Jana

When I met Jana in 2007, her 8-year-old daughter Kayla had been in foster care for two years due to Jana’s addiction to drugs and alcohol. Jana was in her late 30s and had been struggling with addiction for more than a decade.  Over the years she had lost custody of all five of her children, four of them permanently. This time she was determined to win her child back. After many attempts, she had finally stayed clean for nine months and was staying in a sober living house in Brooklyn, awaiting a court hearing for Kayla’s release.

Jana had grown up in an abusive home.  She remembered her father running after her mother with a machete, and her mother beating her, claiming, “I hit you because I love you.”  She spent years in and out of foster homes and, after a suicide attempt, spent six months in an institution.  In an effort to fill the emotional void, she got pregnant when she was a teenager, and felt love for the first time.  But the lure of self-medicating with crack and alcohol became too overpowering to resist, and she fell into a pattern of using, losing her kids, getting clean for a short period, and then relapsing.  It didn’t help that her husband Walter, Kayla’s father, also had a drug problem.  There seemed to be a lot of love between them but he became violent when he drank, and his drug use threatened to derail Jana’s sobriety, so they lived apart and she kept him at bay.

At one point Kayla got very close to coming home on a trial discharge but at the last minute Jana relapsed and the process began all over again.  The courts nearly started Termination of Parental Rights (TPR) against her but her tenacity paid off, and the judge granted her an extension to try once again.  This time around her sobriety seemed to stick.  Jana spoke like an addict deep into the recovery process, taking responsibility for her actions, and working hard to beat her cravings so she could get Kayla back.  Everyone around her recognized how motivated she was, and how hard she was working to stay clean.  In fact, she was such a star patient in her drug treatment program that she was in school to get certified as an addiction counselor, and had already been hired to work with other addicts. 

Because she’d been clean for nine months, Jana was granted unsupervised weekend visits with Kayla.  Kayla would spend weekends with her at her sober living home in Brooklyn and on Sunday evenings they’d pack up her belongings in a black plastic bag and get on the subway for the long trip back to Kayla’s foster home on Staten Island.  The only thing that seemed to be keeping them apart at this point was Jana finding acceptable housing and daycare. 

Last I heard they were due in court for a “permanency hearing” to determine whether Kayla could go home.  Jana stopped answering my calls and I was never able to reconnect with her to find out what happened.  I don’t know if she suffered another setback or if Kayla eventually went home.  I’ve tried to find her but she doesn’t show up on LinkedIn or social media. I have so many questions: Did Kayla ever go home? Did Jana relapse and lose her parental rights? Where are they now? How are they doing? Kayla would be in her mid-twenties now. Does she have her own children? What is her life like?