If her four grandchildren ever come back from Nebraska, Lynette will be ready. She keeps a blue dirt bike propped against the wall of the back porch, and she has plastic-covered children's books, like Peter and the Wolf and Smokey Bear, stacked in one corner of her living room. The fifty-year-old west Valley grandmother still keeps one drawer in her dresser full of crayons and extra clothes and other odds and ends that children always seem to need. And she stores the children's school reports, health certificates and crayoned scribblings in a file on her kitchen table.
When Lynette looks at these relics of the short months her grandchildren lived with her last year, she worries the usual grandmotherly worries. Are the children going to the doctor? Are their teeth attended to? Are they behind in their schoolwork? Are they making friends with other children?
But the questions she asks most frequently are far from usual. They are strange and troubling. Are her grandchildren being sexually abused? Or beaten? In the file on her kitchen table, along with the health certificates and grade reports, Lynette has documents from Phoenix Police Department and records from Maricopa County Superior Court that lend credence to her fears.
Her story is tragic, and all too common. (See the related story on facing page.) It is a story of generations of women born into disorganized blue-collar families, unhappy women who have unconsciously passed a legacy of abuse from one generation to another, like weird family heirlooms. It is a story of mothers and daughters who hate each other, and of the children who are their victims. It is the story of a mother who turned her daughter over to the custody of the state. And finally, it is the story of a grandmother who, after rescuing herself from the cycle of abuse, hungers to rescue her grandchildren.
Lynette was emotionally battered by her mother. Unwittingly, she did the same thing to her daughter Tammi. And Lynette says Tammi's eleven-year-old daughter Celestina has also been abused.
Lynette has battled state officials over the fate of the children for more than a year. And now the grandmother has almost despaired because Tammi moved from Phoenix to southwestern Nebraska over the Labor Day weekend. She took her four children: the twins, Celestina and Bobby, nine-year-old Marta, and seven-year-old Ricardo.
It is a measure of the kind of life Tammi leads that Lynette doesn't know which of two former husbands her daughter is with. One was accused of physically abusing Celestina; the other of molesting her. (Neither man could be reached for comment, and Tammi did not respond to requests for interviews.)
Lynette is realizing, only too painfully, that the state is simply not capable of fixing complex family problems. She realizes this because she herself has changed in the past few years. After three unhappy marriages, many low-paying jobs and painful clashes with Tammi, Lynette is only one semester away from becoming a registered nurse.
But in her bleakest moments, Lynette wonders if there is any hope for her grandchildren. She wonders if she can break the grim cycle so her great-grandchildren won't have to live as she and her daughter have lived, without fully understanding the legacy that drives them.
THE BLACK-AND-WHITE snapshot Lynette has of herself as a child looks as if it were taken by Dorothea Lange, the photographer of impoverished Depression-era farmers. In the photo, Lynette stands shyly behind her cousin in the bleak barnyard on their grandparents' Missouri farm. Both children have dirty, sober little faces. Her cousin's dress has a hole in it. "I grew up poor," Lynette says.
She also grew up in her grandparents' house, because her mother, a sometime cocktail waitress, wasn't around much. Her grandparents' sons, Lynette's uncles, lived with them. The cycle began when the uncles molested Lynette as a little girl. "No one believed me then," she says. "I just learned to stay away from my uncles. It was different in the country, I guess." Her mother was unwilling to help her. Lynette doesn't like to talk about her mother, except to say she "cussed~~" and had six sons by six different men. Lynette's mother would fetch her from her grandparents for short visits punctuated by discipline with a belt.
The belt left its mark. "I didn't realize how angry I was," Lynette recalls. "For years I'd have these dreams that I was beating and beating my mother. I would wake up in a cold sweat."
She says her mother is still alive and that she survives in Missouri on the generosity of a sister, and a monthly social security check. "She might as well be dead," says Lynette.
Lynette grew up fast. She was 16 when she met a 32-year-old bus driver. He fathered her first child. A few months after Tammi was born, Lynette was working at the lunch counter of the local drugstore. She fell in love with and married Tom, a 23-year-old licensed practical nurse who sold vitamins at the counter on the opposite wall.
Tom and Lynette had three sons. One is a paramedic in the Midwest, another is a serviceman in Germany and yet another is a musician and farm laborer.
Tammi was "the difficult one." Lynette is clinical when she speaks of Tammi, showing the same sort of detachment she has toward her mother. Like a nurse talking about a patient, she details the symptoms of her daughter's madness. "I know now she was in a depressed state," says Lynette. "I should have taken her to a psychologist instead. She was mentally ill then and she is mentally ill now; it just involves more people."
The signs began early. As a four-year-old, Tammi incinerated newborn baby chicks in the flames of the gas stove. They had been put on top of the stove for warmth. Lynette has never been sure whether her daughter turned on the flames out of curiosity or cruelty. By the time Tammi was twelve, the family had moved to Denver, Colorado, where Tom worked for IBM. Tammi was as lonely a teenager as Lynette had been. She became promiscuous. She ran away from home several times, ditched school, refused to take baths and sneaked out the window to meet boys. Lynette gave up. She says she had no choice. Tammi was so incorrigible Lynette signed custody of her over to the state, an indication of her detachment from her child. Tammi's letters from various Colorado juvenile institutions show how troubled she was. They also show the part Lynette played in the child's anger. "Dear Mom," Tammi wrote. "I will probably never return there, because I am happy here . . . . Well, I am waiting for my lab tests to find out if I am pregnant or not. I hope I am because I love kids. But then again I have the feeling I do not even want kids. If you know what I mean?! "Oh before I forget, I thought I would tell you how I felt, because I do not get the chance at home, by this I mean when I talk to you I always get cut down or beat on! So you should know what I mean, right?"
Tammi was in and out of institutions until she was fifteen. During this time, Lynette and Tom divorced.
After her marriage broke up, Lynette decided she was tired of what she calls "white America keeping up with the Joneses." She began taking Spanish classes in Denver. At a dance, she met and fell in love with a car painter named Ramon, the man who would be her second husband. Unconsciously imitating her mother, Tammi fell in love with Ramon's brother Alfredo. "Hey Mom," wrote Tammi from reform school, "Please send me the Spanish-English dictionary so I could get on the ball and learn before I come home next weekend please . . . . I love you. I love Alfredo, too."
She loved a lot of other men as well. Tammi came home for a while when she was fifteen. Ramon discovered her in the bedroom with two boys. Then Tammi ran off with a man she met at a magazine-distributing company. Lynette says he was a pimp. Lynette didn't see her daughter for months after Tammi ran off. Then a friend in Denver spotted the girl on a street corner. The friend thought Tammi was hooking, and called Lynette, who was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lynette sent for Tammi.
In Albuquerque, Lynette enrolled Tammi in cosmetology school. Tammi dropped out. Then Tammi went on a spending spree with Lynette's credit cards. Lynette says she had to return her new Audi to pay off the debts.
Lynette moved back to Denver. Tammi stayed in Albuquerque. They never wanted to see each other again.
And they didn't for a long time. But after Lynette was divorced again, she says, Tammi and a boyfriend "put all their belongings in a bedsheet and hitchhiked up to Denver to live with me."
Lynette married for the third time in 1977, this time to a meat cutter named Ignacio. Lynette didn't realize she was imitating her mother, who had also married several times. And Tammi didn't realize she was imitating Lynette when she fell in love with Ignacio's cousin Antonio Andrade. He was illegal, illiterate and unable to speak English. Tammi, like her mother, got pregnant out of wedlock. Only Tammi had twins. "`Don't let her marry him, he's lazy,'" Lynette says her new husband Ignacio warned her. But Tammi and Antonio Andrade were married in 1979. Ignacio's description proved true. Antonio and Tammi moved to Phoenix a year after they were married. They lived in terrible poverty. Lynette remembers coming down for a visit. Antonio was picking up cans for money. "They were living in a shack," Lynette says. "The twins drank Kool-Aid from a bottle all day. Their shoes were too small and had holes in them." Nevertheless, two more children were born by 1983.
Soon Tammi was letting the government take care of her. She lived in the Coffelt public-housing project in Phoenix. The state and federal governments provided childcare, food and a roof over her head, and had become her surrogate mother. She even attended federally funded computer-programming school, but dropped out. In 1985, Tammi divorced Andrade. Shortly later, she married Fernando Romero, a mechanic.
By that time, Lynette had moved to Phoenix to be near Tammi. Her third marriage had fallen apart after five years and the birth of a son. Although she was living in Phoenix, Lynette was growing estranged from her daughter, but closer to her grandchildren, just as she had been estranged from her own mother, but close to her grandparents. With her savings, Lynette bought a little house with a pool. Each weekend, two of her grandchildren would come for a visit. She became concerned about the kids' health problems: tooth decay and gum disease from Kool-Aid in baby bottles, head lice, weight loss.
Then Lynette began noticing behavior that troubled her. The kids would kiss pictures of women in bra advertisements in women's magazines. Once Marta passionately kissed a female neighbor watching fireworks with them on the Fourth of July. They drew weird self-portraits that emphasized their sexual organs. Ricardo wound a rubber band around his penis one night before going to sleep. At the age of ten, Celestina wrote a note to her twin brother: "I am in love with you are you in love with me well I am in love with you and want to lay down in bed with you by Celestina."~ Celestina also began fits of screaming for no apparent reason.
Lynette began to wonder if the children might have been sexually abused, just as she had been.
Tammi's life was getting worse. She divorced her second husband, Fernando Romero, in 1987. Once he pointed an air gun at her and was arrested for assault but not charged. He told police he would kill Tammi one day with a machine gun.
AT THE VERY TIME her daughter's life was at its most disorganized, Lynette began to turn hers around. She decided to sell her house, go to college and become a nurse. She decided this when the cycle of abuse reportedly began to play itself out again. Tammi and the kids had left the housing project, and were living in a mobile home with Fernando Romero, the ex-husband who had threatened Tammi's life. They'd lived with him for about a month when the children told Phoenix police a horrifying story.
On April 23, 1989, Tammi and Marta had gone to the doctor, leaving the other three children with Romero. On the pullout bed in the living room of the little trailer, with Romero in his underwear, ten-year-old Celestina performed oral sex on her stepfather. Her six-year-old brother fondled Romero. Unknown to them, Celestina's twin brother watched from the bedroom door. This is what the children told police.
Although the boys stuck to their story, Celestina later denied the incident had occurred. "I think Tammi shut her up," says Lynette. "Tammi is missing some piece of logic in her brain." It reminded her of her own mother, who didn't believe she'd been molested by her uncles. Romero told police that he was innocent. The case is still under investigation, and no charges have been filed. After the alleged molestation, the juvenile court decided the children should live with Lynette temporarily. Then Child Protective Services (CPS) got involved, and told Tammi to take parenting classes. She did. Tammi wanted desperately to get her kids away from her mother. She wrote her son Bobby, who was living with Lynette: "Bobby, mama and daddy are going to a class to learn how to be a better mama and daddy. Before we had a lot of trouble, but we are learning. Honey, you do not have anything to be afraid of. We love you very much. If you want to give us a try tell the caseworker, ok?"
An indication of Tammi's haphazard life is that the "daddy" she is referring to is Antonio Andrade. She had returned to her first husband, who was working as a nightclub security guard.
A young CPS caseworker was assigned to monitor Lynette and the children. The two women clashed almost immediately, about problems that now seem petty. The caseworker criticized Lynette because she let the twins, then ten, stay alone with Lynette's twelve-year-old son for 45 minutes each afternoon, while Lynette raced from nursing school to daycare to pick up the younger kids.
At the time the children were with Lynette, CPS was taking heat from the public. At statehouse hearings championed by Senator Jerry Gillespie, angry parents said CPS had removed their children from their homes after the kids made bogus charges of sexual molestation. Lynette thinks CPS was smarting over the well-publicized criticism. She knows the caseworker wanted to return the children to Tammi.
She thought that was a bad idea, so in June 1989, she filed for custody. She told the judge that Tammi had "a history of psychological problems, involvement in prostitution and in making poor judgments." She also said that Tammi associated with men who were violent, hit the children, neglected them, once left them with a man who was a stranger while she traveled to Mexico and "hitchhiked with the children at night, accepting rides from strangers." The petition also mentioned the alleged molestation of Celestina.
In court, Tammi and her two ex-husbands denied Lynette's charges.
As the fall of 1989 wore on, Lynette's nerves were ragged. She was going to school. She was caring for troubled grandchildren and an adolescent son. She was working. She was clashing with the CPS caseworker. Exhausted, she turned to the government for help, an action she regrets now.
She asked CPS to place the two younger children with one of her older sons and a friend for just a few months, until she could graduate from nursing school. CPS instead persuaded Lynette to return the kids to their mother. Lynette dropped the custody petition.
CPS had assured her that Tammi had "participated and cooperated fully" in parenting classes, Lynette said in court papers. The parent trainer from CPS said the kids were no longer at risk with Tammi.
In late December 1989, the judge returned custody of the children to Tammi because "the children no longer appear to be at risk of abuse or neglect."
But Bobby, the oldest grandchild, refused to leave. "I love my grandmother," he said. "She buys me clothes and food."
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT proved that the judge was wrong. It proved that CPS was wrong. And it taught Lynette that the state really can't solve family problems.
Once again, Celestina was the reported victim. The child who was allegedly abused by her stepfather was allegedly abused by her natural father.
According to police documents, two weeks after the judge returned the kids to her, Tammi called the Phoenix cops. She met them at the county hospital emergency room. She told them that the night before, Antonio Andrade couldn't endure Celestina's screaming. The same man CPS had praised in court only two weeks before for his cooperation in parenting classes had slapped Celestina, thrown her on the bed and "tried to strangle her," Tammi told police. (A doctor documented ugly red bruises on the girl's chest and leg.) Celestina refused to say what happened.
The Maricopa County Attorney's Office did not see this as a winnable case. Andrade was not charged with the crime. Tammi and the kids left Andrade's house. But it was for a worse situation. Lynette says they moved in for the third time with Romero, the alleged molester and Tammi's ex-husband. Lynette informed the CPS caseworker. The caseworker, she says, told her the case was "closed." Lynette, remembering her own childhood, became desperate. She wanted to see the children. Tammi refused. Early last spring, Tammi sent a police officer to get Bobby away from his grandmother.
Last summer, Lynette went to court to get visitation privileges with her grandchildren. A judge ordered Tammi and Lynette to go to mediation classes. But then Tammi left for Nebraska on Labor Day.
Lynette tracked Tammi to North Platte, Nebraska, through school records, although she doesn't know her daughter's telephone number or address. Lynette isn't sure which ex-husband she is with. Just two weeks ago, the judge granted Lynette visitation every other weekend.
"A lot of good it does me," says Lynette. "I don't have the money to go to Nebraska."
Lynette realizes the cycle of abuse has to be stopped, but she feels powerless. "If something doesn't happen soon," she says, "I see Celestina in a home for pregnant girls in two years." The grandmother sees that Celestina hates Tammi, just as Tammi hates her. "Celestina once burned Tammi on purpose with a hot iron, at least that's what Tammi told me," Lynette says.
"I feel like I let them down," she says of her grandchildren. "Sometimes I feel these kids are absolutely doomed." The questions she asks most frequently are far from usual. They are strange and troubling. Are her grandchildren being sexually abused?
She grew up in her grandparents' house, because her mother, a sometime cocktail waitress, wasn't around much.
She doesn't like to talk about her mother, except to say she "cussed~~" and had six sons by six different men.
She has never been sure whether her daughter turned on the flames out of curiosity or cruelty. A friend in Denver spotted the girl on a street corner. The friend thought she was hooking.
She began noticing behavior that troubled her. The kids would kiss pictures of women in bra advertisements in women's magazines.
The mother once left the children with a man who was a stranger while she traveled to Mexico.
The child who was allegedly abused by her stepfather was then allegedly abused by her natural father.
She tracked her daughter to North Platte, Nebraska. She isn't sure which ex-husband she is with.
