No Longer a Prisoner of Silence

Suzi went to her first foster home at 6, believing she’d be there for a week or so.

“No one told me it’d be forever,” she said in sign language.

Suzi is 17 and deaf and living in her 10th Los Angeles County-assigned home. Her mother was a crack addict. Her father allegedly kidnapped and molested her. Until recently, she tumbled from one foster family to another, unable to communicate with those around her, a prisoner of her own silence.

She could neither speak nor lip-read. She did not learn sign language fluently until three years ago. She could not tell neighbors the bad things Da-Da did. The simplest hurts--a toothache--became ordeals of isolation. The worst part about her life was being unable to talk about it.

Yet today, Suzi is a cheerleader with a blond-streaked ponytail whose pressing recent concerns were whether to go to the winter prom and selecting a gift for her boyfriend. She gossips with friends, hands gesturing furiously, and she likes to dance.

She talks of going to college and becoming a therapist.

Most important, Suzi now has a home where she is loved. Her foster mother, Denise, plans to adopt her. “Suzi just melted my heart,” said Denise.

Suzi has begun to make peace with her past. She says she has forgiven her mother, who has been drug-free for nearly three years.

Her father--who taught her to roll marijuana joints at age 8 and whom she hasn’t seen since she was 9--is another story. She has one photo of him. On its back, an edict is penciled in a child’s scrawl: “I hate Dad very much.” Authorities believe her father stalked her in recent years.

“If my real dad died, it wouldn’t even make me cry,” she said. “I picture my father as Satan. Evil. Evil.”

Suzi’s life is an odyssey of human resilience, a transformation of an angry, animal-like child into a teen grappling with adolescence and the hearing world.

Like some foster children, Suzi fell between the cracks. Most of her social workers knew no sign language. Only in 1994 did the county set up a deaf services unit to try to place children with foster parents who could communicate with them.

Officials say they are unsure how many have suffered a fate like Suzi’s, but they believe her case is unusual.

Why was Suzi able to rise above years of abuse, neglect and communication deprivation?

Her former therapist, Dina Feldman Taylor, has a one-word explanation: “Gumption.”

‘We Weren’t Ready to Be Adults’

Suzi’s mother, Suzanne Norman, raised in Los Angeles, fell head-over-heels in love at 14 with a boy a year older. She adored his dark brooding good looks. She longed to provide the love he’d never known as an orphan in a foster home. They dreamed of living in a log cabin, raising cows and pigs, tending a garden and being forever true to one another.

Norman, who smoked dope and popped pills, dropped out of 10th grade. Her mother, a pill user, drove the couple to Barstow so they could hitchhike across country. When they reached Joliet, Ill., Norman’s relatives said she was welcome, but her beau was not. They ended up in Portland, Ore.

At 18, after a year of trying, Norman became pregnant. But 2 1/2 months later, she contracted German measles, which is known to cause birth defects.

Living off public aid, the couple ran short of money and scoured back alleys, picked fruit off trees and pawed through trash bins.

Their dreams unraveled as their drug use escalated. They yo-yoed between Los Angeles and Portland. Nothing happened the way they planned--most of all, this odd child who was their daughter, who struggled to say “Momma” and “Da-Da.”

When Suzi was 18 months old, the couple moved into a one-room Los Angeles apartment in a decrepit building with no heat and little hot water. At night, the rats and mice scurried through, eating the fingers off Suzi’s one doll.

By now Suzi should have been speaking. It was a shock when doctors informed the young parents that their child was deaf.

Her father refused to believe it. Suzi was enrolled in a school for the hearing-impaired, a rigorous program demanding parental involvement. But, Norman said, her boyfriend broke every rule. He refused to make sure Suzi could see him when he spoke. He never knelt so she could see his lips.

“We were adults at 14 and 15, eating out of trash cans. We didn’t get the chance to be teenagers,” Norman said. “We weren’t ready to be adults.”

Frustrated with his daughter and the constant struggle for money and drugs, her boyfriend beat her in front of Suzi, Suzanne Norman recalled. The child would cry and try to throw herself between her parents. Her mother, in turn, sometimes hit her.

Suzi remembers hunger pangs and embarrassment about wearing dirty clothes. She had one toy, her doll. Knowing no language, she never gave it a name. She liked going to neighbors’ homes because they always seemed so clean. If she was lucky, someone clucked their tongue in dismay and gave her something to eat. Unable to speak, she thanked them with a smile.

Life in a Series of Foster Homes

When Suzi was 6, her parents split up. She and her mother moved in with her mother’s new boyfriend.

Her father wanted Suzi back. Once he kidnapped her from the new home, Suzanne Norman said. The police found them within three days, she said.

Norman’s new relationship was based on cocaine, she said. Soon the rent money fed the couple’s drug habit. Suzi’s teacher sent notes home, chastising Norman for sending her child to school with no jacket in a driving rain.

“Suzi just wasn’t wanted any more,” Norman recalls bluntly. “I was in a new relationship, the man was more important, the drugs were more important. Me getting loaded was more important than her having dinner.”

Twice, authorities intervened, placing Suzi in foster homes. The third time, the mother of Norman’s new boyfriend called the social worker and said the couple were ill-equipped to tend a child.

“Suzi was nothing more than a pain in the ass to me,” Norman said. “Suzi got thrown to the wayside. . . . I was glad she got taken away.”

It torments Norman, now 35, to remember this. Having lost custody of Suzi and a younger son, she cares for her third child, a toddler, and hopes to build a relationship with Suzi.

Suzi rarely saw her mother. Once, Norman showed up stoned and stormed out--enraged that her firstborn could not hear her.

At first, the foster home seemed nice. Her clothes were clean. But Suzi could not understand why she was there. Where was her mother?

Suzi’s ability to communicate was based solely upon crude gestures. She realized her high-pitched shriek irritated her foster parents, who had two sons and a daughter.

Frustrated that she could not make herself understood, Suzi would scream and cry, kicking her foster parents and hurling objects across the room. Compared to the way her foster parents treated their own children, she felt second-class.

One afternoon, Suzi’s father showed up when her foster parents were not home. He asked the sitter if he could visit with Suzi on the front porch. But when the sitter took out the trash, he pulled Suzi into the car where his girlfriend sat waiting, according to Suzi and Juvenile Court records. When his car broke down, the trio hitch-hiked to Oregon.

For two years, beginning when she was 7, Suzi stayed with her father. She did not attend school. He taught her to roll joints, she said. He’d offer her tastes of alcohol, laughing when she made a face at its bitterness. As a disguise, he kept her hair shorn and dressed her like a boy. And he molested her, according to court records.

Her mother knew where Suzi was. But she didn’t call the police, Suzanne Norman said, figuring that Suzi was better off than in a foster home.

After police caught up with Suzi’s father, she was sent to a foster home in Southern California, where she stayed for four years.

Her foster parents’ knowledge of sign language was limited to spelling words out. Suzi knew rudimentary sign language. Describing her turmoil in this simplistic vocabulary seemed as futile as trying to lasso a steer with garden twine.

It made Suzi feel inferior to see people talking and excluding her. She became depressed and withdrawn. These foster parents seemed very strict. Could she go to the mall? No. Feeling she wasn’t being trusted, Suzi rebelled.

She broke windows, stole inexpensive jewelry from a store. A slow-burning anger built. She contemplated suicide, once slashing at her wrist. She threw her hearing aids in the trash and buried her glasses in a house plant.

Finally, using sign language, Suzi threatened to kill the family. You have to go, her foster mother told her. She was 13.

Suzi bounced from a residential school for the deaf to a psychiatric hospital, where she was given Prozac. Finally she was assigned to McLaren Children’s Center, Los Angeles County’s shelter for abused and neglected youth. She said she saw no other deaf children; she had no interpreter. She sat bored and confused through group therapy. She beat the walls with her hands. Why was she in prison?

Soon, she began faking seizures.

“I just invented them. People were worried about me, they acted like they cared,” she said. It seemed like a topsy-turvy world. “Nobody believed me when I told the truth and when I lied, they believed me.”

After six months of inconclusive diagnostic tests, Suzi was sent to a foster home. Her foster mother was hearing impaired and her foster father was deaf. For the first time in her life, Suzi had foster parents who were fluent in sign language and could teach her. When she arrived, her signing vocabulary was the equivalent of a 4-year-old’s. It soared to an age-appropriate level within a year.

“She was severely neglected, severely abused and severely deprived of communication,” said Taylor, Suzi’s therapist for four years, who talked to The Times with Suzi’s permission. “The deprivation of communication was probably the worst abuse Suzi suffered.”

Finally, Suzi was able to articulate her feelings. The floodgates opened. She began having nightmares about her father. She realized she’d been cheated of a normal childhood.

“The more communication she got, the angrier she became,” Taylor said.

Suzi started arguing with her foster mother. She’d walk out of the house at midnight. She took up with boyfriends. She broke a closet and hit walls until her knuckles ached. Finally, she kicked and punched her foster mother.

Suzi was dispatched to a group home. She was the only deaf child. No one knew sign language. She ran away repeatedly, showing up at her previous foster home until the family agreed to give her another chance.

This time it seemed Suzi, now 15, had learned her lesson. She stopped fighting. Her foster mother talked of adopting her.

Suzanne Norman appeared in her life again. She had a baby, Nicole, whom she brought to visit Suzi. It pained Suzi to see that her mother had sobered up to take care of Nicole--something she hadn’t done for her.

One afternoon, as therapist Taylor visited, Suzi’s world once again crashed around her--this time, it was not her own doing.

Suzi’s social worker arrived and told her that authorities believed her father was stalking her. She no longer was safe in this house. Suzi sat shocked.

During three weeks at an emergency shelter, she turned 16. “I was very depressed,” she recalls. “I was trying my best to make the foster family work and it failed again. The cycle began again. I was so sick of moving and unpacking.”

Finally, Unconditional Love

Denise, an energetic divorcee, had raised three children when she learned through her church about the need for foster parents who know sign language.

Denise, 44, a training supervisor for an oil inspection company, had deaf friends and signs fluently. She had a big house. She signed up to be a foster parent.

She imagined tending a 4-year-old girl, but she didn’t blink when the call came: Could she handle 16-year-old Suzi? Of course.

“I don’t think I could know the language and know there are children out there who can’t communicate and not do anything about it,’ Denise said. In December 1995, she and Suzi met at Five Acres, an Altadena-based center for abused children that recently had launched efforts to recruit foster parents for the deaf. Suzi smiled shyly and dropped her eyes. She pulled up her shirt, showing her inflamed belly button, which she had pierced at the shelter.

“Accept?” she signed to Denise.

“Yuck,” signed Denise, wrinkling her nose. The two burst into laughter.

“She’s very sweet--a little shy,” Denise wrote later in a journal.

That first night, Denise’s beeper sounded at 3 a.m. Her company needed her on a ship. I’m a supervisor, I don’t pull shifts like this and I have a child I can’t leave alone, she protested. But she had to go. So Denise and Suzi boarded a ship for two days.

“I had a decision,” Denise said later. “Reject a child who’d been rejected all her life or I could quit my $50,000-a-year job.”

She quit two weeks later, picking up part-time work as an interpreter for several school districts. She also moved when she realized that her longtime home was not close to the public high school with the best program for deaf children.

In those early days, Denise wondered about what she’d taken on. In Suzi’s first six weeks at school, she was suspended three times for fighting, enraged at classmates who spread rumors she had been raped by her father.

More than anything, Suzi wanted to fit in, to be popular. But she didn’t know how. She flirted with boys, upsetting their girlfriends.

As desperately as she wanted friends, she seemed unable, initially, to find them. Maybe we should discuss your clothing, Denise told her gently. Short shorts and low-cut blouses send a message. She and Suzi thumbed through magazines, picking outfits they liked. Not nerdy, not sluttish. Then they went shopping.

After poring over Suzi’s records, Denise had reached her own conclusions. Suzi didn’t need Prozac.

She needed firm, consistent rules. She needed to learn boundaries and to distinguish right from wrong. She didn’t need to be indulged because she was deaf. And she desperately needed what most children take for granted from their parents: unconditional love.

Denise weaned Suzi off Prozac. She introduced her to religion. When they fought, she made it clear she loved Suzi and that she would forever have a home. And she encouraged Suzi to try things like joining her school’s deaf cheerleading squad.

In the months after Suzi’s arrival, and with her approval, Denise accepted three deaf foster children, girls with cerebral palsy. Today, Denise worries because her landlord’s family wants to move into the house she has been leasing and she has four weeks to find a new home.

Suzi was immediately taken with the youngest girl, a 9-year-old who could neither sign nor speak. This child weighed less than two pounds when she was born prematurely. The fingers of her left hand have been amputated, so when she signs with that hand, it’s almost indecipherable.

“She just hits my heart,” Suzi said. “I see myself in her, frustrated and wild.”

Suzi still battles to contain her emotions. When she gets angry, she tries to go for a walk. She’s feeling her way through the hearing world.

Yet for the first time in her life, she has a vision of her future. She accepts her deafness. If surgery were available that could allow her to hear, she insists she would turn it down.

“It’s who I am,” she signed. “I hear with my eyes.”

This spring, Suzi hopes to fly to Portland with Denise to visit her mother. She hasn’t seen her for two years, but they speak on the phone once or twice a month.

Suzi and Denise joke that as they fly over Oregon, where she believes her father lives, they will make a point of flushing the toilet.

She has come to see her parents’ lives as a cautionary tale. She neither drinks nor uses drugs; she attends church and Bible study.

“I’m breaking the cycle of my parents,” she said. “If I follow their footsteps it will ruin my life--my kids will be in foster homes like I was. I want to prove that I can take care of my own kids, that I’ll have a good job and a good life.”

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BACKGROUND

* In Los Angeles County, about 42,200 children are currently placed in group or foster homes; of those, about 150 are deaf. On average, each foster child is placed in about two homes or facilities. The average length of stay in foster care is three years.