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Amanda Spindle plays with her 18-month-old son, Jayden, in their living room. Amanda and her boyfriend are working with Healthy Families Rappahannock Area to learn parenting skills. The agency serves about 60 families.
Once homeless and sleeping in a car, Amanda Spindle and her boyfriend, Michael Hare, are working to provide a better life for their son Jayden.
Amanda Spindle spent part of her childhood in foster care and juvenile facilities. |
By CATHY DYSON
Amanda Spindle looks around her trailer, at her boyfriend and 18-month-old son, and is grateful for all she has.
She smiles when her case worker tells her how well she's doing. She's proud of how far her young family has come, even though things aren't the greatest now.
Spindle and her boyfriend, Michael Hare, are both 19, out of work and trying to keep the mobile home they bought last year in a Stafford County trailer park.
But this isn't a story about the impact of the economy or the plight of teen parents.
It's about a young woman facing another bump in what has always been a rough road.
"I don't come from money. I don't come from opportunity. I don't come from education. You know what I'm saying?" said Spindle, whose voice rises as she makes her point.
She wants to get a college degree so she can better provide for her son, Jayden. She's trying to break free from the cycle that landed her in foster care, but it seems like every time she gets ahead, something happens.
"I want it just as bad," Spindle said about her goals. "But why is it 10 times harder for me than anybody else?"
Spindle was talking with Melodie Eggleston, a support worker with Healthy Families Rappahannock Area. Eggleston has visited Spindle every week for nine months, through the program offered by the Rappahannock Area Community Services Board.
She knows all about Spindle's past.
"You've been in this place before, so you just keep fighting for it, girl," Eggleston said. "You've fought through a lot of other things. You can fight through this."
When Spindle was a child, her family was homeless at times. One of her first memories is sleeping in a white Monte Carlo with her brother while their parents slept on the hood.
Even when the family could afford an apartment, the kids went without food and clean clothes.
Spindle ended up in foster care facilities that got more restrictive as she got more "opinionated," which is how she described her outspoken attitude.
She bounced from one home to another. When foster families couldn't cope with her, Spindle said she was sent to group homes. When she ran away from those, she was put in locked facilities.
"They kept shoving me everywhere, so I acted out," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "If they were gonna treat me like a bad kid, then I was gonna be a bad kid give them a reason to move me."
At 15, she crashed her father's van into a tractor-trailer after she fell asleep behind the wheel.
She was 17 when she and Hare started living together.
"If not for her, I'd be in jail," Hare said one morning, as he cooked breakfast for his family.
Both admit that each turned the other's life around. Hare stopped doing drugs, and Spindle got her driver's license and high-school equivalency diploma.
She also got pregnant.
The teenagers got their first apartment three months before Jayden was born in September 2007. Spindle started college classes, and Hare worked at a convenience store.
Things were going well until Jayden was 2 months old. Spindle and Hare overslept one morning, and in the rush to get ready for work, Spindle said Hare slipped on the steep steps.
He was carrying Jayden, who fell down a flight of stairs.
Spindle said her worst nightmare began. Some of the same social service workers who handled her case as a teenager looked into her care as a mother.
No charges were filed against the young couple, but officials said Jayden's injuries weren't consistent with a fall and recommended he be placed in foster care.
Spindle volunteered to bring him to social services, rather than have agency workers pick up her baby.
She thought about running, the way she did when she was younger and things didn't work out.
"That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life," she said. "I was going to give my kid up for something I knew I didn't do. I just wanted to take him and hit [Interstate] 95 and go."
Instead, she followed the ruling--and waited for the court to send her son home. Spindle said she often felt she was being judged on the environment she came from, not on who she was now.
At one hearing, she asked the judge to treat her as an individual. "I'm not my family," she said, repeatedly.
Jayden was returned to his parents eight months after the fall. He was an infant when he left and on the verge of walking when he came back to them.
Healthy Families, which serves at-risk parents, offered to help teach the young couple about the care their son needed.
At first, Spindle wasn't thrilled at the notion of having another agency in her life.
"I wanted to drop everything, take an 'F-you' kind of attitude," she said. "You know what I'm saying?"
She's glad she changed her mind and agreed to the voluntary program.
"I don't know where I'd be if not for Mel," Spindle said. "Some days, she comes over and I'm OK, and she teaches me a lot of stuff about Jayden. Some days, she comes over and I'm a train wreck, and she helps me."
Healthy Families has nothing but praise for the young parents. The agency suggested Spindle as a subject for the "Some Good News" series.
Spindle has "only good things ahead of her," Michelle Wagaman, public information specialist for Healthy Families, wrote in an e-mail.
"Amanda is an active, devoted mother with a story to share," Wagaman said. "She has benefited from this community service and now has a strong family unit and a healthy, happy toddler who will have the family Amanda did not growing up."
Eggleston believes Spindle is so determined to succeed because of what she experienced as a child. She sees few 19-year-olds that motivated.
"She has the fire and goals to go after her dreams and to take care of her child," the case worker said, "and a lot of that has to do with where she's been and what she went through."
Cathy Dyson: 540/374-5425
Email: cdyson@freelancestar.com
| Some Good News is an occasional series that celebrates cheerful or inspiring news. See more at fredericksburg.com. |
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Healthy Families Rappahannock Area serves about 60 at-risk families a year in Fredericksburg and the counties of Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania and Stafford. It's operated through the Rappahannock Area Community Services Board. For no charge, case workers make home visits and work with parents to understand their child's development process and needs, with the ultimate goal of reducing child abuse. Parents can enroll before their babies are born and remain in the program until their children start preschool or kindergarten. The program is supported by local funds, but proposed budgets include less money--or no funding at all--from every jurisdiction except King George, which funded at the same level as this year. If the proposed budget cuts remain, the agency would serve five fewer families, said Program Manager Michele Powell. "This is not the time to cut funding," she said. "Research has shown that child abuse and neglect cases rise when there is a difficult economy and high unemployment." |
