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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After Tracey was on “Wednesday’s Child,” she was placed with the family of a DHS child-abuse investigator who quit his job so he and his wife would be eligible to adopt Tracey. The adoption was never finalized. She was returned to the state after eighteen months because of conflicts with family members, compounded by hygiene problems associated with spina bifida. “I guess there is something wrong with me,” Tracey says, sheepishly. “I’ve lived in six different homes, had eighteen foster brothers and sisters, and I bombed out of every last one of them.”
Tracey was born on April 19, 1968, in Denton. Her mother, Janie Bush, was an unmarried twenty-year-old who had dropped out of college by the time Tracey was born. Janie decided the best thing for both of them would be to give Tracey up for adoption. When the couple who had agreed to adopt Tracey found out she had spina bifida, they changed their minds. Janie went to the Dallas office of the Texas Department of Health, where she was told how to relinquish custody of her child. A few days later Janie signed the paper, and Tracey became a ward of the state.
When Tracey was three weeks old, the state sent her to live with a foster mother in Balch Springs. At five, Tracey was adopted by her foster mother’s adult daughter, Norma McDonald, and her husband, Kevin. “She was a bright and beautiful little girl,” Norma recalls. Because Tracey’s condition required that she use a urinary catheter, two or three times a week Norma would have to go to Tracey’s school to clean her up. “She was a burden, but a sweet burden,” says Norma.
Five years later Tracey was too much of a burden for Norma to handle. By then, Norma and Kevin were divorced, and Norma could not financially support their four biological, much less their adopted, children. In May 1980 Norma contacted Janie with the idea that she could help rear Tracey. By June, Tracey had moved in with Janie.
Janie found out that her daughter’s childhood had been anything but happy. DHS supervisors believe 80 to 90 percent of Wednesday’s Children have been sexually abused. Tracey’s experience conforms to that theory. From the time she was a little girl, she had been forced to engage in oral sex with her adoptive father. Unlike many other Wednesday’s Children, Tracey didn’t maintain the silence. Eventually, she testified against Kevin McDonald, and on March 30, 1981, he was convicted on one count of sexual abuse of Tracey. McDonald was sentenced to five years in prison but was released on probation shortly after sentencing.
For Tracey, however, returning to her biological mother was not the answer to her problems. In spring of 1981, less than a year after Tracey moved in with Janie, the two of them had a terrible argument. Neither of them remember exactly what provoked the fight, but at eleven-thirty that night Janie telephoned a DHS caseworker at home and told her to come and get Tracey. Two days later a crestfallen Tracey wrote in her journal, “I’m in a different home. She gave me up.”
Once again, Tracey was returned to the social service system, and she spent an unsuccessful year with a foster family, Tracey’s caseworkers next decided to try to market her on television. “They asked me if I’d like to go on TV to try to get another family, and I thought it was a great idea,” Tracey recalls. Caseworkers warned her not to get her hopes up about being placed in another adoptive home, since she was almost fourteen.
Being on television provided no magic solution. Between the spring of 1982 and the summer of 1985, Tracey shuffled from family to family, until she was sent to the Mary Lee School, a residential group home, in Austin. Tracey didn’t like the school and its strict structure—when she disobeyed the rules, her privileges were taken away. One evening she and a friend ran away from the home. After that, three caseworkers met with Janie and Tracey. There, in a conference room in Austin, the system gave up on Tracey Bush. At seventeen—three years after she had appeared on television—Tracey became an emancipated adult.
Today she lives with two roommates in a two-bedroom apartment in Euless. In some respects, Tracey is doing better than ever before. She has a job processing payroll checks, earning $6.12 an hour. But she often defeats herself. For instance, she bought a used car for $400, but she doesn’t know how to drive. Lacking only a half-credit to graduate from high school, she dropped out. Criswell has told her that there is a full college scholarship waiting for her through the Wednesday’s Child Benefit Corporation, but first she has to receive a high school diploma. She can’t seem to summon the will to finish high school. Yet she has accomplished something: She freed herself from the child-welfare system by surviving long enough to outgrow it.
Illusion and Reality
“The problem is, no one in the system wants to get their hands dirty with these kids,” says psychologist Barbara Rila. Rila’s analyst couch is rarely empty. Every day she gets her hands dirty with Wednesday’s Children and their distraught parents. Instead of talking generally about child abuse, she forces the children to face whatever horror they have endured in brutally explicit ways. There is no polite and gentle way to deal with the rape of the innocent. Yet that is what the DHS tries to do by portraying these children in cabbage-patch TV settings.
DHS officials defend the television recruitment campaign. As Betty Avant, an adoption supervisor, puts it, “There are families for these children. It’s simply a matter of us finding them.” TV is a convenient and powerful vehicle. Avant and other adoption officials realize that there is an inherent contradiction in their method: They insist that publicity about the children be presented in a favorable light, but they also don’t want to mislead the public. Once prospective parents have become interested after seeing a child on television, DHS officials say, they can tell them all the facts about the child and train them to be good parents.
Several adoption workers maintain that the DHS does not purposefully withhold information from parents. “It’s a big department, so obviously there may be isolated examples of caseworkers not telling a family the total truth, but I would hope we aren’t intentionally not disclosing information,” says the DHS’s Susan Klickman. Several adoption workers said they alert prospective parents to a child’s behavioral problems, but the parents are so excited they simply don’t comprehend negative information. “We tell them everything,” said Helen Grape, the program director in Dallas-Forth Worth, “but I can’t be responsible for what they hear.”
There is also a gap between what the rules allow and what adoptive parents say is needed. For instance, the state’s policy on post-adoption services is contained in one small paragraph of the voluminous pages of DHS policy manuals. If the caseworkers have time, which they often don’t, they can help families in trouble—as long as they have permission from a supervisor. Klickman is now reevaluating whether the state can provide continuous counseling and more services. “Our families are telling us they need help, and we are trying to accommodate them, but it takes time and money,” she said.
Klickman and others think that most Wednesday’s Children are better off being adopted, even if later they have to go to group homes. Klickman, however, believes most Wednesday’s Children thrive in their adoptive homes: They are sheltered, clothed, and encouraged to become self-sufficient. The DHS is aware that some Wednesday’s Children are in trouble, but the department does not attempt to find out how many and in what ways. According to DHS records, 10 to 12 percent of the children who are placed in adoptive homes leave during the first six months, before the adoption is legally final. They have no idea, however, how many children leave their homes after the adoption is final. The notion that adoption is forever is so firmly embedded in the agency’s psyche that DHS workers don’t even use the word “failure.” The DHS’s word for an adoption that doesn’t work out is “disillusionment.” And the agency doesn’t keep score of disillusionment.
Twenty years ago social workers arrived at the consensus that every child is adoptable. Even today many social workers argue that what abused and abandoned children need are “therapeutic” parents. But it is obvious that some Wednesday’s Children need more therapy than most ordinary parents can provide. Indeed, the role of parents and therapists may be mutually exclusive. Some of the parents are challenging the accepted wisdom by saying their children need too much mental-health care to be able to live in a family setting.
Even though the word “orphanage” has been expunged from our language, institutions for children still exist. They are group homes run by trained counselors. Some adoptive parents say that such group homes offer the best solution for deeply damaged children and that the DHS should be more sensitive in deciding which setting is appropriate for each child. Many of the Wednesday’s Children whom nobody wants or who are incapable of living with their adoptive families end up there. Unfortunately, the decision about who goes into a group home is left to the marketplace—the DHS forbids caseworkers from recommending that any child would be better off placed in such a home rather than with a family.
Caseworkers also know what kind of people make the best parents for Wednesday’s Children. Older parents who have reared biological children successfully often have fewer ego needs and are able to slowly earn the trust of the unattached child. Few upper-income families ever inquire about adopting a Wednesday’s Child. But social workers say low- and moderate-income couples tend to make better adoptive parents for troubled children. These families have more realistic expectations and give the child room to breathe; they are less concerned that the child excel in school or sports. But they must have a generous health-insurance policy; woe be unto any family of a Wednesday’s Child who does not.
There are never enough of these special parents to claim waiting children. So the DHS uses the power of television to elicit an emotional response from a wider audience. Sadly, the gap between TV and real life is dangerously wide. The first villains in these children’s lives were monstrous parents who took away their innocence. But all of us share complicity if we allow these children into our living rooms every week, give them a benevolent nod, and insist that they stay invisible by encouraging so much to go unsaid.
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