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Forgotten Children
by Cass Eastham We pay before we pump the gas, we work before we receive the paycheck, and we must pass the exam before we get the grade. It’s legal and it’s fair. It’s unfortunate that human biology prevents us from requiring people to raise a child before they are awarded an orgasm. A moment of romance results in a life-long responsibility. Some planned on it, and some tried to the ‘right thing’, but when the romance ends, when the marriage is over, when the reality of responsibility becomes unbearable, it is too easy to leave those responsibilities, those children, to somebody else. I suffered from serial monogamous relationships for ten years and as a result I have two very different child support cases that I struggle with every day. The primary reason I kicked these men out of my home was that it was easier to support my children without them. They each decided they could not handle the stress of supporting a household, so they just stopped. I spent years trying to talk, convince, coerce, assist, con, plea, support, get on my knees and beg each man to stop neglecting the child, to get a job and to stop spending money on computer games and pornography. There was nothing I could do to get their help while they were still in my home, and I was naïve enough to think the laws would help me retrieve financial assistance from both fathers once they were gone. My sons and I have dipped under the poverty line more than once. We have frequently gone without daycare, dental work, clothing, food, and a place to live. It turns out that my situation is not unique. “Child support payments, which are intended to provide economic resources and security to youngsters, are often made irregularly, partially, or in many instances not at all” (Kalter 10). Why? “Married couples brought in $28,168 a year more than single mothers. Even single women managed to collect $7,494 a year more than single mothers” (Watnik 339). Why? “Despite efforts to increase awards, the average amount received is less than half of what it costs to actually raise a child” (Watnik 333). Why? “Seventy-five percent of women on AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, also known as welfare) [are receiving] public services because the absent parent of their children is unable or refuses to pay child support” (Spence 153)? WHY!? Is it the laws or is it the fathers?
The laws, at least in California, seem to be in place. The California Family Code Section 4053 states that, In implementing the statewide uniform [child support] guideline, the courts shall adhere to the following principles: (a) A parent’s first and principal obligation is to support his or her minor children according to the parent’s circumstances and station in life. (b) Both parents are mutually responsible for the support of their children. (c) The guideline takes into account each parent’s actual income and level of responsibility for the children. (d) Each parent should pay for the support of the children according to his or her ability. (e) The guideline seeks to place the interests of children as the state’s top priority. The process in which to collect child support also seems to be very simple. One must first locate the other parent, establish paternity if the other parent is male, establish a support order, and then have that support order enforced. Locating the other parent can be difficult if the custodial parent has no legal data such as social security number, driver’s license number or place of birth, but locating the other parent can be simple if the custodial parent is still in touch. Still, in order to enforce the support, the government needs to know more than simply where the parent is. It is customary to fill out more detailed information on a case file such as: the parent’s place of business, type and license plate of the car, any assets or real estate the parent owns, names and locations of the grandparents and so forth. The more information collected at this point, the smoother the process will be. Next, legal paternity must be established if the non-custodial parent is the father. If the father is present at the child’s birth, hospitals establish paternity while issuing the birth certificate. If the parents are married, it is assumed husband is the father unless legally contested and proven otherwise. Once the other parent is located and is legally recognized as the child’s parent, a child support order must be awarded. If the child is a product of the marriage, child support orders are often established at the time of the divorce. Historically, the amount was determined by an agreement between the parents before the divorce was filed in court through a Marriage Settlement Agreement. Forcing a couple to cooperatively discuss money matters who are already at odds with each other was like pouring gasoline onto a fire. Luckily, the laws in California changed and the amount is now calculated by the courts. The three key factors in deciding the amount are: income of both parents, percent of visitation of both parents, and price of childcare. The last step, enforcing the support, is not something the custodial parents can do themselves. They must rely on the District Attorney’s Family Support Division to enforce a support order for them. Yet, “the ultimate responsibility for enforcing the court order is [the custodial parent]” (Watnik 310). Raising a child as two parents is not easy, raising a child as one parent is bordering on superhero. That single parent now has to be the mom and the dad, the disciplinarian and the nurturer, the teacher and the playmate, the taxi, the housekeeper, the cook, and the breadwinner. Society does not generally call single parents superheroes because it plainly cannot be done. On top of all that, they are forced to tack on the duties of legal secretary in order to get the help they desperately need. “Despite custody orders, collection of child support long relied heavily on voluntary cooperation and was rarely enforced. . . . It took many years of seeing women and children intolerably impoverished before people realized that a system of child support would not work without serious enforcement measures” (Wallerstein 251). The federal and state governments have gone through great pains to support the needs of single parent families. The AFDC was established during the Great Depression to help single parents who were not receiving support. A Head of Household status has been added for filing taxes. The Personal Responsibility Act for tracking down and enforcing payment from absent parents was passed by Congress in 1996 (Mink 69). Orders can be enforced by wage withholding, wage garnishment, writ of garnishment for personal property, a creditor’s bill if assets have been signed away to a third party, and even a till tap in which authorities can empty the cash register of a business the parent owns. Orders can also be enforced through a diversion of government benefits: child support can be deducted from unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, pension, retirement fund, trust, social security, disability, and tax refund. Up to 55% of the obligor’s wages can be withheld in all states (Watnik 311). A non-custodial parent failing to produce a good reason for failing to pay past due child support is now charged with civil contempt of court. “Criminal prosecution for non support means the paying parent is accused of criminally neglecting the child by failing to pay support” (Watnik 313). Delinquency of over $1000 is, by law, reported to the Credit Bureau and a bankruptcy does not absolve the non-custodial parent of past due amounts. Driver’s licenses, business licenses and even fishing licenses can be revoked. “The judge can order extra child support payments to make up the difference, require that a bond be posted, or even send the parent to jail until back payments are made” (Watnik 313). Even worse, there is no statute of limitations for back-owed child support. Whatever monies not paid to the child before the child turns 18 will continued to be owed to the child after age 18, after the child is adopted, married, and to the next of kin when the child dies. In short, authorities have tried to write child support laws to carry the same weight of responsibility as actually raising a child: you cannot get rid of them, it is very bad if you fail, and the duty does not expire . . . ever. Why then, “when the Census Bureau surveyed child support collections, they found that only 51% of the parents received full payments, 24% received partial payments, and 25% received no payments at all” (Watnik 303)? Why don’t parents want to support their children? There are a lot of miserable excuses, but the top 5 reasons why parents don’t pay child support fall into the following categories:
Despite the laws, fathers have sidestepped child support because the sense of responsibility is just not there. Perhaps the laws should be even tougher. Welfare mothers are sometimes given court ordered birth control. Why is it that fathers who deliberately fail to pay support for their children are not? Perhaps society’s outlook needs to become more stringent. “Despite their blood relationship some divorced fathers do not see their children as their moral or social heirs” (Wallerstein 252). In, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce- The 25 Year Landmark Study, Wallerstein continues to illustrate this idea with the following story: I remember a lecture I gave on [child support] to law students at Berkeley. When I finished, a young woman in her mid-twenties approached me. “Professor,” she said, “You have just given what to me is the most important lecture in my life.” I was taken aback, “How so?” “I never thought I had the right to even ask my dad for support [for college].” Fathers are not only relieving themselves of the personal guilt for failing to pay child support, but they are also inadvertently teaching their children that they don’t deserve assistance from their dads in the first place. How is all this affecting the children? The information that Marian Wright Edelman collected in Wasting America’s Future – The Children’s Defense Fund Report on the costs of Child Poverty has only bleak statistics to report. [The] second major reason [for the rise in child poverty] is the rising number of families headed by single parents, usually the mother; mother-only families are at high risk of poverty due to the absence of a second adult earner; the historically lower earning power of women, and the failure of absent parents to provide financial support or of state child support enforcement agencies to ensure that payments are made (6). There is powerful evidence that the burden of poverty also makes it much harder for parents to provide the intangible nurturing that children need to grow up strong, secure, and productive (xxii). Poverty wears down their resilience and emotional reserves; saps their spirits and sense of self; crushes their hopes; devalues their potential and aspirations; and subjects them over time to physical, mental and emotional assault, injury, and indignity (xvii). Other research supports her dreary outlook. After divorce, the drop in income carries other losses that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, like being forced to move away from friends in a familiar neighborhood to less expensive housing, like being exposed to the violence and chaos of a bad neighborhood, like being sent to a more crowded school with overwhelmed teachers (Wallerstein 164). Children that live under the poverty line for only a year are more likely to drop out of school before they receive a diploma. And if they do make it to college, their parents are not required to help. “Like the whoosh of a falling guillotine, the law states that child support terminates at age eighteen” (Wallerstein 250). As appalling as these statistics are, it only supports that my cases are not unique. Eastham vs. NolanI divorced Frank Nolan when our son, David, was only three months old. We settled out of court that my son and I would receive $175.00 a month in child support. We were both active duty military and the same rank at the time, so details of medical insurance and employment were not an issue. Although $175 a month was barely enough to keep us going, Frank could not afford more for he was already paying child support to somebody else. To make matters worse, the military had what is called a “double occupancy order” : no married couple could assume two different military berthing arrangements simultaneously. He had immediately checked into the barracks, so when I could no longer afford rent and tried to acquire base housing, I was denied. My infant and I lived in my commuter car until the issue was cleared up through my chain of command. The child support order was effective the date the divorce was final and automatically enforced through the military by way of a wage garnishment. Frank Nolan soon completed his contractual obligation and was honorably discharged. Frank had never exercised his visitation when he was still in town, so once he was discharged, I never heard from him again. Child support payments came to a screeching halt, and when I tried to do something about it, the invalid forwarding address he gave the military put a brick wall in the way of my progress. The last payment I received was in 1993. Over the years, I have sought advice from several lawyers in order to get any of the back owed money and always walked away with the same answer: ‘You have to find him first, and then it still won’t do you any good unless he actually has money to get.’ It wasn’t until 2001 that a neighbor told me of the Family Support Division of the District Attorney’s office. I could not help but wonder why all those family law attorneys failed to mention this public service. Eastham vs. BeyenkaJim Beyenka and I had planned to get married all along but were delayed due technical problems. I had long since decided all of my breeding would be over by the time I turned thirty, so my second child was not delayed. As soon as Jason was born, Jim stopped working, outside and inside the home. Two years later, I tired of the misallocated money, child neglect, and “technical problems”. We met under court mediation fight over full custody (and upon proof of child abuse, fight over visitation) but I was not able to pursue a child support order because the data had not all been collected. I was finding that Jim managed to misallocate over 50 thousand dollars of my income. I planned to sue to get some of that money back as soon as the evidence was collected but I discovered that while evidence was all there, the money was not. Jim did not spend the money on anything worth the price. It was as though I was trying to sue a gambling junkie for money lost in the games. The money was just gone. I managed to get back $800 dollars in a giant yard sale six months later . . . when my neighbor browsed my wares and told me heard about the Family Support Division in the DA’s office. Eastham vs. BureaucracyI have been struggling through the FSD’s process of retrieving child support from these two separate cases for the last twelve months. Now I know why those lawyers never mentioned it. The process is ridiculously cumbersome. Problems range from re-establishing the support order in a new county to the FSD losing the case file . . . twice . . . forcing me to start from scratch. Add a few lay-offs to the pot and I had one very smelly stew. I requested assistance from the AFDC, but no, I made too much money while I was with Jim. It does not matter that the money no longer existed. It does not matter that I can no longer afford to live where the jobs are. I ask one father for help and his answer is repetitive. “It’s not my job.” The FSD found the other father but no valid employer. I would ask him for help but the FSD will not tell me where he is because it is a ‘privacy issue’. By August 2001, I was jobless, homeless, money-less, and ineligible for financial help. The only reason my children and I are not lying dead from starvation or living in a cardboard box house is the rock solid responsibility in my father. ‘Grandpa’ is filling in all the financial and emotional gaps my sons fathers refuse to fill. The only assistance I receive from AFDC is Medi-Cal coverage for the children. Since the AFDC drives the process through the FSD, the only results are that both fathers are now required to provide medical insurance for their offspring. Actually receiving that medical insurance requires each father the burden of having the child added with their insurance provider and tell the custodial parent who that insurance provider is. . . . In other words, these two big stacks of typed, tumbled, filed, stamped, and signed court documents aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. As Wallerstein so eloquently stated, “Like the Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland, the faster she runs, the more she stays in one place” (164). I have yet to receive a brass penny from either idiot. Why? After all the research, I cannot find any solid answers. It seems that fathers failing to pay support for their children find excuses that absolve them of their responsibility, and the bureaucracy around child support law is too overworked and cumbersome to catch them. Each child support case in the system is certain to be as different as the two cases I deal with daily. Frank Nolan owes his son over $15,000 in back child support and has nearly $15,000 to go before our son turns 18. I am still trying to get a court order for child support money from Jim Beyenka. I am still trying to receive financial assistance from the government. Every time I balance my checkbook, I thank the powers that be that I miscarried the pregnancy that chronologically occurred between leaving Frank and meeting Jim. It is as bitterly ironic as it sounds.
Looking back, I can only say that if I had known they would fail in their responsibilities, I would not have tangoed with them in the first place. I have already cut a lot of fat from my financial worries. No one is spending my paycheck behind my back. No one is beating or neglecting the boys while I am at work. There are no mysterious purchases showing up at my door and no 1-976-HOT-SEXX numbers showing up on my phone bill. I know my children are getting all the resources that are in my power to give them. I am very and most permanently single. From this position, it is easy to want to hate all men, but I cannot, for I am raising two boys to become men. It is easy to want to blame laws, society, bureaucracy or the father’s themselves for the lack of support, but trying to force people to accept the virtue of responsibility would take more than laws and consequences. It would take a bunch of big miracles. I will continue to wiggle my way through the red tape, and their fathers may pay up eventually, but I can no longer hold my breath. Fighting to squeeze blood from an unyielding stone requires a lot more energy, time, money and patience than any single parent has to offer. Instead of spending these precious resources on making my exes pay, I feel they are better spent on raising the children my exes forgot. Perhaps that is why. Bibliography
2017 In 2005, two years after this article was published, 'Grandpa the Savior' retired and returned to his home of Tucson, Arizona. I threw in the towel on surviving in California, and I moved us with them. At or near minimum wage for ten more years, my boys and I fell into the world of Trailer Trash. I abstained from all social life to keep them out of drugs and gangs, and I set aside all personal aspirations in order to keep their noses in books and computers. It was my father who convinced me to try for welfare in Arizona, and I fought against it because of the harsh insult to my pride and the assault to the integrity of my upbringing. He said, "You have worked since you were 16 years old, including serving your country. Welfare isn't about you ‘not working hard enough’. It's about those deadbeats not working at all." He pointed hard at my boys, "And that's not their fault." Essentially, dad threw this article back in my face. So I got over my hang ups, applied for food stamps and state medical insurance . . . and started receiving child support from both fathers. It turns out moving to another state makes child support Federal case, and being broke enough to need food stamps creates awesome motivation for the legal goons to hunt for blood. I received exactly what I was awarded years earlier, based on out-of-date math. It was barely enough for groceries at that point, but I was glad to get it. I never tried to have the math updated because I was sapped of strength to fight the battle anymore. And I learned my lesson. I never budgeted for it because I never knew when it was going to hiccup or disappear (which it had a tendency to do.) I had zero control. I took that unexpected cash to spend at bookstores and movies, and I kept the boys off the streets. It worked, but not without consequences. Both boys graduated high school, on time, without any trouble with substances or the law. Their adult world is about community college and coding games. We still get together for movie night and book talk, but when I mention their fathers, I get strange look from my two responsible adults. I have told them about their fathers. I've shown them photos. I've told the tales about the good times and I've glossed over the bad. On multiple occasions I have offered the data they would need to find their fathers, even if just to say hello, without my interference or judgment. I get the same general response, from both boys, every time. "Nah, Mom, s’okay. Thanks though.” And the topic is emotionlessly shrugged off in favor of current events such as, "So what are we gonna get Grandpa for Father's Day?" Now look who's been forgotten. All is well.
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