I Didn’t Sign Up For This

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From ELLE

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The earliest I can remember my sister using drugs was when she smoked marijuana at age 12. She was 14 the first time I remember her taking pills, and eventually, she started using heavier drugs: cocaine, heroin, and pills, anything she could get her hands on. Every time I saw her, she was high.

I didn’t understand how she was functioning. Sometimes we didn’t even know where she was or whether she was alive. We would call the hospitals and the jail to see if anything happened to her. She had two daughters, and they were both briefly put in foster care because of my sister’s drug use.

Then, the two girls started living with us when they were nine and four, but we didn’t have full custody. After about three years, we found out that my sister was pregnant again. When the baby was nine months old, a SWAT team raided her house for drugs, and the conditions prompted the Department of Child Services to ask if we’d be willing to take in her baby. We got all three children on the same case, and we were officially fostering by June 2015.

At the time, the caseworkers gave my sister and her boyfriend, the dad of the two youngest, a case plan to follow in order to keep the kids. They had to take random drug tests, go to counseling, and get mental health evaluations. But they kept failing their drug tests.

Finally, they stopped showing up to court and because they didn’t follow the case plan, they had a choice to either sign over their parental rights or have them taken away. My sister decided to sign over her rights, but the girls’ dad did not show up to court and was stripped of his rights. From there, the case managers started the adoption process and set us up with an adoption specialist.

It was all a very long process, and the adoption was official as of January 2018. Because of our financial situation, we were able to get an adoption subsidy; the girls are covered by Medicaid until they’re 18 and have four years of college paid for by a state program. Without that adoption subsidy, we would be dying right now financially.

Going through this whole process led me to my job as a kinship navigator. I work at an organization in Florida that provides kinship caregivers—i.e. people who take care of a relative’s children for any number of reasons—with resources, including legal aid, counseling, and public benefits assistance.

It takes a lot of support to take on the children of a relative who can’t parent because of their drug addiction. You have to deal with the children’s anxieties; they don’t understand how to handle any type of stress or anger or sadness. They didn’t have a model for those coping skills early on because their parents used instead of coping.

My oldest niece doesn’t trust many people, and it took a long time for her to trust us. In the beginning, the girls were hoarding food in their room, hiding it in their pillowcases, underneath their mattress, in their socks, in their dresser. Any time somebody would knock on the door, my nieces would hide underneath the table. They refused to talk to their case manager because they thought that anything they said would hurt their parents.

They still have trouble managing their anger. They have outbursts and little things can set them off. They’ve needed extensive therapy, and they were far behind in school when we started caring for them. My niece, who was four years old at the time, knew her alphabet, but she could not recognize letters. She could only count to five. She only knew the color pink. And she was afraid she was going to get in trouble if she was wrong.

The kids also felt like they had to protect each other. If I reprimanded her oldest sister, the four-year-old would walk up behind me and kick me or pull my hair. My oldest niece would carry her around on her hip. Instead of having a sibling relationship, they had a mother-daughter relationship. We had to tell my oldest niece so many times, “You are a child. You need to be a child. You are not her mother. You cannot do this to yourself.”

I used to feel angry at my sister. How in the world could you choose drugs over your children? At this point, I’ve come to terms with it. She made a choice to start using drugs, but the drugs took over. I don’t have a relationship with her because I can’t put myself through hoping she’s going to change. I can’t put myself through the stress because I have to be mentally healthy for these girls.

People need to understand that the opioid crisis doesn’t just destroy one life. It destroys entire families. And it’s hurt these children for a lifetime.

C, 31, is a kinship caregiver in Florida. Today, her girls are 16, seven, and six, and her sister’s girls are 15, 11, and four.

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