Paul's Shirts and Child Protective Services

After the divorce, I moved the kids and myself back to Minnesota. I had family here. It probably also helped that 4 winters in Georgia helped me forget what the climate here was really like. (That was promptly corrected: our first winter back was unusually cold and full of heavy snowfalls.)

At first we moved in with my folks, a crowded situation for all of us. In a few months, we moved out for a mobile home in Lake Elmo. The timing was such that my older two kids were in three schools in one year. The youngest, Paul, went from being home to two different day cares that year. Geographically we changed from Georgia to Oklahoma to Minnesota. It was a time of lots of upheavals, and had at least one odd result.

Paul became attached to his shirts. He fought having whichever shirt he was wearing removed for bedtime, fought putting on a different one in the morning. Since he was too old to carry around a security blanket, I figured this was just his was of substituting. There were way too many other battles to fight to get through the day, and I chose not to fight this one more than twice a week. He had a drawerful of shirts, clean and ready for him. He changed pants and socks regularly with no fuss, took baths, brushed his hair and washed his face and hands, and was in all other ways a clean kid. But his shirts were inevitably filthy by the time they got removed. He was, after all, a normal active 5-year-old boy. Eventually he'd decide for himself that clean shirts were important to him. It just wasn't going to cause a daily battle in our house.

His shirts got noticed. His day care center sent a couple shirts home with him, thinking they were being helpful. They didn't know about the drawerful of shirts at home waiting for their turn. When that didn't make a difference, they made a phone call. I got a visit from Child Protective Services.

Luckily for me, the caseworker was a good listener. I explained my child-rearing choices, showed her all the shirts he wouldn't wear as well as the rest of his home environment. She went away satisfied, at least for the moment, that there was no real problem. Then I went and had a chat with the day care center director. It wound up being one of those lets-work-together-to-make-the-kid-feel-more-secure kind of chats.

I don't think I really noticed when Paul started wearing clean shirts again. But that's not the end of the story. It wasn't my last visit from Child Protective Services. It took several weeks and input from my kids to piece together what had prompted this visit. And of course it came at the worst possible time.

After finally seeing a doctor for my foot injury, I was prescribed Clinoril. It was an anti-inflamatory meant to reduce the bone spur in my heel. It had a secondary effect, one my doctor denied could happen. It made me depressed. I took it for a month, called the doctor, and got a different prescription, for some new drug called Motrin. I had taken my last Clinoril pill the morning of the new, suspicious CPS caseworker's visit. The following day I would be euphoric, bouncing off the ceiling as the old drug wore off, but this day I could barely manage to answer any questions, much less care other than remotely what the results of this visit might be.

He asked me first if I needed any kinds of help that The System might provide. It was a nice day, and we were sitting outside on a pair of patio chairs while the kids were inside. I looked past him at the screen door that was mostly sans screen and partly off its hinges and asked him if there were anything he could do about that? That was the kind of help I needed. When he said, "No," I figured he was a lost cause. He'd also indicated to me that the previous worker must have been careless and a bit too lenient, since this was another contact, and he was going to get to the root of whatever was going on in my household. Where there's smoke....

Some of the issues he brought up were, to me even in my state, a bit off the wall. There was a complaint about my having no food in my refrigerator. First, that had never happened, and second, who the hell was snooping around in my refrigerator? Then there was the accusation that I sometimes spent days away from home, leaving my kids totally on their own. I puzzled that one out, slowly, before remembering. I'd had car repairs a few months earlier, and the car had been absent for a few days. I caught a ride to and from work with a coworker until it was fixed and returned. Being winter, I didn't stick my nose out of the house if I didn't have to. I guessed that some neighbor hadn't actually been spying on my house during those particular minutes when I was leaving or arriving, and didn't know whether or not I was home. Whoever it was, they also didn't bother to ask my kids. Or perhaps they did and got the typical, "I don't know," from somebody wrapped up in their own world of play.

I offered to let the worker talk to my kids to verify any of this information, but he declined, saying they didn't like to drag kids into the middle of these kind of situations. C'mon, one was a teenager at the time and could have easily put his concerns to rest, and he's not going to talk to her? Finally he left, leaving me with the distinct impression that he simply hadn't been able to unearth the damning information that he knew was there. I still couldn't really care, and I knew that my drug-induce apathy contributed to his negative impression.

The next day, back to my old self, the euphoria also having worn off, I sat the kids down after I got home from work, filled them in, and asked their help. Who had been in the house, looking at the refrigerator? I'd figured out it had to be a neighbor, after the car thing. Everybody puzzled over it, off and on for weeks, until at last we had it! Eureka!

A few months earlier I'd been giving the refrigerator a complete cleaning - inside, outside, top, bottom. We'd gathered coolers to put food in, leaving them scattered over the counters, stove and sink. Somewhere in the process I tried to move the fridge forward to clean the floor under it. Since it had very tiny wheels, and our floor was very cheap construction, the front wheels had settled down into the floor just enough that forward movement caused the top of the fridge only to move, making it tip. Onto me. I was trapped between fridge and stove in this very tiny kitchen. What made it worse was that something - perhaps an empty ice cube tray - had fallen behind the fridge at the time, wedging between it and the wall, making it impossible to right it. I yelled at the kids, asking them to go find a neighbor, any neighbor but preferably a strong man, to come and help me pull it forward, tip it upright, and free me. They returned with the husband from next door, who quickly corrected the situation. And of course, the fridge had been empty at the time. (Who's dumb enough to try to move a full fridge?) Apparently he was selectively blind enough while helping me that he didn't see all the coolers of food cluttering up the kitchen, or notice the reason for an empty fridge being cleaning in process.

I thanked him, finished up, and thought nothing more of the incident. Apparently, they did think more of it, and made a phone call.

Part of the reason my kids thought of him was that they knew this family didn't like them. Their family had a couple of younger kids that mine thought were pure brats, winding their own parents around their fingers, feigning innocence in all things and shifting blame onto others. Like my kids. It came home to me one day when I had been outside, reading, gardening, soaking up sun - who knows what? The mom came storming into my yard, ready to read Richard the riot act for tormenting her son. I dimly recalled having heard him briefly crying a bit earlier, but, hey, not my kid, not my problem. When she asked where Richard was, I honestly couldn't tell her, not having seen him for a bit. I called for him, and he promptly came out of the house, saying he'd been there the whole time and had nothing to do with her kid. (This time, anyway.) His sister popped out and back him up. The neighbor went way unsatisfied, but came back the next day, having gotten the truth out of her son that he had lied about Richard being involved. She apologized.

I never heard from Child Protective Services again. I'm sure there's a file sitting somewhere. I jokingly refer to it as the reason I've never considered running for any important political office.

However, the shirts part of this story continues. Paul still has an interesting connection to his shirts. Of course he changes and cleans them. His stint in the military with restrictions to uniforms never bothered him. But the shirts he buys for himself for everyday - and for work - are of the captioned T-shirt variety. He likes them with a twist. There are a couple of Pinky and the Brain shirts. Several are along the theme of "Four out of the five voices in my head tell me you are crazy," or "My imaginary friend thinks you have serious mental problems." A camouflage shirt declares that now you can't see him. Some are both bitingly funny and obnoxious. "How about never? Is never good for you?" "I'm not indifferent. I just don't care." "If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten." But at least he's an adult now, and nobody is going to come knocking on my door demanding that I justify how I'm raising my kids.

Whew!