ARE YOU GOD?

When Social Workers Don’t Keep Their Cool

Jan 30, 2024

It’s Story Time…

One long ago March morning, I stood on a line in lower Manhattan, unprepared for the whipping wind chilling me to the bone. People around me were grumbling, all of us reluctantly waiting to enter the courthouse building as potential jurors. It wasn’t my first call to duty, but I’d never made it to selection. I attributed it to the fact that the MSW on my vetting questionnaire made me undesirable. No attorney wants an objective juror, or so I’m told. It’s funny how you sit in wait, averting your eyes, trying to be invisible, to avoid notice, silently pleading ‘let me go home,’ yet there’s a twinge of insult when you’re rejected.

That day, instead of sending us to a generic jury room to watch a torturous introduction-to-the-government-system video with horrible audio, they escorted me and my fellow-potentials to a hallway outside a real authentic courtroom. Once inside, we sat on the benches behind the court rail, our coats and bags scrunched between us. Someone read us our rights, rather, our instructions, while a very judgy looking judge observed us from his elevated private bench. As a lover of mystery and suspense, I was into it all. As an aspiring writer, I was making mental notes of everything for some future plot, until someone nudged me. My number was called. The first twelve of us filtered into the very unglamourous jury box. I was surely going to get fanny fatigue from the front row, middle, folding chair they assigned me.

Here’s where things got wonky. I’m trapped in this box, elbows grazing strangers, and behind me, seat #9 was coughing and sniffling. As a woman with an alphabet of medical issues, I’m terrified of getting sick.

this was long before Covid was a word, so don’t give me that ‘just wear a mask’ thing

It’s also difficult for me to sit still—a prerequisite for the unwanted job I was interviewing for. And don’t forget, I have trouble hearing and the now mumbling judge was on my bad side. Yeah, good luck to me!

So, there’s a box-full of us civilians, the judge, a 20ish looking defendant, his eyes fixed to the surface of the defendant table, and the two opposing attorneys. The prosecutor was direct, brief, to the point. Mr. Defense wanted to play tough. Maybe he thought he could take down the prosecutor before the game even started. To his credit, he went to bat for his client as though it was a huge murder trial rather than a kid who’d ripped off some food from a gas station. But his tactics backfired. A few of us potential jurors squirmed, jaw-dropped, rolled eyes at each other (was that against the don’t discuss the case rule?). He came off inexperienced and the impatient judge seemed to agree.

When he began voir dire, Mr. Defense chilled out, asking only two benign questions of seats #1,2,3, the jurors to my right. These were questions we’d answered in our forms. Answers he already knew. He was taking it easy on us! Maybe I’d been wrong about him? He looked at his paper. “Juror #4.” That’s me. My stomach flipped, and the chair squeaked as I sat straighter. Our eyes connected. “Do you think you’re God?” Gasps—audible gasps around me. My face twisted (not attractive) I could feel my eyebrows pinch. I whispered “What?” keeping “the fuck” part to myself. “You worked in adoption, didn’t you?” He looked pissed. “What right did you have to play God and decide who gets to be a parent and who doesn’t?”

Earlier, I noted my MSW is a deterrent because social workers are keep-your-cool-objective people. Should I have folded my hands in my lap and said, “It seems like you’ve had a difficult, personal experience with adoption?” 100%. But it had been years since I’d worked in the field, and now I was a snarkastic, reborn New Yorker. The essence of what I defensively said to the defense was that, in my adoption work, I did not make unilateral decisions. There were systems in place, created not just by agency policy, but by laws. My job was to make recommendations. Supervisors reviewed and signed off. The courts ultimately decided if a family was a family. We weren’t determining the standards people had to meet. A set of laws that we followed guided and restricted our policies, our recommendations and standards. Just like him, and the prosecutor, and the judge. By following those laws, we changed people's lives. In the same way the jury would follow the guidelines and laws and ultimately change the defendant’s life too. (Maybe I shouldn’t have pointed directly at the alleged thief when I said that part.) I was the first juror to be sent home. Shocker.

Side Bar:

The lovely attorney for the defense would become a muse for a character in Not Yours to Keep. When you finally get to read it, let’s see if you can figure out which one. ~I’ll remind you

The memory of the attorney and the mean-spirted question he hurled at me came up after reading an adoptee’s personal and compelling story posted on Huffpost. The article brought me right back to the mood of the era I worked in. The essay by

Jillian Barnet

expresses the impact of adoption that those of us on the outside could never consider. She eloquently highlighted some issues heavy on my mind as I wrote Not Yours to Keep, and the way it felt to discover that all these years later, many of the laws hadn’t changed. To quote Jillian’s article:

“The vast majority of the now 5 million adoptees in the United States have no right to our original birth certificates, our medical histories or to any information regarding our identities.”

Think about that for a moment. Imagine if you were told you couldn’t know where, when, how or to whom you were born? No, not that you couldn’t, that you don’t have the right to it!

Because of the work I did, I understand the promise of anonymity we made to birth parents. I’m going to save that discussion for a future newsletter. Right now, I’m focused on the adoptees, because I don’t think we did enough of that back then. And, despite our increasing awareness of an adoptee’s need to discover their identity, their need for valuable medical history, the laws still aren’t thinking of them enough.