Breaking Through the Darkness
It was a benefit for abused children, a cause that was too wrenching for most of the cocktail chatter it generated that night. She understood this and she discussed it anyway, gently coaxing a clutch of well-dressed donors over by the hors d’oeuvres plates. It was mildly remarkable. Those gold earrings, that pageboy haircut. She was a Studio City stay-at-home mom. A woman like her at a benefit like this usually ends up assuming the standard, frustrating posture: a smile, held fixedly while VIPs talk to each other as if she’s not around.
“This is Renne Bilson, one of our court-appointed special advocates,” someone said to a visitor, steering Bilson away from her rapt audience. Again the incongruity: Bilson’s smile of introduction was not the perky greeting you usually get from your average community volunteer. There was a weariness, a ballast that bespoke experience way beyond charity balls and bake sales. In a realm that the fortunate and well-adjusted rarely bother to think about, let alone wade into, Renne Bilson--not her money or her contacts, just Renne Bilson--has changed the lives of 22 children in 13 years.
Children abandoned by mothers. Children raped by fathers. Children belittled and worse in loveless foster homes. Children without a bedspread or a teddy bear or a familiar smile to claim as theirs alone. These are the cause of Renne Bilson and 299 volunteers like her: the lost, wounded children of Los Angeles County’s behemoth “dependency” courts. Children whom nobody likes to talk about, whom we write off as too far gone for the rest of us to help.
*
“Oh, I can tell you just how I got started,” said a smiling Bilson, who was an actress in her old life, before she married a TV director and quit to raise their family. “Our son was 8 years old. We were at home on New Year’s Eve, and my husband said, ‘Let’s tell about all the good things that happened to us this year.’ And my husband told his good things. And my son told his good things. And then I told mine. And everything I had to say was about my husband or my son.”
She told a friend that she was stir-crazy, that she needed more, something that was purely hers. The friend told her about a network of volunteers who are trained and then deployed by Superior Court judges to help sort out the futures of the more than 50,000 abused and neglected children in the dependency courts. Its name was shorthand for court-appointed special advocate: CASA.
The need is massive. One-tenth of the nation’s dependency court caseload is here in Los Angeles County, so many children that the phrase “beleaguered county social worker” is a redundancy. A child might share a caseworker with a hundred other kids, a court-appointed lawyer with 500 more. And the problems involved are not the kind in which resolution is a phone call away. Each case requires investigation, meetings with schools and therapists and halfway houses and out-of-state relatives and real parents and foster parents. A little person might languish in limbo forever, and many do--unless the case gets assigned to a CASA, whose job is to act as a champion.
The CASAs get 40 hours of training in everything from child welfare law to how to beat back the simple urge to take these poor kids home with them. It is emotionally taxing, Bilson’s friend warned her. But, with so many kids and so few caseworkers, it mattered. Bilson listened--and volunteered.
*
Her eyes lit up as she talked about what came after that, about how even the smallest effort made such a difference. There was the runaway teenager for whom her intervention meant reconciliation with her mother. There were the three terrified children of a brutal and murderous father, for whom Bilson moved heaven and earth to find an adoptive home.
There was the 3-year-old boy, kidnapped and then abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, whose frantic grandma--the only one who had loved him--was tracked down by Bilson and flown to his side on Christmas Eve. Alone in the house on the day of her victory, she had no one to exult with until her son walked in from school. “I found the grandmother!” she told her little boy joyously.
The victories were especially poignant this month, the 20th anniversary of the CASA program in L.A. Last week, its fund-raising arm, Friends of Child Advocates, strung 50,000 lights across the dependency courthouse in Monterey Park. Their hope is that people will help underwrite the training of more CASAs by contributing. Five dollars sponsors one light.
This, in fact, was why Bilson was at that night’s soiree. The switch was being flipped for the first time. So much pain behind each tiny beacon, and yet it was breathtaking, that sudden radiance. “Twenty-two of those lights,” Renne Bilson said with a luminous smile, “are mine.”
Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].
