Starfish story
On my first day of “Advocacy University”, I was given a handout with this story on it. Advocacy University was the training to be a CASA volunteer, or volunteer advocate in the courts. I remember being very inspired at the time by this, but as time went on, my love for this story waxed, waned, and even turned into cringe and even hatred. (And then back to cringe and back into liking it or loving it). I do have a couple pieces of starfish artwork on my walls at home because of this story, but it took me a while to be comfortable enough to put it up and be reminded of the CASA program on a constant basis.
This is because I didn’t always feel like I was helping when I was a volunteer advocate. One of the chapters I worked with was so closely intertwined with CPS that we were highly discouraged from making a report that disagreed with the recommendations of CPS. And as you may be aware, CPS has a tendency to either ignore blatant abuse and allow kids to fall through cracks, or just take kids away from parents for being poor. One child I worked with had a file that stated his reason for removal was that his biological mother was bipolar. There was no reason for removal listing anything she did or didn’t do as a parent- just her diagnosis. When I brought this up as a concern, my coordinator explained to me that “sometimes” mental health diagnoses can impede a person’s ability to parent. When I brought up recommending that she get into mental health treatment, I was told “She won’t”, even though the baby had just entered care and there didn’t seem to be enough time to determine if she “would” or “wouldn’t” based on anything. In that situation, I felt like the presence of CPS and casa did more harm than good. Sometimes I felt like my presence was just neutral. Once, I tried explaining my role to a grandmother who was about to get custody. The grandmother responded, “But the kids have lawyers and caseworkers who do that.” I mean she wasn’t wrong. The advantage of CASA was supposed to be that we were volunteers with only one case. We weren’t “stretched thin” like the lawyers and caseworkers were.
Other times, the verbal and emotional abuse from my parents and aunts would stay with me, and I would consistently feel as incompetent as they wanted me to feel. When I was 16 and got my first job in a daycare, my feminist aunts used to say things like, “Why would anyone trust you with their kids? You would probably do something so stupid that a child would die in your care.” This absolutely killed me and stayed in my realm of intrusive thoughts for decades. However, definitely no kids ever died in my care. My feminist aunts just wanted to set in motion in me a complete lack of self esteem and a complete lack of trust in my own abilities. It was a way to set me up for failure so they could rub any such failure in my face later on.
But there definitely were times that I felt I was helping. That was most of the time. I felt I was an asset to these kids more often than not. For instance, right after a hurricane I helped a foster family fix their sliding glass door pretty quickly so they wouldn’t have to lose their foster son. We got it fixed before the caseworker even showed up!
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