How did we get here?

Ok, this is really just about a couple of older people who ended up with the full-time care of a 13-year-old and a 2.5-year-old. These children are my husband's grandchildren. Both mom and dad are in jail (actually it's even more complicated than that, as there are two different daddies).

First of all, we live in a house that is really two bedrooms, but you could call it a three-bedroom house if you move all the stuff out of the storage room, which is about 12 feet by 5 feet, and turn that into a nursery for the 2.5 year old child.

Ok, how did we get here? How does any grandparent become the custodian and guardian of a grandchild? Generally, it occurs because both mom and dad are out of the picture due to drugs, incompetance, irresponsibility, jail, or some combination of those things. Depending on the situation, mom and/or dad may only be temporarily out of the picture, but my guess is that through their selfishness and irresponsiblity, the damage to their own children is extensive. This seems to be happening more and more these days, because I keep hearing these same types of stories from my clients at the bank.

Ok, back to our story. Mom, I hate to say, is an idiot. She is fatally attracted to the biggest, baddest drug dealers and murderers in town. I believe she completely gets off on being able to control them, even if they occasionally kick down the front door and try to strangle her in front of her own kids (true story). She is beautiful, magnetic, and unbelievably self-destructive.

She got involved in the biggest mortgage scandal in the state and was sentenced to a year in prison. On parole briefly because of her dad's upcoming open-heart surgery (that's my husband), she of course violated the terms of her parole by getting involved in a local murder. Her new boyfriend pulled the trigger, killing a young boy who had stolen a very expensive ($100,000) necklace from some other local lowlife. After going on the run with her boyfriend (and claiming she wasn't at all involved) she finally turned herself in and has been in jail ever since.

So what happened to her two kids?? This would be the 12-year-old girl and 2.5-year-old girl. Well...they were first taken to their uncle's house, where he lives with his pregnant girlfriend. This situation lasted about two weeks. The 13-year-old, Mari, called us one day when my husband and I were out driving around iwth his 16-year-old daughter, and asked us to come and pick up her and her little sister. The uncle and his girlfriend were fighting and the kids couldn't take it any more. So we turned around and drove for an hour out to the uncle's house. The two kids were sitting at the bottom of the driveway with their little suitcases packed and their little dog in his carrier. They had been sitting out there for an hour, not wanting to go back into the house.

We loaded them into the car, less the dog (we had to break their hearts and tell them we couldn't take their beloved toy fox terrier with us). We didn't even stop in at the house; we just drove straight home. On the way, we stopped at Wal-Mart and got pull-ups, toothbrushes, milk, and other necessities. Then we headed home, fed the little ones, arranged for mattresses, bedding and pajamas, and put them all to bed. They have been with us ever since.