I really don’t have a story.
I grew up south of Lebanon, just a few minutes from town, but it felt like the whole world came to us.
My dad came from a big family that didn’t have much, and he never forgot that. Most every Saturday in winter, people would show up to help cut wood. The uncles came. Friends from his job at Laclede Electric. By afternoon, truckload after truckload was loaded and gone. Before all headed out to deliver the loads of wood my mom laid out sandwich meats and cheeses, every kind you could want. She usually had a crockpot full of warm soup to go with the sandwiches.
I was older before I understood that. I thought everybody’s Saturdays looked like ours. He just knew who needed wood, and he gave it away, and somebody always knew somebody else who needed it too. It wasn’t organized. It wasn’t announced. It was just Saturday.
Once, a woman met us at her door and said she couldn’t take the wood. My father asked why. She said she couldn’t afford it. He asked if she had coffee. She said yes. He asked if she had two cups. He said he’d have three cups of coffee when he was done unloading her wood. By the time we finished, she’d called her neighbor. He needed wood too.
We always had a bigger garden, much more than what our family needed and more than we could ever use. My dad would plant tomatoes and other vegetables yearly. My mom canned a lot of vegetables. One afternoon, in the last year or two, I remember my dad just walked into L-Life with three Walmart bags full of peppers. You grew it so you could share. That was always the whole point.
I have always loved kids. Since my dad came from such a big family, there were always cousins around, always somebody younger who needed holding. I was around two years old and I remember my mom would push me through Walmart and I’d hear a crying baby a few aisles over and I’d say, “take me to the baby.” I needed to go. I knew I could fix it. I didn’t play with dolls. Why would you, when you could have a real baby in your hands?
I didn’t take a straight path into social work. College, then a few different jobs, then a position opened up in Webster County and I took it. I came to Laclede in 2008 and moved into alternative care, which is where I have stayed for over a decade.
What I do is focus on what happens after a child comes into the state’s care. You’re working with the child and with the whole family, trying to understand what brought them there and what they need to get back to each other. If you can get them there, you do. If you can’t, you find what comes next. That’s the job. I love nothing more than watching a family transform and be able to have their children back and safe children at that.
I have always had two rules for the families I work with. Don’t lie to me. And don’t use. If you do, tell me, because there’s a program for that. There’s no program for honesty. I tell them we’re building a house together. If we’re honest with each other, that’s the foundation. Then we get walls. Then a roof. Then that house becomes the safe home for the children to return home to.
My phone number hasn’t changed since my 20s. Every family I’ve ever worked with has my personal cell. Some of your best social work happens after five and before eight in the morning. That’s when people are really thinking. That’s when they’re calling for a reason. If they need you, they need you right then.
You pick up.
The cases close but the relationships don’t. I’ve had young people find me years later just to tell me they’re okay. That they moved somewhere new, that things are good, that they wanted me to know. I’ve had others call when something came up and they didn’t know where else to turn. They still call me. I still answer.
In May of 2021, I was promoted to supervisor.
That Memorial Day weekend, my mom said her ribs hurt and she kept falling. I took her to the ER in Springfield and told them we weren’t leaving without answers. That’s when we found out she had cancer. It had already spread to her bones, and there was a spot on her liver. She’d beaten breast cancer in 2012. Nine years without it. Then it came back, and it was already stage four. I told her, “You’ve done this before. We’re going to do it again”.
Six months after her diagnosis, my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. His treatment was in St. Louis, every month for a week at a time. My brother and I split the weeks between us. We made it work.
After she passed, I was sick for three days. Fever. Sweats. All of it, like somebody coming off something hard. My body just broke down. Four years of holding everything up and then it was over, and I didn’t know how to stand still.
Then my dad needed me.
He turned 80 in November. He’d been so excited about it, talking about it for months. He had classmates still living and he wanted to be able to tell them he was 80. We had a weenie roast the Saturday before, with all the people he loved. One week later on Veterans Day, I went out to make him enchiladas and he said, my legs don’t work. Just like that. I can’t walk. I took him in, and 34 days later he was gone. Hospital, rehab, back to the hospital and then home on hospice, four days.
Six days after my mom passed, my son called to tell me his wife was pregnant. He waited a week after that to tell me why he’d waited to talk more to me about their exciting news. He said everybody else celebrated, and I just said congratulations. I told him I kept thinking about his grandma. He said, Mom, we used to pray with her. We told her, when you get to heaven, send us a gift. Let us know you got there. Five days after she left us, they were expecting my first grandbaby.
I’m setting up a memorial fund in her honor. A pool of money that caseworkers can draw from when a family needs something that doesn’t fit on any form. A coat. A deposit. Cleaning supplies for a home visit. The kind of thing my mom would have found a way to get to people without ever putting a name on it.
I live in their house now. The one I grew up in, south of town. My brother is 200 yards down the road. I kept all the bird feeders going because that’s what my parents did, and I couldn’t let that stop. I still put out the oranges and the grape jelly in the spring because the Orioles have been coming for years and they’re expecting it.
Last weekend I bought tomato plants.
Jenny Morgan, Alternative Care Supervisor, Missouri Children’s Division, Laclede County
