Keren
- Together again
The Welfare authorities contacted
us regarding a two and one-half-year-old child, Aliza, who was
at the custody of the courts and due to be put up for adoption.
The mother, twenty-two year old Keren, desperately wanted to
keep her daughter. Keren's childhood and youth had been rocky.
At the age of fifteen, she had arrived home one afternoon and
found her father shot dead, a suicide, on the kitchen floor.
Her mother remarried to an abusive and violent man who had Keren
kicked out of the house by the age of sixteen. Penniless, and
with no family left to her, Keren made her life on the streets.
After moving in with a boyfriend, at the age of eighteen Keren
found herself pregnant with Aliza.
When Aliza was barely two years old, unusual
circumstances led to her removal by the social service authorities
from Keren's care. Keren was devastated. Having grown up with
no supportive family of her own, she was determined to give
her own daughter the family she did not have when she needed
them most. However, her experience and the authorities had
convinced her that she could not accomplish this on her own.
Through the New Start Hostel program,
Keren was given one last chance to prove her ability to have
Aliza returned to her care or else Aliza would be put up for
adoption. Keren arrived alone to our home where she made it
clear that she had no reason to live if her daughter were
not with her. Depressed to the point of being suicidal, Keren
needed first to balance her own dysfunctional background and
her self-image before we could help her manage the responsibilities
and concerns of raising her child independently.
Two months after her arrival, Keren was
reunited with Aliza in our supervised and guided environment.
Keren immersed herself back into their relationship, trying
to revive her daughter who had regressed after living for
six months in a large impersonal institution. The change in
Aliza was clear within a few weeks. Keren showed herself to
be so capable, with our guidance, of attending to Aliza's
emotional and physical needs that, within six months, Keren
and Aliza were able to leave the New Start Hostel program
and set up their home again in the center of the country.
Within one year of moving out, Keren shared proudly that,
after a year of supervision, they had "graduated"
from Welfare department intervention as she has proved herself
to be a competent and loving mother for her child.
Keren was an atypical resident of
the New Start Hostel program, already a mother, but at risk
of losing her child. Keren had become suicidal due to her
background of neglect and emotional abuse coupled with the
removal of her daughter. We literally saved her life by allowing
her to be reunited with Aliza, as Aliza's life was revived
after suffering from the loss of her mother who cared so deeply
for her. Through the New Start Hostel program, Keren regained
the joy of her life, her daughter. Aliza regained a loving,
energetic, and determined caregiver, her own mother.
|
