From: Halburton Echo,
Ontario Canada,
Sept. 98

WHEN EVIL'S NOT TO BLAME

by MARTHA PERKINS

EVE HAD A CERTAIN "what the heck" attitude towards temptation when she decided to take a bite of the apple from the Tree of Wisdom.

That one, single bite condemned all human beings to the knowledge that there is good and evil, right and wrong, and that we therefore have to make choices between the two. Eden's blissful days of ignorance were over. But what if the root of such knowledge were not in the soul, but in a small part of the brain which links the half governing intellect and the half governing emotions?

And what if a pregnant mother happened to be drinking at the time when this part of the brain was being developed by her fetus, the tiny baby in her womb?

Eighteen-year-old Colette Philcox has been to hell and back, often taking her parents, Bonnie Buxton and Brian Philcox, along for the ride. She's stolen, she's lied. She's been homeless on the streets of Toronto, one of the modern-day Dickensian creatures everyone calls "squeegee kids." She's polluted her body with drugs, she's all but prostituted herself in order to pay for them. She has no barriers separating right from wrong. No guilt, no remorse, no sense that life's actions have consequences.

Bad upbringing? Poor parenting skills on the part of Bonnie and Brian? A lack of self-discipline? A reason to "get tough" on young troublemakers? Certainly, her parents were blamed or at the very least, given books on parenting whenever they took their daughter to see a doctor or psychiatrist. Colette was told she'd do better - at school, at life - if only she applied herself more studiously. Fault was assigned one way or another.

Then, last year, her mother happened to be watching a television documentary about two young men who have what's known as Fetal Alcohol Effects. Doctors had long known about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome because there are physical manifestations of the damage done to fetuses if their mothers consume alcohol at critical stages of pregnancy, such as small hands and wide-set eyes. But more and more, they're beginning to acknowledge that there doesn't have to be physical damage for a child to be affected by his or her mother's drinking. As the television show described some of the problems associated with FAE, the Philcoxes felt as if they listening to Colette's story.

It turns out that Colette's birth mother was a binge drinker during her pregnancy - three weeks on the bottle, three weeks recovering from it. It was the mother's continued drinking that prompted neighbours to phone the Children's Aid Society, which responded by taking Colette into protective custody. At three years of age, Colette was adopted by the Philcoxes, who already had an older, adopted daughter named Cleo.

"We always just thought Colette was a feisty tomboy," Philcox says. "She always lied, would always steal. By the time she was 10, she had a full-blown womanly figure and was starting to get hit on by guys much older than she was. She'd hang around with a tough crowd and we'd be making missing person reports every three weeks."

"She had no conscience, no remorse. She'd be sorry because she was caught, not because she had stolen my 25th wedding anniversary present to sell so she could buy crack," says Buxton, who learned to lock everything and anything of value, eventually even locking Colette out of the house. "Brian and I took three rounds of family counselling and they'd try different things with us. My feeling was (Colette's behaviour) had something to do with adoption - she'd yell 'I'm not going to clean up my room, you're not my mother' as she'd slam the door."

There were also bizarre personality traits, such as being impervious to cold: going outside when it was 20 below with only a t-shirt. Her pain threshold was amazingly high. Food had to be super sweet or dripping with fat. She needed intense stimulation, such as the type offered by drugs, to be content. "And yet she was articulate, charming and passes for a normal human being... Her report cards at school would always say 'doesn't apply herself, could do better, doesn't complete tasks', and at the end there's 'we know you can do better - good luck next semester.'"

At 10, Colette was taken by her worried parents to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where they lived. "They said 'there's nothing wrong, here's some parenting books.'" Last year, after hearing about FAE, they took her again to Sick Kids to be tested, only to be told the hospital doesn't test children older than 16.

"Doctors don't want to give excuses for bad behaviour," they say, in part agreeing that you shouldn't look for what may seem as an easy out, but also angry that a diagnosable cause for certain behaviours can be so deliberately ignored. Colette instead was told she suffered from a "conduct disorder." In short, she was an evil child, God's responsibility, not society's.

Research has indicated that with FAS and FAE children, the bridge between the two halves of the brain, the place believed to be the seat of morality and the ability to discern good and evil, is often smaller than usual. That part of the brain's tissue isn't properly or fully developed.

Philcox says you should think of your favourite sitcom, with each week having a separate plot. If you miss one week, you won't know what you missed. With the brain's development in the womb, "what happens if you miss the math episode or if you miss the ethics episode or even the ability to gauge time episode?"

Not every fetus will respond to a mother's drinking in the same way, especially since not all mother's will drink to the same extent, or at the same critical times.

Harold and Edith Woodward knew there was something wrong with their daughter Jennifer from the moment they took her on as a foster child: "Jennifer had exhausted every foster home in High River, Alberta, where we were living at the time. She totally disrupted everyone. We were her first long-term placement. If we gave up on her, where was she to go? She'd been everywhere, she'd been uprooted so many times. You fall in love with her and you say 'how can she go back into the system?'"

At two and a half, the toddler, whose birth mother had been an alcoholic, literally did not know how to play. She broke all of her toys and if a kitten was a playmate, she could very easily strangle it to death, not out of maliciousness, but because she didn't realize you shouldn't squeeze it so hard. She also couldn't talk and wouldn't sleep.

School was a disaster. Jennifer hated it and she hated being with so many people. Bad behaviour became the norm. "I just didn't like it," she says. "When I was in Grade 1, I wanted them to take me out. I didn't know what to do."

"These kids are so gullible," says Mr. Woodward. "They find it hard to make and keep friends and are desperate to be accepted."

"That's when I started to steal," Jennifer, now 17, says. "I thought if I got them candy, they'd like me."

For a period, Jennifer was suicidal, even though she had no understanding that if she committed suicide, she'd be dead, the ultimate lack of awareness that every action has its consequences.

Not willing to give up on their daughter - "they fell in love with me," Jennifer giggles - the Woodwards decided to make her their life's mission. Mr. Woodward is a contractor and Mrs. Woodward stays at home with Jennifer, providing home schooling and being her external conscience since Jennifer does not have much of one on her own. (They also have been successful in making Jennifer agree to take medication to control erratic behaviour and mood swings.)

"Jennifer's my life," says Mrs. Woodward. "We would have lost her if we had kept her in school."

"It takes a lot of repetition," Mr. Woodward adds. "If there's anything that will get through to them, it's repetition."

Like many FAS/E children, Jennifer may have her problems, but she also has her strengths. She loves writing and drawing, especially if her drawings have something to do with fashion. She's meticulous in her dress. One day, her goal is to be a pioneer with the Jehovah's Witnesses since she loves going door to door talking with people.

But how did Bonnie Buxton and Brian Philcox happen to be sitting in the Woodwards' home in Wilberforce, talking about fetal alcohol disorders? On their own, each family learned about a chat group on the internet called Faslink. Three hundred people with FAS/E children "talk" daily on their computers, exchanging anecdotal stories about children's behaviour and then sharing information on how to deal with it. During one of these chats, Buxton mentioned she was coming up to her cottage on Deer Lake, south of Highland Grove, and "boom", the two families realized they were more than just virtual neighbours, on weekends at least.

For both families, learning that there is a reason for their children's behaviour has been an incredible release.

"It's much easier once you know this person is not maliciously evil, she's a brain damaged child," says Philcox, adding that the FAE diagnosis for Colette raises a fascinating moral question: "if you don't understand what you've done, are you guilty?"

'It's not these kids' fault - they're victims," says Mr. Woodward. But understanding FAE and its manifestations are not the same as being able to cure it, or even change the behaviour.

"You have to forget their weaknesses because you're never going to fix them," Buxton says. "You have to concentrate on their strengths."

"You have to lower your expectations," adds Mrs. Woodward, "because when you expect too much from them, you're setting them up for a fall." "For some it's a life sentence but there are some of them you can help a lot," her husband says. Although damage done during pregnancy can't be undone, he says there's a natural brain spurt during adolescence and if a teenager can avoid drinking or doing drugs at this time, "they can gain back some of the loss."

Today, Colette is on welfare, living with a fellow squeegee kid who may also have FAE. Ironically, Colette, the girl who could not differentiate between good and bad when it came to her own behaviour, is starting to get mad when her telephone is disconnected because the money she gave her boyfriend to pay the bill was spent on alcohol instead. As well, her old neighbourhood vet, who has known her since she was a child, is giving her a chance to work at his clinic, cleaning cages and using her fearlessness to help him with the animals. It's a start.

Looking back over all the terrible times they've been through, Bonnie Buxton and Brian Philcox are asked why they never gave up on Colette. "I have to admit," Philcox says, "there were many occasions when I said 'This is it, I'm not going to let her break my heart again,' but that was before the FAE diagnosis."

"The grief was terrible, knowing your kid was living on the streets," says Buxton, a screenwriter and freelance journalist who recently outlined their travails in an moving essay in Elm Street magazine. (The magazine says it has never received so many letters and requests stemming from a single article before.)

Just as the Woodwards got their strength from faith, the Philcoxes got it from each other, including Cleo. Colette may have been depleting their emotional reservoir, always taking, never giving, "but at least we were getting what we needed from each other," Buxton says. "Brian has what he calls 'epigrins' and he came up with one in the car on our way up: Our greatest renewable resource is love. Whenever you think there's nothing left, there it is like a spring, coming up again."

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