An addict's recovery can mean defeat for a family

Monday, October 13, 2003

By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

It was a stunning new beginning for Tangela Smith, an opportunity granted precious few drug addicts who'd lost parental rights to children.

Smith's daughter, a 12-year-old named Tay, would return to her immediately, moving from a foster home in Duquesne to her mother's newly rented house in the same town.

	Tangela Smith cries while talking to her daughter Tay on the phone, hours after caseworkers removed Tay and her sisters and brother from Smith's house in Duquesne in November 2000. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

Smith's son, an 11-year-old named Jay, would also go home, but not until the school year ended.

Common Pleas Judge Cheryl Allen didn't want to interrupt the boy's studies by making him switch districts. She also didn't want to overload Smith, a recovering crack addict, by giving her two adolescents at once, especially when Smith already had three other children, all under age 6.

Allen's experience in juvenile court made her uneasy in such situations. She knew losing children to foster care was a powerful incentive for addicts to enter treatment. She also knew that regaining children could drive parents back to drink or drugs.

It's the bitter irony of juvenile court: The reason for recovery frequently jeopardizes it.

Parents get tantalizingly close to success, then lose everything again, following a cycle of addiction, recovery and relapse.

Allen struggled for months with Smith's desire to have Tay and Jay back, and with the children's dream of returning to their mother. To them, reunification couldn't happen soon enough. To Allen, it could occur too soon.

At one hearing, she tried to explain this to Smith, who was teary-eyed when she learned she would not get either child that day. "Whatever is going to happen," the judge told her, "we need to proceed slowly. Ms. Smith, I know you love your children. But you have a lot on your plate."

Replacing a family

Allen's long history with Smith made her particularly cautious.

She'd gotten Smith's case in 1992, and four years later, terminated Smith's parental rights to Tay, Jay and their little sister, Coco, enabling the children's foster mother to adopt.

Smith was hurt, but not defeated. She decided to get clean and start a new family. She even named the first new child for the oldest daughter. She would be Little Tay.

	TAKING A TANGLED PATH HOME THE SERIES Day One: One woman, one family's journey through juvenile court, where three-quarters of child welfare cases involve addiction, making the court more about drug abuse than child abuse. Today: An addict's recovery can mean defeat for a family. Tomorrow: If redemption for drug addicts usually involves relapses, how long does a child welfare system keep children in limbo awaiting a parent's real recovery?

That baby went to foster care from the hospital in September 1994 because Smith tested positive for drugs. But Smith was clean in December 1997 when the next baby, who she'd affectionately call Mooky, was born. Mooky spent only a few months in foster care. And then Dean, born Aug. 31, 1999, went directly home from the hospital with a triumphant Smith. Not long after that, Smith had a tubal ligation. She had her three replacement babies. She was 31 and she was done.

While Smith had rebuilt her family, her two oldest children had lost theirs again. Their adoptive mother couldn't tolerate Jay's behavior, a result of his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And she was beating 10-year-old Tay, to the point that someone alerted Allegheny County's Office of Children, Youth and Families. Caseworkers took Tay and Jay and terminated the adoption.

When Smith discovered her two oldest children were back in foster care, she became obsessed with bringing them home. It didn't matter that she was on the verge of collapse trying to care for her littlest three.

Little Tay was not quite 5 and Mooky not quite 2 when Dean came home. Mooky, born prematurely, suffered from cerebral palsy and a lung disease. She needed constant breathing treatments and could not walk.

Just getting all three to the first floor of Smith's Swissvale walk-up was a challenge. Her Social Security disability payments and welfare weren't enough to cover the bills when Dean's father left a month before his baby was born.

Scott Hollander, director of KidsVoice, the organization that represents children like Smith's in juvenile court, has seen the situation many times.

Tangela Smith waits for the results of a drug test administered by Betsy Price, who worked for Operation Nehemia, contracted by Children and Youth Services to perform the evaluation at Smith's home in Duquesne in June of 2000. The test would be negative for drugs and alcohol. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

"In recovery, she is focusing only on herself and her needs," he explains. "But when she gets out and gets the children, she has all the added stress and usually no help. It's usually single women."

Many addicts succumb to such stress by resuming use. But Smith didn't.

Reunion tensions

She was clean and proud of her hefty 5-month-old son and two perfectly-coifed daughters when she arrived in Allen's courtroom on Jan. 21, 2000, the day the judge agreed to send Tay home to Smith and promised Jay's return after his school year ended in June.

In the months leading up to the decision, Allen had permitted visits between Smith and her older children and ordered evaluations by Neil Rosenblum, a psychologist who had examined mother and children before the termination.

Rosenblum found that Tay harbored a fantasy common to many adopted children -- reunification with birth parents.

"After her adoption failed [Tay] undoubtedly began to romanticize return to her mother at some point in her life," Rosenblum told the judge. "I do believe [Tay] feels that she belongs with her birth mother and that she will live happily ever after there."

Rosenblum urged the judge to stall a bit. "Though she means well," Rosenblum said, "mother tends to take on too much too quickly. ... If she takes on too much, it will jeopardize all of her accomplishments."

Also, he warned, Tay needed to settle down before moving to her mother's home. She was skipping school, failing classes and misbehaving.

Allen took Rosenblum's advice. She told Smith the reason for the hesitation: "This is a lot of responsibility. I am not sure I could handle the responsibility for this many people."

Tay finally moved home early in March 2000. She went to a five-bedroom house Smith had rented in Duquesne with a public housing voucher.

	Tangela Smith talks with Dean Flowers, the father of her unborn son, on the porch of Smith's apartment in Swissvale just weeks before he left Tangela in the summer of 1999. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

She helped her mother with the three younger children. And Smith came to depend on her, leaving her to baby-sit while Smith went grocery shopping and ran errands, even though caseworkers repeatedly told Smith that was too much responsibility for a 13-year-old.

Tay came to resent it, which compounded the growing tension between her and her mother over skipped chores. Tay continued playing hooky until her grades were so low that she was to be kept back. Then she was expelled from summer school for misbehaving.

CYF thought adding Jay to the household that June would be too much. Allen agreed, and he remained in foster care.

Rosenblum evaluated Tay again and reported to Allen that like many children sent to foster care, Tay was angry. While Tay loved her mother, she was furious with her as well. She was angry that Smith had used drugs. She was angry that she'd been in foster care.

And, as many children do, Tay exhibited her rage in misbehavior.

"Though the parents have come through recovery," Allen says, "the children have not. They still have a lot of anger and they've often got problems that were exacerbated by their parents' addiction, and before you know it, the parents are using again."

'I got weak'

Allen and CYF did what they could that summer to prevent Smith from resorting to drugs, sending counselors and therapists to the house. All of Smith's drug tests were clean through the fall.

But Smith attended only a half-dozen drug counseling sessions and blew off the rest. She got in fights with neighbors. She wasn't paying her bills. Tay's grades remained low, and she told school officials it was because her mother forced her to watch the little children. Then, counselors arrived at the house to pick up Jay from a visit and found no adults.

That was it. On Nov. 3, 2000, eight months after Smith had gotten Tay back, caseworkers took her and the three little children.

Smith was distraught and angry. She cried and ranted.

She was furious and hopeless after a hearing in which Allen refused to return the children. She went back to the empty house in Duquesne. She slept with a teddy bear.

Just before the next hearing, on Nov. 11, 2000, she tested dirty. She'd used $20 worth the night before. She had been clean for more than two years.

"I got weak, very weak," she explained later.

Allen was unsympathetic to Smith's claim that it was a one-time event. She told Smith she'd begun relapsing when her household had started falling apart in the summer and that she'd have to go to another treatment program.

Smith was in tears. She thought she was done with all of that. It meant she would likely never get Tay or Jay back, and it meant a harder time regaining the three little ones.

As Smith stood before Allen looking defeated, the judge gave her words of hope. "The goal is reunification, especially with your younger children," she assured Smith. Go get rehabilitated, she told her: "It's not over until it's over."

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