I’m unemployed currently, and have done many jobs over the years. It’s helped me gain insight as to some of the social dysfunction I see around me as I relate to it in my own personal defects. I do not stand as any employers judge. Many helped me grow in ways that I will always appreciate. I was lucky to work for Van Buren Community Mental Health during a period I was dealing with mental illness and substance abuse issues for the first time, while going through college in a transition from being a NATO Peacekeeper and US Army soldier. It was a mutually beneficial experience that could have launched various opportunities. Instead I often squandered my behavior into decisions that lacked strategic ingenuity and foresight.
My last job was working in a foster care home that was pragmatically an orphanage for three intellectually, (and physically disabled,) teens. I need to be real general due to HIPPA, but this experience was an important lesson towards ultimately me choosing to leave social work for the second time. In retrospect it was like working in a reality series that had a small private interactive audience of perceived mental health professionals. There are cameras everywhere in the house, and I was told there was audio as well. Employees are often threated with a complete career loss or criminal charges for both not being perfect, and sometimes, just doing the right thing. The care takers are usually low paid, undertrained, and imperfect beings like me. However, that wasn’t the real problem. Children need families, but can spend from infancy to adulthood institutionalization, or even death, in these type of facilities. They need families.
I didn’t generally see this happening, so I tried to create some fictive kinship between the youth I worked with, and my coworkers. That’s what they needed, but there was a lot of resistance towards this philosophy from young coworkers pretending everyone they want to rise up over is sexual predator suspect, including teachers not even in our program. I had upper management tell us to keep a log of a teenager’s masturbation habits who simply asked for some ‘alone time off camera.’ The range went down and it took months to get it replaced. Most of the food was donated pantry food, and the kids became adjusted to some bad habits. So have I in my life and families aren’t perfect. However it was the lack of a sense of family that these kids got that ultimately disturbed me. I do recommend this style of foster care home be dismantled, but it isn’t my right to determine nor academic expertise. Being denied a family is inherently neglectful, and there isn’t much society can do about it if good people don’t step up to adopt. It’s a hard sell to get families with the necessary resources to adopt physically and intellectually disabled teenagers. However, this sort of professional foster care housing program sucks. It’s not right.
Maybe I don’t have the solution, but fictive kinship in the house itself between employed staff and youth was mostly discouraged. At one point my reputation was attacked by a coworker for hugging a kid in the foster system most of his life who was in need and reached out to me. His case worker tended to agree with me, and did show a lot of wisdom. We settled officially settled that it was okay to hug with one arm between the child and youth, though regulations technically didn’t allow any touching at all. I eventually lost the job after encouraging a rather severely intellectually disabled teenage boy still in diapers to go pee in the toilet by peeing in the toilet first. It was how I got my son to train when he was a toddler at a similar intellectual level. This didn’t go over well. I lost my job, and was initially told I was under investigation for criminal sexual misconduct. I interviewed explaining that this wasn’t sexual. It just wasn’t and it worked; the diaper bound kid started going repeatedly for me. Foster Care Licensing didn’t determine any criminal charges should be referred. It merely indicated that I had used an outdated method that is no longer used due to an incident that happened not matching my situation. My employer however went silent and fired me by just taking me off the schedule. They didn’t answer my texts and fought me on unemployment. The whole situation was degrading but a lawyer advised me that it just wasn’t worth working in this line of field, because of the low pay and situations like these. He was my mom's supervisor in Child Protective Services. (I've got stories about briefly working in that field a couple times as well.)
I’ve been unemployed for over 2 months at the time of this writing. It’s not just degrading to me. The kids and I really bonded. I called them my work kids, and I was the closest thing that had to a father figure. The situation sucks all around. It’s kind of depressing. To some degree, I had to mourn them being taken out of my life. They would have had to do the same, but with limited cognitive abilities. The system is broken, and this is an aspect. Kids shouldn’t be raised on camera by social workers removed from the actual home. It just shouldn’t work like that, but it does and it’s not something I can change beyond writing this and moving on. It really is like a sick reality game show. People just take each other out.
It’d be nice to move on career wise. I’m stuck; at least for the moment. My writings aren’t serious. They are for me. I’m happy if someone gets something out of them, but that wasn’t the motive, I assure you. It’s merely cathartic. My readership is at best a dozen people. I don’t care if I get sued though. When one’s back is to the ocean, you march forward into the fire or you’re screwed for sure.
Joker's Wild 