An angel who knows she’s the only one to blame

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2015 (4147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The middle-aged Winnipeg woman had read my recent column about a mother and her runaway 14-year-old daughter; the one headlined Like mother, like daughter.

She said she could identify with the mother who blamed the system.

To a point, anyway. She had her own story of being both a runaway foster child and a struggling mother in the child-welfare system. It’s another, like-mother-like-daughter story. Again, to a point. That point — that saving grace — was her refusal to give up on her two sons. Or herself.

Her refusal, in the end, to blame the system for what happened to her and her children.

To protect her and her boys’ identities, I’ve given her a pseudonym: Angel.

Why Angel, of all names? We’ll get to that.

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It was cool and raining the night last week when we met at the Dairy Queen near her home in the Wolseley area. “I almost cancelled,” she said on my arrival. “I don’t think my voice is going to make that much of a difference.”

Angel said she had been following the changes to Child and Family Services.

“I struggle a lot with the response of, ‘It’s Child and Family Services’s fault,’ even though I do know the system, and I was a victim of the system.”

Her story begins with her own mother; a drug addict and “criminal.” The father she never knew was an African-American member of the U.S. air force in the 1960s, who drove up from Grand Forks in a pink Cadillac and met Angel’s mother at a notorious St. Charles Hotel nightclub. Angel’s earliest years would be spent abandoned to CFS in a rural Manitoba foster home.

“A very bad foster home.”

So bad that, eventually, she ran.

“I ran away from my first foster home because I was being beaten, locked in the basement and sexually abused and woken up with a cattle prod. And I was tired of being called a nigger.”

By 13, looking for the one person she thought had to love her, she had found her birth mother and moved in with her.

“That shouldn’t have happened. She was very ill. Lots of bad things happened.”

Soon, Angel would be back in care at a truly caring group home run by a husband and wife, where she would stay until she was 17.

Then, at 24, while she was visiting that one person who was supposed to love her, Angel’s mother stabbed her.

“She could do no wrong until she did that. Because I loved my birth mom.”

After that, Angel hit the streets in search of a different kind of family.

Two years later, now a full-blown alcoholic, she had her first son, followed several years later by a second.

“And I almost lost my children to the system.”

At various times she did lose them.

She recalls the day her then eight-year-old son was picked up by a CFS worker.

“And watching his eyes in the back seat of the car. Not knowing if he’s ever going to see me again.”

Angel would try to get her addiction under control through treatment four times over the years, and four times she would fail.

She was becoming her mother, I suggested.

“I became everything I despised. Absolutely. And I was blaming CFS for everything that ever happened to me.”

Then, in 2006, two months after her fourth failure, she tried again. “The fifth worked, thank God.”

Why? “Because I realized I had the ability to make or break my kids.”

They were 14 and seven at the time and having their own problems. How did she do it?

“A lot of soul searching. A lot of communication with God. A lot of honesty with myself. That it’s not anybody else’s fault. That it’s my fault. Yeah, the past is the past, and it’s part of what got me where I am.”

But? “You get to an age where you can’t blame anybody anymore.”

Nearly a decade later, Angel is not only still sober, but she has a good job, and the older son is not only proud of his mother, but walking proudly himself.

The younger one is still struggling, though, and she with him, but Angel can’t abandon him again. Which brings us back to blame and blaming.

“There needs to be less blame and more power,” Angel said, “because we have so much power inside. So much.

“I just don’t like to see blame on the system anymore. Because the system is never going to work. The system doesn’t care. It’s a system. How does a system care? My mother should have cared. She was incapable. I understand she was sick. I understand that.”

Near the end of our conversation, Angel mentioned her older son drove her to work earlier in the day. “And I said I was meeting you today and what I was going to talk about, that I don’t think it’s the system’s fault. And he said, what I said. ‘It’s not. It’s the parents.’ Because after I straightened out, he straightened out. When I put value in him, he put value in himself.”

Oh yes, I promised to explain something.

Why I chose Angel of all names, when she hasn’t always been one?

Because, like all innocent children, she was a little angel when she was born.

Blaming anyone or anything for the hell she has been though seems pointless now. What’s more important is giving credit to the person who made her who she is today. Angel.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca