Sidebar: Slipping Through the Cracks
In a dowdy apartment complex on a busy stretch of Southeast
Division Street, not far from the Big Dollar Shopping Center,
Richard and Nancy sit on a threadbare couch staring at the
floor.
Nursing a shadow long past five o'clock, Richard Dunham,
32, scratches his head, his eyes puffy and tired. Nancy
Axsom, 25, dressed in sweats and a Statue of Liberty T-shirt,
hunches forward, resting her elbows on her knees.
Their apartment is immaculate, but their finances are a
mess. The phone was shut off months ago. The electricity
will be shut off tomorrow. The refrigerator is empty. They've
been swapping dirty clothes for days to save on laundry
costs.
Their savings account consists of a shot glass on the coffee-table
containing exactly two dollars and 50 cents.
Bob Rosholt, their apartment manager, has been trying to
avoid this moment for almost 18 months. He has spent countless
hours on the telephone with caseworkers and social-service
agencies. He has begged and pleaded with the building's
owner to be patient. But Richard and Nancy are now almost
four months behind on their rent. Unless they come up with
$475 by the end of the month, he won't have any choice but
to evict them. If that happens, he says, "I'm going to feel
like the ugliest man on the planet."
Richard and Nancy don't say anything. After the roller-coaster
ride they've been through, an eviction seems like a small
kink in the track. They have suffered through poverty, homelessness
and the agony of watching their four infant children be
taken away by the state--all of which has left them with
a somewhat fatalistic attitude. But that's hardly surprising,
because Richard and Nancy are both losers in the game of
genetic roulette, born with borderline mental retardation.
. . .
Like height, weight and shoe size, the distribution of
intelligence follows a relentless pattern known as the bell
curve. The average IQ is 100, and the majority of the population--roughly
66 percent--lies between 85 and 115. Below 85 sits a hazy
mental limbo known as "borderline" that extends until about
70, which signals the onset of true mental retardation.
On the surface, many people with a borderline IQ appear
quite normal, according to Portland psychologist Steven
Barry, who administers intelligence tests for state and
county agencies. "There's a lot of bluffing," he says. "They
nod and smile and do things to tell you they're following
your conversation. But they're not."
Behind the façade, borderlines have trouble with
a whole range of mental tasks, including mathematical reasoning,
problem-solving, short-term memory, vocabulary and attention.
They usually read at or below 4th-grade level, Barry says.
Nancy's IQ is 74. Richard's is 75. He explains it like
this: "Sometimes my brain works, and sometimes it doesn't.
I can read a newspaper, but not a big fat book. I'll be
stuck on the same page over and over. I forget where I am.
It's like there's a wall. And I can't get over that wall."
In some ways, Richard and Nancy would be better off if
their IQ were lower. Many states automatically grant
a variety of social services to anyone who scores 75 or
below on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, according
to Bill West, a social worker at the ARC of Multnomah County.
But Oregon regulations, which have not changed since 1977,
set the cut-off at 69.
That doesn't mean people like Richard and Nancy cannot
qualify for food stamps or Section 8 housing--but rather
that they have to navigate the labyrinthine government bureaucracies
on their own.
In that respect, they are hardly unique. Social workers
reckon there are anywhere between 12,000 and 15,000 people
in Multnomah County with borderline IQ who are potentially
eligible for these programs, but who obtain no assistance
from the county's Developmental Disabilities Services Division.
"There's a huge number of people who don't access these
programs," says ARC's West. "The cracks in the system are
more like chasms."
"There are tons of people out there with developmental
disabilities, who are above the eligibility line, and who
are desperately in need of services," agrees Howard Klink,
who manages the county's DD services. "It's a tragic situation."
With a decent income, stable housing, strong family support
and adequate health care, most, if not all, borderlines
are fully capable of leading happy and productive lives.
But what happens if those props collapse--or were never
present in the first place? Faced with adversity, borderlines--like
anyone else--struggle to do the best they can with what
they've got. But as the story of Richard and Nancy demonstrates,
it is often an unequal struggle.
. . .
Twice a week, Richard drags himself out of bed at 6 o'clock
and boards the Tri-Met No. 4 bus downtown to the Alpha Plasma
Center on Northwest 5th Avenue and Burnside Street. Twice
a week, he lies back on a reclining gurney and stares at
the wall, listening to Z100 on his walkman while he pumps
his blood into the machine.
Two hours and 901 cc's later, the cashier marks his fingernail
with a fluorescent dye and hands him two crisp $10 bills.
Richard has been donating plasma twice a week--the maximum
Alpha will allow--for six years now, earning about $160
a month. "That's pretty much the only job I never get fired
from," he says.
Born and raised in American Samoa, Richard knew he was
different from the start. He grew up scared to death of
his two older brothers, who used to torment him with mock
interrogations, hitting him on the head with a broom if
his answers displeased them.
Richard failed all his classes his freshman year of high
school. He wanted to go into the Army, like his father,
but flunked the entrance exam six times. "The military guys
said I was the dumbest kid they ever met," he says.
In 1993, tiring of living at home with his mother, he left
Samoa and came to Portland to live with his sister and her
husband. It didn't work out. One night, after an argument,
Richard packed his bags and moved into a friend's trailer.
He worked a string of odd jobs. Then, the following year,
at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's house, he met Nancy.
Nancy's mother was just 13 years old when she was born,
in Santa Rosa, Calif. Her family later moved to Portland,
where Nancy attended Sunnyside Elementary. One day, when
she was 8 years old, her stepfather got mad at her because
she couldn't pronounce the word "orchestra." The next day
she went to school with a black eye, a fat lip and a welt
across her face. Her teacher alerted state authorities,
who put her into foster care.
Nancy eventually graduated from Marshall High School with
a modified diploma. Later she worked as a cashier at Kienow's
during the 1994 grocery strike. As soon as the strike was
over, she was laid off. She never worked again.
Nancy and Richard started dating in 1994 and decided to
move in together a few months later. What happened next
should have come as no surprise: Nancy got pregnant. Their
first daughter, Katie, was born in November 1995.
Richard and Nancy had always been poor, but they had never
quite realized how difficult it would be to raise Katie
on Richard's $200-a-week paycheck from washing windows.
Their address was constantly shifting: an apartment on Sandy,
a fourplex on Albina. When Katie was 7 months old they moved
into a battered old house on Southeast Gladstone with five
other people. "We didn't have the food to feed Katie properly,"
Nancy says. "We had food stamps, but if you put food in
the refrigerator it'd be gone the next day."
Meanwhile, their housing situation deteriorated. They were
sleeping on a couch in the living room. Nancy was drinking.
They were in constant conflict with their roommates, and
the heat and the water were both shut off.
On Jan. 5, 1997, after several drinks, they got into a
shouting match. Richard called 911. When the police showed
up, Nancy said she'd thrown Katie against a wall, a confession
she now says she made up in the hope of getting some help
for their daughter. "In a way, I regret I said that," she
says. "But in a way, I don't, because Katie was hungry and
we didn't have enough food."
Because Katie had no bruises or injuries, child-abuse charges
against Richard and Nancy were dropped. But that telephone
call brought them into contact with the State Office for
Services to Families and Children--a development that would
change their lives forever.
SCF caseworkers took Katie into protective custody, and
Richard and Nancy were ordered to complete programs in drug
and alcohol treatment, parenting and domestic violence and
to undergo a psychological evaluation if they wanted to
get her back.
But in the meantime, their lives imploded. Richard lost
his job, plunging them into homelessness. Without a telephone
number, a mailing address or money for bus fare, they simply
dropped out of the system. They never saw Katie again.
. . .
In the shadow of Powell Butte, at the end of a rutted gravel
road called Southeast Mall Street, sits a tiny shotgun shack--a
glorified toolshed without plumbing or electricity--where
Richard and Nancy spent the summer and fall of 1997, paying
$150 a month to their Samoan landlord. While Richard sold
plasma and hunted for work, Nancy suffered through another
pregnancy, hungry and isolated.
In October 1997, she gave birth to their second daughter,
Misty, at University Hospital. Alerted by hospital staff,
SCF caseworkers intervened. There was no way they were going
to allow Richard and Nancy to raise children in the shack.
They let Nancy hold Misty for just a few hours before she
handed her baby girl over to the foster mother, sobbing
and wailing.
In January 1998, Richard and Nancy signed papers permanently
relinquishing their parental rights to Katie and Misty--in
part because they believed that this act of cooperation
would count in their favor in the future. "I thought that
signing away our rights to our daughters would give us the
rights to the next ones," Richard says.
Within weeks, Nancy was pregnant again. "I wanted a child,"
she says. "I wanted to start a family. I kept thinking things
would get better."
They had some reason for optimism. Richard had landed a
security job that paid him $7 an hour--a princely sum, by
their standards--and they had stumbled upon an unlikely
ally: a white-haired, barrel-chested retiree named Bob Rosholt,
who rented them a one-room apartment despite their spotty
credit history.
Knowing another child was on the way, Richard and Nancy
both quit drinking and did their best to comply with SCF's
requirements: parenting workshops, drug and alcohol counseling,
psychological evaluations. Although they had trouble keeping
their appointments, by the time Andrew was born, in November
1998, they believed they would be able to keep him. "I had
the feeling I was going to take him home, because we had
a house," Nancy says.
But circumstances were working against them. Two months
before, Tammy Hyslop, a Portland mother with borderline
intelligence, was charged with shaking her 23-month-old
daughter Kathy Garcia to death. The tragedy was heightened
by the fact that SCF workers had removed Kathy into foster
care shortly after she was born, but eventually returned
her to Hyslop, with fatal consequences.
In the aftermath of the Hyslop affair, SCF caseworkers
were hardly in the mood to take chances. The morning after
Andrew was born, they appeared at Nancy's hospital bed and
told her she could not take him home. She grew hysterical.
"I was mad," Nancy says. "I was crying. I started yelling
at them."
Despite their previous experience, Richard and Nancy believed
they had a fighting chance to get Andrew back. They got
hooked up with a caseworker at ARC. They went to parenting
classes. And they began a round of "family unity meetings,"
where they met regularly with Andrew and his foster mother,
and a whole panoply of interested parties: an SCF caseworker,
an ARC caseworker, a community health nurse, Richard's parenting
coach, Nancy's parenting coach and a slew of legal assistants.
At the meetings, the assembled group worked out a strategy
to gently transition Andrew back to his parents. SCF paid
their overdue bills to US West so they could get their phone
service reconnected. Richard got a graveyard shift at the
Sunrise Nursing Home. They completed parenting classes.
They began regular visits with Andrew three times a week
at the SCF office at Southeast 122nd Avenue and Powell,
where they were allowed to play with him for 90 minutes
at a stretch under the watchful eye of a caseworker who
monitored them from behind a one-way mirror.
Caseworker Bernadine Douglass of ARC helped them pick out
a crib and a stroller and did a safety walk-through of the
apartment. By July 1999, their visits were up to four hours
at a stretch. On Aug. 3, they brought Andrew home for his
first overnight visit.
. . .
The visit did not go as planned. Andrew was, like his sisters,
a high-maintenance baby, and he cried all night. Nancy's
frequent pregnancies, combined with poor nutrition, had
drained the calcium from her body and left her teeth decayed
and rotting. Her back hurt. And to top it all off, she was
pregnant yet again.
By dawn, Nancy was exhausted and overwhelmed. "It wasn't
working out at all," she says. Although the visit was not
supposed to end until 1 pm, she called her SCF caseworker
at 8:30 that morning and asked for Andrew to be picked up
early.
The turning point came at a Sept. 13 hearing at the Multnomah
County juvenile justice center on Northeast 68th Avenue.
The session was supposed to be a routine opportunity for
the judge to get an update on the case. In the small wood-paneled
courtroom, Judge Nan Waller (who is technically known as
a referee) asked two social workers, counselor Tina Mann
of SCF and Bernadine Douglass of ARC, for their assessment.
Both began on a positive note. But both added that Nancy
had confided in them that she felt unprepared to take care
of Andrew full-time.
As the hearing dragged on, Nancy kept her eyes downcast,
while Richard became more and more vocal, speaking out of
turn even as his attorney tried to calm him down. "He was
adamant," says Andrew's foster mother, Leah Bellamy, who
watched the proceedings from the gallery. "He was determined
to have Andrew at home."
Finally, Waller asked Nancy point-blank if she was ready
to parent Andrew. Richard tried to answer for her. "I am
not speaking to you, Mr. Dunham," Waller said. "I want to
hear from Miss Axsom."
All eyes turned to Nancy, now seven months pregnant. For
almost a year, she had tried her hardest to follow the program,
to please Richard, and to keep her family together, hoping
that she would find some way to take care of her baby boy.
For almost a year, she had struggled to overcome her disability
by sheer force of will, as if parenting classes and government
programs could somehow erase the kinks and dents in her
brain.
But now, sitting before the judge, she could no longer
hold back the truth. With tears streaming down her cheeks,
Nancy told the court she couldn't do it.
"We were all bawling," says Bellamy. "Everyone was crying,
even the attorneys. Nancy was just heartbroken."
There were no more visits after that.
. . .
There are an estimated 900 families in Multnomah County
in which one or both parents have some form of mental retardation.
Under the right circumstances, many of these parents can
raise their kids without intervention.
But often those circumstances prove maddeningly elusive.
Although SCF does not compile figures for parents with mental
retardation, ARC caseworkers reckon they have seen dozens
of low-IQ parents lose custody of their children in the
past three years. According to ARC caseworker Bill West,
once these families get involved with SCF, it is often difficult
for them to remain together. "The system can be ruthless
in these sorts of cases," West says.
SCF officials vigorously deny any suggestion that they
are prejudiced against mentally retarded parents. Mental
retardation is "absolutely not" a reason to remove children
into protective custody, says Carolyn Graf, the branch manager
of SCF's East County office.
But anyone who has been awakened at 2 am by a screaming
toddler, or tried to match wits with a teenager, can appreciate
the red flags raised by parents who suffer sub-par intelligence.
And even state officials will admit, when badgered, that
a low IQ can contribute to poverty, unemployment, homelessness
and poor parenting skills--all of which increase the risk
of child abuse or neglect.
In the final analysis, SCF officials concede that their
paramount duty is to protect the child, not to provide social
services to the parents--even if those services might ultimately
allow the family to be reunited.
Two months after Andrew was taken away, Nancy gave birth
to their fourth child, Matthew. SCF workers removed him
from her within 48 hours. Richard and Nancy were too demoralized
to put up much resistance. "I didn't want to fight any more,"
says Richard. "I'm just getting sent down the same road
as before."
For five years, Nancy had deliberately eschewed birth control
because of her desire to raise children. But in January,
she agreed to let a doctor insert a Norplant implant into
her upper arm. The six tiny contraceptive tubes should prevent
her from getting pregnant for the next five years.
Nancy seldom leaves the apartment any more. She passes
the time by watching TV or doing crossword puzzles from
a book. When the puzzles get too hard, she tears the answers
out of the back and simply copies them into the grid.
"I feel depressed lately," she says, flipping through photos
of Andrew with his foster mother. "It's so sad to see my
son in all these pictures with someone else. It's sad because
they say this woman is better than me."
Later, she shows a visitor a cardboard fruit box containing
wads of toilet paper. Inside are the newest members of her
family--a bright-eyed pair of baby rats Richard bought for
her at the pet store. She feeds them popcorn, and holds
them while they drink from a water bottle. Sometimes they
get out of the box and scurry around. But most of the time,
they stay in the box, huddling together for warmth and comfort.
SLIPPING
THROUGH THE CRACKS
It is difficult to know what to make of Nancy and Richard's
situation. But it's hard not to agree that, given their
circumstances, raising children would be an extraordinary
challenge.
SCF officials declined to discuss Richard and Nancy's case
with WW, citing confidentiality (despite the fact
that Richard and Nancy signed an explicit waiver for this
article). Nonetheless, it is clear that there are two issues
that made their problems almost impossible to overcome.
The first is the almost medieval practice of making parents
pay support for children that have been taken away. The
rationale for this is simple enough--it is supposed to prevent
deadbeat dads (and moms) from sticking the state with the
costs of caring for kids. In this case, however, it resulted
in a crippling burden. Last year, Richard earned a mere
$5,400, but paid almost half that amount--$2,048--in child
support.
It is also puzzling that despite the extraordinary efforts
of their landlord, Bob Rosholt, Richard and Nancy were never
connected with any of the government programs--such as food
stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, the Oregon Health Plan,
General Assistance or Supplemental Security Income--that
could have helped them retain their children.
Rosholt chalks this up to bureaucratic incompetence. "These
kids--this is what the system is designed for," he says.
"It makes me sick to my stomach."
But according to Richard and Nancy's former ARC caseworker,
Bernadine Douglass, the real reason is more poignant. Richard
and Nancy were afraid to sign up for government programs,
she says, for fear it might count against them in the battle
to regain their kids. They were so anxious to project what
social workers call the "cloak of competency" that they
cut themselves off from the very resources that might have
enabled them to succeed.
Richard and Nancy don't buy this theory. "It's not because
we're not willing," Richard says. "We need someone to take
us by the hand. The world is closed to us. It's not like
we can go and read all these papers. Someone has to explain
it to us."
Six days before WW went to press, it appeared that
Nancy's application for General Assistance had been approved.
Although GA pays only $300 a month, the money will help
them to stave off eviction proceedings, at least for now.
--CL
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