CARING FOR CRACK BABIES DEDICATED FOSTER PARENTS STEP IN, FILL THE LOVE GAP

Nobody knows how much she longs for a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. And
it would be nice not to have to change all those diapers. And she's sure
tired of all those trips to the doctor.

Then the little girl grants her the faintest little hint of a smile, or the
boy drinks from a cup by himself, and she's protesting a little because the
program will let her have just the two of them in her house and no more.

Being a foster parent to crack babies is not for everybody. Elnora Chase is
adamant about that. But, oh, how she loves those twins.

Chase, 50, who has a 23-year-old daughter and two grandchildren of her own,
has been raising children with fetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal exposure
to cocaine or both since 1993.

Before that, with the help of her husband, David, 60, a retired truck
driver, she took care of infants for friends in a hurry to get back to
work, then began taking in foster children in state custody for one reason
or another.

Under the auspices of the Stepping Stones foster care program at Senior
Services - which pays about 80 foster parents in West Tennessee to care for
children who had prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs, have been abused,
or have birth defects and other conditions that require special care - her
first crack baby came to her Whitehaven home in 1993.

"He was 4 years old wearing Pampers," she said. "He came in the door
running in circles. He couldn't talk. He cried a lot. Kicked the wall. Had
temper tantrums. Throwed food. He would just get angry and fall out.

"But he was a sweet little boy after we got him to settle down. He just
needed love. He needed some attention. He got a lot of that here."

The boy left when his father won legal custody of him.

In 1995, the twins arrived, 6 weeks old and as vulnerable as chicks in a
hailstorm. Their mother had been doing everything she could to stack the
cards against them, smoking crack cocaine and drinking whisky and beer
during her 38 weeks of pregnancy and never seeing a doctor. Their father
wasn't involved.

She checked herself into The Med on Sept. 12, 1995, under the name of one
of the 11 children she had at the time. The girl weighed 2 pounds even, the
boy 3. Their arms were drawn up against their bodies. An investigation
eventually led to the court-ordered loss of her parental rights last fall.

"There was a plan to try to reunify the family," said Annie Dickerson,
program director for Stepping Stones. "People are given an opportunity to
try to get themselves off drugs so they can provide for their children.
This lady wasn't meeting the plan. She couldn't get away from her drug
usage. She just wasn't capable of doing it."

As a result, 12 of her 14 children - she has had another baby since the
twins - are among almost 1,000 Shelby County children in the care of foster
parents, who draw monthly payments of $238 to $1,000 or more, depending on
the children's particular needs.

In the case of the twins, who can't be identified by name under
confidentiality guidelines of the Department of Children's Services, the
needs are profound.

The girl "will run into the wall and don't even feel it," Elnora Chase
said. "She bangs her head. They scratch their skin and make sores, dig into
their flesh. They get a little bump and work on it to get it to bleed and
make a big sore. They have tremors."

Both children have asthma. At age 3, they weigh only 24 pounds each. They
have underdeveloped features around the mouth and the bridge of the nose.

The boy had four operations for a hernia when he was an infant. Neither
child learned to walk until about 19 months old, and neither one has
learned to speak beyond the occasional "Mama" or "Da" or, perhaps, a barely
whispered request for a drink of water.

The boy may be fitted for a helmet soon to protect his head when he falls
and bangs it on the floor. Both kids throw things, hit each other, stage
temper tantrums.

"We use time out," Elnora Chase said. "They don't know what it is, though.
I'll sit them in a chair, and they get up and come right back in. They'll
calm down for a minute. But they don't really understand. She'll normally
cry the whole time. I praise 'em when they do good. I talk to them. But
they just cry so much. I have to sit up and hold them."

The twins are taken about once a week to one doctor or another, at the
pediatric clinic, pulmonology clinic, neurologist's office, a
gastrointestinal clinic for the boy, another specialist who's trying to
break the girl of the habit of, literally, pulling her hair out.

At night, they wake up every 45 minutes or so, banging on the walls,
jumping in their beds, screaming, laughing. They sleep, fitfully, in cribs
with built-in dressers - large boxes stacked on top of each dresser to keep
them from climbing on top of the whole works.

Chase tried putting them in separate bedrooms, but the problem got worse:
more crying, communicating with each other through the walls.

As slowly as it's happening, watching the children grow and develop makes
it all worthwhile, she said.

"When they were born, they had so many problems. They were so pitiful when
I got them. And I just love working with them. I just want to see them grow
up. You know? To try to motivate them to be like other kids. We're making
them do things we never thought they would do."

A few weeks ago she was told at a city schools testing center that the
twins are operating on the level of a 1-year-old. That sounds about right
to her. She's been working for a year now on toilet training.

"I wish they could just grow up to be like normal kids," she said. "But I
know they're going to have a lot of problems, being delayed so. They're so
slow. They're just beginning to walk up and down steps. And they still
don't do that too good. We work with them on that. And we read. And we
watch television. I repeat words to them, trying to get them to learn."

"It's a heart-warming thing," David Chase said, "when you see how you can
help someone develop and get them to do a little better than they could
when they didn't have anyplace to go."

The Chases came to the Stepping Stones program after being "highly
recommended" from other agencies they had worked with as foster parents,
Dickerson said, and they quickly proved they had what it takes for the
difficult job.

"Mrs. Chase and her husband work so close together, and they're so loving,"
she said. "I can see how they really care about children."

David Chase has a history of caretaking. Abandoned by his own father, he
was left at age 17 with a younger brother and sister to raise when his
mother died.

Elnora Chase was the second-oldest in a family of 13. A society that
produces crack-using mothers saddens and puzzles her.

"We had to work in the fields," she said. "We didn't have time for stuff
like that. Work in the fields. Go to church on Sunday."

If crack cocaine is losing popularity in the Memphis underclass, she has
seen no evidence of it, said Dr. Henrietta Bada, professor of pediatrics,
obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Tennessee, Memphis.

A study at The Regional Medical Center at Memphis from 1992 to 1995 found
that 12 percent of the deliveries were complicated by the use of cocaine
and/or opiates. "I would think the rate would be the same (now) if not
higher," Bada said. "And I would project that if you add to it mothers
using marijuana or mothers using alcohol, you could double that percentage."

Bada said that in the past two years 213 mother-baby pairs have enrolled in
Project Care, a program for mothers who have exposed their babies
prenatally to potentially harmful drugs. About twice that many qualify for
the program, she said.

Medical experts say some 20 to 40 percent of babies exposed to cocaine
prenatally appear to be unaffected by the drug, and among those who have
been harmed, profound improvements can be realized with therapy and special
attention.

Even the twins, profoundly affected by their exposure to alcohol and
cocaine, produce glimmers of hope and moments of gratification in the Chase
household.

Quarreling, striking at each other and shrieking as they dash between the
dining room and kitchen one day, they get off the bus after preschool a few
days later, walk into the house in an orderly fashion, take off their coats
and quietly snack on graham crackers.

The children often respond when David or Elnora asks them to put up a coat
or perform some other little task, obviously understanding what's being
asked of them.

But they seem incapable of expressing their own thoughts or desires, except
by crying - loud and sustained for something to eat; low and intermittent
to be held and comforted.

They're distant, but not hard to love, Elnora Chase said. In fact, "You
love them more," she said, "because they need us more. They're helpless.
They can't do things for themselves. And it seems like nobody else wants
them."

When the children become eligible for adoption - no date has been set yet
for that to happen - the foster parents would be first in line. But in this
case the Chases don't think they're ready for that kind of commitment.

"Not at our age," Elnora Chase said. "I wouldn't want to do that. It
wouldn't be fair to them."

She'll take care of the twins, though, "just as long as they want me to
keep them.

"I'm going to be right here."

To reach Michael Kelley, call 529-2392 or send E-mail to kelley@gomemphis.com

For information about becoming a foster parent in Shelby County, call 543-
7703.

For information on the Stepping Stones program at Senior Services, call
766- 0600.