Molly McGrath Tierney

The other day I met up with a woman I have known for more than 30 years. I do not have a word for our relationship. Friend? No, although I do love her dearly. Caseworker? Not anymore, as that chapter of our story has closed. Relation? Colleague? Not quite.

I had called her for a favor. I’m making a movie about child welfare, and I needed someone to explain to the film director what it feels like to have a caseworker come into your home armed with the threat of separating you from your children.

First, though, we talked about what it feels like to be a mom. Having one and being one are drastically different experiences. Your firstborn crashes you into a new intimacy. The little one responds to your smell and your voice. Feeding him is the joy of a lifetime; you and you alone are keeping this beloved little being alive. We each found, inside us, a mother bear with a ferociousness we did not know we had. The need to be near our baby was desperate. We both theorize this is a thing only mothers know, and we agree that having a child restructured our sense of self. It gave us the profound understanding that the only reason we are on this earth is to care for this little person.

Next comes a part of our story that is harder for us to revisit.

When we first met, it was the early 1990s in Chicago. She had six beautiful children, four of whom were under the age of six. I was her child welfare caseworker, part of a team dispatched to families in an effort to keep their children out of foster care.

She had a lease in public housing and lived in the high rises in the Robert Taylor Homes and, later, Cabrini Green. We both recall a bleak landscape — as if the earth around brutalist buildings had been worn to a nub.

Rats as big as raccoons roaming the halls. Piss-filled elevators that were broken half the time anyway (which was great when you have six kids, a month of groceries, and a unit on the 14th floor). Radiant heat that came up through the floors, with some kind of maniacal thermostat that had the units sweltering in February. Cinderblock walls where even the best tape could not get a drawing to stick. Addicts everywhere with their dope fiend version of crazy. The constant threat of gun violence. Often, being pinned for hours in the apartment until the shooting stopped.

Like most caseworkers, I was young, eager, and well meaning. Despite never having parented, I was taught that I could discern the most vital of questions about a family: does a child belong there? The method of answering that question was to enter the family sphere — at my whim and without advance notice — to observe, inquire and interpret behavior. I was the most dangerous of combinations: bold and ignorant.

Back then, she was embroiled in heroin addiction, an unrelentingly selfish and demanding drug. This had typical byproducts: premature infants failing to thrive, very young children left at home without adult supervision, missed doctor’s appointments, poor school attendance, meager food in the house…. I thought the problem was she did not understand and went about helping her solve those problems with zeal.

When we sat together to talk, there were tears and laughter as we pulled from the depths of our memory and joined the two halves of our story. We recalled the craziness of a house with all those young children. The particular challenge of managing two of them, impossible boys, with their father’s hard blood running through their veins.

The time I saw her four-year-old walking down 41st Street on his own and we realized he had learned the bus routes. (He would exit the craziness of the house unnoticed, then at the bus stop get some stranger boarding the bus to hold his hand and slip on unnoticed to take himself to Grandma’s house.)

The time I came over to find the five-year-old had put a rubber band on his two-year-old brother’s wrist. It was constricting blood flow, and his hand was swelling. But there was so much yelling in the house no one heard his wails. We scrambled to find scissors.

The worry with which we tracked her baby girl’s feeding schedule, praying every day that she would gain weight. The way I would just pop up in public housing as if I were normal and belonged there. How I would often visit just as she was getting high, making her irritated that she had to put all her paraphernalia up until I left.

The flowered couch on which we sat the first time she trusted me and shared that her children’s father was beating the children and had choked her unconscious the previous evening. How mad she was at me when I selected for her an inpatient treatment facility that was out in the country.

The day I took her children from her. The crushing feeling of knowing her newborn daughter would not know her.

That last one is a bitter memory, so we were quiet for a while.

Then she told me the story of her son’s recent, untimely death and the arrival of grandchildren on her doorstep. She was given custody, and the state child welfare agency showed up again. They count now 35 reports to child welfare that allege she is abusing or neglecting her children. That’s when I realized that while my part of the story ended, hers has continued.

Child welfare never left.

She talked about the array of investigators she has known over the past three decades. They treated her like she was stupid because she was uneducated. They spoke to her as if she were incapable. They were always telling her what to do without understanding the context she was in. They came in with all the power and ran roughshod over her house.

By inserting someone who didn’t belong, it disrupted her ability to parent her children. She sees the child welfare system now as the enemy of families, there with the explicit purpose of doing damage. All the while, individual investigators wear convenient blinders, so they do not see themselves as a part of the problem.

From her perspective, it was the visits from caseworkers that tipped her addiction. Caseworker visits were so overwhelming that she turned to her drug of choice for relief. That’s how it works, of course; all addicts are simply seeking relief. By making the stress level intolerable, we threw her into all-encompassing addiction and then “solved” the problem we created by dissecting the family. Which is to say: we thought we were solving a problem when, actually, we were creating it. She and I can run the list of her beautiful children and name the damage it did.

Taking the long view, she is an unusual success story. After losing all her children to foster care, she fought her way back and got them home, one by one. It took years of labor, and the credit for success is hers alone. This weekend she’ll celebrate 28 years sober. She plans to open a home for women who are struggling with domestic violence and addiction — a haven like the one she needed when she was in their shoes.

She says if caseworkers could just come in open to understanding and ask simple questions. “What, in your opinion, is the problem that needs solving?” And “how can I help?” She feels sure that kind of intervention would be more likely to keep families together.

I concede to her that if I could turn back the clock, I’d like to think I would have done things differently. If so, we might have avoided so much of the damage we did. She is gracious and full in her strength of recovery, interpreting the events as critical to her healing journey. Without them, from her perspective, she might not have kicked her habit.

I am less sure. I am not certain the outcome could have been averted, if for no other reason than we arrived at her doorstep so late in the cycle. We began already too far downstream to achieve what we had hoped.

It does leave me more desperate to alter child welfare at its very core. As an industry, we presume a new policy or practice model is the first step. I wonder now if a place to start is a more personal reframe.

Instead of training caseworkers to wield power that most of them are far too inexperienced to manage, we could open their minds to the human condition. It would go something like this: not everyone gets a fair shake in life. You have the chance to stand next to someone who is struggling and see the world from their perspective. If you get it right, you might help them see choices they can make that will ease their burden.

Until then, the movie we make will have her fingerprints all over it. Maybe it’s a start.