Word: karla
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...GRAHAM'S CHILDHOOD MEMORIES are mostly the stuff of nightmares. In and out of 36 foster homes, Vonda, now 22, says she was sexually abused by relatives, molested by a foster parent and raped as a teenager. By the time she got to the home of Dale Graham and Karla Groschelle in Whitley City, Ky., at 17, she had been in eight hospitals and three group homes and had just run away from her last foster home. Arriving at the couple's house for what she expected to be yet another short-term placement, she remembers, "I was so nervous...
Instead she found that for the first time in her peripatetic life, she felt at home. Karla and Dale "didn't seem fake," she says. "Usually when I'd act up, my [other] foster parents would just send me away, but they didn't. They stuck in there with me." Even when Vonda's date wrecked Karla's brand-new Durango on prom night, Vonda remembers fondly that Karla was worried more about whether Vonda was hurt than about the car. In fact, for the first several months, things went so well that one evening Vonda sat Karla and Dale...
...18th birthday, but she's still waiting for her happy ending. At 13 she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She never stayed on the prescribed medications but did get hooked on the painkiller Oxycontin. ("I forget my problems. I forget everything," she says of her addiction.) When Karla, now 47, and Dale, 53, tried to intervene, Vonda resisted. Karla, a therapist, says Vonda once agreed to enroll in a rehab program and then checked herself out just three hours after she arrived. She was arrested in 2002 for breaking into a house to steal money for drugs...
...door open so a big chasm doesn't occur and that kid is never willing to open that door again." But she also tells parents to "take care of themselves and to accept that they cannot do everything. We're careful not to lay more guilt on the parents." Karla and Dale say their home is open to Vonda as long as she stays clean. But they have also come to accept that their daughter will make the ultimate choice about how to lead her life. "All we can do is be there for her and be supportive when...
John Baker says he and Karla won't need those support options because they have been drug free since the arrest. But he says he appreciates the attitude behind them. "They treated us like we were still people," he says. "They didn't point fingers at us. They said, 'We're not going to tell you you can't use. But if you choose to use, we want you to have these plans for Justin.'" This laissez-faire approach may make parents feel more comfortable, but it troubles critics like Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights. "Drug...