Monday, 8am
I never thought I'd be in 8 am yoga. Oh, my god do I hate the people in this class. They are mostly true believers--those who meditate before and after class, who chant and Om and have their own yoga mats. I can't remember to bring my sweatshirt to class most of the time, and the trunk of my car is too full of case files to fit a yoga mat. I would never miss class, though, because I can't. It's the only exercise I can do. You'll see why this is important, once I start recounting my week--a fairly normal week in my life.
10 am, staff meeting
The first part of the meeting is the usual paperwork update. I wonder sometimes about this part of the job--we have endless conversations about what to put on one line or in one box of a particular form, because a specific kind of answer--say, an X rather than an asterisk--can either expedite a referral or stall it, depending on the agency. The difference between an expedited or stalled referral can be huge--the equivalent of your mom remembering or forgetting to pay your school fees. If she forgets to pay, you end up denied your chemistry book in front of all the other kids in the class.
I get caught staring at something fascinating on the bottom of my shoe and realize I've missed the transition to part two. The bottom of my shoe is really interesting--there are swirls and logos. I guess people who walk behind me want to know what kind of shoes I wear--it's too bad I don't pick up my feet.
Part two of the staff meeting is painfully familiar--due to budget cuts, we're limited to a certain number of resources and no more. Don't go beyond the allotted hours for your job. Don't spend expense money on clients (children) unless absolutely necessary. Don't drive more than needed. Don't refer kids to good homes unless they are group care 1a's or b's--those kids are the ones for whom the state has allotted the most money, and the only kids for whom we can allot scarce resources. Their status is decided by a mathematical equation that takes into account things like combative histories and stays in mental health facilities, but every time the process is explained to me all I can think of is the way my seventh-grade math teacher taught us to remember the quadratic equation by putting it to the tune of "Jingle Bells."
11:30 am
I've escaped. I have a meeting with an elementary-school principal about an 11-year-old girl I'm still calling "the new girl" because she showed up last week on the doorstep of a foster home I work in, her worldly possessions in the trunk of her caseworker's car. The principal is concerned: The new girl has been heard in the hallways swearing, announcing that she's had sex before, and threatening second graders.
I catch myself unamazed at these meetings sometimes, and it's an out-of-body experience. The fact that this girl is 11 and announcing that she has had multiple sexual partners somehow doesn't even touch me. The principal and I spend most of the meeting discussing psychiatric evaluations, in-house counseling, and resource teachers. During the last 10 minutes she gives me the rundown on their school philosophy while I check my paperwork list. This meeting must be documented appropriately.
After the principal meeting I pull the new girl out of class so that I can take her to her counseling intake. These are fairly perfunctory meetings between clients (children) and therapists during which the therapists attempt to discover what the main goals of therapy should be. The new girl tells the therapist about the series of foster homes she's been in, about her visit to her mom last year, and about how much she misses her brother. The new girl says little about her therapy goals.
I take her back to school, but have to stop at Dick's to get her some lunch because she's missed the free school lunch. She wants me to keep her out of school for the rest of the day, and is lobbying hard for it. She has these huge, endearing eyes that she knows how to use, and somehow she can make ditching school seem like a reasonable choice. When I steadfastly refuse her she turns from cute to devilish on a dime and throws her French fries on the ground, screaming, "You're such a fucking bitch!" Then, turning to a passerby, she says, "Hey lady, she's not my mom--I'm not even supposed to be with her! Will you give me a ride?"
I want to tell the passerby it's not my fault; strangers walk by me, and I know they're wondering what I've done to this child. She'll probably tell some story about me when she gets to school, and her friends, teachers, and counselor will hopefully realize that the story she's telling is really about her neglectful parents, her four foster homes, and her lack of schooling.
As I shepherd the new girl back into my car, hoping I won't get milkshake in my hair, she pushes me while pinching the inside of my arm so hard that I drop everything in my arms. She doesn't speak to me all the way back to her school, and when we get there she smiles, apologizes, and returns to her classroom. I pull a blank incident report form from underneath the seat of my car and recount the hours' worth of the new girl weeping and leaving me with a bruise, put it in my notebook, and pull out of the school's parking lot.
2 pm
There's a note on my computer that says the director wants to see me. I avoid it. She isn't in the office, so I figure she's gone home for the day. I pull together my mileage and expense reports for the month and put them on her desk. I drove more than 900 miles last month. I get back into my car to head to a foster home. This one is difficult. They have an 11-year-old fire starter, and we didn't discover that she was a fire starter until after she was placed in the home. To my boss' credit she was the one who discovered it--the girl's case file was about 50 pages long when we got it, and this information was buried somewhere in the middle. There is something about case files that makes them impossible to read; they're all in strange fonts that make them look like they were printed in the '80s, and they're always full of inaccurate information and poorly written half-sentences.
I want to avoid the boss because I've heard already from a foster parent who heard from the secretary that they've decided to pass me over for a promotion. Instead, they've hired a guy named Bear who has no computer skills and has just moved here from another state, which means he'll need a background check that will take about six months, and until then he can't be alone with children. If they'd promoted me instead, they would have had to bump me up to 40 hours and give me a raise. He's working part-time, with no benefits and for less money than I make. The agency is in trouble, and we all know it. The group homes are running at a large deficit. One of them should really be shut down; it is run poorly, by a man who spends as little time there as possible. On top of that it's a crisis shelter that's supposed to take every child, and it makes more money when all of its beds are full, but it turns kids down all the time.
7 pm
I get home and reach into the refrigerator for a beer while I listen to my messages: two from my boss, one from my boyfriend saying that we need to talk, one from a foster parent with a child ready to run away, and one from my best friend, a program director for a social service agency. I call her back and tell her about my day, and she listens patiently before giving me a lecture about defending myself and asking me if my resumé is up-to-date.
I sit by the window drinking beer for a while, thinking about how I've gotten to this place. I tried to quit once before, and when I hinted to one of the foster parents about it she bought me a gift certificate for a massage and made all of her kids make cards pleading with me not to leave. Really, the only thing that kept me on the job wasn't bribery--it was the fact that my supervisors paid so little attention to what I did that I got away with a lot of subversive behavior. At election time I took a kid out and put up Gore/Lieberman signs in front of Bush/Cheney signs along a busy stretch of road in Snohomish County. My kids believe that the war on Iraq, based on the evidence we had, was illegal, that having the right to choose what happens to your body really matters, and that Maya Angelou is wonderful while Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway are tolerable at best. This is in part because of me, and none of this is my job, but it's fun to exert my influence.
Tuesday, 9 am
I'm in the director's office, wishing I could put this off. I broke up with my boyfriend and got rejected by graduate school last night, in one night. I know bad news is coming from work now, and I don't want to hear it. The associate director comes in and sits down and says that the agency is spending too much money on the work that I do, and that my job, as it exists in this moment, will dissolve in two weeks. I'm being offered another job that will have more responsibility, fewer hours, less money, and no benefits. I have a week to decide whether or not I want to take it. The new title: life coach.
The conversation is interrupted by a phone call from the fire starter's home. She's done it again: The foster parent is on her way over with the girl because they've narrowly escaped having their house burned down. The girl had taken a candle from the kitchen and lit it on the stove, gone out to the back porch, and lit some branches on fire. The wind blew the smoke inside and set off the large number of smoke detectors that had been installed recently. The girl comes in, dejected and sad, while I'm still on the phone. No one in the office makes any effort to talk to her. I pull some Mad Libs out of my bottom desk drawer and hand them to her.
I have to go back into the conference room to discuss the girl's future, so I convince a case manager to do a few Mad Libs with her until I'm through. I'm not the primary person in charge of this girl, and yet I seem to be the point person on her case. I am her entertainment committee, her interpreter, and the main consultant on the question of the day: What the hell do we do with this kid?
3 pm
I haven't had a chance to eat yet, as my boss and I have been looking for temporary shelter for the fire starter. We were stumped after the first 20 phone calls, all of whom said no immediately. It's not so surprising that no one wants her. She requires constant supervision. After several tries at temporary shelters I strong-arm a foster parent into taking her for a few days. Even the crisis shelters don't have to take her, and people who are paid $9 an hour staff them. Who wants to baby-sit a fire starter for $9 an hour? It requires constant thought about where the girl can get matches, candles, lighters, or two sticks to rub together while she's pretending to be going to the bathroom. I drive the girl out to the foster home and listen while she reads me the murder mystery she wrote.
Wednesday, 9 am
I am required by law to do a certain number of hours of training, so last month I signed up for a day of trainings on childhood mental illness and grieving. The training starts late and ends early. I doodle on my notebook while I think about how tired I am.
5 pm
The fire starter wants to go back where she was, but agency rules will not allow it. She is going into a mental health facility. I have to go to her temporary placement and tell her she can't return to the people she calls Mom and Dad. When a foster child refers to his or her mother or father it is impossible to know immediately who is being talked about--it could be a biological parent, an aunt, an uncle, or any in a string of foster parents. Each move, each home a foster child is sent to, requires the child to meet "new" parents. The fire starter is at the beginning of what will probably be a string of strangers she'll call Mom and Dad, until she has an even more complicated history, one that even she will be confused by, where no one will be able to tell if she is actually related to anyone she calls family.
Thursday, 9 am
A 17-year-old I have worked with for about a year and a half is pregnant. She is going to age out of the system in a few months, and she is unwilling to discuss adoption or abortion. When I tell my boss about the pregnancy my boss snickers and says, "Well, that's job security."
I'm getting serious pressure to respond to the director on whether or not I want to take the new patronizing job offer. The director pulls me aside before anyone else gets in this morning and tells me that I can extend my health insurance for another month if I take the new job, even if I quit on the first day. I have an autoimmune disorder and the agency knows how important my benefits are to me, and I stare at the director, wondering to myself if she can really be that calculating: She knows I am considering having surgery soon, she knows how important it is to me, and she also knows that if I take the new job I give up my unemployment benefits--which the agency would have to pay.
I think they feel like they've given me enough. They pay me more than anyone else in the field who has the same sort of title, and they probably think I don't deserve it. The thing is, I make $15 per hour and work 30 hours a week. That's barely a living wage. I don't sit down, I don't slack off, and I do everything I can to improve the lives of my kids.
Friday, 10 am, staff meeting
Last night I went to a birthday party for a client who is turning 18 and aging out of the system. He told me he'd been an asshole to everyone around him because he was freaked out about being on his own. He didn't know what to say to the people he'd hurt, and asked my advice. I told him to go to each of them and apologize for being an asshole.
After the meeting, the rest of the staff disperses and the director asks me what I've decided, and I look her in the eye and say, "I'm not taking the job. I'm sorry that you are an asshole."
Then I blink. I had that interaction with her in a fantasy. I look at her and explain patiently (I think) that I feel her offer is patronizing, and that I know she'd wanted an answer before now but I'd needed some time--most of my life had fallen apart in a day, and it'd taken me some time to gather my thoughts. She scowls at me and I get angry, really for the first time, because a small agency should be more sympathetic than this. A small agency should make more sense than this. I could have written a memo laying out expenditures they were making that could be cut back in the name of preserving the work I do with five children, but I didn't. Five seems like a small number, but it's more than nothing. It's a moot argument, though, because I realize in this moment that I'm not going to do this anymore.
"The answer is no," I say. I stand up and collect my things, smile at the secretary, and burst into tears as I leave the building.
Saturday, 10 am, a week after leaving my job
The week after my last day on the job I stop by the office to pick up a mileage check. My former boss gestures at me to sit down at her desk and then tells me all about the foster-parent crises she's had to deal with since I've been gone, and asks me if I can believe that they are demanding these things from her, these things that they're saying I did. She asks me if I think it's amazing that they really believe all of those things are reasonable to ask of the agency. I don't say anything at first, and then she asks me if they are telling the truth--did I really do all of that work?
Stymied, I have yet to say anything, so she assumes that she's in the right and she smiles at me. "Aren't people amazing?"
"Amazing," I say, and I walk out the door.
I'm going to struggle for a long time with regret over the crises in kids' lives that I might have been able to do something about. I probably changed very few lives during my time with the agency. I'm lucky if I made the lives of a few kids a little better.
Social workers often suffer from martyr complexes, for obvious reasons, and I am no exception to that rule. I never wanted to be the aggressively beleaguered advocate for the downtrodden, but I did suffer from the delusion that I could control the lives of the kids in my care, and was blindsided when chaos overwhelmed me. I called friends in the middle of the night asking them to help me track down a girl on the run involved in prostitution--a job for the police, not for me. I blamed myself for girls getting pregnant, for boys running away, for kids selling drugs, and for a thousand other failures. All the blame was selfish and useless. I'm one person, and it was a job, nothing more. It's what I did for a while.
I have a file on my desk at home full of letters of recommendation from foster parents and caseworkers. They are all glowingly positive--but the letters written by the foster parents are much more eloquent and moving than the ones written by caseworkers. Unfortunately they won't do me much good. I am looking for a new line of work.
