Lunch and Kids Trading Cards

Jenny wanted to see Sean so I told her I would pick her up for lunch on Friday after her hearing. I picked her up outside the Justice Court at 12:30. This was the first time I’d seen her since she’d been out of jail and the first time she’s seen Sean in six weeks. Sean was asleep in the back seat. She got in the front seat starting talking and then looked in the back seat at Sean and said “awww.”
She talked about the people she had met in jail. One of them was one of my former students. I wondered how I came to be a topic of conversation. I guess there’s a lot of time to talk in jail. We went to Aristo’s for lunch. Sean woke up when I got him out of his car seat. I said, “look who’s here” and pointed at Jenny. Sean looked really confused and didn’t say anything. I handed him to her and he just looked daze. She put him down and said, “Do you want to walk.” We went in and sat down. Sean wouldn’t talk to her. I didn’t think that particularly significant, as he is two. He doesn’t necessarily talk to anyone at any given time. All he would say to her is “where’s Brie?” or “where’s Kylie?” He knows that when he sees her she is with his sisters so it was confusing to see her alone. I went to the bathroom at one point and he willingly stayed in the booth with her this surprised me and I thought would make her happy.

I asked her where she was staying and she said with her foster cousin Dale but that he was actually camping for the next week. She said she didn’t have a phone or an address to put on job applications. She’d had a housekeeping interview the day before but didn’t leave any contact information. We talked a lot about the girls and how they did when I took them to meet their new foster family and how they were the month she was in jail. She told me how hard she was going to work to get the girls back. She was in pretty good humor. She has a hearing with her attorney, the judge and DCFS on Monday and a hearing for a simple assault on Tuesday. She was at court Friday for a “gas and go.” (IE, stealing gasoline from a gas station.) That happened a year ago and I had never heard about it. So many things I don’t know about. I asked her how she got caught. She said they pulled her in and had the witness ID her from a picture line up. She said the other pictures were a white girl, a black girl and another Hispanic. “They should have just put a circle around me,” she said. She told me they had scheduled another hearing and she hated that because she could never remember to go.

After lunch I asked her where she wanted me to drop her off. She said the library because Dale was going to pick her up there. (Hmm, didn’t she tell me he was camping for a month? I let that one go). I had found Chuck e Cheese cards from all three of the kids in my purse. They are little plastic cards with pictures of the kids on them. I asked her if she wanted them and she said yes. As soon as Sean saw them he wanted them. She gave him his and he said, “I want Kylie.” She said, “I will give you Kyle’s if you give me yours” and so it went. She really wanted all three of those cards. I can understand, she doesn’t have much of her kids left. She started trying to negotiate with Sean by giving her cards out of her purse and he kept saying no and giving them back. Finally she handed him her state ID. (I have 3 of these she said). Sean took the ID looked at it and said, “I don’t want this it’s HERS.” It was a slap in the face. She gave him his card back and left the car with the girls. It was sad. Trading cards of her kids, I found a lot of symbolism there. Sean left with his own card. He’s not available for trading. As she was walking across the grass Sean looked at her and asked “where’s Ryan?”