I want to tell you of my own experience with the Child Protective System (CPS).

When I took my first kids – 3 brothers, 8, 10. 12 – I had no intention of adoption. Their mother went into rehab and I took the kids until she would finish her program and then take them back. It was a shock to me when she quit the program and did not take them back. That’s how I got started in this adoptive life of mine. 

At the same time that I was dealing with all that, I was a “big brother” to a 12 year old boy named Gilbert, who lived at an RTC, Children’s Village, in Westchester. We used to say that Gilbert was going to end up in the back wards of a psych hospital.  He was a good kid, friendly and funny but he would go bonkers regularly.  He was a skinny kid, but when he went off, it took six adults to control him.  He would grab big butcher knives in his cottage and go after the other kids or the staff.  He did that regularly. When I moved up here, it was too far to drive down to meet with him, and I had the other three here so we decided that Gilbert would visit on the weekends.

One Sunday, he announced to me that he was moving in here. I didn’t take it seriously, but I still told him that no he was not (it wasn’t even a little bit on my radar).  We went back and forth some and then he said, “Why not? These other guys have.”  Now I was stuck. I said to him that he couldn’t do it because Children’s Village would never allow it. He asked me why.  So, I figured, let me go for it. I told him because he went after people with butcher knives when he got mad. I asked, “what are we going to do – have you run up and down my street chasing kids with butcher knives when you get mad?” He looked at me, and asked, in all sincerity, “That’s why they won’t let me come?  Because I chase people with knives?” Now I was taken aback. He’d been at CV for three years already and had been told a zillion times that that behavior was unacceptable. Yet he was responding as if he’d never heard it. I said, yes, that’s why. He then said, “Well, I will stop picking up knives then.”  And that was it: he walked away happy and so did I. I was certain that he could not control his behavior: three years at CV and much meds hadn’t done it for him. Certainly, willpower wouldn’t do it either. 

But he did do it.  He never picked up another knife. Over the course of months, he showed everyone that he had indeed stopped with the knives completely. I was blown away and intrigued. I knew I had to give him a shot here. It was a huge fight to get him, but get him I did. Eventually. 

He did fine enough here. I had to run up to school every day though to deal with his nonsense. And he was constantly threatening suicide. Especially when they built the second span of the Newburgh bridge, in 1980.  But eventually he got enough control that I was able to take him completely off his meds and he was able to move out of his emotionally handicapped school placement.  In September of 1985,  still in school but 18, he was allowed to ride to BOCES every day for a child-care program they had.  He did great there.  But one day, he sat at the kitchen table and told me that his doing great was because of me, not him. “It’s you, not me” is what he said. That he was allowed to go to BOCES; that he was out of the self-contained class; that he was off meds; that I didn’t even know his teachers that school year all didn’t cut it for him. It was me, not him. I did not agree; hell, I didn’t even understand it. 

Two months earlier, I had a child abuse charge lodged against me. My then-17-year-old son had been doing nothing in school for two years. Finally, I told him that I was going to sign him out and maybe he should think about the army. He was curious and he and I went up to the recruiter even. But he failed the entry exam. However, he’d told his “victim” version to his friend and the friend’s mother called CPS. It was August, as I remember.

The investigator, maybe 23, was named Deborah Rinaldi. That four decades later I remember her name shows how I experienced what happened next. It felt from the gitgo that she had something against me. She refused to look at any of the school documentation, for instance. Ultimately, she found me guilty – “indicated” – in CPS terms. I was shocked and horrified. I appealed it to her; to her bosses; and I got nowhere. Finally in October I went to a lawyer. He told me that there was nothing to be done but do whatever they wanted. I told him that there was nothing they wanted me to do. My case was “indicated but closed.” And he told me that I was stuck with it. I had another kid in the midst of being adopted and I knew his adoption would be stopped cold with a CPS conviction against me. 

I came home from the lawyer on a Friday and completely fell apart.  My life, I felt, was destroyed. It was a terrible Columbus Day weekend.  Monday night, Gilbert picked up a knife for the first time in over six years.  The next day, he jumped off the bridge. 

It took me a long time to recover, if I even still have. I blamed the system; specifically, Rinaldi.  Here I was doing this incredible work with now seven institution kids that no one else could touch. I was the opposite of an abuser. I was saving them, and society. I told myself lots of truths.  All truths. 

I realized only years later that those truths were what we later named “irrelevant truths.”  The deepest truth was that I had been insulted by her; by the system. I was the good guy here. I was entitled to respect for what I was doing – certainly not this. 

But it didn’t matter. Gilbert held himself together; hell, he created himself with me as his support; as his father. And I threw it all away to indulge in my resentful feelings. Because the CPS folks were wrong. And they were – 40 years later I still say they were wrong. Disgustingly wrong. But I allowed my feelings about them to take over my life. I didn’t deserve what they did to me. But instead of putting the feelings where they belonged I indulged them.

And with that, Gilbert knew I couldn’t help him any longer. Once I allowed the feelings to take me over, once I indulged them, there would be no room for him. And, sensing what was going on inside of me for two months, he’d told me – weeks earlier – that without me, he couldn’t do it: “it’s you, not me.”

I didn’t know better; I was only 35; I had no one to guide me through that horror of CPS.  Too bad. I took my eye off the prize and Gilbert died. 

There are all kinds of truths. The most difficult to get past are the ones that feel so completely true but are ultimately irrelevant.  And dangerous.  I wish I’d known that forty years ago. 

Jack