Read Online Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan - Free Book Online

worker … I know my options that I can make, but being that I’m not ready to care for another child and financially I can’t care for another child, so I rather have an
Obortion
.”
    On March 1st, ten days after the abortion, Diamond Madison removed a gold-link bracelet from his arm, transferred it to Crystal’s, and went to jail on Riker’s Island. He had been arrested twice with large sums of money on him and no way to account for how he had come by the money honestly, and was given a six-month sentence. With time off for good behavior, he served four months. Between March and July, Crystal visited him faithfully the three days a week she was permitted to visit.She missed only two days: she was with little Daquan on Easter weekend, and with big Daquan on Mother’s Day weekend.
    A lmost from the day a child is placed in foster care, plans are made to discharge the child. The original plan drawn up for Crystal by St. Christopher’s was “discharge to biological mother.” When Crystal was fifteen, this was not considered a realistic goal, because of Florence’s drug addiction, refusal to seek help, and enduring homelessness. Throughout 1985, monthly attempts made by Crystal’s social worker to reach Florence were futile: she didn’t answer letters sent to her last known address, on Findlay Avenue. The social worker knew that Crystal visited her mother in the Bronx, often in a park, and talked to her on the phone fairly regularly, but Florence preferred to keep those contacts informal. Whenever a social worker asked Florence for a phone number, Florence said that Crystal knew how to get hold of her. Cousin Hazel had no telephone, but a woman in her apartment building who babysat for Crystal’s younger siblings did, and there was a telephone at the nursing home where Florence’s current man, Clarence, worked as a janitor.
    Crystal acknowledged that some of her meetings with her mother were frustrating, because Florence was often high or intoxicated. “My mother didn’t recognize me until I got rightinto her face,” she said after one Saturday visit. A child-care worker who saw Florence when she came to the group home for the first time, around Thanksgiving of 1985, remembers her as “a fat bag, unkempt, unwashed, and boisterous, who talked too much, laughed too much, and made the mistake of asking for a beer.” She also remembers that Crystal, who was fastidious and was dressed “impeccable,” seemed embarrassed by her mother’s behavior and determined never to look like her or sink to that level. “And yet,” the child-care worker adds, “there was an unshakable bond between them.”
    Soon after Crystal turned sixteen, Special Services for Children accepted a “change of permanency goal” proposed by St. Christopher’s for Crystal: discharge to independent living. In the world of foster care, there are goals within goals within goals. For the next several years, the long-term-treatment goals for Crystal included graduating from high school, securing a full-time job, and making a home for her son. Crystal was highly goal-resistant. She appeared in no hurry to get through school. Her social worker discovered when she contacted Flushing High School in May of 1986 that Crystal had been absent thirty days and late thirty-six times since January. She had little interest in employment. She had enjoyed a summer youth job in 1987 as a hospital receptionist, but a social worker noted in March of 1988 that “the only effort Crystal made to finding a job was talking about finding a job.” And she declined St. Christopher’s many attempts to interest her in a mother-child program, in which she would live in a St. Christopher’s house with otheryoung mothers and their children, attend school (day care would be provided for the mothers during their school hours), and look after Daquan evenings and