Episode 5, Chapter 4 1980 July 10th. The state finally almost lets us go

By the summer of 1980, something was happening that nobody could have predicted from the reports written about our family just a few years earlier. Mom was doing it. She had Eric and me back. Baby Summer was with us. We had a home again. And for the first time since the State of California had stepped into our lives, the people watching our family were beginning to believe that maybe they didn't need to watch anymore. Things weren't perfect. They never were. After our court hearing in April, Tom gave up selling knives, pans, china, and flatware door-to-door. It hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped. At the end of May, he left for Texas to work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The plan was for him to make enough money to move all of us to Texas by September. But plans in our family had a way of changing. According to what Mom told the social worker, Tom went to Colorado to visit his family and reinjured his leg. He needed surgery and would be laid up for at least six weeks. Suddenly, Mom was on her own. She had three little kids to take care of—me, Eric, and baby Summer. A few years earlier, the State of California had decided she couldn't safely take care of two children. Now she had three. And the state was watching. The social worker, Charlene Atkins, didn't just schedule visits and give Mom time to make everything look good. She showed up unannounced. Again and again. Those visits mattered because Mom didn't know when somebody from the Department of Public Welfare might knock on the door. There wasn't time to hide anything. What Charlene Atkins saw was simply how we were living. And what she saw surprised me when I read the report all these years later. The apartment was tidy. The curtains were open. Mom was taking care of us. Eric and I looked healthy. Sure, sometimes we were dirty. But the social worker understood why. We had been outside playing. And if she had known the kind of kid I was, she probably would have understood just how dirty I could get. I was five years old and going full speed through life. This was the same kid who had pushed his little brother down a hill on a Big Wheel and sent him crashing into a wooden fence. The same kid who had tried to surprise Mom and Tom with pancakes at six in the morning and put a plastic mixing bowl directly on a hot stove. The same kid who packed his cuppy and stuffed bear into a tiny suitcase, put on his white Sunday suit, and marched down to the bus stop because Mom jokingly told me to leave. Apparently somebody even wondered whether there was something wrong with me because I had so much energy. In June, Mom took Eric, baby Summer, and me to a free clinic for checkups. The doctor said we were fine. And as for me? According to Mom's account in the report, the doctor said my hyperactivity was normal for my age. In other words, I wasn't broken. I was five. I was just a wild little kid who played hard, thought fast, acted before thinking, and somehow managed to turn ordinary childhood ideas into family emergencies. But beneath all those funny memories, something much more serious was happening. Mom was proving herself. The social worker watched her feed us. She saw that we were getting enough sleep. She saw Mom letting us play outside with other children. She saw that we weren't wandering miles away from home anymore. And she found no evidence of the alcohol problems that had been part of Mom's life when the court first became involved. That was a long way from November 1977. Back then, I was three years old and found wandering about five blocks from home after Mom hadn't seen me for hours. That little boy became part of a court case. Eric and I were removed. We went through Hillcrest Receiving Home, our grandparents, and foster families. Our lives became court dates, social workers, lawyers, reports, and placements. Now the same system was looking at our mother and seeing something different. Charlene Atkins wrote: "This mother has come a long way in straightening out her life." When I read those words today, I stop on them. Because they're important. This wasn't Mom saying she'd changed. This wasn't me trying to make the past prettier than it really was. A social worker who had been showing up at our home without warning wrote those words. Mom had come a long way. The social worker wasn't pretending everything was perfect, either. She wrote that our home wasn't necessarily the kind of nurturing environment that would encourage us to reach our fullest potential. That's a hard sentence to read. But then she wrote something more important. Our basic needs were being met. We weren't starving. We weren't being left completely unattended. We had somewhere to sleep. We were being cared for. And even with Tom gone for a month and a half, Mom was handling three children by herself. The social worker saw no signs of the depression or alcohol problems that had plagued Mom when the original petition was filed. She even admitted she wasn't sure Mom and Tom would stay together. But that didn't change what she had seen. Mom was standing on her own. And she was taking care of us. Finally, Charlene Atkins reached a conclusion that would have been almost unimaginable three years earlier: "I do not believe that these minors are in danger of extreme neglect which originally brought them to the Court's attention." We were no longer considered to be in danger. Then came the recommendation: Terminate jurisdiction. Those two words meant the San Diego County Juvenile Court no longer needed authority over my life. The state that had once decided where I slept, who cared for me, which foster family I would live with, and whether I could live with my own mother was preparing to let us go. I was only five, so I didn't understand the significance of any of it. I wasn't sitting around thinking about juvenile court jurisdiction. I was outside getting dirty. I was getting into trouble. I was playing with Eric. I was being a big brother to Summer. I was being a kid. But somewhere in an office, a social worker was writing the words that could finally close the file that had followed us for years. And there's something about these particular records that matters to me now. My mother made terrible mistakes. There were things that happened to Eric and me that should never happen to children. Those things are true. But this is true too. She fought her way back. At least during this chapter of our lives, Mom had done enough that the people who once removed us from her care were now willing to trust her with us again. I won't rewrite my childhood to make her better than she was. But I won't rewrite it to make her worse, either. If I'm going to tell the truth about my mother, then I have to tell all of it. The woman described in the earliest reports wasn't the only version of Robin Jones. There was also this woman. A mother with three little children, her husband away, answering unexpected knocks from social workers and opening the door to a home that was tidy, children who were fed, and two little boys who were finally healthy enough to spend their days outside getting dirty. For once, somebody knocked on our door and didn't find a reason to take us away. And on July 10, 1980, after nearly three years of being watched, evaluated, moved, placed, reunited, and watched some more, the recommendation was finally made: Let them be a family. The State of California was ready to let us go. And for a five-year-old boy who had already been taken from home more than once, maybe the greatest thing about that moment was that I didn't understand any of it. I didn't have to. For once, I could just go outside and play.

What the Court Didn't Know