‘Since I’ve been here, it’s been a better childhood’

By: 
Staff Writer Kate Wehlann

Carin Bennett likes being a mom.

She raised two sons to adulthood, but when her sons left home, she was left wondering what her purpose was in life. Sure, she had her work as a nurse, but it wasn’t the same. There had to be more to life than going to work, coming home, playing with the cats and going to bed — wasn’t there?

“Once the boys were gone from home, … they were grown and didn’t need me as much and I knew they loved me, but it was that empty nest feeling,” she said. “I was, like, OK, what’s the next phase of my life going to be?”

She tried dating, gambling, shooting pool, arts and crafts, trying to redefine herself again after years of mothering.

“Being a single person, I don’t know if it was harder for me or easier for me, because I could choose what I wanted, when I wanted,” she said. “After all that, I started getting a bit down, thinking about what my life was going to be. I tried everything and nothing was working.”

She talked with her older sister, who reminded her of all the times she’d talked about being a foster parent.

“I said I’d look into it,” said Bennett. “I was single, making a decent income — not great, but I was a nurse, so of course, they were telling me about special needs kids.”

The first baby sent to her was Liliana and doctors weren’t terribly positive about their predictions for her future. She had microcephaly, a condition in which a person’s head is smaller than normal and often comes with smaller brains and an intellectual disability. Doctors said she had severe drug exposure in utero and had spent her entire seven weeks of life in the NICU.

“The nurse told me she would never walk or talk and I should really think about this before I do it,” said Bennett. “They said her mother had visited her for maybe 20 minutes at a time, less than three times.”

But the predictions didn’t turn out to be accurate. Lily is a happy, bouncy kindergartener, walking, talking and defying every expectation placed on her when she was just a tiny baby. She’s also found her forever home with Bennett.

“I still have her,” said Bennett. “I don’t think she’s ever spent a day away from me, except when I went to England one time … She’s a gorgeous child and she’s got a hell of a sense of humor. She’s very independent.”

Lily said she’s very happy her mother adopted her. Her favorite things to do is to play with her toys and help her mother cook.

“I like to make cupcakes,” she said.

She added she likes it when Bennett takes her to school.

Adoption wasn’t a quick process, however. Lily was 3 1/2 before Bennett could finally call her hers.

“It was very lengthy,” said Bennett. “The family, the father in particular, was in and out of jail, so sometimes he would be at court hearings and sometimes he wouldn’t. He wasn’t objecting, ever, to her being adopted, but they couldn’t find the mother quite often and then she would be in and out of jail and it just drug on forever. They told me later someone from another state, maybe a grandparent, acted interested in adopting her. If a biological family member steps in, that can stop everything at a moment’s notice.”

Bennett said the court sometimes even had trouble getting the lawyers in court at the right time and said the judge had to, at one point, subpoena the attorneys involved.

“It just took forever, but I just tried to be patient and let whatever happen happen,” said Bennett. “I was very, very happy to finally adopt her.”

During that process, she still wasn’t finished adding to her family. A brother and sister, Abby, now 13, and Jalen, now 17, came to live with her as well. They are now, officially, Bennetts.

Recently, Bennett posted a photo of them on Facebook, taken at Thunder Over Louisville shortly after they came to stay with her. She was asking for anyone in the area who had known them and had old photos of them to pass them on so they could have them.

“When kids come to you, they don’t have anything and they have nothing from their past,” said Bennett. “As they become adolescents and Jalen’s a young adult now, they they don’t have those baby pictures, things about themselves growing up, let alone their families. It helps to fill holes if you can find a few pictures … When they hit teenagehood and they start processing these thoughts — they go through so much as little kids that they don’t process it for a long time. Then they get to a certain age and it just kind of floods them and it’s hard to process that. Little things like pictures from people who knew the good side of their parents, that can give them one word of knowledge their parents were decent people.”

She said she got a lot of responses, but not very many pictures. She said the couple photos she did get did help Abby and Jalen.

“I didn’t really experience anything bad [in foster care],” said Jalen. “Overall, it was good because I ended up with my mother.”

When he was separated from his biological family, he was in upper elementary and said there had been a lot of drug use. Abby agreed, saying Jalen often took care of her and shielded her from some of what was going on, giving her part of what he was given to eat so she would have enough. She also remembers the night they were placed in the system, when she was 6 and Jalen was 10.

She said she and Jalen were taken to the hospital and were there all that night.

“We weren’t thinking about the sadness,” she said. “We watched Spongebob and ate biscuits and gravy. Then they took us away.”

This, she said, came on the heels of the death of an aunt she was very close to, which compounded the emotional trauma she was feeling. Then came the jumping around from place to place, she said — to her father’s house, which she didn’t like, then to other foster homes with Jalen. Jalen remembers an older couple, then men named Brian and Bill took them in for a few months with four other foster children.

They came to Bennett when they were 9 and 13. Jalen and his biological father had been spending more and more time together, preparing to transition into Jalen and Abby, who had a different father, moving in with him. However, that fell through and the short time they had been due to spend with Bennett grew longer and longer.

“She was the saddest little girl and he was just angry,” she said. “It’s been over four years, almost five now, since they were adopted. They pushed that one through quick. I don’t think anyone thought they would ever be adopted [at that age].”

She said, combining the ascension to adolescence with the previous family trauma and instability they experienced, the siblings came with their set of emotional hurdles to cross.

At the end of the initial two weeks they were due to spend with her, Bennett said a case worker came to her and said, “I’m sure these aren’t the kind of kids you signed up for. They’re not medically needy or anything like that. I assume you don’t want to adopt them.”

“The kids were just standing there, wondering what was going to happen to them,” she said. “My comeback to that, and I’m sure this helped was, ‘Do they want me?’ Because here I am, an almost-50-year-old woman, going through social security, I didn’t have much income because now I’m staying home with the kids. My biggest concern was that they would settle with me. I wanted them to have a happy life and if that meant a mom and a dad — their happiness was the big thing. I adore their case worker, I really do, but that conversation kinda kicked me in the feels. I made them very aware it was their choice. I’m not the typical mom, dad, white picket fence family, and I was a foster parent, so the doors were revolving. It wasn’t the easiest life in the world, but they knew they were loved.”

She said Jalen, immediately, said he wanted Bennett to adopt him and that Abby followed along.

“She knew she was out of options and this is really starting to [emotionally] come out now,” said Bennett. “She’s like, ‘Mom, I love you. I love you with everything in me, but at that time, I just felt like I didn’t have a choice. I did want the white picket fence and the young parents and the shopping every Friday and Saturday.’ They go through a lot with all of this, but they’ve come out troopers.”

Jalen said Bennett’s house felt like home to him.

“It’s been good, even when we were being heathens,” he said. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else. There’s no questioning if I’m acting up and going to have to move.”

“We started getting comfortable here,” said Abby. “She said she wouldn’t give up on us.

“Kids shouldn’t have had to go through what we went through,” continued Abby. “Jalen helped me through a lot of things. Now my mom helps me through my problems … I didn’t know what foster care was until I was in it. I had multiple case workers … Now I have my mom, Carin, and me and my brother are always there for each other. Since I’ve been here, it’s been a better childhood.”

She said her grades are starting to pick up and she’s learning how to cope with the things life has thrown at her. On occasion, she still sees her biological mother. Sometimes, she sees another of her older brothers as well, who she said would be there for her when she was younger, though more from a distance.

“I still miss them,” she said.

Throughout the process of adoption for Lily, Abby and Jalen, other children filtered through Bennett’s home, often emergency placements, sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes longer.

“Then I got Brad [not his real name], a 6-year-old, who they told me only had a clubbed foot that had never been repaired,” she said. “After two years with this kid — this was supposed to be a temporary placement, too — I had nurses come and help with him, but he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and profound autism. He was like a 3-month-old baby when he got here and he was like a 3-year-old when he left. We made big progress with him. He was a light.”

Bennett said she couldn’t really consider adopting Brad due to her adopting three other children and the needs Brad had, but fortunately, one of the nurses who came to help care for him stepped up and adopted him.

“That was such a great ending to that story,” she said. “… I’m really proud of that situation.

“It seems like my stories are either great or devastating,” Bennett continued. “There’s not a whole lot of in-between. Brad was a great in-between story; I didn’t adopt him, but he had a very happy ending. Him, Lily, Abby and Jalen are my huge success stories. I’m working on a few others.”

Jalen and Abby’s lives have found even keels for the most part. Jalen enjoys language arts at Salem High School, reading, writing, playing basketball, track and field and works at Arby’s. He enjoys playing video games and hanging out with friends and he’s looking forward to getting his driver’s license.

Abby is an animal lover with three cats who hopes to go to college and get a degree that would let her work as a veterinary technician and/or groomer. She likes playing volleyball, running track, swimming, spending time with friends and even helping out around the house. Her favorite subject is math.

Following Brad, Lily’s biological siblings came to stay with Bennett for a time, but were eventually placed elsewhere. Lily is still able to visit her older siblings.

“They know who each other are and they’ll always know who each other are,” she said. “They have visits with Lily every two weeks.”

“I felt like she was my sister,” said Abby of one of Lily’s biological siblings. “Five months ago, they were moved. I got angry and depressed, but I got through it. I still see therapists. My best friend helps me through stuff. She’s always there for me when I need to talk.”

As a foster parent, Bennett is very familiar with the insecure feeling when a child is taken from her care and placed with someone new. She’s familiar with recovering trauma and the highs and lows of foster parenting, including some less-than-pleasant interactions with the Department of Child Services.

“I don’t want to be negative because I really advocate foster parenting, but the system needs to be corrected,” she said, not just in Indiana, but across the country. “… There’s so many ups and downs to foster parenting and it’s confusing and I’m sure it’s keeping some people from becoming foster parents. They’re like, ‘No, I’m going to get my heart broken.’ When I foster a child, the only thing I can do is make sure they’re loved, they’re secure, that I can give them everything I can give them. I have no control over what happens next. That’s all I can do. Even with Lily, who I had for 3 1/2 years, I did not open my heart until those adoption papers were signed. Then she was mine. She got as much love as I could give her, but I couldn’t give that last little part of myself until those papers were signed.”

Bennett said, before becoming a foster parent, she thought it would be more difficult to become a foster parent as a single person.

“I’m sure other people might have difficulties I didn’t,” she said. “I had a very supportive family. If I needed daycare, they helped, but it was all joy to me, except during struggles with DCS. I don’t want to scare anyone off from foster parenting. I still advocate to this day. It’s not going to get better until we’re all working on it, because the situation is so bad right now.

“If everybody could take one child out of the system, and make sure they stayed close with their siblings, we would solve a lot of problems,” she said. “… Just jump in there. These kids need love.”

Recently, Bennett wrote an article on Quora, a question and answer website, about becoming a foster parent at an older age. She had no idea how many that message would resonate with.

“The next three or four weeks, my phone was just blowing up with people reading and upvoting and it was pretty cool,” she said. “60,000 people read what I wrote. There were a lot of comments.”

Her question at the beginning of her journey with foster parenting was wondering why she was here? Now, she said, she knows her purpose.

“I love fostering,” she said. “You’re going to go through trials, but it’s worth it.”

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