Just Another Day At The Office - Annals of A Social Worker

I'd been in emergency care long enough to convince myself I'd seen every nasty,evil thing out there. That changed one morning when I got to work and was told to get out to City Hospital "chop,chop". A woman was dying, actually, seemed to be refusing to die until she could see her social worker, more to the point, see her many children, each child damaged physically as well as mentally. I'd just inherited this family from their former case worker. All of the children were now in my care.

I can't remember her name, but their mother was hospitalized with brain cancer. A month before I was assigned to children's division she'd been expected to die after each breath she took. When they thought she would not survive the night, the sisters of her Baptist church - I heard six;I heard eight - rushed to her hospital bed, surrounded it, and began to pray, to sing and pray,to exhort "Sister,remember your children". They kept at it all night, singing and praying and clapping. Hospital personnel told them keep it down, but the only keepin' down they did was to clap a little softer. At some point,in the early hours of the morning,the woman reached out her hands as if gripping a bar, pulled herself up, and went home. She had to see her children, see they were all right. Now, she was back in the hospital, ready and about to die.

City Hospital was a huge, uninviting structure where the poor went to die, a gigantic maze, difficult to negotiate. Eventually, after many wrong turns, I found the right room. Two of the sisters, very large, imposing women, stood outside the door. Had to be them.

Assured that I was the case worker, they ushered me inside where four more sisters stood around the bed, women you did not want to  piss off. They reminded me of an enormously popular gospel group in the fifties and early sixties - The Seven Tons of Glory! Seven very, very "big" women with voices that shook the rafters and brought down the roof. I was taken to her bedside while a sister gently shook her. She was emaciated, fragile as a human could be, almost not there except for those eyes filled with death. "Sister, the man's here." Her eyes fluttered,fixed on me.

     "Children?", she tried to vocalize the word but all I could hear sounded like gravel and wheeze.     

     "Fine. Doing well." In fact, I hadn't yet met even one of them.

     She fought to get the words out. "Good kids."

     "Yes, ma'am." She squeezed my hand with the pressure of butterfly wings and shut her eyes. I started to move away but she held on.

     "Nobody hurt 'em."

     "Yes, ma'am. Nobody."

     "Nobody.

     "Yes, ma'am."

She died shortly after I left.

It fell to me to round up the children and get them to their mother's funeral. They were scattered around the city, mostly in foster homes, and co-workers helped to gather them. I drove out to Rosewood, a "home" for the mentally "challenged", to pick up a young girl, one of the daughters, a ten year old. I knew from her file that she was a double amputee. Her father left her in the kitchen during a cold winter with the stove burners going for warmth. At some point she climbed up on the stove, caught fire, legs burned off. The next winter, in order to teach her a lesson, he locked her out on the porch in a snowstorm without her prosthetic legs. 

ROSEWOOD

I hadn't yet been there. It was way out in the boonies, somewhere inaccessible, but I found it. A long road lead up to the housing units. I drove past a hillside where children were playing: rolling down hills, tagging each other, romping, laughing - except,I suddenly realized, these were not children but fully grown adults, some actually, much older. A strange sight - people with gray hair swinging, on the sliding board, giggling, shouting, falling down and laughing. Hard to wrap the mind around this one. The world through a distorted lens. A world turned inside out.

I parked, got instructions from the main building, and went to find the cottage that housed my client. I didn't like that word. Client. They were flesh incarnate. Humans. Damaged, yes, but still with feelings, dreams, ideas, desires. My job was to protect them not label them. 

It was a hot day. My mind must have wandered. It often did. It often does. I followed a path, turned, followed another one, arrived at the cottage, a small, brick structure I believed to be hers, climbed the steps, rapped on the door, waited, rapped again, waited more until I heard the sound of a chain sliding through whatever held it. Did I think this unusual? Yeah, but everything about this job was unusual. I waited as the chains were drawn through and the door opened. The person who opened it had no face - oatmeal skin, specks for eyes, specks for breathing, speck for a mouth. Holy shit! I forced myself to stay calm. I did not want to cause this creature any discomfort. He had enough. Almost instantly an attendant raced up, took charge, and gently led the man away. I had come to the wrong place. Eventually, I found her. I believe an attendant went with us, but I'm not sure. Those days were somewhat less cautious than these.

At the funeral, a beaten, stooped little man in orange prison garb, handcuffed, flanked by two burly guards came in. He seemed stunned, unsure of where he was. It was a shock when I realized this cipher of a man was the father who had mercilessly brutalized all these children. They had been sitting on a row of wooden chairs in front of the coffin. Happy to see each other but mostly composed, they paid little attention to him. My little girl rolled her wheelchair up beside the coffin. Others joined her. Not all. When some organ music began to play, they moved back to their chairs, some of them weeping, softly.

As always, when I write about my time as a social worker, I have no endings because there were no endings. I don't know what happened to them all. I disappeared from them. They disappeared from me. Only feelings are left.

One thing I did takeaway - the extraordinary love and care of the mothers I met for their children. I remember once somewhere I was talking with a wealthy and entitled fellow. How did the subject of a woman we both knew who worked in a bar come up? She was in love with someone we also knew who loved her back. My conversation partner kind of shivered with repulsion. "What does a girl who works in a bar know about love?", he blurted. My jaw dropped. I couldn't even laugh. The reasoning of a person like this might be,if somehow the topic came up, "What do poor, colored, irresponsible, coca-cola-and-potato-chip-courtesy-of-the-state welfare mothers know about love?" 

Contrary to the ignorant notion of the "welfare queen", it's hard work being poor. It took those women a great deal of effort simply to get by. Ghetto mothers, really bottom of the barrel poor- ragged clothes, waiting in the welfare line for peanut butter and a five pound chunk of cheese per week, constantly navigating an inhuman bureaucracy, kids with rickets, old buildings with lead flakes to chew on, women treated with disdain - impoverished women devoted to their kids. I'm not gonna argue the absurd idea of the poor bilking the state by cranking out babies to get more welfare. If you've ever been pregnant you know how dumb that is. I'm also not going to defend multiple pregnancies and too many children. In a more perfect world these would not be. Still, as bleak as those children's lives had become, they would have been much bleaker without the enormous love of those women, women who made their children feel as if they're always tucked in their mother's arms.