TRANSCRIPT
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Gissele: Are there limits to a mother’s love? Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world.
Gissele: Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. And if you’d like to support our podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion.
Gissele: Today, we’re talking with Sandra Cavanaugh is a creativity and communication specialist, transformational coach, consultant, keynote speaker, educator, podcast host, and best-selling author, as well as CEO of Spontaneous Brilliance , LLC. Sandra helps people step past the fear, frustration, and limiting beliefs to recognize and value their unique creative genius, discover their purpose and passion, take inspired action, and thrive as empowered conscious creators on the great stage of life.
Gissele: Through decades of working with children with special needs, Sandra developed [00:01:00] her deep belief that everyone is brilliant. We have no shortage of brilliance in the world, just a reluctance to offer it and a resistance to accept it. And as a very proud mother of four remarkable daughters, Sandra’s personal journey as a mother has made her a fierce advocate for children in foster care, adoption, children’s mental health, FASD, autism, neurodiversity, LGBTQIA+ rights- Yes
Gissele: and creativity in education. Please join me in welcoming Sandra. Hi, Sandra.
Sandra: Hi. How are you?
Gissele: Great, thank you.
Gissele: Thank you so much for being on the show. I was wondering if you could start by telling the listeners a little bit about how you actually became an adoptive mother.
Sandra: How I became an adoptive mother.
Sandra: I gave birth to my oldest daughter almost 36 years ago. and that was a very difficult pregnancy. And even though she was[00:02:00] Born super healthy. It was something that I almost didn’t live through and couldn’t do a second time. So we were telling her from about the time that she was two that we would adopt a little sister for her.
Sandra: And when she was 13 she came to us and went, “Hey, you guys if you don’t do that soon, I’m gonna be out of the house before you adopt.” And so we went through the process to set ourselves up for foster adoption. We were looking for one one girl, about seven was what we thought. and one day after we had put in our home study and gotten all prepared, I was looking at kids all over the country that were available for adoption, and I literally saw this girl.
Sandra: There was only two paragraphs on the website thing, and there were these two paragraphs there, and she was sitting, in a photo shoot that they had set up for her, and she was nine. [00:03:00] And I saw her, and I just thought, ” Okay, I can read between the lines here enough to know that there’s other issues going on that they’re not mentioning, but I’m supposed to be this girl’s mom.
Sandra: I’m this girl’s mom.” And I called my then husband and said, “Hey, y- you’ve gotta see this because this is it. This is her. I know she’s older than we thought. I don’t care. I’m supposed to be her mom.” And so we set out in the process, and just a couple of days later the social worker from there, which they’re not supposed to do, they’re supposed to call social worker to social worker, but instead they called me directly and said, “She has a biological half-sister that’s also just become available for adoption.”
Sandra: These girls had been in foster care for two and a half years. And she’s four, and would you consider adopting two? And we were like okay, we’ll consider it. It’s not what we planned on.” But when I went home that night with the paperwork on the younger one, our daughter went, “We’re not going to bed [00:04:00] until you guys agree ’cause this is my sister.
Sandra: We’re just not leaving this conversation till it’s done.” We went through what was a crazy fast and furious process that can only be called a series of coincidences and weird miracles, but those girls were in our home three months later, which is pretty unprecedented. And and then in Idaho which is where, We were living it…
Sandra: they basically hold off for a year before they finalize a foster adoption. And so by the time that the adoption was finalized, we knew we were in for a rocky road. And my then husband really did not want to do it. The girls both had… By that point, I had gotten them both diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Gissele: And Brittany, the younger one, had neurological processing disorders. And Andy, we knew, had what we at the time thought were, was a severe form of RAD. She was [00:05:00] extremely manipulative, which is not rare in, kids adopted from foster care. But she had some issues that we were just starting to realize, and it was time to finalize the adoption.
Sandra: And I was all in, and my husband at the time was really reluctant. But we did finalize the adoption and yeah, that was 22 years ago.
Gissele: Wow. What made you wanna adopt older children? Traditionally people wanna adopt usually younger babies because they don’t want the conditioning or all the experiences that happen.
Gissele: What made you decide for older kids?
Sandra: I think part of it was our lifestyle at the time, and part of it was adopting a child that would be older and more in the, within the range of our older daughter Shelley’s, life that she was gonna be in the house for.
Sandra: And so even… she and Brittany are 10 years apart, which was a good healthy span, but also [00:06:00] younger children they are… I just to be perfectly honest, I just couldn’t look at all those children that weren’t gonna be adopted. And even to this day, if you show me a group of kids that are in foster care, I have to talk myself out of adopting them- Yeah.
Sandra: Yeah … because I just wanna love them.
Gissele: Thank you for sharing that. Were you told that the children might be coming with some trauma?
Sandra: No
Gissele: Okay. No, ’cause I worked in the field of child welfare for many years and many of them have trauma. They can be diagnosed from ADHD, for all kinds of things, and especially kids that are older, and if they’ve only been in foster care for a short time, that there might be a lot of trauma that is completely missed.
Sandra: Yeah, no. I learned after the fact that that social workers at the time were really prone to, and I assume they still do it now, they deliberately didn’t have them diagnosed because they didn’t want that to be a barrier to them being adopted. And, … when things got really dicey on this [00:07:00] end, which we haven’t even gotten to yet, but when things got really bad here, the social worker that had worked with us to get through the adoption on this end, the first thing she said to me was, “Throw them back in the system.
Sandra: This is not what you signed on for. You need to terminate your parental rights right now. This is not what you signed on for.” And I was just appalled at that. and the second thing she said to me was, ” I realize that they did this probably with their eyes open, but all I can think of right now is how many kids I’ve put on a plane and just crossed my fingers and known that the parents didn’t know what they were in for.”
Sandra:
Gissele: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Which is really unfair to the children, right? I, I don’t wanna judge social workers. I think it’s coming from a place of we want this, the home stability.” But I know of circumstances for sure where there was, like, parents who did not know the level of required care, and did end up returning.
Gissele: So imagine you think you finally found a home. So it’s better [00:08:00] if you have that knowledge up front, and then are working actively on it, than to get surprised. And I’m just wondering if you could tell the audience when things started to get bad and then how it went from there?
Sandra: Okay. Like I say, we’d been going for about a year. We knew that Andy was super manipulative. We Brittany was as ADHD as the day is long. She was bumping into everything everywhere. They both had, Real issues with lots of the executive functioning things, from the fetal alcohol syndrome.
Sandra: So lying was the first thing out of their mouth even when there was no reason to lie . And I learned a lot about FAS in that year. but we knew that Andy had some psychiatric issues. And in fact thewe had taken them to what was then called the Pediatric Abilities Clinic here.
Sandra: And so there were neuropsychologists and neurologists that examined the kids and gave them all their diagnoses. with Andy, we found that because of the [00:09:00] fetal alcohol syndrome, her brain actually, The human brain is only supposed to be five IQ points apart maximum, like the two sides of the brain and their IQ.
Sandra: Hers are 20 points apart because with fetal alcohol, if one side of the brain at a certain developmental point is impacted, then one side of the body… she’s got moles on one side of her body and none on the other side. She’s got a- … a cowlick in her hair, and she’s got that side of her brain has a lower IQ by 20 points.
Sandra: And the, it took m- quite a while for the neurologist to go, “Why did I not notice this before?” It’s one side of her body because skin, hair, and the brain develop at similar rates. And so that was a very interesting point. But anyway, I digress. But so we finalized the adoption in September, and then at Thanksgiving, by the point of Thanksgiving we had started to notice [00:10:00] that the guardrails were coming off for Andy.
Sandra: Some of her behaviors that she’d been masking, she was letting them off. And so the girls were fighting more and more. and Brittany was showing up with bruises on her all the time. And she she was little, just tiny, undersized because of the FAS, and just a rocket going all the time, and had to be a lot of times physically restrained for, say, 10, 20 minutes because she would just flail.
Sandra: When her nervous system would just go off the rails, she would just flail and scream and so you’d have to restrain her. She actually put her little foot through our drywall at one point. and so her having bruises was easily explained. But one night we were getting her ready for a bath, Shelly, my oldest daughter, and I.
Sandra: And and, We were running the bath and getting her out of her clothes, and she was facing me, and Shelly was standing behind her. And I looked, and she had two matching bruises on [00:11:00] her two hip bones. And I thought, she’s always running around things and hooking her hip on them, catching them.
Sandra: And I said, “Did you do this at school? Did you…” And Shelly was behind her, and just her eyes were huge, and she said, “Mom, that looks like a hand.” And when I turned Brittany around, there were four matching finger points on the other side. And from a hand about the size of mine, and I have really small hands for an adult.
Sandra: And I said to her, I said to her, “Honey, did somebody squeeze you?” And she said, “Oh, yeah, I think Reggie did,” a little kid at school. And she was in kindergarten, and I’m like no, sweetie. That’s not what I’m talking about. Did somebody big squeeze you?” She goes I don’t know.
Sandra: I suppose…” Just didn’t attach to anything. And then one day later… And the bruises kept coming. And then one day about Thanksgiving time on the weekend after Thanksgiving, Shelly and I were doing some housecleaning, and we were in my room. And my then husband [00:12:00] was at his parents’ house about eight blocks away, and Brittany and Andy were in one of the bedrooms cleaning up.
Sandra: And I could hear them start to argue, and I’d been teaching them to deescalate, and I said, Shelly was like, when they started to argue, Shelly was, like, gonna get up and get in there. And I said no. Let’s wait and see if they can do it,” yeah. “They know what to do. Let’s see if they can do it.”
Sandra: And so then it got a little more heated, a little more heated, and then all of a sudden it was just silent. And I looked up, and in the doorway, Brittany was standing in the doorway, and she was holding her arm, and tears were just streaming down her face, but she was completely silent. And Brittany’s a screamer,
Sandra: and and I said, “Honey, what’s the matter?” And she said, “My arm hurts.” And so I went over and looked at her, and she had this giant welt on her arm. It was a big stripe of a welt. And so I said, “What happened?” She didn’t answer me. So I took her hand and walked back down the hall, and as we were cresting the [00:13:00] doorway, Andy was across the room with her back to me, and as I crested the doorway, Andy went, without turning around, said, “Mom, I did not hit her.”
Sandra: And I was like, “Okay, sweetheart. I didn’t say that you did.” But the fact still remains Brittany has a big welt on her arm. Where’d it come from? I was up on a chair putting something up in the top of the closet, I had a hanger in my hand, Brittany’s down on the ground. I turned around real quick because of something that she said, and I accidentally hit her on the arm.
Sandra: I said, honey, this is way too big a welt to have been caused like that.” And all of a sudden, just for some reason my brain just clicked and I knew, I just knew that I was- … in the twilight zone. And I went, “Shelly, take her. Take Brittany, go watch cartoons, put some ice on her arm. You guys go watch cartoons.”
Sandra: And Shelly’s eyes are like dollars, and I’m like, “Go. Now. You guys go watch cartoons. You’re [00:14:00] out.” And I sat down on the floor with Andy and sat cross-legged facing her, and I took her hands and I just said, “Sweetheart, I’m your mommy and I love you, and there is nothing you can tell me that is gonna make that go away.
Sandra: I’m always- … gonna be your mommy, I’m always gonna love you.” ‘Cause I knew right then that I was dealing with some serious, sociopathy and this, and the only way I could talk to Andy at that point was for Andy’s benefit. I had learned that well before this. And I said I’m gonna be here no matter what.
Sandra: And so I need you to tell me the truth, though, because I think something’s happening and we need to get to the bottom of it so that we can fix it.” I said, “Brittany is showing up with lots of bruises on her body, and you guys play together a lot, and you’re so much bigger than her,” because Andy was just, Andy was literally just a muscle at…
Sandra: She was just barely, at that point, she had just [00:15:00] turned 11. She was 10, essentially. She might’ve been two days past 11. Or no, she was a month past 11. She, I said, Brittany is getting these bruises. Either you guys are playing together and you’re playing too rough and she’s getting them accidentally, or you’re doing it on purpose.”
Sandra: And she said, “Oh, it’s definitely the other one.” And I said, “What, which one’s the other one?” She goes, “I’m definitely doing it on purpose.” And I was like, “Okay, why are you doing that?” And she goes, “Because I hate her and I want her dead.” And I said, “Honey, why do you want her dead?” And she goes, “Because ever since she was born, I’ve been invisible.
Sandra: People only care about me if I pretend to care about Brittany. If she were dead, my life would be better.” And, then I’m thinking about all the times that it said in her paperwork, her adoption paperwork, that that- Andy was asking to not be adopted with Brittany. She was requesting it, and they didn’t listen to her.
Sandra: And then as [00:16:00] we kept talking, I was like honey, have you ever tried to kill her?” And she was like, “Oh, yeah.” And she’s … And I’m like, “Really? How?” And she starts telling me all these different things. And I’m like would you ever really hurt her?” And she’s “I hurt her all the time.”
Sandra: And I’m, “What are you talking about?” And she said, when she’s asleep, I can squeeze her, and when I know that I’m making a bruise, it makes me feel better.” She’s “She doesn’t have to be awake. She doesn’t have to know it. I just need to know it.” And oh. And she’s, she was hurting her during the day.
Sandra: She was doing all kinds of things. And I would say, “Why doesn’t Brittany tell on you?” And she said, “Because I either scare her or I give her something.” And then I was thinking of all the times Brittany would run in and go, “Look what Andy gave me.” And I’m thinking, “Oh my God.” And so I, she was telling me that to fall asleep at night she would dream of sawing Brittany’s head off with a chainsaw.
Sandra: She would [00:17:00] imagine that, and that would make her feel calm. And- Wow … and I was like, “Okay. Okay.” So I said, “Sweetheart what I said before is still true. I love you, and I’m gonna help you, and I’m gonna protect you, but you have to stay honest with me because what you’re doing, the things that you’re doing and the way that you’re thinking about it, that’s not normal and it’s not healthy.
Sandra: And the worst thing that’s gonna happen…” is the way I said it to her, I said, “The worst thing that’s gonna happen is you’re gonna get caught and you’re gonna go to prison for the rest of your life. And you’re my baby, and I don’t want that to happen to you.” And I said, “You cannot kill Brittany because if you kill Brittany, people are gonna know it’s you.
Sandra: You can’t do it.” And she started to cry. And she said, “I’ve gotta get out of here, Mommy.” And I said, ” Why?” And she goes, “I gotta get out of here because I’m gonna kill my sister, and then people are gonna blame me for it.” And I was like, “Yes, they will. Yes, indeed, they will. So let’s not do that.” Yeah. “Let’s figure this out.
Sandra: we’re gonna [00:18:00] get some help, and we’re gonna have to have you go stay someplace else for a while.” And she said, “Okay, I’ll go spend the night at Grandma’s or Nana’s.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s not what I mean. We need a doctor’s help because this isn’t normal, and so you’re probably gonna have to go to a hospital.”
Sandra: And she was like, “Okay, let’s do that so that I don’t get put in jail.” And so we did. And then, And I took in a girl that was extremely mentally ill, clearly, but also amazingly manipulative and amazingly charming. She looked like the little girl in The Bad Seed, ironically. She had blonde hair, freckles, green eyes, just as adorable and homespun America as you could possibly get.
Sandra: And she walked into that place and 24 hours later the main psychologist there was calling me saying that it was all because of me being an overactive parent, that I didn’t understand, what it [00:19:00] was like to adopt a child from foster care, that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and she just had a little trauma, and I just had to… I was overreacting. And then I kept saying no,” and bringing them information and talking to them about, “We’ve gotta, we’ve gotta do something because I’ve got a five-year-old at home that she’s bent on killing- and she can do it.” And they were like no.” So finally the State Department of Children’s Mental Health, within probably, I guess this was about four days into this process, State Department of Children’s Mental Health sat me down and told me that I had to take Andy home and figure out a way to keep my children safe or they’d charge me with child abandonment, and the other two children would be taken away.
Sandra: And-
Gissele: Wow. That’s
Gissele: awful … and
Sandra: I was like can I have some PSR help? Can I have- … something? Because, I work, my husband works. Shelly goes to school. They’re in grade school together. How do how do I [00:20:00] do this?” And they’re like no, we can’t authorize PSR help.” And I was like, “Why?” And they said, “Frankly, because a tragedy hasn’t occurred yet.”
Gissele: Yeah.
Sandra: I said so let me get this straight.” “I can’t get any help with my 11-year-old because my five-year-old hasn’t ended up in the hospital or dead yet?” And they’re like, “Basically, yeah.”
Gissele: Yeah. Oh my God. We have these systems that they’re not bent to protect.
Gissele: It’s awful. So before you get to the next stage, I just wanted to point out two key things that I don’t want to get lost. First and foremost, this is not the case for all or most children that are adopted from foster care, but there are some that come with significant trauma.
Gissele: when I was working in the system I, similar experience, I knew of a young girl who had said that her sister That they were not bonded, because she had tried to kill her when she was younger. and they placed them together, and it ended up that she threatened her life again, and then once it was witnessed, that’s when she was removed.
Gissele: But [00:21:00] they weren’t listening to the voices of young people And that actually led to my doing some research. And the truth of the matter is you should not be placing siblings together unless the siblings are attached. Unless they’re a positive attachment between the siblings, then they should be placed together.
Gissele: But if they’re, like, inappropriately attached, it’s not always safe or appropriate to house the children together. The second thing that I think is fundamental about your story, and then we’re gonna get to the next phase, is the way that you engaged Andy was about Andy, which I think is really smart.
Gissele: The minute you had made it about Brittany would’ve shifted all of the things of, yet again, this is another reinforcement that she’s more important than me. The fact that you kept it Andy-focused got her to at least admit and to acknowledge that she can lose significantly if she moves forward with hurting Brittany.
Gissele: And so I think I just wanted to point that out. Anyways, okay, so like to the next stage of the conversation.
Sandra: And I do want to [00:22:00] say that even though this story is a little on the scary, terrifying side in some ways, at the same time, I am a huge advocate to this day of adoption from foster care.
Sandra: I am not in any way against that whatsoever. I speak to parents all the time about that, helping them prepare for it. It’s just that the system is a little screwed up- … and is set up for people to be able to test drive these kids. And so yeah, for me it’s all about the commitment of the parents and recognizing that you’re there for that child as that child’s parent from the second they walk into your home, not, if they perform correctly, that you can- Yeah
Sandra: opt out of the test drive. So I’m really glad that you brought that up, because I wouldn’t want anybody to ever get the impression that this is about, “Don’t do it.” I’m saying-
Gissele: Yeah …
Sandra: go there. Just know that you’re there- That you’re committed … for the duration, whatever it is. So- Andy came back home, and we had alarms on all of the [00:23:00] doors, and we had Brittany sleeping in bed with me, and we had Dean, my then husband, was sleeping on the hallway floor a lot of the time to make sure that Andy wasn’t able to figure out how to get out of her room without an alarm going off.
Sandra: And it was a little crazy, and it was before Christmas. And Christmas tree was up in the house, and I had Andy and Brittany getting ready to go back to school, and they were going to school that morning. And Brittany had been in therapy for several weeks at that point while we’d been dealing with Andy.
Sandra: Brittany had been going to therapy to learn to speak up and to say- … something when things were happening and to protect herself. And so I was in the kitchen. The two girls were at the dining room table across the table from each other, and Dean was in the shower, and Shelly was already gone to school.
Sandra: And what Andy would do a lot of the times with Brittany is whisper at her and threaten her and scare her and traumatize her that way, and that’s what Brittany had been raised with. [00:24:00] Because they were in their biological home until Brittany was 18 months, and then they were in foster care together until she was four.
Sandra: And she’d basically been raised by Andy, more or less, and this is the way that Andy- … controlled her. And so Brittany all of a sudden yells, “Mom, she’s doing it. She’s doing that thing.” And Andy was livid. She was like, “What is she doing? She’s telling on me.” Literally was Andy’s reaction.
Sandra: And I’m like Andy, welcome to your new world. This is what’s gonna happen now.” “We have taught her to speak up.” Yeah. “And so you can’t do that anymore, and that’s part of being in this household together.” And so fin- you know, she’s all tensed up, and a couple of minutes later… And Andy had her back to me at the table.
Sandra: And so a couple minutes later, Brittany yells, “Mom, she’s doing it again.” Andy flew up and threw this chair that she was sitting in, which was a very heavy dining room chair with arms. She threw it [00:25:00] backwards, put it through the wall behind her, and screamed, “I hate her and I want her dead.” And which Brittany had never heard before.
Sandra: And so Brittany’s under the Christmas tree hiding. Andy goes down the hall. I think I said to her at the time, I said, “Andy, go to your room,” to separate them. She stormed off down the hall. She went into the bedroom. I followed her. I get in there, and she is literally, she’s… Her skin’s very pale, but she was bright red.
Sandra: She was scratching the skin off her face. She was crying and laughing at the same time. She was pulling at her fingers and pulling the fingers out of the sockets. All this was happening in this chaotic mess, and I was like… And she kept screaming that she was on fire inside, and she was gonna die if she couldn’t squeeze Brittany.
Sandra: And I was clapping my hands in front of her face. I was [00:26:00] like, “Andi, if you are faking this, you gotta stop because this is gonna not end the way you want it to.” And I was, like, trying to stop her, and I was holding her hands because she wouldn’t quit scratching at her face. And Dean comes out of the shower, and he’s “What is happening?”
Sandra: And I said, “Get Brittany out from under the tree, get her to school, and get back here really fast.” And he did. And when he came back, I handed her off to him, and I ran to call the psychiatric hospital, the children’s psychiatric hospital, and said, gotta bring her back. This is what’s happening.”
Sandra: And I got the permission to bring her back, because you have to get permission. And so I got permission to bring her back. I went back down the hall, and I heard Dean in this very sing-songy kind of voice, and I didn’t hear anything from Andi. And I get there. Andi’s sitting on the floor.
Sandra: She’s looking up at him, and [00:27:00] he’s sitting on the bed, and he’s reading Winnie the Pooh. And she turns and looks at me, and her face is scratched, and there’s, it’s still all sheened with tears. And she looks at me and she goes, “Hi, Mommy.” I’m like, ” Okay, Andi, you’re really freaking me out right now.” Yeah.
Sandra: And she’s “Why, Mommy?” And I’m like, “Because five minutes ago you were gonna die if you couldn’t hurt Brittany, and now you’re fine because Daddy’s reading Winnie the Pooh?” And she goes, “I feel much better.” And I’m like, “Okay, we’re packing a suitcase and going back to the hospital.” We get her back to the hospital.
Sandra: Later that day, that same day, same psychologist calls me from the hospital and says, “You’re gonna have to make some difficult choices. This child can never come back into your home.” I’m like, “Dude, would you pick a side and stick on it?” This is the same human being who told me- Yeah … it was all me and all magical and in my mind, telling me that now this child can never [00:28:00] come home.
Sandra: Yeah. We, for the next five years- I was basically told day in and day out from professionals, “What’s wrong with her cannot be fixed.” She was diagnosed as a homicidal sociopath at- … 11 years old. And they don’t do that, they don’t give a sociopathy diagnosis to children. But she won the grand prize, and no matter who examined her, who looked at it, they were like, this can’t be fixed. This one can’t be fixed.” I don’t believe any child is give-up-on-able, that’s not what you do. Yeah. My husband at the time had been saying for a long time, “I just want my life back,” because we were three people.
Sandra: I was running a professional th- repertory company. He was one of the leading actors in the company, and our daughter was an actress. So we were, like, these very, this very creative team of three, and the [00:29:00] chaos infused the circumstance. And he was just constantly saying, “I want my life back.”
Sandra: And I would say, “There’s nothing back there. There’s no back to go back to.”
Gissele: Yeah. “
Sandra: This
Sandra: is who we are, and these are our children.” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m not so sure.” And so he had really developed quite a hatred for Andy. and he wasn’t much more invested in Brittany.
Sandra: He was angry at Brittany all the time. And so a lot of my energy was to keeping everything, you know- Yeah … stable and working with Andy. And so we still… there’s no facility in Idaho for a child of that age that has a diagnosis like that because there are apparently no mentally ill children in the state of Idaho under the age of 12.
Sandra: And so there was just nothing we could do. We found a residence facility that would take her, that took children. It was a group home sort of thing. And [00:30:00] so we took her out there, but we told them, we don’t know what’s gonna happen when she doesn’t have Brittany to take her stuff out on.”
Sandra: Yeah. “And so when she says she’s annoyed with somebody, that means she doesn’t want them on the planet anymore. So w- we’re telling you her languaging. We’re telling you all the things that are the ways that she does stuff.” I was actually in- Kentucky because I’d been hired to write a screenplay from a novel, and so I was in Kentucky visiting the author, and I got a phone call in the middle of the night from the hospital because after she’d been there for several months, the the psychologist there had decided that she was too great a threat to the other younger children there.
Sandra: She’d already taken an adult down to the ground. She’d e- Wow … but she was convinced that if you suffocated someone in their sleep that no one could tell how they died. And so that was her practiced way. And when she headed down the hallway in the middle of the night with a pillow toward the younger [00:31:00] kids’ rooms, that was when they called it and went, ” We’re done.
Sandra: This is not happening.” And so they took her to the hospital. So the hospital called me and said, “You’ve got 48 hours to take, basically take possession of her or be charged with child abandonment.” So Dean was back. Thanks for the help. Yeah. I was in Kentucky. Thank… Yeah. Dean was back here. He didn’t wanna go sign on for…
Sandra: And I was like, “You don’t have to take her home. You just have to go sign in that she’s under your…” And so I talked him into it. He did. He went and signed. Then while I’m still in Kentucky, I’m talking to the people at the hospital and talking with Andy, and the people at the hospital are like, “Yeah, we’re gonna let her go home, and, she’s fine.
Sandra: She’s okay. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing wrong here.” And I was like look. Don’t let her out till I get there. I’m gonna be there in a couple of days. Don’t let her out,” because she just told… We had just been on the [00:32:00] phone, and she had just told me about a nurse there that had put her into a solitary room, in punishment for something she had done. So Andy was telling me the ways she was planning to kill this person, and this- Oh … nurse at the… To… And I was like no. Don’t let her out. Don’t let her out, and also don’t leave her alone with this nurse.” And they’re like- Yeah … “Okay.” I was like, “I just need to get back into town and then I’ll take her.”
Sandra: I just kept saying, “I’ll take her, I’ll take her.” So I get back into town. I go into Andy and I said, “Honey, tell me about what this nurse did to you,” and she does. And I’m like, “And when you told the people, how you felt about that, what did they do?” She’s They didn’t do anything to her, so I’m gonna do it.”
Sandra: And She’s telling me how she’s figured out how to kill this person while… with her back to her. And I said, “Okay, sweetheart, these people need to understand what’s really going on with you, sweetie, because they don’t believe you,” which is [00:33:00] a real trigger for Andy at the time.
Sandra: It’s “They don’t believe you, so let’s make them believe you.” I said, “I want you to take this pad and this pen. I want you to write out everything about her that made you mad, what your plan is, and also how you feel about the doctor and what your plan is there. Write it all down and tell them what you want them to do for you.”
Sandra: And she’s “Okay.” So she writes it all down, and the same guy that had called me and said, she’s fine. I had him come into her room, and she and I were both sitting on the bed there. He came into her room. I said… And Andy was sitting against the wall a little bit, and I said, “So I had Andy write down for me, so that you could see it, everything that she’s feeling and what she actually plans to do to this nurse,” and I called her by name.
Sandra: And she… And he said, “Okay.” And I said, “I want you to see what’s actually going on in Andy’s head.” And I handed him the paper, and he starts reading [00:34:00] it, and he’s reading it, and he’s looking up at Andy, and he’s looking at me, and he’s keeps reading, and he keeps reading. And these were graphic descriptions of murder.
Sandra: And as he’s reading, and he looks up at Andy and he goes, “Andy, is this true?” And as he’s doing that and trying to have a conversation back and forth with Andy, Andy literally fell asleep against the wall, sitting up. And I said this is what Andy looks like when she’s telling the truth because her brain won’t let her stay awake and participate.
Sandra: Like, when Andy does this, you know that she has let everything out.” And he was like, “Oh, okay.” So we went through it again, but again we wound up having her come home again because the insurance would only pay for a certain number of weeks there in the psychiatric hospital and she was too young for the longer term psychiatric hospital in southern Idaho at the time ’cause she wasn’t 12 yet.
Sandra: So she was fine, and she needed to come home, and it w- needed to be our problem. And I [00:35:00] found a facility for her to go to called the Youth Ranch, and she was the youngest child there. But thank God for them. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, and she got a lot of a lot of ability to work with horses and stuff.
Sandra: And so she managed to be there and be there successfully, semi-successfully for a while. But because the kids were all older than her, that was probably a lot of what was helpful about that environment. But at the time Dean and I were splitting up, and w- I couldn’t let Andy know that because I didn’t want her to know that he was just, he had checked out as far as she was concerned.
Sandra: And one day we were on the phone in a staffing because it was far away from here, and so I couldn’t always go to all the weekly staffings, so I did them on the phone sometimes. And we were on the phone and when the staffing was over Andy asked if she could just talk with me for a while. And they said sure, [00:36:00] so she and I were on the phone, and she goes, “Mommy, I wanna come home.”
Sandra: And I said, “I know that, sweetheart, and we’re trying to figure it out.” And literally, I will confess, and I’ve confessed this to Andy, as I was talking to her at that moment, I didn’t think she was ever coming home. I had come to believe the party line, that this was broken in a big way.
Speaker 3: And,
Sandra: And I was saying to her, “Honey, we’re working on it.” And I said, “But the thing is that the adults that are working on this, if we make a mistake and we bring you home too soon, the only way we’re gonna know is somebody’s gonna get hurt.” I’m like, “So we have to be careful.” And she was like, ” Okay.
Sandra: How long is that gonna take?” And I said sweetheart I honestly believe that someday you’re gonna wake up and realize that Brittany is not the person you’re mad at.” And she said, “But what if that never happens?” And I said, “What?” She goes, “What if that never happens? Can I never come home if I don’t love Brittany?”
Sandra: And I just thought, “Oh, my God,” this is a [00:37:00] child. She wasn’t 12 yet. And I’m like, I said, “Okay, honey. We’re doing this wrong.” And I said we’ve been planning this whole time for you not to get well.” I’m like, “But even if you and I are the only two people on the planet that believe it, we’re gonna start planning for you to get well.”
Sandra: And she’s “Okay. Let’s do that. Good answer.” And so we did. We just started… We worked it out with the therapists there that, like, when Andy would get into an argument with somebody or she’d get into a fight with somebody and instead of getting disciplined, they would take her, separate her, and have her call me, and she would talk it through with me.
Sandra: And she would say, “Okay. This is what happened, and this is what happened, and this is what I did, and this is what I think. What should I feel?” And then I would say, “Okay if I, if that happened to me, this is how I would’ve felt, this is blah, blah, blah.” And I would [00:38:00] talk her through it.
Sandra: And Dean one time heard that going on, and he’s “You realize that she’s using you as her conscience?” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s cool. That’s great.” “Okay.” She’s training a conscience into herself. And then there came a time where I started advocating for Andy to be able to come into a f- a PCS home, and start to work her way into seeing if she could be in our home.
Gissele: A PCS
Sandra: Is a high level of foster care residence- … where the parents in the home are the foster parents are trained to deal with kids with particular disabilities. And in this case, the parents w- weren’t really particularly well-trained, but we got her into the PCS home.
Sandra: She was going to school in a town a little ways from here, maybe 20 miles from my house. And and one day she told me about a kid that was annoying her, and I called the school, I called the f- foster parents, I called everybody. I was like, “This kid’s [00:39:00] gonna get hurt. This kid’s gonna get hurt. You gotta listen.
Sandra: She said he’s…” And they’re like she hasn’t demonstrated anything like that.” Within 24 hours she had sent that kid to the hospital, and looked like it was a total accident.
Sandra: He was on the other s- he was on the other side of a big, heavy metal door at the school, those kind with the push bar, and she knew it.
Sandra: And she went… And like I said, Andy’s a muscle. She kicked that push bar into that kid and knocked him out, hit the linoleum floor, she sent him to the hospital. And I was like, “Do you see? I told you.” And they’re like, “She didn’t mean to. She didn’t know he was on the…” She was very remorseful.
Sandra: I’m like, “Oh, you guys. Hello.” And she did come home eventually because in that foster home when I took her back, went to… She would come and spend the weekends, and then I would take her back. And and when I took her back one night she called me because she was saying that, they had [00:40:00] pushed her and yelled at her and, that she’d come home.
Sandra: They’d had a death in their family, and so she’d come back to chaos and they, and so she was really upset. And I can tell when Andy’s lying and I believed her, and I was like, “I wanna go get her.” And I, I literally called my oldest daughter, who was 16 then, and was the other parent in the household because her dad had left.
Sandra: And and he’d just basically opted out of everything. So Shelly had become the other parent in the household with Brittany. And and I called Shelly and I said, “Look, this is what’s happening, and I think Andy’s being mistreated, and I wanna go get her, but I will not do that to you because I don’t think that things are healed between her and Brittany, and so you’re gonna be the other person trying to get in between them.”
Sandra: And Shelly, at the time, was smaller than Andy in terms of muscle mass. Shelly was tiny and very thin and Andy, no. And so I was like, I’m not gonna, I’m [00:41:00] not gonna put you through this. It’s completely up to you, and no, no stress.” And Shelly’s answer was, “Mom, go get my sister.” And then I said, “Okay, let me talk to Brittany.”
Sandra: Brittany gets on the phone. I said, “Brittany, I think Andy’s in a tough situation. I wanna bring her home, but I want you to feel safe, so you tell me.” And so Brittany was six, at the time maybe. And and she said, “Mommy, everybody deserves a second chance, even Andy.” And so went and got her, brought her home.
Sandra: We went through crazy times. It was not the end. Andy went into psychiatric placements multiple times. when she was 12 she had some violent episodes, and she was in a place called Hayes Shelter, which was, like, a place for, supposed to be for 16-year-olds and above, but Andy was in there when she was 12.
Sandra: and she was staying there, Because there had been some violent interactions with Brittany, she was trying to, [00:42:00] she was still trying to do things. And and I had tried to get her back into psychiatric hospital, and they would not take her. They were, like going no.” And I kept going to the State Department of Children’s Mental Health and saying, “W- can I just get her a CAFAS test?
Sandra: Can I just get her a test to see what her psychiatric situation is?” They wouldn’t give her one. So finally one day, I talked to a special needs attorney who had just recently he had sued the state on behalf of a child that had died in prison because they were suffering from some extreme psychiatric issues, and he was 16, and they put him in prison, and he was killed.
Sandra: And so this attorney had sued the State of Idaho and won gazillions of dollars on behalf of the family. And so he turned to me and he said, All you need to do is
Sandra: Call them and tell them I’m your attorney and that you want a CAFAS test done now.” [00:43:00] And so I because I called them up to say, “Just let her into some psychiatric help.” And this girl that… this woman that had called me and this was before I had claimed that attorney, she said, we are not gonna do that, and we’re not going to let her go to Blackfoot.
Sandra: We’re not gonna do any of that.” And I said, “Why? Why is this happening?” And she said, “Honestly, because if sh- we don’t believe that she’s as mentally ill as you say she is. However, if she is, the State of Idaho does not want that financial responsibility for the rest of her life.” I was like, “That’s what your board told you?”
Sandra: And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Okay, then here’s what I want.” I’m like, “This is my attorney, and I-” am giving you two hours to have that in writing and signed by the president of your board that says that you will not treat her [00:44:00] because you do not believe that she is going to actually kill somebody. And then when she does- then it’s on you. I’m like, “Because she’s going to.” And at the time she was in Hayes Shelter, and she was telling me that there was a boy there that she was gonna kill because this boy had said things, rude things about me, and rude things about his grandmothers, her grandmothers-
Speaker 3: … When we’d
Sandra: come to visit.
Sandra: And he was, like, 16, and she had a plan. And so they called me back shortly after that and said, “Okay, “you said the right thing. You can come and get her tested.” And so it was her birthday. It was actually her 12th birthday when they scheduled the test for. And so I took her in for the test and it’s a, it’s a verbal test, and I said, and I was manipulating her. All, all honesty, true transparency, I knew what was happening, but I needed to get her some serious psychiatric help, and I and I didn’t want her to kill anybody, and I [00:45:00] knew that she believed that killing was an okay answer still. And I I said, “Andie, again, you gotta just…
Sandra: You know you need some help, and I know you need some help so that we don’t get this taken out of control and other people make decisions for you that, that we don’t get to make.” I said, “So you gotta just lay it all out on the table. Be perfectly honest with… Whatever the questions are that she asks, just tell her everything, and you just let them see you exactly as you are.
Sandra: Don’t hide anything.” And she’s “Okay.” She’s she goes in there, and I sat way far away where I couldn’t even hear them, ’cause I didn’t want this lady to think that I was influencing Andie in any way. And this same lady who had told me, “This isn’t gonna happen,” was the one to give her the KAFAS test, and she all of a sudden in the middle of the test, she goes, “Okay, enough.”
Sandra: And I, my first reaction was, “Oh, crap, she’s gonna tell me that, And- there’s nothing wrong with Andie.” And-
…
Sandra: And she w- she turns to me and she goes, “I think you know I’m a straight [00:46:00] shooter, right?” And I said, “Yeah,” and she goes “This child cannot go back to Hayes Shelter. She’s gonna kill somebody.”
Sandra: And I was like… She’s “She needs to go to the psychiatric hospital right now.” And I said, “The problem with that is you’ve told the psychiatric hospital not to admit her,” because it’s me trying to get respite at the expense of the psychiatric hospital. Yeah. And she’s I will call them right now.”
Sandra: And I’m like you better call them fast.” So I get out to the car with Andie, and when I took her to the appointment- I had helped her clean up her little area in Hays Shelter where her bed was and stuff, and I had found this metal thing. And I didn’t know what it wa- I knew I was supposed to know what it was, but it was so chang- altered that it didn’t register with me what it was.
Sandra: What it was it was one of those hangers for a shower curtain. The metal thing that’s like the shape- … of a light bulb and you can pop part of it out, and it’s just this metal thing. And so she had taken one of those and straightened it [00:47:00] out and molded it to her hand so that the little loop part would go around her bottom fingers, and then the top part came around, and she had bent it to where it poked straight out- and she had sharpened it to where it was a fine point. And so she was telling me in the car about wanting to kill this kid, and that she’d been planning to come up behind him with a pencil and stab him with a pencil. But she realized that the pencil could probably break, it probably wouldn’t work, and so she was going to take this thing that she’d take…
Sandra: I pulled this thing out of my pocket, and I said, “Is this what you were gonna use?” ‘Cause she was describing it to me. I said, “Is this it?” ‘Cause I had taken it. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew she shouldn’t have it. And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Show me what you were gonna do.” So she put it on, basically, with the point coming out like this, and she goes, “I was just gonna stab him in the eye, and I figured that would kill him.”
Sandra: And I s- “I think you’re right, [00:48:00] and I also think that this is a sign, Andi, that you can’t be in Hays Shelter.” And so I called the hospital, and they said, I s- w- as soon as I said my name and said her name, you could hear the heavy sigh. They didn’t want her back. And
Sandra: They said, “What’s going on?” And I told them about this wi- I called it a wire. And she- it’s like I don’t think a wire is a lethal thing.” And I said, “Okay, I tell you what. I can’t in good conscience take her back and drop her off at Hays Shelter and, expect them to take her. So what I need you to do is I’m gonna bring her in, you guys evaluate her, and then if you give me the go-ahead to take her back to Hays Shelter, I’ll take her back.”
Sandra: I’m like, “So it’s okay if you tell me after evaluation she doesn’t need to be there.” Okay. So I take her in. We sit down. There’s this woman across the room from us, and there’s a security guard between Andi and I and this woman, so on a certain level they weren’t sure. And there’s a glass- One [00:49:00] of those reflective mirrors, there’s a glass wall there, and so I knew that, a psychologist or somebody was watching us, a psychiatrist or something was watching through there as well. There’s this woman, and she’s in this chair across this little room, and she’s very condescending to Andy. And she’s “So Andy, what is it that you were planning to do?”
Sandra: And Andy was telling her about the wire and that she was gonna stab this kid in the eye with it, and why she was gonna do it. And she goes, “Oh, Andy, I don’t think a wire is gonna do anything, do you? Don’t you really think that’s just, I realize that you’re saying this, but there’s-” … a distance between talking about it and doing it.”
Sandra: And I could see the muscles in Andy’s jaw ti- she was getting mad that this woman was so condescending toward her. And so I had just had enough. I took it out of my pocket and handed it to Andy and said, “Show her what you were gonna do, Andy.” Andy put it on, and mind you, Andy was [00:50:00] bigger at 12 than this woman.
Sandra: And Andy goes, “I was just gonna jab it in his…” And she sails across the room toward this woman with this thing on her hand. And she stopped short of the lady, but the lady climbed up in her chair against the wall, and the security guard stood up. But I didn’t move, because Andy wasn’t gonna do it there.
Sandra: Andy would’ve been caught, right? Andy wasn’t gonna do it there, but she was full-fledged showing him. And we had walked into the place with me going, “Andy, just tell them what… tell them the truth.” So she does that, then she just stops, comes back, sits down, puts the thing back in my hand, and sits down and looks at the lady.
Sandra: And the lady’s plastered up against the wall, and she looks at the security guard and she goes, “Aren’t you gonna take that thing?” And the guy’s just “No, mom’s got it.” ‘Cause at that point he was like, “You dealt with this completely poorly.” And so she said, “I have to go talk to some people. Do you [00:51:00] want the security guard to stay here?”
Sandra: And I said, “No, I’m fine.” And I could see Andy starting to crumble at that point, because Andy realized she’d just gotten herself committed. And so she, she’s… As soon as they left Andy started to cry and she was like, “Mommy, pl- please, I don’t wanna stay here. Please, not on my birthday.
Sandra: Please. Can we just come back in a couple of days? Not on my birthday, I wanna have my birthday.” And I was like, “Sweetheart, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about this. I’m really sorry.” And she was like, “But I just wanna have my birthday.” And I’m like, “Honey, but your- Every part of you wants to kill that kid right now.
Sandra: And she goes, “Oh, Mommy, I can wait. I can wait. I don’t have to kill him today. I promise I’ll wait.” And I knew these people were watching us through that reflective glass. And “Sweetheart, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.” So she did stay there for a while and and then she did get into an extended placement, and she got [00:52:00] into some places that could help her for a little while longer, and then she came back home.
Sandra: And she kept coming home, and we just kept going through that cycle, and I kept believing in her. And one day when I was dropping Andy off at Hayes Shelter, Andy said to me, she goes “Mom, I know you don’t believe in regrets, but even me?” She goes, ” Aren’t you sorry?” And I s- “Absolutely not, sweetheart.”
Sandra: I said, “Do I wish that nobody had gotten hurt? You bet. But I’m not smart enough to know what I would be giving up in my life and what the rest of the family would be giving up in their lives if we didn’t, if we weren’t where we are. I’ve grown a lot. You’re growing. I’m like, this is our life.
Sandra: This is what we are doing, and I love you, and I believe that we’re in on the situation we’re in for a reason.” And she goes I know that you think that our souls, kinda help pick where we’re born,” ’cause she’d listened to me [00:53:00] a lot and, and I said … She goes, “But why couldn’t I just have been born to you?
Sandra: Why did I have to be born to those people?” And I said, “Sweetheart, I really do believe that we help pick what life we’re born into.” And I said, “So can you imagine how brave your little soul had to be-
Speaker 3: … To do
Sandra: this on purpose, to give those people the opportunity to treat you differently than they did treat you, and to then be willing to go through all of this, and trying to figure this out, and all of the stuff you’ve been through?
Sandra: Your soul had to be the bravest little angel on the planet.” And I- … I referred to Andy and Brittany as my inconvenient angels, because- … I would not be who I am without them. My God, what I have learned from those girls. And I will tell you that Andy is… She just corrected me.
Sandra: She’s th- I have to think birthdays. She’s gonna be 32 this year. [00:54:00] And she is the kindest- Gentlest, most loving, generous human being you would ever want to meet. and Dean my ex-husband, he was estranged from the kids for a while, but he he was very good at admitting that he copped out, he opted out when the going got tough, and that it wasn’t their fault, it was his choice, and he developed quite an amazing relationship with the girls, and Andi and Brittany were very close to him. He just passed away unexpectedly last November. And those girls still suffer every day because their dad died, and these are kids that as adults were two of his closest friends in the world.
Sandra: And they are… That’s the other thing, Andi and Brittany are thick as thieves. They are best friends. All of my girls are. I also adopted a fourth daughter. A- as a [00:55:00] teenager, we did an adult adoption with her ’cause she’d been- … traumatized and abandoned later in life. And so we did an adult adoption with her s- and she already knew all the girls and had been- Nice
Sandra: socially with them and…
Sandra: So I wanted to ask you What turned it around when did you know that things had turned for Andi? One point where I knew that we were getting there, that we were making progress, was Andi was about 13 and she went into a bouncy house with Brittany at a festival, and she got picked on by some boys that were also junior high school age, and because she was heavy.
Sandra: She’d been taking some medications that had made her gain weight. And so she’d gotten picked on, and she came out, and she was sad. And she and I went for a walk, and she was crying, telling me about how she felt being picked on by these kids. And I was like, “Honey, I know this was hard for you,” but I was like all smiles ’cause I was like, “I’m so proud of you right now [00:56:00] because you’re sad because somebody picked on you.
Sandra: You don’t wanna hurt them. That’s amazing.” Yeah. And that was a big one. And then I would have to say she was 25 Before, before we really hit the place where, And that was a day where I was on the phone with her, and she was in a, she was in a residential home because she had actually been committed and then come out, and then she was in this residential home, and she was doing it again.
Sandra: She was manipulating. She wasn’t violent at that point, but the manipulation was off the hook. And so I said, “Andie, you realize I’m the last person standing right now? What are you gonna do if I hang up this phone?” And for some reason, of all the things, that was the moment Andie stopped.
Sandra: She had been married and and was divorcing at the time. Her husband was divorcing her because she’d been manipulating him. There were, there were tons of things. So she was 25, [00:57:00] 26 years old before the snap actually happened and Andie was really good at being who she is at her heart, even back then. It’s just it didn’t stick if things got difficult or if she wanted something and went to her old ways of figuring out how to get it. So- … it started to stick at about 26 and it’s- … it’s definitely stuck,
Gissele: the other question I had is what made you keep holding on and keep believing when the evidence wasn’t there? I know that you suffered some financial hardships due to the separation. And so- Yeah … what kept you holding on and keep moving forward when the evidence was not there that she might get better?
Sandra: It’s funny and, Brittany was no cakewalk either. That was something that took lots of time every single day. And as Brittany got older it got harder, not easier. And, … and so Brittany’s 26 now. ButI think first and foremost the big thing for me was that I [00:58:00] never for a second thought of them as not my daughters.
Sandra: They were my daughters. And so there was never, it was never an option for me, even though it was… The system is built to, to tell you to opt out and to give you lots of opt-out opportunities. AndPeople would say to me all the time, “Oh,” “and they’re not even your real kids.” And I would go, “Yes, they are real kids.
Sandra: Last time I checked, they weren’t plastic.” And I think it was that. And I realized that- Other people around me all the time were saying, “Oh, I couldn’t do what you did. I couldn’t do what you did.” And- Yeah … even my husband, and I was realizing that my level of commitment to them was the thing that was odd about me.
Sandra: Other people would enter into these situations going, “I’m gonna love them unconditionally.” And I was like, there are some days I don’t even know if I like them, let alone love them.”
Gissele: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But
Sandra: that doesn’t make them not my daughter. And so I started teaching, [00:59:00] actually, parents what I called the art of unconditional commitment.
Sandra: I started speaking to parents who were adopting from foster care or who had children with special needs or had adopted kids from foster care with behavioral challenges. And so I started trying to codify what unconditional commitment consists of. And there are some pieces and parts to it, and I just, I help people recognize what it looks like from the child’s point of view too, what the circumstances that they’re dealing with.
Sandra: Because these kids have lost complete control. Not only have they come from trauma where they didn’t have any control, but they know that staying in your home is completely up to you. It’s not up to them. Yeah. And so they’ve got nothing to base anything on except just survival.
Sandra: And helping people see the children’s point of view and where they’re coming from in an interaction is something that is really helpful. My daughter Shelly used to [01:00:00] say, when we… She and I’d both be exhausted with something Andy’d taken us through, she would say the biggest thing that’s a comfort is at least we can say if it’s this hard to be on the outside of Andy’s head, imagine how hard it is to be on the inside of Andy’s head.”
Sandra: So she’s like- Wow … “Let’s just keep going.” And so- Yeah … yeah. I mean- That’s very
Gissele: insightful …
Sandra: I’m very blessed to have an oldest daughter who is a remarkable human being. She’s just an extraordinary human being, and she has her own challenges. She’s on the autism spectrum, but she is one of the most brilliant, incredible people I’ve ever known, and she’s a- and very courageous.
Sandra: Very courageous and very compassionate. And she really helped me walk through this, there are a couple of times where I have said, I- one time in particular where Andy was actually violent toward me. The one time Andy at [01:01:00] 18- when she was stronger than any man I knew she almost accidentally almost broke both my arms in one quick move.
Gissele: Wow.
Sandra: And we were, like, face-to-face, and she had me by both wrists, and Shelly came up under our arms and right in Andy’s face and went, “Andy, stop. Back up,” and just interrupted where Andy was in a kind of a blackout rage, interrupted it, which could have just as easily resulted in Shelly not being here on the planet anymore.
Sandra: And instead, Andy backed up. Shelly and I both got out of the way. Andy locked herself in a room for a while. And, that’s how we got through that. Andy did not stay in the house that night, police had to come, and things happened, but, it just, at the same time if it weren’t for Shelly’s presence…
Sandra: and Shelly and Andy are so close. The last time that Andy w- had a complete dissociative episode and I couldn’t [01:02:00] get her to calm down, I had her in my car. And Shelly lives in California now. I had her in my car. We were on the way to the hospital. Andy couldn’t breathe, and this was, Andy was 24 or 25, and she couldn’t breathe.
Sandra: And I called Shelly, and I said, “Shelly, I’m in the car with Andy on the way to the hospital.” Shelly had no warning. I said “Help me calm her down.” And she was just like, “Okay, And, let’s do it. Let’s breathe in for four, and then let’s hold for four.” And by the time we got to the hospital and the people were coming out with a wheelchair for Andy she was like, “I want my sissy.”
Sandra: She didn’t want the phone to go away, and these girls are so bonded, all of them, including Maria, who’s the last one I adopted, and including what I call my daughter in love, who is Shelly’s best friend from high school that she then married later in life, and so that’s my fifth daughter.
Sandra: They all have their, their challenges, their neurodiversities, their whatevers. But we just have a rule that, [01:03:00] we are a family, and we do talk it out, and we don’t lie to each other, which is hard with two with FAS. But they’re good
Gissele: now, thank you very much.
Gissele: And thank you so much for this extraordinary story. It’s a story of resiliency. It’s a story of unconditional love in its probably rawest form because people don’t show up the way we want them to. And to be able to see, without judgment, Andy for who she really was- And still advocate for her and also to protect Brittany.
Gissele: Yes, it took extraordinary courage and a lot of work and effort, I’m sure. So my last question is just where can people find you ? Where can they, get your books? Where can they work with you?
Sandra: Sandracavanaugh.com is probably the easiest way, but if they can’t spell Cavanaugh then spontaneousbrilliance.com is the same website.
Sandra: Yes. And and I I have a link there where people can get on my calendar because if somebody’s got a challenge or they’re having challenges working with their kids, or [01:04:00] if they’re neurodivergent and they’re feeling unseen and unheard It’s just complimentary. Just get on a Zoom call with me and I will help.
Gissele: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Sandra, for this extraordinary story and for the commitment that you continue to have for your girls. And thank you again for sharing your story. And thank you for everyone that tuned in to another episode of Love and Compassion with Gissele.
Sandra: Thank
Gissele: you.