Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (19 page)

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’m looking for. Mrs. Morgan, do you have someone you need to call? You’ll need to come with me to the police station.”

I was confused. “Mrs. Morgan? Police station? What are you talking about? I’m Diane Lierow, and I’m not going to the police station with you! I have to go pick up my son from school in about five minutes.”

“Is he the attacker?”

“The attacker? Willie? No! He’s my son! And Danielle came this way!”

The police officer looked skeptical. “You can pick your son up, Mrs. Morgan but I will need to come with you.”

“I’m not Mrs. Morgan. I’m Diane Lierow. I don’t know why you want to take me to the police station when the abuse happened in the Morgan foster home in Tampa. You don’t have your facts straight, lady.”

About that time, Danielle started rocking and moaning. I could feel a tantrum coming on and was tempted to let her go for it. Maybe that would drive this misinformed policewoman away. Instead, I picked Danielle up and told the officer I needed to call my husband.

“Is that Mr. Morgan?”

“No! My husband is Bernie Lierow. I’m Diane Lierow, and we picked Danielle up yesterday from Mr. Morgan in Tampa. She is here on an emergency placement. Here’s my driver’s license.”

The policewoman took it from me and examined it while I called Bernie and got his voice mail. “Bernie! You have to come home right now! And call Garet right away! A police officer is here and she thinks I’m Mrs, Morgan and she wants to arrest me! I have to pick up Willie from school. Please get home now!”

Poor Bernie. I was sure he would think I had finally gone off the deep end.

I told the lady I was going to change Danielle’s diaper and then I was going to pick my son up from school, and she could wait outside for Bernie to come home. She eyed me suspiciously. I’m not sure whether it was because I was changing the diaper of a child way past diaper stage or she thought I would try to escape out a back window. I invited her to come to the bathroom with me, but she said she would wait in her patrol car, which I discovered was parked in our driveway. Great. That would definitely give the neighborhood something to talk about tonight on the evening walk.

Willie was the last child left at the school when I got there, and he was none too happy about it. I explained what had happened, and we both laughed about the policewoman asking if he was the attacker. If there was any child less likely to be an “attacker” than Willie Lierow, his name would be Ghandi. Ridiculous. At the same time, I was still shaken up by the incident and by how quickly things could have gone very bad. We were already on pins and needles about the possibility that Danielle would be sent back to Tampa. The last thing I needed was the police department here accusing me of abuse. I knew the policewoman would have to make a report of the call, and I didn’t want the word
abuse
to be included anywhere near my name. Who knows whether somewhere down the road, as we were moving closer to adoption, this police report might come up and cause more problems?

When we got home, the patrol car was still there, but Bernie’s car was, too. Upstairs, he and the policewoman were sitting in the living room like old friends. Darned if she hadn’t accepted a soda from Bernie. I scowled at both of them. “Mrs. Lierow, I want to apologize for what happened. I have spoken to Mr. Lierow and Ms. White, and it was all a terrible mix-up. I am so sorry. Is this William?”

The “attacker”? I’m sure that by looking at him, she realized the absurdity of the label. Willie very politely went over to her, shook her hand, and said, “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

She got up to leave, and I was very happy to walk her to the door. While we were chit-chatting, Danielle had slipped over to the refrigerator, opened the double doors, pulled open the bottom drawer, and was standing in the freezer staring into the fridge.

“Danielle!” Bernie, Willie, and I all shouted it at the same time. She turned to look at us with an expression that said, “What? What’s the problem?” The policewoman looked confused, but when we all started laughing, she did, too.

“Happens all the time,” said Bernie. “No big deal. You should see her with a bag of French fries!”

The officer wished us the best of luck with the adoption procedure and gave Bernie her card. “If you need anything, please let me know. She’s a beautiful little girl, and Willie, you’re going to make a great big brother.”

That ended well. I hoped that it was a sign that things were going to get better.

Unfortunately, things got a bit worse. Because we couldn’t get the refill and we didn’t have the authority to obtain a new prescription for Danielle, there was no choice but to take her off her medication. I got online to read about weaning people off those particular drugs, and there was some helpful information, but Danielle was going to have to go cold turkey.

The first several days were rough, on her and on us. She screamed constantly. We assumed that she was getting headaches or maybe even migraines from withdrawal. I couldn’t legally even give her a single ibuprofen, so I just made the house as dark and quiet as I could and kept her out of the sun. We went out in the evening to walk the dogs, but otherwise, I just tried to let her rest as much as she was able. We needed to keep her as hydrated as possible, but she was also nauseated and would throw up most of what we gave her. Bernie and I hated seeing Danielle that way and had no way to explain to her what was happening. Willie was so upset and worried about her that he slept on the sofa upstairs those first few nights, so that he could get to her quickly if she came out of her room. This was a big help to us. Danielle was waking up every couple of hours, sometimes to pace the house, other times to study the contents of the refrigerator. She never took anything out to eat, and she never tried to open an outside door. We had installed an alarm on all of the outside doors just in case, but she never did try to go out. Maybe she had been conditioned not to in Michelle Crockett’s house or in the foster home. Or maybe, just maybe, everything she needed and wanted was inside our house, and she had no desire to leave.

One week after Danielle came home with us, she got up only once in the night, and I heard Willie walk her back to bed. I woke up at six, thinking that something was wrong because it was so quiet. Tiptoeing down the hallway to her room, I nearly tripped over Willie, who was curled up in a quilt on the floor outside her door. Peeking into her room, I saw her lying on her side on the lower mattress, holding Lullaby Gloworm. My heart filled with love for him and his protectiveness for Danielle, and I carefully picked him up and carried him out to the sofa. He barely stirred.

It had been a horrible week: the phone call from Garet, the hurried drive to Tampa, the long wait in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, the scratches, Danielle’s distance from us, my near arrest, and her painful withdrawal from medication.

But I felt that the experience had pulled us closer together. We had gotten through it as a family.

I went out to the kitchen to make coffee. The sun was coming up over the canal. It was going to be another beautiful day.

Chapter 18

T.J. Bearytales

We did not yet have the hard copy of our foster license, but we did have three different social workers, so I assumed we were legitimate and that gave me a little peace of mind. There was one social worker from Florida Baptist Children’s Home, where we had started the adoption process, which now seemed like a million years ago; there was Garet from Hillsborough County; and there was one from Lutheran Family Services, the agency responsible for overseeing children in foster care in our county. Florida Baptist is the adoptive or foster family’s advocate; Lutheran is the child’s advocate. Every child in the system is supposed to be seen once a month by the various agencies responsible for him or her, but it’s a system set up to fail. The woman from Lutheran had seventy kids in her caseload. This meant that in one month of weekdays, she would need to see more than three kids a day. If the kids were in school and possibly had after-school activities, that left a very small window of opportunity for her to check on those children. She told us that if she didn’t see Danielle for a couple of months, not to worry. I didn’t worry about Danielle. I worried about the children who were not in healthy, stable, caring environments. No wonder there was no scarcity of horror stories about children in foster care.

On the other hand, there was a policy that went to the other extreme. As foster parents in Florida, we could not so much as cut Danielle’s hair without getting special permission from the court. It was ludicrous, but after all we had been through to have her in our house, we didn’t want to do one thing that could jeopardize this tenuous arrangement. Unfortunately, she still rocked in her bed at night, and as her hair got longer, the morning tangles and knots got worse and worse. I began gathering her hair into a ponytail at the top of her head before putting her to bed, and that helped some, although she looked a bit like Pebbles Flintstone.

Foster parents can get whatever medical treatment is necessary for the children under their care, but dental care was another story. Danielle had never been to a dentist when we got her. In order for her to have a checkup and get her teeth cleaned, we needed to get clearance from the DCS. We knew a dentist in one of the foster parent classes that we had taken, and we asked him whether he could look into her mouth without touching it. He did the best he could under the circumstances and told us there were no obvious signs of decay. I could have said as much from my two years—minus two weeks—in dental hygienist classes.

School was out for the summer, and with so much free time stretching before us, I saw it as an opportunity to create our own life curriculum. We had a girl who was nearly nine years old, with a developmental age of a two-year-old in some critical areas: toilet-training, drinking, and self-feeding. That was ground zero; anything else would be a bonus.

Because Danielle was no longer on medication, her tongue didn’t hang out of her mouth, and the drooling had stopped. Aesthetically, that was a big plus. She didn’t seem any more hyper than when she was on medication, which had been one concern for us. In reality, she was more alert, and that vacant glaze she had often had in her eyes appeared less frequently. When she did get it, I knew it wasn’t from the medication but was probably a coping mechanism she had learned in her previous homes. By the time school started in two and a half months, I hoped that we could master at least one of those toddler development markers, if not all of them.

The first thing Danielle went for when she came to the kitchen every morning was her sippy cup filled with fresh-squeezed orange juice, which I left on the counter for her in case I was in another room. The medication she had been on had given her dry mouth, and she had always been thirsty, which is why her diapers were always soaked. Although she was off the medication, drinking lots of fluids had become habit for her. I thought this would be helpful in transitioning her to a regular cup.

What I foolishly didn’t anticipate was that she would treat a regular cup like a sippy cup. Nor did it occur to me to put only a very small amount in the cup. The first time she stood in the kitchen with a real cup, she lifted it to her mouth and turned it upside down, and the entire contents sloshed down her chin and her shirt and onto the floor, where the dogs quickly assembled to lap up some good Florida OJ. This was going to be an education for all of us.

Danielle began to cry, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because she was afraid she had done something wrong, because her pajamas were wet, or because the dogs were drinking her juice. I apologized to her, assuring her that mom had made a silly mistake and that I would get her more juice as soon as we got her cleaned up.

Back in the kitchen, I poured a very small amount of juice into the cup and added a straw. When eating at McDonald’s, Willie had sometimes shared his milk carton with her, so she was familiar with a straw and the concept.

I held the cup on the table, and she dipped her head to the straw, getting a mouthful of juice. Apparently delighted at the results, she laughed before swallowing, and the juice ran down her chin again. I wiped it off, told her what a smart girl she was, and poured a little bit more in her cup. It took about fifteen minutes, but she eventually drank her eight ounces of juice. Next on the agenda—fun with forks!

Since the first time we had met Danielle at school, we’d had to feed her or serve her finger foods like cut-up fruit, grapes, cubes of cheese, and crackers. Finger foods presented their own challenge because she had no self-regulating button. Similar to her gluttonous approach to French fries, she would just keep stuffing food into her mouth until she went into lock jaw or gagged and got sick. I would cut up a sandwich or a pizza into bite-size pieces at lunch, but I could put only one or two pieces on her plate at a time or she would put all of them in her mouth at once.

Dinner was the most time-consuming meal because Danielle had to be fed every bite. Bernie almost always took on that job because she had been with me all day. He knew from experience, having been Dad and Mom for many years when his boys were growing up, that by five o’clock—the universal witching hour for mothers and children—I needed a break.

Because Danielle loved waffles so much, it made sense to incorporate one into our first lesson in Utensils 101. Willie was up and available to act as her mentor. I cut up one waffle and put it on his plate. “Willie, show Danielle how to use a fork. Danielle, watch Willie with his fork.” To his credit, Willie did not roll his eyes at me, although he did get a little bit theatrical with the task. I cut a couple of squares of another waffle for her plate and put a fork in Danielle’s hand. She dropped the fork on the table. I tried again. She dropped it on the floor. The third time, I put my hand over hers to hold the fork in place

“Now, Danielle, watch what Willie does with his waffle. See how he puts the bite of waffle on his fork and then puts it in his mouth? Mom knows you can do that, too.”

Danielle’s eyes were following Willie’s hands as he speared a bite of waffle and brought it to his mouth. He had taken about three bites when she couldn’t stand it anymore. Her left hand darted across the table. She snatched about three pieces of waffle from his plate and stuffed them in her mouth. She was fast! I shot Willie a look when he started to laugh and then put my fingers in her mouth to pull out the purloined waffle.

“Danielle, we don’t take other people’s food. If you want to eat, you have to eat from your own plate. Let’s try the fork.”

I guided her hand to the plate, the fork to the waffle, the forked-waffle to her mouth. “Good job, Danielle! That’s the way!” We did it again. Again. Again. Danielle had a voracious appetite. She could and would eat more than anyone else in the house. As long as food was in front of her, she would consume it. Two waffles in, I thought I’d see if she would use the fork on her own.

I put the fork in her hand, removed my hand, and waited. She dropped the fork, grabbed a piece of waffle with her hand, and started to bring it to her mouth. I gently but firmly stopped her, pried the piece out of her hand, put it back on her plate, picked up the fork, and guided it to her mouth.

By the time she finished three waffles, her face was sticky with syrup, and I could have used a nap. Instead, we moved to the next class. Toilet training.

As far as I could remember, it had taken anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months for Paul, Steven, and Willie to transition from diapers through pull-ups to consistent use of the toilet during the day. I was always prepared for accidents in that first year, and I accepted that staying dry through the night was more of a challenge for children, especially for heavy sleepers. I had to wake one of my boys up every three hours or so during the night to take him to the bathroom well past toddlerhood, or he’d wake up in a wet bed every morning.

I was prepared to be in it for the long haul with Danielle, although I figured that if we did total immersion, she might just get so sick of being in the bathroom that she would take the alternative—and the M&M’s, which I had used with the boys as a reward for doing something on the toilet, much as I had used little doggie treats to house-train Cece, Bebe, and Inky.

But nothing could pry a pee out of Danielle if she wasn’t in the mood. We would sit and sit, I would read her two or three books, then read them again. Not even a tinkle. Until I would say, “Okay, I give up,” then she would stand and go all over herself and the floor. I believed that she knew what I wanted her to do, and that peeing on the floor was a statement of some kind from her. An annoying statement, to be sure, but any sign that she was taking deliberate action was a good sign. Maybe she was testing me. Whatever it was, I was determined to outlast her, and in the meantime, I put a towel on the floor beside the toilet to absorb her “statement.”

Bowel movements were another issue altogether. Long before we even knew Danielle existed or that we would try to adopt, Bernie saw a commercial on television for a toy called T.J. Bearytales. It was an animated electronic teddy bear that came with a storybook and a cartridge, aimed at three- to five-year-olds, which explains why Bernie loved it so much. He became obsessed with T.J. Bearytales, calling me to the television each time the goofy ad came on. I kept pointing out that Willie was well past the T.J. Bearytales stage, but Bernie thought it would be perfect for our future grandchildren.

We generally try to avoid Target. There is something very manipulative about that store. We could go in for a sale it was having on storage bins, walk out with patio furniture, an electric frying pan, and beach towels—and forget the storage bins. One afternoon we ventured in for a new inflatable raft for the pool—blinders firmly affixed to the sides of our eyes—when Bernie gasped. “T.J. Bearytales!” There, right in our path, was a huge display of T.J. Bearytales. One was powered up and ready to read. Fuzzy arms waving, lit eyes blinking, story cartridge in place in his back, T.J. was telling the compelling tale of his Beary First Day of School. I thought it was kind of creepy, but Bernie could not be dissuaded. Thirty minutes later, we walked out of Target with T.J. Bearytales—and didn’t realize we had forgotten the raft until we got home.

Within a week, I had put T.J. away and forgotten about him. I thought Bernie had, too.

One evening, as both of us sat in the bathroom with Danielle reading her a book and hoping for a bowel movement or a miracle, whichever came first, the proverbial lightbulb went off over Bernie’s head. “T.J. Bearytales! Where is he?” “In the storage closet downstairs, under the crib.” Bernie darted out the door and five minutes later was back, proudly carrying a slightly dusty T.J. He set the bear on the edge of the tub and pushed the button, and T.J’s mechanical but very enthusiastic voice began the story of his Bearific trip to outer space. Bernie held the book up so that Danielle could see the pictures, but she couldn’t take her eyes off T.J. She was hypnotized. She didn’t do anything on the toilet that night—except sit quietly while T.J. told stories.

A couple of days later, I went to her room to look for her. I didn’t see her, but I could hear her from behind the partially closed door of her closet. I slowly opened it, and she was squatting, having a bowel movement in her diaper. It occurred to me that maybe she wanted more privacy for this particular function.

The next day, I put Danielle in the bathroom alone with T.J., turned him on to loop the story, and left her there for about ten minutes. When I got back, she was still engrossed in the Bearytale, but she had also had a bowel movement in the toilet. Success! I was so excited, I called Bernie on his cell phone. I can only imagine what the guys he was working with thought when he exclaimed, “She pooped? In the potty? With the poopie bear?” From then on, T.J. was known as Poopie Bear, and that silly toy turned out to be a godsend. Training Danielle to urinate on the toilet was not meeting with the same degree of success, and I told Bernie to be on the lookout for a Pee Pee Puppy.

Nearly one month from the time Danielle came to live with us, we received an 8×10 envelope from Children’s Network of Southwest Florida. Things like that always made me nervous, and I held it up to the light, trying to determine the contents. I could see an official seal, and, practically holding my breath, I tore it open. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Lierow: Enclosed is your foster license to provide foster care service for children placed in your care. The number of children you may accept is specified on the license as ‘capacity.’”