Memoir: Kala's Tree, part 3

Memoir:  Kala's Tree, a ongoing memoir of our niece Kala Hardy, can be found in its entirety by following the Kala Hardy cloudtag at right.



I walk in after hearing a loud buzz and a surprised shriek.  The outlet is low and to my immediate right as I enter Kala's room.  She is crouching in front of the outlet, stunned, her bright brown eyes perfectly round to match the surprised O of her mouth.  One of the outlets bears a six-inch corona of black soot that extends off the switchplate and onto the light blue wall.  Her fist clenches a silver-plated fork.

* * *
Kala will not stay in her room during quiet time.  She behaves as though she has never been told "no" in her life.  She is out 10, 20, 30 times in a two-hour period.  I am so exhausted and exasperated that I threaten to lock her in during quiet time.  This terrifies her, so we agree on terms:  I will keep the door unlocked IF she will remain in her room.  It's sort of a catch-22, since the way to stay free is to remain a willing prisoner.  Most of the time it works, but every great once in a while she hits the three-strikes rule and has to be locked in briefly, until she agrees to stay in.  I hate this part. 


* * *

She goes with anyone, any friendly stranger who approaches her, which terrifies me.  It has never occurred to me that a child would not be other than cautious and strongly attached to a parent, and then I remember, oh yes, you don't know what it is to be securely attached.  Your mother disappears and has to be fetched back by your father, who drives the streets looking for her.  You have no idea where they are right now or why you're here.  The level of responsibility we have taken on, the risk, begins to dawn on me.

* * *
The phrase "a short leash" pops into my head at some point as I realize we are host to a small person who has never in her life been given consistent limits or structure.  Add to that her naturally strong, high-energy personality, and it's clear that Kala needs to be on a very short leash indeed.  I don't mean to speak of her as a dog, but it has to do with helping a person get themselves under control.  When she can demonstrate self-control under very strict limits, the leash is occasionally let out a bit to give her freedom to take the next steps.

* * *

It's as much of an education for Sean and me as it is for her.  One early lesson:  if a three-year old is alone in room for a couple of hours, and if you've folded all her clothes on a bookcase because you don't have a dresser handy, and if this girl likes to dress up, she will pull down all her clothes every day and try on everything and get every single pair of her underwear dirty.  Every Single Day.  After three days, I finally figure out this is dumb, and I get a dresser.

* * *
I am standing one morning hand in hand with Kala, and Nora in a front baby carrier, at the corner of St. Louis and Addison Avenues, in front of the Mirabell Restaurant.  We wait for the light to change so we can cross the street and go to Kmart.  Kmart has become a stand-in for closure in my new-parent role:  as in, well, I might not have accomplished anything today, but at least I got out to Kmart with the kids.  A woman waits for the bus a few feet away. She is Eastern European, stout and fiftyish, with a bright purple dress, metallic high heels, black fishnets and alarmingly bright makeup.  Kala fights every urge to jump and down and holler in excitement at the sight of her, but she shows admirable cool.  Just as we step into the street, Kala looks up with an excited smile and says to me, sotto voce, "Fancy!"  Yes, she sure is fancy.

* * *
[Driving by the Crafty Beaver hardware store on Montrose Ave.]
Kala:  There he is.
Sean:  Who?
Kala:  The Crafty Chipmump.
Sean:  Um, Kala? I think it's a beaver. It says Crafty Beaver on the sign.
Kala:  Yep, there he is, the Crafty Chipmump.
Sean:  Kala, the word you're thinking of is pronounced "chipmunk."  But anyway, I think it's a beaver.
Kala:  Well, that's my word for it.
[to be fair to Kala, you can't see its tail and it does look more like a chipmump.]

* * *
I worry that I might forget something important about Kala.  I worry that, having started to write about her, I now bear some responsibility for putting down everything I can remember in the most faithful way possible.  I'm afraid I'm missing something major.  So much of what I remember is just the everyday moments, sitting on the couch with her or watching her play in the park while pushing Nora in the baby swing.  Those moments are nice to remember too.

* * *
I do not know how to get Kala to pick up her toys.  She dumps out every toy bin with a flourish every single day.  Six hundred separate toys and toy parts are on the floor, which is now unnavigable.  In desperation, I come across a book one day called Parent Effectiveness Training that changes my outlook completely.  Instead of putting the emphasis on what I want her to do, I learn I can reframe everything as a choice for her to make, either good or poor, with attendant consequences.  This realization helps hugely.

The next time Kala's room is in a shambles, rather than battle with her, I say, "You need to decide whether you care about your stuff.  If you care about keeping something, you'll choose to pick it up off the floor and put it away.  I'm giving you about 45 minutes to decide what you care about and what you don't.  If you decide to not pick up something, that means you don't care about it, and we'll give it away to another child who will want it more."  The first time, she is quite surprised to see me come in after 45 minutes, put all the toys on the floor into garbage bags, and take her with me to the Salvation Army.  To her credit, she has picked up enough of her toys to have something to play with.  Luckily most of our kids' toys are from thrift shops or second-hand.

The second time her room needed cleaning, Kala knows I mean what I say and hops up to rescue the toys she wants to keep.  Writing about this approach makes me look unfeeling, but here's the truth:  Kala needed more structure and tighter limits than I ever imagined having to set for anyone, ever.  Looking back, she tested limits more admirably in the short time she was with us than the combined effort of our own four children over the past 16 years.  It was a matter of necessity to set - and be relentless in enforcing - very clear limits with her.  I believe to this day that it helped Kala to feel safe, to know exactly where she stood, since there seemed to be no limits set on her young life thus far.

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself so it hurts less.

* * *

Almost everybody involved with Kala in any way can easily find some pathway to guilt.  Although I don't ruminate about it daily, my guilt has a few different sources.  First, after eighteen months of foster parenthood, I tell Kala's father that at some point, he will need to come get her, even though I know there was a good possibility her parents couldn't handle it.  Sean and I have recently had our second child, Aidan, and I am wearing myself out with the effort of parenting our own two children, plus the added emotional/physical energy required to care for Kala.  Frankly, I also worry whether, in caring for Kala, I am exposing our own children to a parenting style I don't like.  Even though it seems to be helping Kala straighten up and fly right, I am not crazy about the person I fear I am becoming in taking care of her.

Kala's dad comes in April 1997 to bring her home.  The day after she goes back with her father, I seal up all her toys, blankets, blocks, all the things she cares about, into a 2x2 foot box, and mail it to her parents' apartment in Anchorage.  The box weighs 57 pounds.  For some reason, thinking about that 57-pound box makes me want to cry, and I have no idea why.  Maybe it's how sealing it up made me feel, the last tangible vestiges of her presence were leaving us.

My other major source of guilt is the shockingly recent realization that if we had pushed back harder, if we had somehow convinced Alaska's department of family services to let us hang on to Kala longer, that there is a chance she would still be alive today.  Simply put, if we had fought harder for her, maybe she wouldn't have died.  I don't spend lots of time torturing myself about that because the Alaska social services people were pushing quite hard to reunite the girls with their parents.  It's doubtful they would have agreed to it.  But the thought still haunts me sometimes nonetheless.

* * *
As Kala gets older, we find time every summer to have at least a little private conversation.  I ask how she is, she smiles with her beautiful eyes and plucked sad eyebrows and tells me she is OK.  Every summer I repeat our standing offer, that she can always come stay with us if she ever feels like she has to get away from a bad situation.  But I don't think she ever takes it seriously.  For one thing, I always make clear that if she does come to us, we will have rules, just as we had rules in the old days.  And living the way she has for so many years, I don't think she cares much for rules.  Lack of a regular routine is a double-edged sword: lots of freedom, but who can you really count on?

* * *
As she gets older, in addition to the support she gets from Grandma Pat over the summer, Kala gets lots of help from her maternal grandmother, Linda, in Alaska.  She even lives there for a time as a teenager, fighting Grandma "Wonga's" rules all the way but achieving new goals such as learning to play the clarinet.  At one point, Kala decides she would rather return to her father's place, where the rules aren't so strict.

* * *
I go deep-sea charter fishing sometimes in the summer in Lynn, MA, and this time Kala surprises and delights me by agreeing to come along.  It is the last summer I will see her.  She is fourteen and gorgeous.  I insist that she put on her biggest, most shapeless sweatshirt, big pants, and wear no makeup.  I tell her, "This is a boat full of guys, and I will not have them staring at you all day."  It's a three-hour trip to the fishing site.  It's spitting rain and about fifty degrees.  Kala wonders what I have talked her into.  This is what she looks like.

"Why the hell did I agree to come fishing with you?"

We're shown how to bait the jumbo-sized hooks with chunks of herring.  All the tackle is heavy, fit for catching huge fish, though all we catch is small dogfish (sharks).  One of the mates, a red-faced, friendly, and portly young man with a yellow crewcut, approaches Kala and asks politely, "Can I help you, miss?"  Without missing a beat, she smirks, cocks an eyebrow dramatically, and says in a low, commanding voice, "Oh yes, you will help me." I am momentarily knocked out at how self-aware Kala is of her own sexual power at such a young age.  She has always been charming, especially to strangers, but after seeing how incredibly self-assured she is around this young man, I start to wonder how long ago she became aware of the power of her sexuality, and whether, or at what age, she began to use it.

The encounter makes me think that Kala has had to grow up very quickly.