What Will Happen to My Kids? : Like other single parents with AIDS, Tanya Shaw is terrified she won’t find the right home for her children before she dies.
Destini knows there isn’t much time.
At 7, she’s aware of her mother’s illness; she understands the word AIDS . When her mother dies, Destini and her 2-year-old sister Chassidy will have a new, adoptive family, she says.
Their mother fears she won’t find that family in time. As she fights the diseases that tax her depleted immune system, 25-year-old Tanya Shaw races against a frightening deadline.
“Some nights I’m afraid to go to sleep because maybe I won’t wake up and I haven’t found a family for these girls,” Shaw says. “Some nights, I just don’t sleep.”
Shaw is among a growing number of parents with AIDS who face the same question: What will happen to my kids?
Social workers say children left parentless by AIDS are perhaps the newest victims in the epidemic’s wake.
According to county and federal officials, 503 women in Los Angeles County and 22,056 in the United States were known to carry the HIV virus, as of Feb. 29. Most are of childbearing age, but it is unknown how many are mothers.
“People in the field are saying now that we’re going to start seeing something we haven’t in a long time--what used to be called orphans,” says one AIDS hospice director.
Dying parents who can’t leave their children with family now have but one choice: the county’s overburdened foster care and adoption system.
Tanya Shaw is determined to increase the options. She won’t leave her children with “the system,” she says. Instead, she’s trying to create a nonprofit adoption agency specifically to help families of people with AIDS and HIV.
Tanya’s Foundation for the Children would arrange meetings between prospective parents and AIDS-affected families.
“I feel that as people with AIDS and HIV, we should have the chance to choose with whom and where our children will go when we leave this world,” Shaw wrote in an outline of the foundation. “The goal of this foundation is to find families open-minded enough not to discriminate against the virus. “
Although exact figures are difficult to project, the number of families looking for adoptive homes will rise dramatically as AIDS reaches further into the heterosexual community, Los Angeles County health care and social workers agree.
Juan Ledesma, director of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation clinic at Queen of Angels, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, says the women’s clinic patients have swelled from 20 to 70 in less than a year. He estimates that 25% are mothers.
“We’re going to have a lot of kids who need care,” agrees Marcia A. Gonzales of the L.A. Pediatric AIDS Network.
Placing these children will not be easy. While the waiting lists for healthy infants are long, older children can languish, oftentimes burdened by the stigma of abusive or neglectful backgrounds.
Shaw wants to include all children in her organization: infants and teen-agers, healthy and HIV-infected.
“There’s been enough discrimination,” she says. “Every child needs to be loved. They are all a part of society.”
Shaw’s daughters are bright, pretty girls. Destini, now in third grade, reads aloud with a certain pride to whomever will listen. She guards her younger sister with a mother’s protective hand. Chassidy toddles about, happy and confident, investigating everything with equal curiosity, too young to understand her mother’s fear of the future.
Both have tested negative for human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the precursor to AIDS. The girls have different fathers, neither of whom the man Shaw says infected her with AIDS.
Looking at her daughters, Shaw says they will go with only the very best family.
But the clock ticks louder every day.
Eight days ago, Shaw had planned to enroll Destini in a new school, then check the library for information on starting a nonprofit agency. While standing in the school office, however, she collapsed.
After a full day’s odyssey of bus rides and waiting in emergency rooms, Shaw was admitted to the hospital with a dangerously low white-blood-cell count. Without white cells, she’s open to every possible infection, any of which could kill. Visitors to her room had to wear surgical masks.
Destini and Chassidy went to stay with a family friend; Shaw lay awake in her hospital bed that night fighting exhaustion and prescription sleeping pills. If she sleeps, there won’t be any time left, she says, crying.
And there is so much to be done.
Shaw perks up when she talks about a fund-raising banquet she’d like to have on Mother’s Day. It would be a black-tie affair, she says; she can almost see the linen-covered tables.
“I want the mayor to be there and everybody else who cares about children and AIDS--Barbra Streisand and Magic Johnson and, shoot, all the Lakers. They can sit at my table,” Shaw says.
The young mothers Shaw has met in clinics and hospice programs around the city would be there, too: the English woman trying to find a home for her 17-year-old daughter; the Latina with a 16-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
Health willing, they would all be there.
If Tanya Shaw had been told five years ago that she would become an AIDS activist--and try to create an adoption agency bearing her name--she would have laughed.
“I never thought about this kind of stuff before,” she says. “It wasn’t until I got sick that I started thinking about being remembered as a parent, as somebody’s mother.”
An Arkansas native, Shaw moved to Los Angeles with her mother at age 6. She attended Dorsey High, but transferred to a continuation school after becoming pregnant, earning her diploma when Destini was less than a year old.
After Destini’s father went to jail, Shaw married an older man. He made a comfortable living, and for the next few years her only worries were about spending money, she says. She had a maid to pick up the house; it didn’t matter that Shaw couldn’t cook.
In 1988, when she says she could no longer ignore her husband’s bisexual infidelity, they separated. Nearly two years later, her mother-in-law called from Texas to say Shaw’s husband had been hospitalized with AIDS complications. (He died last week.)
Shaw spent nearly a year in a whirlwind of denial. One party led to another, cocaine led to crack. At age 23, she couldn’t believe she was at risk.
“I refused to hear anything about that,” Shaw recalls. “HIV? No way, not me. Just give me some more parties and shut up about that AIDS junk.”
Last June, after suffering a bad flu, she went to the doctor. Later she was called back to the his office. When he said “HIV positive,” Shaw fainted.
Within three months, she had checked into Queen of Angels Medical Center with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a common complication of full-blown AIDS. She left the hospital two weeks later, but was readmitted in two days when her right leg suddenly locked up. This time it was arthritis.
Shaw had another 11 days in a hospital bed to think. She decided to live.
On Dec. 23, she checked into Rue’s House, a shelter for AIDS patients in South-Central Los Angeles. Counselors there helped her get off drugs and find government assistance for housing.
“I wanted to find out who I was and how to deal with this,” Shaw says. “But coming out of denial was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
She doesn’t remember exactly when she faced her own mortality, but does recall asking what would happen to her children. The answer horrified her.
Leaving her daughters with family, Shaw feels, is out of the question. She has a strained relationship with her mother and an 18-year-old sister is a single mother.
“I want my girls to have a better life,” Shaw says. “But the only other choice was leaving them with the county.
“That’s no choice.”
Shaw’s predicament isn’t unusual, says Gonzales of the Pediatric AIDS Network. Many mothers with AIDS lack family support, partly because of the disease’s stigma.
“Oftentimes, we see families with AIDS separated from the extended family’s support because of their illness. Some people still consider HIV dirty or immoral,” she says.
Shaw looked for other mothers with AIDS and generally found women who refused to consider their own, imminent death. Others thought about it, but didn’t have any better solutions for their surviving children.
She started thinking, and talking, about another option.
At Shaw’s foundation, mothers and children with AIDS would be accepted and listened to, she says. Potential parents would be thoroughly screened; they would submit essays on their feelings about AIDS and agree to a 60-day trial period before any adoption.
At the slightest hint of discrimination, the whole deal would be called off, she says: “Children should never be lied to about who their parents were or how they died.”
Talking with anyone who would listen, Shaw caught the ear of counselors at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation women’s clinic. Her doctor, Bisher Akil, agreed to serve on the board of directors and pay legal fees to establish the nonprofit foundation.
“I like the idea because it came from a mother’s heart,” he says.
On Saturday, Shaw left the hospital and returned to her clean, sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in Hancock Park.
She and her daughters survive mainly on government assistance.
Occasionally, she and Destini talk about the future. Destini knows she could have a new family some day--when her mother “goes away.”
In some ways, Destini will be the one to choose the family, Shaw says: “All Destini has to say is Mommy, I don’t like it and the whole deal’s off. It’s really that simple.”
Destini apparently understands her mother’s impending deadline.
When a visitor recently asked what kind of family she wants, the little girl looked up from her Cinderella coloring book, put down her crayon and pointed:
“You,” Destini said.
“I’ll go with you.”