A Lydia Lowry was listed for an initial consultation with me at 9 a.m. that day, and it was exactly 9 a.m. when my secretary, Sydney, ushered two harried-looking women into my room. The arrival of two people for an initial consultation was not uncommon because I always encouraged clients to bring a friend or family member with them. Being a legal aid attorney, specializing in representing victims of domestic violence and the poor in family law matters, I like to give clients a lot of information and advice when we meet. So, it is beneficial for them to bring someone along to help them process it all. A client’s friend or family member can be helpful to me, too, frequently providing important information that the client fails to remember or relay.
“Which one of you is Lydia Lowry?” I asked, rising from my desk to shake the women’s hands.
They answered in unison. “I am.”
The Lydia Lowry who was my official client (I’ll call her Lydia #1 was the mother of Evelyn, a sixteen-year-old girl that Bucks County’s Children & Youth Social Services Agency was threatening to take into protective custody. Lydia #2 was Lydia #1’s elderly mother. Both were visibly distressed. CYS had given them thirty days to remedy their situation before legal action would be taken against them. They were working frantically to try to do so, they told me, but they didn’t trust CYS. So they had certainly come to the right place when they came to me.
It didn’t sound like the situation was insurmountable. The way they explained it, CYS had decided that their house was dirty. If they didn’t clean it up to CYS’s satisfaction, Evelyn would be taken from them and put in foster care. The Lowrys were twelve days into the deadline. Friends had helped them get rid of some accumulated clutter, they said, and they were making good progress. But eighty-year-old Lydia #2 had a broken right wrist in a cast, which was slowing them down.
“We have eight cats,” Lydia #2 informed me near the end of our meeting. “CYS ordered us to get rid of them.” She reached into her handbag for a tissue as tears welled in her pale blue eyes. “They said we have to take them to the SPCA! But how could we do that? They’re like members of our family!”
This was all so characteristic of CYS, I thought, setting an arbitrary deadline for compliance with heartless demands and threatening to throw a child in foster care if their deadline wasn’t met. The family was obviously very poor, and, as I saw it, CYS was full of caseworkers who thought poorly of poor people.
Lydia #2 was old and disabled, and Lydia
