jim’s insurance pays half the bill, Jim and Bonnie pay $170 a month, and the remainder goes unpaid. If it weren’t for the Harlows’ health-insurance policy, Chris would have bankrupted them. Jim owns a landscape-and-lawn-care business in East Dallas, earning roughly $30,000 a year, not enough to cover the cost of Chris’s care for one year.
Last June 6—ten years to the day when they first saw Chris—the Harlows drove the 35 miles to Terrell to visit their son. All the way, Bonnie kept remembering how excited and hopeful they had been that very first day. When they arrived at the hospital, Chris would hardly speak to them at all. Finally, after much prodding, he told his parents he was afraid they were abandoning him in the mental hospital. Although they had visited him every week, he still had no faith that they would be back. His father tried to assure Chris that they loved him. “You’re just like a bicycle tire with a hole in it,” Jim told Chris. “No matter how many times we try to fill you up with air, you just stay broken. You can’t come home until the hole inside you gets fixed.”
The Harlows realize that no one gets a guarantee that their child won’t become mentally ill. But they believe if they had been warned that Chris was predisposed toward schizophrenia, they would have understood the signs better and would have sought appropriate treatment.
The Survivor
Tracey Bush had her two minutes in the “Wednesday’s Child” spotlight on April 7, 1982, just shy of her fourteenth birthday. By the time Tracey appeared on Channel 8’s “Wednesday’s Child,” her biological mother had twice given her up for adoption and she had been unhappily through one adoptive home and three foster homes. Nonetheless, she was thrilled about being on television, so excited that she never worried about the uncertainty to follow. “I never even thought about it,” says Tracey, hunched over a gooey breakfast of biscuits and gravy. “I guess the idea of being on television overshadowed everything else.”
When Tracey appeared on TV, she was old enough to understand exactly what was going on. At nearly fourteen, she knew that being put on TV would not give her a second chance at childhood. Her television appearance was the DHS’s effort to find a solution for a troublesome case. If Tracey didn’t get a new home, the department could be responsible for her until she became a legal adult at the age of eighteen. Yet on that spring day when she made her televised pitch for a new mother and father, Tracey was incapable of thriving in a normal household. She had endured too much pain. Putting her on TV was deceptive to her would-be parents and to Tracey as well.
After Tracey and WFAA anchorman John Criswell took their televised trip to the International Wildlife Park in Grand Prairie, 24 couples called and expressed an interest in adopting Tracey. It’s easy to understand why. Tracey is a warm and captivating girl who had long, thick black hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion. She was born with spina bifida, a congenital disease of the spine. She walks with a rolling gait, with the aid of braces. Those braces and her worn-down saddle oxfords affirm that this is a young woman with spunk.
Tracey’s two minutes of air time were one of the highlights of her life. Six years later, she still keeps in touch with Criswell by telephone. Even tough her contact with him is minimal, it means the world to her. Criswell is the positive counterpoint in Tracey’s life, a father figure who returns her phone calls and will not disappear. She can see him any night she wants, on the evening news.
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