Social Worker of the Year.

On the last day before I officially closed my office I pulled into my parking space at work and saw a sign which said,

This space is reserved for Carol, Social Worker of the Year.

What a shock! I’m a surprised prize winner! For so long I wanted this coveted award but deep down I knew I would never earn it.

So I prepared myself ahead for the inevitable disappointment:

Don’t expect it. It’s not going to happen. Get used to it! Get over it! Suck it up! Stop pouting! Get a life! Grow up! You’re not going to be named social worker of the year this year, probably no year. Never. Ever. Time to move on. You can do without it, Carol.

This new good news came at the best possible time— just as I was boxing up the charts and readying them for shredding, finding safe spaces for the awards, certifications, and diplomas, tying up all the cards and letters, packing up the little ceramic angels, a set of three once given to me by a client. This news offset my sadness. Packing up Nipper, the big RCA dog who children used to play with in my waiting room, and all the smaller stuffed animals, including Shrek, will be passed on to our granddaughter. I can’t wait to see her smiling, pretty face, her sparkling blue eyes flashing and eyelashes dark, shining, filled with wonder, glee, and excitement when these packing boxes arrive and she finds so many wonderful surprises.

My transition to retirement will be a new phase in my life. I can picture seventy-five candles on my retirement cake— so where’s room for the cake? Well, maybe a large candle seven and a large candle five will suffice. Retirement, it’s bittersweet. It’s a mixed bag. Sad and glad. Tears and laughs. Fears and frivolity.

So many unknowns. I’ve known myself as a social worker for so long, it’s who I’ve been, It’s who I am. Saying I’m retired unglues me. Facing it means putting myself into new spaces and places, immersing myself in new learnings, availing myself of new opportunities. And what will I look forward to? Writing as much and as often, as creatively as possible—lots of personal essays, lots of letters, lots of flash non-fiction, that’s how I will spend a lot of my time. And I plan on taking many trips to DC to see our daughter, son-in-law and play dolls and trains and puppets and reading stores to our precious four-year-old granddaughter.

I’ll never tire of helping people. But I’m tired of writing progress notes. I’m tired of writing just the facts m’am, Sgt. Friday’s signature line. Writing reports. Writing requests for pre-authorization for clients’ mental health coverages. Filling out disability forms. Waiting sometimes for twenty minutes or more to resolve an insurance payment problem.

It’s been quite a career journey. 1964-2017.

October, 1964. New Brunswick, New Jersey. My nascent career began as a state child welfare caseworker, followed by two years in graduate school with internships in a state psychiatric hospital and the VA outpatient mental hygiene clinic. After earning my graduate degree, I was a social worker in a child guidance clinic, and a private practice social worker-psychotherapist since 1972. This totals fifty-three years of dedicated, devoted social work service.

So why do I need to be voted social worker of the year? If I had little ego, I would say who cares? Most of the time that’s how I feel. Who cares? Does it really matter? My answer would ordinarily be no but—and here’s the big but —I am winding down my career. I am on the cusp of retiring. I have many prior awards, special certifications, they’re hanging prominently on my wall in my office, but I’ve never had any present public community-wide recognition since 1989, twenty-eight years ago. Then I was part of a Lilly Endowment leadership training program where I was deemed Council of the Sagamore of the Wabash, by then Indiana Governor Evan Bayh for ...Loyalty in friendship, her Wisdom in council, and her inspiration in Leadership... This was the honor of honors. This award hangs proudly on my office wall which has a gold seal and ribbon of recognition. But what about a reward now?

Recognizing my own accomplishments...

A best guess, I have spent 45,000 hours counseling people. I started my career as a caseworker for the state of New Jersey’s Bureau of Children’s Services working with several teen-age girls in foster care. Who were these girls? Teens who didn’t have families to take care of them. Teens who had problems. Teens who were sexually mature but emotionally immature. They were all needy teens whose many needs were hard to meet given the limited resources for children in the foster care system.

Every three months for two years, meeting the minimal visitation requirement (MVR)mandated by the state, I visited these teens. Sometimes at their foster homes, sometimes in juvenile detention, sometimes at school, wherever they were I tried to meet them. Sometimes we went out for cokes. Original cokes, cherry cokes, lemon-twist cokes, and diet cokes. You choose, I told them. Root-beer floats for your birthday. For these girls this special attention meant everything. Lots of leaked information occurred while we drank these icy-cold highly sweetened treats together. Never would these girls have told me what they did in front of their foster parents so an outing was always a good strategy. Prior caseworkers who came and went, and they were many since job satisfaction was low, frustration levels were high, rewards were few, often missed what was happening to these girls and their foster families. I inherited a lot of omissions and missed steps. Progress was slow. The work never ended. Only repeat beginnings. Patience was paramount. Resilience was necessary.

Sadly I discovered not one, but several foster girls sleeping with their foster fathers. How could this have happened? I’m not sure how comprehensive the vetting process was for foster parents more than fifty years ago. I’m not sure it’s much better today. Getting good, healthy, motivated foster parents is difficult. Foster fathers and foster daughters sleeping together was a symptom of dysfunctional foster parent relationships. I wondered, did foster parents take these teens to stabilize their troubled families, to avoid dealing with their spouse-spouse issues? I didn’t have the power to do anything about it. I reported the abuse to the agency. Sexual abuse, especially back then, was swept under the rug. What should they have done? Closed down the homes, asap. But I doubt action was taken. Who else would take difficult teens? There were few if any long-term placements available.

People had a penchant for leaving unwanted kids on our door steps. Early Monday morning and late Friday afternoons were always heartbreaking, gut-wrenching times. That’s when I had, and other caseworker colleagues, find homes for them. Once I had to place three siblings. One of the siblings was developmentally disabled. Retardation was suspected. Then the fly in the ointment came. Once finding baptismal papers which proved these children were Catholic, the agency had to move them into a Catholic foster home with little regard for their present good emotional and physical adjustments. My recommendation that they remain in their first foster placement was over-ridden. After all state regulations required same religion placements. No surprise that I lost faith in the agency’s policies. The agency often failed those who most needed their services.

And the monetary motivation of foster parents? Word had it that some took the children to use part of the state’s money for themselves. Word had it that some foster families took in multiple children for much financial gain. For me this was so hard to comprehend. The emotional and social costs of raising these children far exceeded whatever the paltry state allowances may have been.

Sadly I couldn’t do much for these foster teens except be supportive and establish that their basic survival needs were met. Like food, shelter, medical care. The emotional care was always hard to read and measure. The girls were often dishonest. Sometimes they complained about their foster parents, some complaints were probably true but some were manipulations which all teens have tried. To get special consideration in some ways from me?, but I can’t recall ever giving any one teen any special consideration. They tried to get me to support them against their foster parents, I didn’t allow that either. These girls were always at-risk for getting into trouble and not doing well in school, especially those who were moved from foster family to foster family most of their lives. If they felt unworthy as many of them did, they sabotaged any efforts to do well in foster care. Or anywhere else. They set-up rejection after rejection. They long ago learned self-defeating behaviors worked, but worked against them. But that’s all they knew. Positive change was rare. When it happened it was worthy of self-celebration. I smiled to myself, knowing I had done a good job. Even praise was hard to ascertain. The agency offered few, if any, rewards

Private practice problems. 

And who were my clients in my private practice? Many pretty healthy women, fewer men. Some always had unstable lives. Others were stuck in a phase of life which they couldn’t handle. Their coping skills which worked at other times in their lives were not working now. Some were in poor marriages. Some were emotionally and physically abused by their partners. Here my job was primarily to get them safely into a shelter. Once hopefully out of the marriages, although some returned to their abusive partners, we continued counseling sessions. Some marriages were good but needed some tweaking. The common complaint was, communication. This word covered a vast variety of complaints and concerns. Maybe at one time they talked to each other, they shared thoughts, ideas, concerns, then these talks eroded over time. Especially when they raised children, cared for elderly parents, and worked, both spouses, there was no talking time.

Then there were complaints by parents in a legal war with their adult children because they were being deprived of their rights to see their grandchildren and needed support and direction from me. Getting two generations, younger parents and their parents, to sit in my office and communicate with less hostility and less grudging was sometimes successful. Somewhere there was love between them, somehow it had gone astray. Was it recoupable?

And for those who never communicated very well, there often underlying difficulties which interfered. Lack of trust, infidelity, jealousy, competition, sexual difficulties. With all the people I have had the privilege to work with few, if any, had good self-esteem. Life’s blows had all but taken away good, positive energy.

And then there were clients who were so depressed I had to do whatever I could do to manage their care in conjunction with a psychiatrist who prescribed their medication. How to convince someone to live? Not an easy task. Those who’ve tried and failed will try again, statistics tell us. Some through counseling improved, they found reasons to live, they turned their lives around. Some remained unstable but alive. And some I have no idea what happened to. A good strong family support system always made a significant difference in keeping someone in-life. Connecting depressed people to community services helped. Priests, ministers, rabbis, neighbors, store-keepers all had a helping hand in giving life back to seriously depressed almost life-less people. Medication non-compliance was often an uphill struggle. When people felt better they stopped taking their medications. They could not comprehend the need to stay on medications daily. Saving people from killing themselves was the most troubling and gut-wrenching part of my work. There was always guilt—no matter how much I tried to help, often it just wasn’t enough. Not everyone, even with lots of help, chooses life.

I had lots of complaints from teens about their terrible parents. Really? So what did I tell them sitting there with their terrible parents? Move out. Live in a foster home. Ugh they’d say. Are you kidding me? I’d never live in a place like that! So I’d say, get a job and earn enough to get a room somewhere. Do your own laundry, make your own meals, pay for what you need. (Parents were clued-in to what I was up to). Often this strategy worked. Then we worked on rules. Teens and parents made family rules together. Quid pro quo was always a good strategy. We wrote and signed contracts: I will be home promptly at 10 PM every school night if you will let me use the car on week-ends. Teens liked to have in-put. If teens refused to talk I told them their parents would make the rules without them. This usually got them talking.

I always tried out new ways of creating positive change. One of my favorite strategies was helping two siblings who were constantly picking, annoying, at each other non-stop. Nothing seemed to work to diminish their fighting. So I tried something different. I asked them to go to court and get a divorce. They said there was no such thing. They thought this was a joke. When they saw I was serious, they were stunned. So instead of fighting with each other, they joined together and said they refused to divorce. They yelled at me for such a crazy idea. Wow! The strategy worked.

Yes, I’m very proud of my creative psychotherapy techniques and strategies which I learned from years of working with families. I’m proud that I was on a research team for a million dollar grant project awarded to Purdue University’s Department of Family Studies in the nineteen- eighties. We compared different therapeutic approaches to stop drug and alcohol addicted teens from using these substances. It was the best family therapy training I had ever received. And there was a reward. None which I could have anticipated. I learned that my clients made the most progress of all those seen in the project. It was a secret, it was the best-ever leaked secret.

I’ve lived in Tucson, Arizona for seventeen years without any community recognition for my contributions. This is disappointing. But those people who still write me Christmas cards, Chanukah cards, letters, they let me know that what I did made a big difference in their lives. And even those I don’t hear from, I can only hope their lives are better.

I’ve figured it out. I don’t need to pull into my parking space and see a sign which says,

This space is reserved for Carol, Social Worker of the Year.

I know I’ve earned it— whether it’s there or not.