Story Photos
 Photo courtesy By an 18-year-old young woman The mountain in this picture represents my grandma's boldness to be a single parent and be truthful with life's situations. The water shows the history of my grandma raising me and my sisters. As the sunset is so beautiful, so is my grandma both inside and out. The reflection of the mountain represents her teaching me and my sisters and raising us in her way. ... She is the greatest ma ever. (From a booklet, "Voices of Children Raised by Grandparents and Other Relatives," put together by a network of organizations involved in kinship care services in Washington State.) |
Reared by relatives
Tuesday, September 4, 2007 7:22 AM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleIn Cowlitz County there's a 74-year-old widow raising her 12-year-old grandson. Grandparents taking in toddlers who have been molested. Aunts and uncles making room for a nephew or niece rather than see the kids live with strangers.
Their kin need love, so people kiss retirement good-bye.
To acknowledge that commitment -- and have a little fun, a Kinship Care Picnic will be held Sunday at Lake Sacajawea.
Planned to coincide with National Grandparents Day, the gathering offers those who are raising the children of relatives a time to relax, share stories and learn about available resources, said Robert Mumford of the Children's Services division of the Department of Social and Health Services.
"Foster parents get training and lots of support," said Mumford, who helped organize the picnic and two new support groups. "Relatives may be left to figure it out by hook or by crook.
"They need to make friends with people who are in the same boat."
It's a big boat.
Nationwide, 2002 U.S. census data reported that 2.4 million grandparents have primary responsibility for their grandkids. More than 35,000 grandparents in Washington state are responsible for raising grandchildren, according to records kept by the DSHS.
Early in 2007, he and representatives from a wide swath of agencies, including Parents Place, Head Start, Lower Columbia Mental Health and the Southwest Washington Council on Aging, met to strategize ways to help.
"We want something more to help relatives in this situation," Mumford said at a May meeting. "We're not going to let these relatives fall by the wayside."
Kinship caregivers face legal complexities about custody, taxes and medical coverage; emotional and physical needs of the children; crushing financial burdens and their own health issues.
Most kinship caregivers are middle-aged or older. In many cases, they pitch in because their own adult children are drug addicts. Added to grief and guilt over that, they must reorganize their lives to care for young children.
"These are discerning people," said Shelly Willis, the executive director of Family Education and Support Services, a nonprofit agency in Olympia.
"Their own kids have been through a lot," Willis said last week. "Sixty percent of kinship caregivers are low-income women. They're overwhelmed. They need support -- not more duties!
"They're so focused on these kids, they can't focus on self care. We're there to help them."
Willis, who oversees a five-county area around Olympia, said she's delighted to know of the new support groups in Cowlitz County. Attorneys and therapists come to speak at the meetings, and social times also are included.
Gatherings such as Sunday's picnic are important, said a Longview woman who brought up her son's two children. Sept. 9 is the opening day of Sunday School at her church, but she hopes to get to the picnic, the grandmother said.
Like many in kinship care, she did not want her name used for privacy issues.
The two grandkids she brought up are now young adults. But she vividly remembers the day she and her husband, who has since died, brought their son's first baby home from the hospital.
She was 47; her husband was in his 50s.
"For the first six months, the baby cried and screamed. He was going through withdrawal." In no time, she said, "he became my husband's sidekick. He called himself 'Grandpa's boy.' "
The benefits were mutual. "That boy gave my husband energy -- so much energy, you can't imagine. He was a wonderful father, and a wonderful husband. We were lucky. We had very little money but we always lived well."
When the daughter-in-law got pregnant a second time, "I said, 'I'm not raising another one!' "
Then her son was on the doorstep. His wife was leaving him, he said, "and she doesn't want her" -- meaning the infant daughter in his arms.
"This stuff happens more than you know," the grandmother said.
A straight-shooting, humorous person, she forged ahead with the second round of parenting -- volunteering at the kids' schools, going to carnivals, helping in a reading group.
"I did all the things young mothers do."
When her husband died, their grandson sat by the casket, rubbing the man's arms and talking to him, she said. "He was right there with him. He put drawings into the casket. He learned a life lesson not too many kids have."
She doesn't sugar-coat the last 20 years, but she has no regrets, the grandmother said. "They may do some things now that I'm not pleased with, but both of them are responsible. They want to work, they want to take care of themselves. They respect people; they really do.
"They have a chance at a regular life, a good life."
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