Irony

By Jody Wheeler (JodyWheeler.Com)

March 05, 2004

You'll have to excuse the lack of postings. I've been a little preoccupied. You see, I got shot the other day.

Last Tuesday, I responded to an emergency call: Kids in danger. Domestic violence. One parent threatened to kill the other parent and the kids. Social worker --me-- to evaluate the safety of the kids. (It's always fun when the referral come across my desk emblazoned with "DANGER! SOCIAL WORKERS TO RESPOND WITH POLICE ESCORT. FATHER THREATENED TO KILL CHILDREN" emblazoned on it in an 18-point bold face font.)

So I motor into a not particularly nice part of Los Angeles, sheriff's deputies in tow. I've got a new worker with me -- The Rookie -- his second day in Emergency Response, his first time responding to one of these nifty, gotta’ see 'em now calls. We've already chatted about the insanity of working for the County, the nonsensical paperwork and how cute cops are in their pressed uniforms and their spit shined shoes reflecting the winter rays of the beautiful California sun. (Hey, it's always nice to find another 'Mo on the job. Mind you, it's not particularly hard as about half the guys in the office read the same books I do, but we don't always get partnered up on emergency calls.) He's asking me what to expect on this call and I'm trying to tell him that I have no clue -- but do it in a very authoritative, resounding, impressive way that bespeaks to my ability to hide my lack of prescience in matters such as this.

We hit the front door to the rather nice little Craftsman, cute Latino deputies leading the way. They're decked out in khaki outfits, badges knight sticks and bullet proof vests. I'm in jeans and tennis shoes, sporting a little plastic ID card put together by an office secretary on a paper cutter with super-glue, an Exacto knife and a Polaroid picture snapped when I was still a wide-eyed and eager pup out to save the world.

The deputies' finger itches toward the bell...his partner is off to the side covering him... the neighbor grabs her kid and closes a big white door with a rolling clap... Me and the New Guy watching as the cop puts one hand on the butt of his pistol...

And my phone rings.

Nice melodious symphonic number -- free with my Samsung -- that sends air into our lungs and attention towards the little chirping flip phone on my belt. It's the Mother, calling me back from her office, wanting to know why we're bothering her. Stating over and over again that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion, that there really isn't a problem and that we're just going to get her husband really, really, angry if we keep at this and besides, her kids aren't even there and--

I spring into action, being threatening, therapeutic, understanding and probing all at the same time. (Try it sometime. It's a lot like running, standing still and doing mid air somersaults simultaneously -- damn near impossible, very noisy in the attempt, but ultimately quite beautiful.) Eventually, after she stops crying, after she realizes how serious all of this is, after she understands that I just am not going away, she discloses that her children are at their grandparents house in yet another, even less desirable part of Los Angeles, and her husband is at work. I tell her to meet me at the grandparent's home as soon as she can.

One of the less convenient aspects of Los Angeles is that that the Sheriff's department manages some sections of the city, local police other parts, and city-wide LAPD other sections still. It's a patchwork of jurisdictions, overlaps and boundaries, where no two police organizations co-exist and we social workers are forced to figure out who claims what zip code as theirs. Same thing can't be said for we social workers. We go everywhere, do everything and see everyone, no matter the hour. It's all our bloody jurisdiction.

The Cute Latino Deputies say they can't follow to the new address. It's LAPD territory. Besides, they've got a 211 in progress to respond to. I still don't know what a 211 is, but it's must be pretty important given how fast they blazed away, lights spinning and siren blaring.

I wasn't expecting the grandparents home to be so messy. It was pile on pile of garbage; gradients of decay, with bottles on top of paper on top of older bottles on top of discarded cartons of half eaten KFC. A treasure trove for future archeologists I'm sure, but currently a breeding ground for several small, wiggly things that I didn't know existed outside of the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars.

Grandma knew we were coming, her daughter probably called her the moment she hung up with me. Grandma's hands seemed to be full dealing with her own husband, a man teetering precariously with each step, gravity drawing him down, his slurred speech, blunt affect and glazy eyes giving some clue as to the causes of the decay. The Rookie mouthed the usual variation of "Jesus Christ," his previous stint in the Adoptions Division not preparing him for the strange decorating tastes of many of the Southland's residents. I made the sign for Binky's Balls to ward off the evil trash monsters and proceeded into the morass of mess to interview the kids.

With the kids -- two over active twin 10-year-old boys and an adorable 8-year-old girl with braided ebony locks -- the information just started pouring out. Usually I'm pulling teeth or doing a simpler variation of my running fast while standing still routine, but these kids were giving up the details before I could pull the cap off of my pen with my teeth. Dad pushes mommy down the stairs, one of the boys says. Mom knows about dad's affair, the other imparts. Mommy told us to go upstairs and lock the doors while she and daddy threw things at each other, the daughter related in the same tone used for the detached play by play for what she learned at school.

By the time the mother arrived I had a fair idea of how everything was transpiring. Fights, abuse, violence, yelling, screaming -- the usual, bad situation where the woman was the victim of a horrendous amount of pain and suffering. She was also the perpetrator too. By keeping her children there with her, in a situation where there was a strong chance of violence and perhaps even death, she was victimizing her kids all over again. Binky forbid that she be killed, but it would be about a thousand times worse were it to happen in front of the twins and their sister.

And death -- or years more of abuse -- was what was likely to happen, given the first words out of the mother's mouth after I discussed my interviews with her kids was "They're lying." Every incident, happening, push, shove, scream or shout I relayed was met with some spin, some comeback, some justification that tried to pass the whole thing off as one big mistake, as just another day in the life of their happy neo-Brady family.

Yes, it's always possible things can get blown out of proportion, that little details become big incidents when the Eye of the State peers through, looking for trouble. I've seen those little things grow quite quickly, kyboshed only after a good deal of work and effort. But that is the rare case. Mostly these things are true; the stories turn out to be the most easily remembered incident of a much larger and more pervasive case. One blow, pop in the eye, push down the stair or clobber over the head, turns out -- with further interviews, conversations with knowing parties and a simple review of previous social worker visits -- to be the most recent, most noticed unacceptable event in a long line of equally unacceptable happenings.

That left me with two options, one involved the mother taking the kids out of the house and heading for a shelter and the other involved mom choosing to stay in the house and the kids coming with me. And I would have explained all of this to the mother in some degree of detail, along with a fair amount of cajoling, sympathy and encouragement towards taking the first of the two options, thus saving me from opening a court case and giving her more leeway in conducting her treatment, but for a rather untimely and unwarranted arrival.

Dad walked in the door.

And Dad was just a bit peeved.

And Dad had a gun.

One of the more common notions out there about child protection social workers is that we're all about breaking up families. Someone calls us, we swoop in, grab kids, cart them off to the dark terrors of the Foster Care System and ask questions about the whole thing later. I can tell you that it's patently false.

Detaining children is just too much paperwork to be done willy-nilly. Seriously. After the Detention Report, there's the Petition, the Amendments to the Petition, the Pretrial Release Interview, the Pretrial Resolution Conference, the 280 forms, the 709 forms, the Case Plan, the Notification to School for Change of Report, the 815, 816, and 817 forms to meet ASFA requirements for placements with RCs or NREFMs or... Well, you get the idea. Gack, the paperwork will just kill you in the end.

Anyway.

The effort that 99% of social workers make, what the supervisors support and the Court tries to uphold, is make sure that kids are safe and to try, whenever possible, to keep families together. Out in the field, in the heat of the moment, discovering messy homes, bugs, spankings or the like, the first goal is to figure out if there is a threat to the health or safety of the child, and if nothing immediate is found but concerns persist, then try like mad to get the family to get the help it needs to stay on the good side of the Welfare and Institutions Code of the State of California. It's the simple presence of the DCFS social worker, on the doorstep, asking pesky questions, that is more than enough to kick people out of their stupor and into the arms of a community organization suited to helping them.

When the abuse is so bad we pull 'em. When all pointers show there's a problem in a family...say like one parent is getting smacked around by another... and no one is doing anything about... like say when the smackie is in denial that the smacker is hurting them... and the kids stay in the middle of the situation ... such as when twins take their sister to an upstairs room, close the door and hope everything blows over... then there isn't anything else to do but put the little ones in the back of the car and tell everyone to show up in Court 72 hours from now. That usually pisses people off. And pissed off people aren't pleasant. And pissed off people with guns can be very, very unpleasant.

Which brings us back to Yours Truly, standing waist deep in a landfill hiding out in an apartment, with a couple of very, very angry parents who I'm about to tell I'm taking their kids away from them. And did I mention Dad's got a gun?

Dad works security. He stated very explicitly that he would in no way go along with any kind of separation and shelter plan for the mother and children, as that involved restraining orders, which would have his gun permit yanked which would cause him to loose his job. Besides, he denied problems, and mom, now very animated, bargaining, and pleading, offered her own denials still. Dad's big .50 Cent sweater obscured the gun, but not the outline of it against the fabric.

Me: (low voice, directed to the Rookie) "Call the cops, now."

Rookie: (lower voice, puzzled and perplexed) "How do I do that?"

Me: (higher, lower voice, slightly panicked) "9-1-1."

Rookie: (light bulb over forehead) "Right."

An hour later I'm still waiting for the police. Still talking people down. Still contemplating just bailing for the car, retreating to the police station, and calling my boss up with a sudden onset illness. But I stayed, worried about what would happen to the mom and the kids if I did go. Or maybe that's just what I tell myself. Maybe pride, or stupidity or masculine ego blinded me to the Trouble-Alert blaring in my head. When I look back on it, it was nuts.

The cops did show up, the cops did remove the gun from the Dad -- a nice .357 with a stylish Eagle handgrip, perfect for maintaining aim when firing while angry -- and I did remove the children from mom. Given her state, there wasn't much else I could do. She didn't want to go to a shelter, didn't believe her life was in danger, and Dad, with no marks found on his wife on his kids, was free to go -- after I left with kids planted in the back seat of the car.

I suppose you are wondering where the gore is, the blood, the bullets, the violence? I did say I got shot after all. Well, see later, after the kids were placed safely in foster care, the Rookie was on his way home to his partner of six years, and I drove off into the cold night, my head pounding, my heart still rumbling, and greatly upset that I didn't have a substance abuse problem to drown my jitters with, I clicked on the radio and heard the President talk about his proposed Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage. It was the irony that hit me about as surely and directly as any one that would have come out of the barrel of Angry Dad's pistol. I can get killed trying to fix something I legally can't have.

Yes, yes, I'm aware of all the obfuscations people pull by saying that I can go off and marry any girl I want and start a family. Since I can't bitch-slap such fools and a simple, curt, "Don't be a tool" is painfully pedestrian, I'll quote France, who wrote in the early part of this century:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

A few days before I met my Angry Dad on my DV call, an LAPD officer was killed after meeting an angry one of his own. I skirted through a tough situation without getting shot. Over a week later, now able to sleep again after the ancient reptile brain stopped arguing shrilly all night long with the newer, more evolved reason centers, I understand that my job hazards include not only paper cuts and ink splatters but arterial bleed outs and exit wounds.

There is nothing heroic about what I do. I do not want to give that impression at all. The cops who helped me out, the firefighters who pull burned kids from buildings, the soldiers who take a bullet far across the sea, are much more in keeping with the idea of defenders and protectors than anything I do or have done. I've got a civil service job -- that I'm admittedly a bit burnt out on -- which allows me to help kids and save families on a good day. That social workers don't get much respect is another matter, an essay, all together.

There is also nothing heroic about proposing an amendment to the Constitution banning gays from marrying in an effort to "protect the family." There's nothing heroic in stating, over and over again, from pulpits to blogs, to opinion pages, to street corners, that gay people are trying to bring down families by seeking legal recognition for their own. My caseload hasn't gone up since San Francisco staged its civil disobedience, nor have the hidden horrors I've discovered in messed up families gotten worse since the SCOTUS handed down their rulings. Gay people, gay families, have nothing to do with the pain and problems of heterosexual families. They don't take away from the scant social services monies available for family care, nor the lack of adequate police resources, nor school deficiencies, nor access to preventive and protective health and medical systems. In short, blaming gay folk for these problems is a bogus argument, one that isn't grounded in the reality of this world. It is rather a sales tool, offered by people scared of change, seeking any reason, any justification, to hold on to a world that never really existed.

Coffee's done. I gotta go. I've several home calls to make before I get into the office and try to figure out if a homeless grandmother with cancer can take care of her special needs daughter.

All in a days work, I guess.