Butterfly Angel

By Norma D'Amico

This is the story of a woman, who as a young child suffered the loss of her father and then suffered through an abusive childhood. After marrying, very young, and raising four children of own, she became aware of the abused and neglected children in the Department of Family Services that did not have homes or families to take care of them. She decided to become involved in helping theses children. With strong determination and courage she put aside her own needs, interests, and desires and began to foster children. Through the years she went on to adopt ten of these children.

This was not an easy road to follow as her being a strong advocate for these children led to much tribulation with the Department of Family Services. The effect on her own family was damaging as well as costly for her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524650407

Norma D'Amico

Norma DAmico lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with her husband and their adorable cat, Princess. She has written two other novels as well as a booklet on the history of Kittery Point, Maine.

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© 2017 Norma Damico. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/29/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5041-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5040-7 (e)

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Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifeteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

To Lynne Sanborn

A true Butterfly Angel

**************

.

Also by Norma D’Amico

Now I Can See

Drowning in her Eyes

Kittery Point

The Hidden Jewel in the State of Maine

I can do anything through him who

Gives me strength

Philippians 4-3

************

Do not wait for leaders

Do it alone

Person to person

Mother Theresa

***************

Let me go unknown

Let the pebbles I have tossed in to the sea of life

Send the ripples to the endless shores

Be all that tell the tale that I have been here

Alphonse D’Amico

***************

In a perfect world this story would not have to be told

The world and life is harsh

That is why this story must be told

Anita Snow

**********

Introduction

This is the story of a woman wanting to speak out to the families who foster and adopt children from the Department of Family Services. Having fostered and adopted from the system, she feels it is important that these people understand what this entails and share what she has learned through her experience.

Most of the children in Family Services have been forced to endure rejection, violence, cruelty, and loneliness. Yet these children must continue to exist in a world where they have difficulty finding their place. Adoption is a wonderful event. It should be a joyous one, but some of these children are special needs children and unless you are prepared with the knowledge of what you face there will be much heartbreak. It is important that foster parents be told the complete history of the special needs children they are adopting from Family Services. These special needs children are born to mothers who might have been addicted to drugs or alcohol. They will be raising a child who has some level of disability, mentally, physically, or both. They will need therapy and medical treatment. There should be therapy for these foster parents as well as for the children. Laura believed she could reach these children and help them to grow into adults able to exist in this society. She tried to teach those social skills and restraint. No matter what she tried to do for them these children considered her their enemy. Because of their genes, the environment they had lived in, or the abuse suffered, they could not trust or love anyone. They did not know that there were such emotions as love or trust. When she realized that there was no changing them it broke her heart.

Laura is a veteran of fighting bureaucracy and a relentless advocate for children. Because of this she feels there should be therapy for the children being adopted, who are old enough to understand. They should discuss how they feel about the adoption and their soon to be parents. Most of the children, not having been told why they had to be taken from their homes, place blame on the adopting parents for their circumstances. These children come with case histories that the adopting parents should be made aware of before decisions are made. Consequently the Family Services fail these adopting parents.

It is not only case workers that fail them, but also management and people in charge who abandon them, glad to be lessening their case loads and saving the money it costs to maintain them in foster care. The case workers are in a difficult position, as some of the workers are not trained enough to know how people behave under extreme situations and pressure and they do not have enough support and training to deal with such emotionally troubled children. These workers see a great deal of cruelty to these children from the parents. This is hard to deal with this on a daily basis. Some of the case workers are very diligent and yet some will make false accusations to maintain their jobs and pensions, without a thought of the effect on the children.

This applies also to foster parents who take children to provide homes for them. They should be informed of the health and emotional needs of the child they are fostering. The concerns of Family Services should be above all focused on the child and not the parents. Instead these children become case numbers and are not seen as individual lives. Foster parents are afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation as in the case of Laura Sawyer.

Prologue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Laura was standing at the window in her living room watching the snow fall. It was fascinating how the wind was swirling around, picking up the flakes, and whipping them into high drifts. Some drifts were as high as the window where she was standing and everything was pristine white. She was feeling miserable, although, she had to admit, that it was a beautiful winter wonderland scene, not unlike the ones on Christmas cards, and in spite of that, she loathed it. She had not seen bare ground since the first snow fall in December. At that time it seemed beautiful because it had given them a perfect white Christmas. Now though all this snow, along with the frigid temperatures, and ice storms, made the winter intolerable and seem much longer, there had been no thaws during these winter months which might have given them some respite but instead the temperatures remained in the single digits and all remained frozen around them. March was finally here, but still it remained bitterly cold, and it was still snowing with no signs that spring would make its appearance soon. She was impatient for it to end.

This extreme weather had made Laura feel as though she was a prisoner in her own home. It was disturbing enough that she couldn’t drive any longer since the last stroke that she suffered had left her right arm paralyzed, and her eyesight was failing. With more snow coming down she would be house bound that much longer. The thought of this made the tears begin welling up in her eyes. Gradually she became aware of the fact that she was feeling sorry for herself, and letting her emotions get out of control, which was not at all like Laura, who always had had control over her emotions.

‘I must not let this happen. I will not cry’ she thought. Yet tears came sliding down her cheeks. Quickly she brushed them away and turning from the window, hurried into the bathroom before the children might see her tears. Laura knew better than to let them see her crying, as they looked for any sign of weakness on her part and would be quick to take advantage of this.

Leaning down over the sink, she turned on the water faucet and rinsed the tears from her face and eyes. When she was finished, she reached for a towel from the nearby rack, grasping it with her good hand she wiped her face as best she could, her useless arm hanging limply at her side.

Raising her head, she looked into the mirror at her reflection, and wondered whatever had happened to the bright eyed, eager young woman she once was. The person who was going to change the world and make it a better place. The one who was going to save the abused and abandoned children in her world. Whatever had she been thinking she wondered? She had put her heart and soul into what she believed and wanted to make a difference, however, now felt that she had failed miserably.

Where was the old Laura Sawyer? What happened to her? As she thought about it she began to realize that she had fallen into despair, and it showed in her face. It was not like her to give in to despair since she strongly believed that despair leads to defeat. She had never allowed herself to be defeated and she would not allow it now. Suddenly her spirits began to lift and she began to feel a spark of life come alive inside her. She knew she had to do something other than continue to be depressed and despondent. Slowly, she became aware of what it was that she must do, and that was to expose the people who had caused her to reach to this point. She must tell her story to others so they would know the difficult path she had followed and try to help them avoid the heartbreak and misfortune that she had suffered.

Chapter One

Laura’s first recollection as a young child was living in a deserted army barrack in Maine in a lonely, wooded, secluded area on the Saint Johns River. The town was Fort Kent, which was the northern most town in Maine. It was close to the Canadian border and very small. There was much history attached to Fort Kent dating back to 1838 when construction on the fort started. It was then enlarged to include barracks, officer quarters, and other buildings, for fifty thousand troops because of the Aroostook War which was a bloodless and undeclared war between the British Colony of New Brunswick and the United State of Maine. It was settled with a treaty in 1839. In 1843 the fort was deactivated, and in 1845 it was abandoned. In 1857 it was returned to the state of Maine.

Laura lived there with her father Charles, her mother Constance, and two older siblings, Brother Matt, Sister Sally, and a younger sister Dolores, who was only eighteen months younger than Laura.

Laura did not remember much of life at that time and was too young to understand why her family was living in Maine since the rest of their family lived in Massachusetts, a long way from them. Later she was to learn it was because her father was a writer and was working on a story he hoped to sell to the local newspaper. It was a story about groups of men who were crossing the border illegally, gun running, and smuggling liquor and drugs into the United States.

The one memory Laura had of the time spent in Maine, was one morning, sitting at the kitchen table eating her breakfast while her father was washing the kitchen windows. Winter was finally over and the first signs of spring were beginning to appear. Winters in Northern Maine were long and arduous, but now that the promise of spring was in the air, and it was starting to warm up, her father had decided it was time to do some spring cleaning and was starting with washing the windows.

Suddenly Laura, who had been watching her father work, jumped out of her chair and ran excitedly to the window and pointed to a bear who was ambling slowly out of the woods, coming toward their yard. Her father, busy concentrating on washing the window, had not seen the bear.

It was common to see bears in the area of Maine where the Texiera family were living, especially now that the bears were coming out of hibernation after the long winter spent in their dens. Laura was excited, but not frightened, at the sight of the bear since her father had explained to the children that these were black bears that made their home in Canada and northern Maine and although they were dangerous for the strength of their bite, they did not view humans as prey and rarely, if ever, hunted down humans. Normally, they avoided contact with people unless they were surprised at