The Spaces We Fill
1. I’m peering into the looking-glass in our home’s atrium-garden.
Here nature’s beauty is on display, an array of plants showing-off their colored leaves. Shades of greens, green-green, green-yellow, green-gray, green-silver leaves. Philodendron, calathea, snake, zz, patricia, goldfish. And the croton which is the most colorful plant in the garden, growing taller, proudly shows its randomly mixed greens, also yellows, reds, purples on its striped stiff leathery leaves, a very sturdy and resilient plant as long as it isn’t over-watered. My plants have become children I nurture. Watching them grow, caring for them, just as my husband and I once watched over and cared for our daughter, it is a labor of love.
Croton’s other name is Joseph’s Coat, probably derived from the biblical story of Joseph and his amazingly hot-colored coat to show-off. Singularly splashy, spectacularly sassy, saucy, specially selected for Joseph. Jacob was blinded by his love for Joseph, his favorite son. He didn’t see that he sowed seeds of hatred in the hearts and souls of his other sons toward Joseph. We see these seeds of anger, seeds of jealousy, seeds of frustration, seeds of misery, seeds of unhappiness become seeds of destruction. By contrast there are nature’s seeds which are life-giving, they propagate and become beautiful plants and trees. Philodendron, calathea, snake, zz, patricia, goldfish, croton and the ficus tree.
The ficus tree. Solidly sturdy, hardy and healthy, it is the only tree in our atrium-garden. Also known as the weeping fig with its glossy-green oval leaves, the ficus tree has established itself as the giant overseer, plant-protector, plant-director in our atrium-garden. It spreads its many leaves upward and outward forming a huge U-shape. At its fullest it takes up almost the entire space in the atrium. Two gallons of water each week, fertilized once a month, it thrives. It requires seasonal pruning. When cut back, it is transformed into a V-shape thinned-out version of itself.
2. I was a neophyte in the plant-parenting business.
It’s not hard to remember when I succeeded in killing just about every plant I ever touched. I watered fake-flowers for two years before realizing they thrived only because they were never alive. Then it was the disaster of the begonia plant. Old photos showed this plant in a pink foiled-covered pot sitting on a pretty green and pink chintz-clothed round table leaning to the right, a mini-green architectural rendering of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Plant photographer and plant-parent have become new parts of my life. They’re much more than hobbies. I am filling unfilled spaces within myself where once I was almost totally disconnected from nature. All this has changed. So many beautiful plants bring life and light into my life, the calathea, known as both the peacock plant and the rattlesnake plant. Zebra plant variety is ours, dark green stripes on lighter colored green leaves; philodendron, its meaning, love of trees; snake plant called mother-in-law’s tongue; zz, eternity plant; patricia, Chinese evergreen. And my goldfish plant, it grows downward in long-wiry-ribbons of tiny leaves, shimmering-shiny green with hints of red. And the goldfish name? Looks like leaping fish because of its long tubular red-orange flowers. Genus name colummea gloriosa, gloriosa strikingly beautiful, impressive. And it is.
3.
We’ve launched our family’s photo project.
Every space in our guest room is filled with piles of photos. Our maiden photographic voyage. My husband and I have no idea when and where we will arrive with our finished album in hand. For our daughter and granddaughter. It’s a labor of love.
My husband is using a new computer program for copying, scanning, cropping, sizing photos to fit into our new fifty-page, ten-photo-slots front and back, a total of five-hundred photos will fit into this album. Photos of great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Spaces for those presently in our lives. Our daughter, our son-in-law, our granddaughter. Some really fun ones, photos of our daughter at age four 1977, washing her doll, our granddaughter, Zoe, now at age four washing her doll, 2017. And our daughter’s boy-doll which her paternal grandpa, pop-pop, gave her at age two is now Zoe’s. She is learning to velcro-close his jacket. Tying his sneakers will be a much later learned skill. School photos of my husband at age six, 1942, me at age six, 1948. I’m wearing a white short-sleeve blouse, frilly-front, and tucked into my dark skirt is a white handkerchief, the handkerchief a school requirement. My husband is dressed in dark slacks, white long-sleeved shirt and tie. Both eager first-graders.
Our family photos mark life cycle events, births, Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs, high school, college, and graduate school graduations, weddings, and the cycle comes full-circle. We honor the lives of our deceased family members placing their photos in our new album. Our oldest photos go back to the 1800s in Russia. Portraits, some in sepia, some black and white, some have thick backings, one of my mother-in-law as a young girl, her photo is part of the oval metal frame beautifully decorated within a flowered border.
We are filling in the spaces, piecing together stories of our family’s lives, stories we’ve over-heard through other family members, vague recollections of meeting them when we were very young children, some we never knew, they died well before we were born. I’ve emailed and phoned other family members for help. In the traditions of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Mr. Keen, tracer of lost persons, Dragnet, just the facts ma’am, newer shows like NCIS and Law & Order, my husband and I use some of their clue-gathering strategies to solve the whos, wheres, whats of their lives.
A magnifying glass helps us identify very small but important clues, a wrinkle, a blemish, a watch-band, details on a necklace, a scarf, a suit, a dress, a hat, sorting them, trying to figure out who’s who, hair-styles, background scenes of our relatives. We guess age by faces, body shapes. Children, teens, young adults, middle-agers, older folks with wrinkles and a cane. What are they carrying? Other clues. We compare the ages of the same people over time. Not perfect, we admit flaws in our efforts, but we are determined to have something important to hand-on to our daughter and our granddaughter. More than our material assets which they will inherit, we will hand-on these photographs and narratives about whom their ancestors were, where they lived, how they lived, and how our lives are connected to theirs.
4. Plant-speak.
It isn’t very different from people-speak. Pay attention. Listen. Monitor. Unscramble their messages. Like with my calathea plant. When I probe its soil at mid-week watering, it is still wet. But some of its leaves are dry and stiff. Plant speak, I’m in distress, I need more water. Four additional cups of water-feedings at mid-week seems to relieve its stress.
Busily unscrambling the who’s who in our family-photo searches we found one photo-card which has the names in Hebrew of my husband’s paternal grandfather, Kaseel or Kutiel, (modern day Hebrew pronunciation), Blatter and great- grandfather, Moshe Ephraim Blatter, long-bearded, seated, wearing a long coat and a kippah, head covering, with Kutiel standing wearing a suit and wide-brimmed hat. There are several dates stated, 1830, 1872, most recently, 1902. Clues we need to further pursue.
5. Gusta Weiner and Ida Pesiaty Weiner. Who were they?
Here I’m looking at a photograph with their names, Gusta and Ida. (Weiner was also my mother-in-law’s maiden name). My husband thinks Gusta and Ida may have been murdered in the Holocaust. But this was never confirmed. Many years ago calls came to his family asking for money for information about lost relatives in Poland. His family never responded. Many times these calls were hoaxes. Sadly people tried to exploit the vulnerable bereaved.
Millions were murdered in the Holocaust. Could this have been the fate of Gusta and Ida?, I asked my husband. Well, we tried to find out. Our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, in search of information about them, proved futile. But the experience wasn’t. It continues to be emotionally life-changing.
We proceeded through the museum, we viewed the exhibits, we read all the historical information. Then we stopped, shocked, mesmerized by the horror of seeing Holocaust victims’ shoes here on display in huge floor-to-ceiling glass cases, we could not pull ourselves away from this display. Our eyes were fixated in disbelief, our faces almost adhered to the glass, our steamy breaths visible. Gut-wrenching. Parched-throats. Tight-tummies. Tearful- eyes. Holes in our souls. Sadness in our hearts. Stinging shock-waves reverberating throughout our bodies. No matter how prepared we thought we were, we weren’t prepared enough. The horror of it all was in front of us. Asking ourselves the questions so many have asked, how could this have ever happened? Where was God? No answers. Only more questions.
Most painful were the shoes of little children who never had a chance to take their places in life. Robbed of being before they could barely speak. Just because they were Jews. Also, some murdered for being gypsies, homosexuals, and dissenters. Baby white-laced shoes, wrinkled brown leather, soles, many with holes, black shoes, heeled shoes, tied shoes with tattered laces, great-grandparents’ shoes, parents’ shoes, aunts’ and uncles’ shoes, neighbors’ shoes, butchers’ shoes, bakers’ shoes, grocers’ shoes, rabbi’s shoes, all their partly-lived lives left behind in shoes. Ashes, no grave-sites. Just shoes.
6. Death.
Exit only. No re-entry door.
We mortals all, we will all die. Me, too.
My mother was the last of our four parents to die. Losing a mother is not the same as losing anyone else. It’s hard to put into words what mother-daughter visceral wiring is. My mom's famous words, I can smell you. Meaning she always sensed where I was and how I was feeling.
My mother was always at my side, no matter where I was or what I needed. From my birth in 1942 to her death in 1986 she was next to me. When the hospital chaplain greeted us at the hospital at 4 AM on that freezing cold January morning, I knew mom's life's journey had come to its end. Icy-cold chills flooded my body. Bereft of her presence, the hole in my life has remained.
I saw her. She was lying in a hospital bed. She looked alive. She was dead. Whatever I wanted to tell her, it was too late. Whatever amends I wanted to make for my selfishness, it was too late. From now on, I could only communicate with her at her grave-site.
7.
A conversation with mom...at her grave-site.
I will gather and place rocks around her marker, marking her grave, a Jewish custom. Hopefully she’ll sense my presence. I will say, I’m here, Mom. I love you. What she couldn’t say, I filled in. I love you, too, preciosa de me vida (precious of my life). Tears will stream down my face. Drip, drip, droplet by droplet.
I’ll read her the Hebrew prayer, the Kaddish prayer. Then I’ll give her gifts of plants like a few philodendron, their colors green and yellow-green to create a sense of calm and peace, and a calathea plant with some darker plain green leaves and some zebra-striped leaves to add decorative interest and uniqueness. And the last plant gift, a patricia, I’ll put on her grave-site for its longevity. Like the calathea, it grows rapidly and tall so one should suffice.
8. Legacy.
Now I can tell our granddaughter about her great-grandmother. And about all the people in our lives for several generations who have loved us, nurtured us, given us strong, safe foundations, and helped us make our ways into adulthood, through these photos and narratives— fragments of our lives we have pieced together and share with her. And we can encourage her to tend her own garden.
Filling in the spaces, these unknowns, that’s our mission.
My Friend, I Console You.
1.
My friend,
I hold you
your arm’s steady in mine
I console you
as you shovel dirt over
her coffin.
I breathe energy into your limp body.
2.
My friend,
I see you looking back
glancing a moment or two—
your daughter’s coffin now in-grounded.
In shock
you’ve become a pillar of stone
Prayerfully I free you from your inner prison.
3.
My friend,
I console you.
I’ve been there.
I understand.
I’ll not leave you.
4.
My friend,
I stand with you under a dark-ink-blot sky
with clouded illuminations
Our breaths be-labored.
Your nightmare-ish screams
pierce heaven’s shell.
“Bring my child back
you have no right to take her from me.
Don’t you hear my pain? A mother’s pain?
I am not ready to join her,
but living without her,
It is death
For me.”
5.
My friend,
I stand by you, I console you. I'll never leave you.
Dear Ms. Personal Essay:
Ms. personal essay, you are my significant other. Through you I tell my life’s stories.
Ms. personal essay, you make me think. You make me go inside myself when I’d prefer to stay at sea’s surface. You force me to ponder questions about myself I would choose to avoid. You don’t let me get away with saying, it’s too hard. You insist on my choosing words which fit my pain. You insist on my creating images which bring the reader into the narrative. You insist that I create color and contrast. You insist I create rhythm. You insist on truth telling. You refuse to accept fakey stuff. Never can I dupe you which is really duping myself.
Sometimes you are my peer- parent who pushes me harder and harder. Your expectations only increase. You lead me to the pinnacle of my capability. Like climbing a mountain only to discover there’s more to climb. I was blind to. So much more to say and do.
Ms. personal essay, thank you, you don’t allow me to hide my face. Do you remember my personal essay, the one about my father, where family secrets jumped off our pages? Remember grandpa being locked out by grandma for abuse, my father becoming the son-father to go out and earn some kind of living, whatever a fourteen year old teen-age boy could earn? This isn’t the narrative I wanted to write. I wanted to make-up a story about my family. But you insisted I tell the story whole. Truthfully.
Ms. personal essay, remember when I talked about my own future death? How now for the first time I said openly and plainly to myself and to anyone else willing to listen, yes, I will die? You were there for me, you rescued me from too much sadness seeing my aging body, you told me my pretti-ness was ageless. You are my blessing.
Ms. personal essay, my life’s words are entrusted to you. Please, continue to hold me accountable when my words are too dull, too strained, too banal, too boring, too off-balance, too off-topic, too distant, too close. Create a safety-net so I do not run away from my fears. What is this safety-net I desire? Be there for me. Never turn your back on me. Reassure me that my words are safe with you, that you will treasure and protect my words, that you will be kind to my words. These words— they are like growing children struggling, trying to find their way in the world. Be here for me when I screw up, when I lose patience and think I’ll never be a good-enough writer. Never turn your back on me. Share tears with me. Share smiles with me.
Ms. personal essay, when my eyes are closed, please open them. When I have lost my way, please bring me back to where I need to be.
In the Genizah
Because I know my time is almost done, well it’s not quite done, only seven-and-a-half decades done, I would be foolish to waste any time from the time I have left. Here in my in-home atrium of greenery are plants and a ficus tree which need my attention. They remind me how precious life is. They teach me to appreciate them, care for them, manage their lives-in-life, bury them in death. Forgive them when they are cranky, cheer for them as they grow, tend to them when they ail, cry for them when they can’t cry for themselves.
The secrets of dying are almost as mystical as the secrets of living.
Eager to grow up when I was young, speeding to meet so many goals, measuring my life by achievements so much so that I have often missed the beauty of things which matter. Now I’m trying to catch up. Now I’m trying to slow down as I have gotten older. Now I’m taking the time to see nature's beauty before my vision is weakened and you become mere blurs, colorless outlines without insides, before my hearing diminishes so I can no longer hear your barely audible rustling, you, my feisty long-enduring ficus tree. Your green leaves working over-time shading my atrium's plants from Tucson sun's powerfully potent rays. I fear my memory failing so I am no longer able to care of you, forgetting to spread life-giving water into your roots, forgetting to fertilize you, forgetting to prune you when you overspread your boundaries.
I pray for a long and healthy life so I can be here for you.
I stare at you, my atrium, my glassed-in-garden of greenery, you are the highlight of our home. You are everywhere, everywhere you make life. You are my reservoir of sunlight, you are my place of peace, you are my space of splendor, you are my holder of my life’s rhythms, my heartbeat. Should I forget openings and closings of each day and night, you remind me.
I value every moment watching you grow, you plant-children. Your differences delight me. You tiny polka-dotted plant. You calathea with zebra green-yellow-striped leaves. You zz with almost heart-shaped vv leaves, tiny petite, bright shiny green pristine leaves. You philodendron rambling, wandering as you grow greener and cover so much space. You croton with your stiff leathery leaves of vibrantly variegated colors, yellows, reds, greens, browns. You patricia with your celadon and dark-green-bordered leaves, you’ve been here for more than ten years, who knows what your life expectancy will be? You have the distinct honor of having the most longevity of any of my plants. And each summer you sprout tiny-twinkly-delicate little white flowers on your tiny green leaves. I cut away each flower to enable you to grow more vigorously and not deplete your energy. I feel sad doing this but I know it’s the right thing to do so you survive and thrive. You goldfish hanging plant, you prominently over-look all the other plants, you grow upwardly, you create nested intertwined branches of tiny delicate dark green leaves illuminated with reddish-tips of glow. You ficus tree, you lead by your tallness, your hearty green leaves reach out, spread wide.
*********************************************************
I.
When you die,
when your leaves wither, shrivel, yellow,
when you’re felled on gray shiny flat rocks,
when you no longer survive,
I visualize
tearing my black-in-mourning ribbon,
pinning it to my shirt
pausing to remember who you were.
II.
Tears from me descend
like condensation’s droplets
down atrium’s glass walls
In the genizah I store you
before burial.
The secrets of dying are almost as mystical as the secrets of living.
Cactus Attack
non-fiction
There we were, my husband and I, taking our daily one and a half mile walk from Sonoyta to Territory, north to south, south to north, in our subdivision in the Sonoran desert. We now start walking earlier and earlier in the morning or just before sunset to beat the Tucson summer heat. Even though Tucsonans brag that we have dry heat which is true, very little humidity here, heat at its hottest, occasionally 110 or 115 degrees, can still be difficult to bear. Considering the heat, that day we walked close to sundown, it was light enough to not need a flash light and cool enough to be comfortable.
My husband started itching his left shoulder. He said he may have inadvertently brushed by a cactus. Well, there is no inadvertently brushing by any cactus. Not here. No where. Not in any desert. Cacti are not people-people, they have no interpersonal savvy. They do not want to engage you in conversation. They are not friendly. They are stand-aloners. They have no impulse control. No cognition. Great thinkers in this universe have never been cacti. None that I know of anyway. Any touch stimulates a feared response: the enemy has arrived, fight back, spines do your work. Like an arrow released from its bow, instinctively they fly out and pierce human flesh. You have now become a prisoner of its spines—pain ensues, redness appears. My husband—its latest victim.
So here’s my husband in his classy walking outfit, wearing Tucson’s super-casual attire, beige special medical high-to-the knee hose and “the beast,” high class, high-end, overly expensive, $150.00 a pop Brooks state-of-the-art athletic shoes, above the knee light beige shorts and a white plain standard tee-shirt. A hoard of spines gathered on his left shoulder. Stupidly I tried to pick them off his shirt. With my fingers. Then I suffered with the spine thing, oooh, oooh, they hurt. A little blood appeared. These few thorns were paying cheap rent to reside, for however long, inside my fingers. I managed to release them pulling and paining. After feeling sorry for myself, got out of my own skin, to my husband I attended.
I helped my husband pull off his shirt. His handsome body was now evident, black haired with many gray hairs intertwined. I couldn’t take in his sexy body. Not even for a moment. I was focused on the remaining spines. Imbedded and un-releaseable. Sprinted home, no time to waste, we tried to figure out what to do next. We didn’t realize there were many more spines to fight off.
My husband discovered his avengers, more cactus spines. Yes, they poked through his pajama top. Ok, now what? Quickly and deftly he got out one of his many engineering tools, a shining silver mega-size tweezer, to do some minor surgery and expunge, exorcise the spines. Obliterate them. Once and for all. This was an ordeal. Involuntarily recruited, I became his health-helper.
Health things scare me, they always have, ever since my mother had her first heart attack. I was age 10, health things from then on un-glued me. I repressed for years fear of her demise. No wonder my level of anxiety rose considerably again.
Anyway back to our operating suite, actually it was my husband’s tiny office, he affectionately calls his cave. That’s how small and dark it really is. So tweezer to skin, that’s my job. Did I really know how to do this? Are you sure you want to trust me as your health-helper here? What if I need to call the paramedics if you pass out? What if these stingers decide to make permanent residence in your shoulder? What if you die? I don’t want to be a widow. That’s for when I’m much older. And besides, I only signed up to be your wife. Not a doctor. Not a nurse. Ok, I know the in sickness and in health part of the traditional American marriage ceremony. But ours is in Hebrew, so who knows what I agreed to.
My husband put on a very bright light. Now I could see what had been partially hidden before. These tiny minuscule spines were no longer totally invisible. The imbedded ones were the hardest to get out. And pulling out the imbedded ones distressed me as I pulled my husband’s hair and skin with it, not meaning to do so. Most of the time I was gentle. He seemed to have survived pretty well. Still breathing, still chatting. Maybe my help was working despite my reservations. His high tolerance for pain really helped.
Now these nasty minuscule devil spines have met their match. We have now avenged the enemies. They are forever attached to duct tape, you know, the very wide, stick to anything, gray colored tape to salvage any household mishap. Now these spines we very very carefully wrapped up, buried, and garbaged. Instead of sticking, pricking the shoulders of decent law-abiding citizens like my husband, they are now stuck forever, married unhappily to duct tape. No breathing either. I have no sympathy for them. Neither does my husband.
Should we have sued for damages? Not a realistic option. There are so many more infinite numbers of enemy spines out there in the desert. With potential to hurt others who brush by them. Suits would likely be thrown out of court.
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.
Dear Risa
Dear Risa:
I wish you could see me and I could see you. I’m wearing this beautiful hot pink mohair sweater you knitted for me fifty-four years ago. Your love is in every stitch. I feel it. You made sure to include every detail. You knitted braided columns for oomph! You covered over each white pearlized button with pink mohair to match. I’ll never let it go. It’s the only physical memento I have from you. I’ve remembered you all these years. You made a significant difference in my life.
Remember our apartment on Springdale Avenue in East Orange? When we were juniors at Upsala College? Well it wasn’t exactly an apartment. It was one very large room bedroom/living room/study area with long tall windows that allowed lots of sunlight in, and even in dark rainy days it was a pretty cheery place. Our mini-apartment was in a very large three story old house built in 1930 with a separate full kitchen, which included an eat-in area. We shared the bathroom with others who had rooms on the same floor. Privacy wasn’t a real concern of ours then. We reveled not having to live at home with our parents, not living in a dormitory with countless rules and regulations, our own place, our own space. I looked forward to becoming seniors and graduating together. Processioning and picking up our diplomas, greeting our parents, sharing personal and family joy together. Here’s where I get tearful, Risa. I am blotting up water droplets on this paper as I write. Thinking of how much you suffered and never lost your smile, never lost being kind to me and everyone else you knew.
Instead of returning to school for our senior year, I watched you being buried on a hot summer’s day, August 30, 1963 at Beth Israel cemetery in Woodbridge, NJ. I watched intently as your mom and dad and your younger brother each put shovels of dirt over your coffin. Then it was closed and lowered. It was a heart-wrenching scene. Seeing your distraught parents torn apart tore me apart. I turned away. I couldn’t look at them face-to-face. I convinced myself they couldn’t have seen me in the midst of this huge crowd of family and friends who came to comfort them and say good-bye to you.
Risa, I want you to know how much your family helped me. They protected me from knowing how sick you were. They protected me from earlier grieving. Until you died. Then it was a shock to me. A total shock. A bolt of sadness descended upon me. It surrounded me. It enclosed me. I couldn’t get free. How could such a loving, kind, benevolent, generous young woman be fated with lymphosarcoma, cancer of the lymph system, before she ever lived long enough to see her twenty-first birthday? A few months before you died, you said, Carol, pray for me. I heard your words concretely, literally. I didn’t listen to the underlying, pleading message. I missed pray for me to live, only pray that I return to good health. Of course I prayed for you. Of course, you would get better. How wrong was I!
After your burial, I couldn’t imagine being at another, not for a very long time. But my father’s was a little less than two years later. Letting you go was very difficult. Letting my father go was very difficult. But two holes in my heart remain.
Carol.