Mothers pay for bad decisions

Every time I see Christy Marr, the mother of dead foster child Logan Marr, on television, I feel like I know her. Yet I have never met her.

I guess she reminds me of so many other mothers I have met, birth mothers of the foster kids I have had in my home. They all share that same haunted look.

I think Tim McGraw says it best in a county song when he describes a woman as having “years of bad decisions written on her face.” The woman in the song is homeless, but she has her child “wrapped around her legs.” Christy and the mothers I know are haunted because they don’t. They made enough bad decisions to lose them to DHS.

What kind of bad decisions can cost a mother her children? Choice of men is a big one. If a woman chooses an abusive man, and the children witness the abuse, that’s considered failure to protect, as well as emotional abuse. Choosing a bad baby sitter can be a failure to protect as well, if the baby sitter does something to hurt the child.

Leaving the child without a baby sitter is and example of neglect. Then there is medical neglect. As an emergency room nurse I’ve seen cases of that called in. Once a 4-year-old was brought in with a bad sunburn. It was neglect because it was day three of the sunburn and the first time the mother sought help. Just being an alcoholic can cost you your children, even though experts say alcoholism is a disease, not a lifestyle choice.

The worst decision is to let life’s stresses beat you down so far you take it out on your children, with hitting, refusing to say “I love you,” and overly long timeouts (10 minutes is the limit). Those things all qualify as abuse, not neglect.

What kind of women make these bad choices? Young, poor and single ones more than mature, educated and married ones. At least to look at the foster care rolls, that appears to be true. Though I have to say, I was 27, married and educated when I started my family and I made a lot of bad decisions. I made some of the same bad decisions I just mentioned (my son still has scars from the sunburn), but no one ever threatened to take my children. We all have low points in our lives, weak moments in parenting. That’s all my bad decisions were. That’s why DHS let me have a foster care license in spite of my failings.

But in the end the women who really make the worst parents are the ones who had the worst parents. They may love their children and desperately want to do right by them, but they never learned how. Some never learned how to take care of themselves, let alone a child. So their kids end up in the hands of the state. Hence, the haunted look. They failed to protected their children from the worst abuser of all, DHS.

Logan Marr was moved from foster home to foster home, back with mom and then back in care again. She was choked in one foster home and died in the last.

But the foster kids I’ve had in my home have suffered almost as much as Logan in our attempt to keep them safe from bad mothers. First they all have the emotional trauma of the removal itself. Kids who were removed because they witnessed domestic violence say the removal was far more painful.

Several of my foster kids had been sexually molested in foster care. Others were beaten. One was threatened by his foster father who said he was going to find him some day and blow his brains out. Another was starved, isolated and humiliated by a sadistic foster mother.

Some of us work hard to provide good homes for our foster kids. But we become just another stop on the road to hell when they get moved, with no warning and no explanation, just when they are beginning to get comfortable. It happens all the time.

In the end, these kids suffer the worst kind of serial parenting. They have to learn a new set of rules every time they move to a new home. They are too stressed to learn anything in school. They have trouble making friends, and if they do, it is only with other damaged children.

Many eventually give up on following anyone’s rules. They are going to make terrible citizens some day and terrible parents. As long as we as a society choose to remove kids rather than help their parents do better, you can be sure those kids will go on to produce the next generation of foster children. It is a cycle, but not a hopeless one. Just one we have allowed to become hopeless.

I pray no one else ever has to face what Christy Marr is facing. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Mary Callahan, of Lisbon, is an emergency room nurse and foster parent.