AGAINST THE ODDS, A MOTHER RETURNS

In a small basement apartment in Laurel, barely visible from the trains
whooshing in and out of Washington, lives a family that probably shouldn't
even be a family under the new federal rules of child protection.

At 39, Tammy Hawkins has a formidable rap sheet for using drugs, selling
drugs, stealing to pay for drugs. Her crack cocaine habit for years
overwhelmed her children, Isaiah and Porshia. Too dazed to get them to
school, she turned them into truants. Trading food stamps for crack, she
let them go hungry. Smoking up her welfare checks, then sticking up a
7-Eleven for crack money, she ultimately left them homeless and motherless.

At ages 6 and 12, Isaiah and Porshia landed in the child welfare system as
the government mounted the human version of a public works project to
retrofit Tammy Hawkins for motherhood. Project Hawkins lasted four years as
she tried, failed and tried again to beat her addiction. It cost tens of
thousands of dollars, engaging the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, the Maryland departments of Corrections, Health and Social
Services, several Frederick County agencies and a handful of charitable
organizations.

Such expensive, prolonged investments in "bad parents" are precisely what
Congress decried last year in passing the Adoption and Safe Families Act,
shortening to 12 months the time for rehabilitation before authorities can
move to place children for adoption. The message was clear: Government must
end what one expert called "wishful thinking" about chronically neglectful
and abusive parents.

Yet here is Tammy Hawkins, arriving home this night at 10 p.m., bushed from
crack but also off welfare. Here is Isaiah, now 10, calling for her from
his bed because he lives for the good-night kisses he missed for four
years. Here is Porshia, now 16, giving a big welcome-home wave from the
couch and calling out to her mother, "I love you to infinity."

Here, in this apartment, the politics of child protection appears more
complicated than ever, despite Washington's get-tough clarity.

Tammy Hawkins's return to motherhood testifies to the redemptive power of
something that knows no federal deadlines: the love between a mother and
her children. From the outside, where all bad parents look alike, a system
that tries to unite children with mothers or fathers who repeatedly failed
them appears fatally blind to the interests of the children. But to Porshia
and Isaiah Hawkins, no adoptive family could begin to replace this
bone-tired mother now working day and night to stay even.

"This is not politically correct," said Thomas Slater, counsel to the
Frederick County Department of Social Services, who handled the Hawkins
case, "but when you get inside these cases you realize there's a piece
missing when advocates talk about permanency for children. A mother or a
father, no matter how bad - sometimes there's just this bond there. And
children will put up with a lot of stuff from their parents because they
are their parents and they want them back.

"Sometimes that can't happen," Slater added. "But sometimes it can."

In Court, a Tearful Parting

"Maternal" was not a word that leapt to mind on May 21, 1993, when Tammy
Hawkins, bony and glassy-eyed, appeared in a Frederick County courtroom.
She had been arrested two days earlier for robbing a convenience store in
Frederick by pretending to have a gun under her shirt. She netted $69, soon
squandered on crack.

The court proceeding was a formality. Hawkins's children had been placed in
emergency foster care following her arrest, and now a judge awarded the
Department of Social Services formal custody.

But as deputies tried to lead Hawkins away, even child welfare regulars
assembled for the day's neglected-children docket were riveted by the scene
that unfolded. Isaiah wrapped himself around his mother's legs while
Porshia stretched her thin arms protectively around them. They stood
holding each other, sobbing. Up on the bench, Judge Herbert Rollins removed
his glasses and polished them - a touch too vigorously.

"I'll never forget that," said attorney Elinor Yates, who represented
Hawkins. "It was the first time I'd ever seen a judge cry."

Hawkins, hazy on many details from those days, is clear on this: "I saw the
look in their eyes and all I could think was, I put a hole in their life."

It is a truism of child welfare - which props up many dysfunctional parents
with counseling, housekeepers and cash aid - that nothing galvanizes an
unfit parent like taking away a child. Tammy Hawkins had been arrested on
drug-related charges several times since 1983, but Social Services had
never before been called. Each time, Hawkins's sisters swooped in to care
for the children. "We did it for the kids," said her sister, Renee Jackson.
"Now we think we became Tammy's enablers."

Now, even with a robbery conviction atop the drug busts, the child welfare
system still greeted Hawkins as a mother worth betting on. "There wasn't
physical abuse, there wasn't any question that she wanted to be a better
person if she could overcome her addiction," said Frederick attorney Janet
Farmer, who represented Porshia and Isaiah. "For every Hawkins family,
there are 10 in much worse straits."

Hawkins turned out to have a deep reservoir of strength, from which she now
drew. Raised outside Damascus, in semi-rural Montgomery County, she was the
last of 10 children born to Madeline Hawkins, a hard-working housekeeper
who, according to Tammy, had a mostly absent, alcoholic husband. The
childrens' grandfather served as the family patriarch.

Tammy was adored - babied, her siblings said - by her mother, who in 1960
had plunged into a raging house fire trying to rescue her two youngest
children. She emerged with only one, a charred, 18-month-old Tammy. "My
miracle," Madeline Hawkins called her.

The fire branded the girl with severe facial scars. In an unfinished
autobiography written during one round of drug treatment, she recounted the
"monster names" flung by other kids, who treated her as a freak. "I always
wanted to fit in with the crowd and never could," she said. "When I found a
crowd, it was the wrong one - the crowd that was drinking and using drugs."

She also found sports. She ran the long dirt roads around her home,
developing an athlete's stamina, rising to track and basketball stardom at
Damascus High School. A picture in the 1978 yearbook shows her lunging, 115
pounds of muscle and will, to steal the ball from an opponent.

Unusual in Damascus for her skin color as well as her scars, Hawkins
started a club to foster racial understanding. She was chosen to travel
with a student group to the Capitol and the White House. "I've not been out
of my town," she wrote in her application. "I think it would be a great
experience to go to D.C. and do some things I could tell my kids about."

She had smoked marijuana since sixth grade, but after high school, without
the discipline of sports, she moved to speed, PCP, "anything they handed
me," at all-night parties behind a local shopping center. A plan to work
for a year - she was night kitchen manager at a Lake Forest Mall restaurant
- - then try for a college basketball scholarship evaporated in a haze of drugs.

Porshia was a product of casual sex at 21. Hawkins went on welfare. In
1983, a year after her mother was killed in a freak fall down some basement
steps, Hawkins was arrested for the first time, for selling powder cocaine.
More arrests followed, but justice was lenient. Each time she received
probation and, when she violated probation, jail time was minimal - seven
days on one occasion, 35 days on another.

In 1985 she moved to Frederick, bore a son, and discovered crack. "Some
people could use and go to work in the morning," she said. "But once I
started, I couldn't stop." With what remained of her maternal instincts,
she at least smoked in her bathroom where the children couldn't see her.
But she spared them little else, failing to get them to school so often
that Porshia was held back for two years. Not until she was removed from
her mother would she emerge as a strong student, skipping forward a year.

"Sometimes they'd come to me and say they were hungry. But there were times
there wasn't food," Hawkins recalled. "Crack took my appetite, and if I
couldn't eat I didn't think about them eating. Sad to say now."

As the years passed, only once did anyone report Hawkins to the child
welfare office - a jealous girlfriend of one of her drug-using partners. A
caseworker visited, but did not file charges. "That time," Hawkins said, "I
did have food."

The 7-Eleven holdup followed her first arrest by a decade. Local radio
stations broadcast a lookout for a black female with facial scars. Within
hours, tipsters were phoning in sightings.

The Long Road Back

From her cell in the Frederick County Detention Center, Hawkins got religion.

"Lord God, bring this to pass," she prayed. "I'm tired of doing what I've
been doing." She studied the Bible with Pastor Louise Banks, a minister to
Frederick's poor and to prisoners, who said Hawkins's commitment to
changing her life "left a tremendous impression on me."

Others had the same reaction. Attorney Yates made a cause of Hawkins,
pushing for drug treatment and job training. Hawkins's first caseworker,
John Bertulis, worked overtime ferrying Porshia and Isaiah across two
counties to visit her in jail.

"Just knowing they needed me and wanted me gave me hope," Hawkins said. "I
tried to put myself in their shoes. I was my mother's baby and I had to
face how I treated them. I just swore it wasn't going to happen anymore."

Hawkins pushed through the physical anguish of withdrawal, and became a
leader in inmate drug treatment classes, counseling other addicts. She
studied heating and air conditioning mechanics, winning the job training
agency's "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" award.

On March 23, 1994, with 10 months served, Circuit Court Judge G. Edward
Dwyer ordered her released on three years' probation. If she stayed sober
and employed, she could be reunited with Porshia and Isaiah in as little as
six months.

Living at a Christian women's home in Frederick, she held down an
$11-an-hour job at an air-compressor manufacturer, took community college
classes, regularly visited Porshia and Isaiah at the home of her sister,
Sheila Wallace, who had become their foster parent. Then, after six months,
she dropped from sight. Having fallen in with her old friends, Hawkins
started using again.

"I blew a circuit," she says now. "I had a big test coming up. I felt I
wasn't getting the kids back fast enough. I set expectations too high.
Instead of taking steps, I wanted a giant leap. There I was, back in the
grip of my addiction."

Soon arrested for violating probation, she reappeared in June 1995 before
Judge Dwyer, who was overseeing both her child welfare and her criminal cases.

"Miss Hawkins, I don't give people too many chances," Dwyer said. "I
believe I already gave you one." The judge sentenced her to serve the rest
of her probation in jail - 18 months. Social Services switched its goal for
Porshia and Isaiah from reunification with their mother to long-term foster
care with their Aunt Sheila, officially giving up on Hawkins "in light of
lack of progress." Federal law at the time gave parents 18 months to
rehabilitate; Hawkins already had had two years.

What jolted Hawkins this time was not just losing her children, but losing
herself. "I saw girls get bonded out and come back on another charge before
their court date," she said. "One of them was a girl I'd played basketball
against. She'd lost her kids and she wasn't getting them back. I saw her
cry, and I saw myself."

Again the system rallied for her. Pastor Banks petitioned the Shoemaker
Center, a residential drug treatment program in Carroll County, pleading
for "this young life really worth saving." Hawkins was admitted, from among
25 to 50 applicants per opening. Dwyer allowed her to go.

Hawkins's 39-day stay at Shoemaker cost the state more than $6,000 for
addiction counseling, psychiatric treatment, family therapy with her
children and training through the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
She was released to a long-term treatment center in Laurel for chronic
relapsers - the "physically, spiritually and mentally bankrupt," said
director Joe Hardy.

In a small, white clapboard house called the Transitional Rehabilitation
Residence, Hawkins dumped out her old self and assembled a new one. An
unruly life was traded for one filled with rules: When to wake up, when to
eat, when to sleep. How to plan meals. How to get work. How to set life
goals, how to define steps to reach goals. How to manage anger, anxiety and
impatience.

Hawkins made parole in early 1996, but Hardy and his treatment team said
she wasn't ready to leave. "I'm not graduating one, I'm graduating three,"
he insisted, including Isaiah and Porshia. The children visited every week,
ferried now by social worker Dawn Blood.

By January 1997, Hawkins had been sober almost 18 months. She landed a
full-time job on a landscaping crew tending open spaces in the town of
Columbia and an after-hours job processing returns at Toys R Us. In the new
age of welfare reform, achieving "permanence" means dysfunctional parents
not only must learn to function; they must find jobs.

Hawkins also found an apartment she could afford, and enrolled her children
in school in Laurel. The last hurdle was cleared in late January 1997 when
Hardy's treatment team declared Hawkins ready for the outside world.

A few days later, Hawkins was observed jumping, whooping and crying so hard
into the phone at the Transitional Residence that everyone figured she had
won the Pick 3. But it wasn't the lottery. It was her caseworker, who
simply had asked, "When do you want them?"

The Pendulum of the Law

The responsibilities of parents in America are at once so ill-defined and
so sacred that no attempt to set them in legislative stone has worked as
intended. The last wide-ranging reform of child welfare, in 1980, was
denounced during the 1997 congressional debate for fostering permissiveness
toward "bad parents." Now the pendulum has swung back, toward iron-fisted
discipline.

The 1997 law appears certain to greatly cut the number of future Tammy
Hawkins projects. "It would be very difficult today to keep a reunification
open for this long," said social worker Dawn Blood.

The new law envisions a family for every child, but many local authorities
warn that freeing thousands of foster children for adoption could overwhelm
the available supply of adoptive parents. Whether the new legislation will
move parents to rehabilitate or more citizens to adopt foster children will
remain unknown for years, according to child welfare experts.

The courts demand that child welfare policy be governed by "the best
interests of the child." In practice, however, child welfare is not so much
about doing what is best for children, but what is least harmful. The
"best" option - growing up in the loving care of adults with whom a child
has bonded from the cradle - already has been interrupted for children in
foster care. The choice between betting on a weak parent or counting on
adoption to replace the primary emotional bond in a child's life is rarely
simple.

Social workers note that parents in America are not required to be perfect,
after all. The law requires them only to be parents.

Watchful 'Normalcy'

It is beginning to feel like normal life in the Hawkins household. Porshia,
all teenager all the time, is curled up in a living room chair,
simultaneously doing homework and talking to a friend on the phone. Isaiah,
a deadeye on the basketball court, is outside shooting hoops against the
former star ball handler for the Damascus High Hornets, who is his mother.

If you've lost your mother, having her back means incalculably more than
having her company. It means understanding where you fit, savoring the
wonder of what you come from. "No wonder where I get this!" Isaiah marvels,
as Tammy Hawkins's still-hot hands steal the ball from him.

As if afraid of losing his mother again, Isaiah is almost always in reach
of her. He sits close beside her, drumming his fingers on her hand. Asked
what it was like when she was in jail, he disappears into his room,
emerging with a stuffed bear and stuffed dog, presents from his mother at
the 1993 jail Christmas party. He holds them close and thinks hard. "Bad,"
is all he can say.

He much prefers to tell how he felt when he and Porshia arrived in this
apartment for their first weekend with Hawkins, a trial reunification. Snow
was falling, and he couldn't stifle a wish: "I want to get snowed in and
stay forever." When bedtime came, they bunked in the living room. Hawkins
couldn't sleep, looking from Isaiah to Porshia all night, thinking, "This
is how it's going to be."

Harder, actually. Hawkins brings home $350 a week working 64 hours. She is
always tired. Her feet hurt. She rises at 5:30 a.m. to read AA meditations.
The other day she underlined this one: "Keep striving for something better
and there can be no stagnation in your life." She hopes so. Recently, her
car broke down, medical costs came due (she no longer has Medicaid and her
jobs provide no health insurance), a friend ran up her phone bill, and now
she is a month behind in her rent, facing eviction. She and the children
will move to a smaller apartment, she says. "Nobody promised if I got sober
things wouldn't happen."

She has confessed to her children her lingering crack cravings, which she
fights by going to AA and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Staying clean means
coming clean, not just at meetings, but out in the world, in front of her
children, just as using drugs meant hiding, even from herself.

It is not easy for Porshia and Isaiah to hear the story. They lived it,
after all. Asked how she reacted when her mother returned to jail, Porshia
looks up wearily from her homework. "Which time?" she asks.

The other night, arriving home late, Hawkins was surprised to find Isaiah
still awake. She kissed him good night and went into the bathroom. Then
came a tap on the door and Isaiah's worried voice: "Mom, are you okay?"

She knew instantly what he was thinking: that she was in her old addict's
hideaway. She cracked the door so he could see her. "I'm fine," she said.

Now she has to ask. "Did you think I was using again?"

He looks at her apologetically. "At first," he says. "Then I thought, 'Why
would someone go through everything she's gone through for three years,
just to use again?' It didn't make sense."

"No," she says, "it really wouldn't make sense."

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company