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Family Stories - Brundage

Father: Booker, age 39
Mother: Lillie, age 29
Children: Patty, age 14 years, Ronald,, age 13 years, Mary, age 6 years, Jackie age 5 years, Bobby Jean, age 34 months, Linda age 24 months, Danny, deceased


Lillie tells her story: I'm telling this story because I have some beliefs and thoughts about what Head Start did for me and my kids. The photographs we have hanging on the wall and all the home visit reports are how you can tell I have been part of the infant intervention and family life program since last year. It's no secret that our family, not just the four younger girls, needed help when the Early Head Start people started coming here.

When you're poor you don't have enough of anything -- not enough money, no transportation, no way to get services like other people do. We were raised poor. I came here from Georgia poor, and had all these kids. I had Patty when I was fifteen, and the next year Ronnie, and the next year Danny. They all had different fathers. I raised my kids by myself on welfare.

Danny died when he fell in the river, while I was fishing on a nice summer day. No one saw it happen. It happened so fast -- he just slipped in while I was fishing nearby and the kids were running all over in different directions. We heard the splash. Suddenly he was gone under and we couldn't find him or see him in the dark water. The police found him out a ways from the bank right away, but he was dead. I was in a black-out for a long time. I had depression and don't remember much. In eight years, I was just looking at one caseworker after another. They all thought I could work, but I couldn't. I have asthma and emphysema, and a bad weight problem. TV and my own thoughts was all I had.

We were in a "bad" house across from the Trinity Institute. The house had a roof, but the windows leaked. There were beds on the floor, a TV, and food usually until the last week of the month. We are not the begging type, but the truth is we needed help from the church, the center, the women's shelter and the food bank to make it through each month.

Then Booker T. and I got married. The depression came back when I had Mary and Jackie, and then with Bobby Jean and then Linda. The babies were always dirty -- I admit it -- and their crying and wanting to get out of their cribs didn't bother me much, so I left them there, with a bottle in the crib to keep them quiet, until the kids got home from school. Patty didn't mind cleaning the babies up, if there were diapers in the house. Patty would try to play with them or sit out on the stoop with them in the good weather. I felt better in the summer, too.

Booker T. wasn't around much of the time. Besides the state job, he worked all types of handyman jobs to get money for food, and he is the type that goes along with everything anyway. He has a stutter, you know, that makes him not talk much. Booker T. doesn't think he has anything to say that anybody wants to hear. Booker T. never did lose his job with the state, but what they would do is to change his job and put him on a lower pay level or make him part-time. For most of last year he was at minimum wage.

When the Early Head Start visitor started coming, we didn't really like the idea of having a stranger get involved with us. She was a white woman and very talkative. Then I found out we had the same birthday, and she was, you know, sincere and knew a lot of ways to help. I told her from the start that I didn't want the girls to turn out like her, being white and northern and all, and that my children should take after their own type of folks. She agreed. She was always considerate of the ways of African-American people.

I knew she didn't think of herself as better than me or over me, if you know what I mean. She was real nice with the girls and started teaching them a lot of games at home. She had bags of plain, not fancy toys and she would fix them up on the floor and I'd watch.

All of my kids are slow and always have been, but the home visitor said slow and different is OK. She was always talking about that picture I have in my mind of what the kids can do and she said little kids are a lot smarter than you think. One thing I always did right and am proud of is that I never hit my kids. It isn't either Booker T.'s or my nature to want to raise a hand to them, but that doesn't mean there wasn't bad things going on.

After a while, I got confidence to where I would be the teacher and Linda and Bobby Jean would sit playing with me. The visitor and I started going places together with the kids, to McDonald's and the park, because she had a car. One day we went to a farm that we saw on the side of a road, and the kids got real upset and cried and yelled when the animals got close to them. I was shook up, too, realizing that they never been to a farm. They had missed those times I had growing up in Macon, Georgia.

We got into a routine where we took the kids to the free clinic and the park every week or two. We found out by testing that the girls had lead poisoning from eating the paint chips off the walls when I would leave them in their cribs. They would just lie there or play with the walls. They were too small for their age, and didn't eat much that was healthy.

I found out that our kids were suffering from malnutrition, lack of stimulation and that we didn't have enough toys and books around. It was painful to admit I had shut them up in the bed, or made them sit in front of the TV with nothing to do, or ignored them when I was cooking. I left the babies with the older kids who weren't very old themselves. I am telling you I didn't know how to do right by my kids until I went to a program and got the help I needed. I hope other people don't neglect their kids like I did.

So when they got older, I ended up taking the girls every day to a Head Start program at the Trinity and I learned from other mothers and fathers. I hadn't been out of my neighborhood since Bobby Jean was born. Going uptown every day, I came out of being depressed more than I had in years. The people who ran the program were pleased with what the home visitor and I had done. Now I know from other mothers and fathers that there was more to taking care of kids than what I thought.

Now I go around to places, such as conferences and talk about what I have experienced, and I help other folks, including parents and other relatives who take care of little kids. I go to day care centers and the Salvation Army and women's shelters. Booker T. and me, we didn't know a different way to raise our kids except the way we was raised. Now we know there are good, better and best ways to do things to help our kids.