Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  Another form these financial barriers take is guardian ad litem fees. A guardian ad litem is an attorney appointed to represent someone, often a child, in a family law case. In heated custody battles, children sometimes get caught in the middle. They need an attorney of their own to represent their interests and be their voice in the middle of a messy he-said/she-said war between their parents. Since messy was the only type of custody case I took, I often had guardians ad litem in my cases.

  Again, the problem was paying these guardians. Under Kentucky law, those who are seeking the divorce have to pay the guardian ad litem fee. In cases of domestic violence, the spouse who was the target of the violence is often the first one to file—after all, it is rare that an abuser will relinquish his control and just let his target walk away. In most of my cases, I was the attorney filing to initiate the divorce. So my clients were the ones obligated to pay the fee.

  Paying these fees wasn’t as big a deal in urban settings. Usually, if I sent a letter to an appointed guardian ad litem explaining that my client was low-income and a survivor of domestic violence, the attorney would agree to represent the child for free.

  But things are different in rural environments. Guardians ad litem are less likely to waive their fees—a lot of them seem offended that I even ask. Perhaps this is because profit margins are smaller for attorneys in more rural areas. Some of them probably can’t afford to forgo their paycheck and work for free.

  This leaves low-income parents in a bind. Often, they know that asking the court to appoint a guardian ad litem is the best thing for their children, the only way to give them a direct voice in the matter, to make sure there is someone looking out just for them. It can also tip the balance in a he-said/she-said custody case, providing an outside voice to give an opinion to the court.

  But poor parents also know that they cannot afford this private lawyer. Guardians ad litem often charge close to two hundred dollars per hour for their services, even in the rural areas of the state. Many poor parents get stuck with bills in the multiple thousands of dollars just because they choose to provide their children with legal representation. Those who don’t pay the accumulated fee risk being in contempt of court and going to jail. No matter how poor the parent, there is no mechanism for waiving this fee.

  I know this because of my client Roy. Roy was one of the few men I represented in his divorce. His wife suffered from a mental illness that affected her ability to parent. Roy had been granted a protective order after she set fire to a shed behind their house while Roy was inside it. A few months later, she tried to run him over with a truck.

  Roy defined himself based on his identity as a parent. He didn’t have much money, but he worked hard building houses to provide for his family. He was a gruff man, but his eyes welled with tears during our first meeting. “My children are my world,” he told me. When I told him that his kids probably needed representation of their own in the custody case, he immediately agreed.

  After the first custody hearing, the guardian ad litem in the case sent Roy a bill for over a thousand dollars. I gasped when I saw the number. I had seen private attorneys in Louisville charge less. Roy made around $20,000 per year as a carpenter; he lived below the federal poverty level. He wasn’t receiving any child support from his wife, and he was struggling to raise his three children comfortably.

  The guardian ad litem wouldn’t reduce his fee. Even after I explained Roy’s situation, the lawyer insisted on getting paid. I wonder if he had just seen so much poverty in his county that he had grown hardened to its consequences.

  I filed a brief with the court explaining Roy’s inability to pay. It seemed unjust that this father would be forced to choose between providing his children with food and providing them with an attorney. It seemed crazy that only children from well-to-do families could expect to have a voice in the custody process.

  Again, the courts disagreed. The judge was sympathetic to Roy’s situation, but he was bound by Kentucky law. There simply was no mechanism in place to waive the fee. The judge ordered Roy to pay it.

  * * *

  —

  I was working in rural Kentucky because I wanted to help struggling families. But, a lot of the time, I felt totally ineffectual. I wondered if I had made the right decision in moving home. It seemed as though no one saw the problems with the court system the way I did. No one else even thought they were problems.

  It isn’t just the courts—it’s everything about living in rural poverty. In urban areas there are multiple resources, both legal and otherwise, you can draw on to support poor clients. There are organizations to help people afford food, housing, fuel. There are nonprofits that provide affordable mental health care to adults and children who have experienced trauma.

  But I often struggled to find resources for my rural clients. Most of the nonprofits that provide services are located over an hour away, and many of my clients can’t make that type of drive. Some can’t afford gas. Others don’t have a car.

  I didn’t quite realize the importance of transportation in rural Kentucky until I started practicing at Legal Aid. Yes, I had heard stories of Granny and Papaw trying to navigate life in the mountains without access to a vehicle. And I remembered stories of my mother walking long distances before she got her driver’s license. But I thought that we had surely come far enough as a society to have solved this problem—that everyone could navigate to the places they needed to get to in order to meet their basic needs.

  I was sitting in court in rural Kentucky early one morning waiting for my case to be called, barely paying attention to the proceedings going on around me. This docket often took several hours to get through and, as an attorney who didn’t practice there every week, I knew it would be a while before I heard my client’s name. I wasn’t one of the judge’s favorites; he wouldn’t put my cases at the top of the pile. I mindlessly checked my email on my phone.

  A woman’s sweatshirt brushed my shoulder as she walked past me toward the podium. The judge had just called her case, and she was making her way to the front of the room. I remember thinking how young the woman looked. She held a child on her hip, and her hair was in a ponytail. I used to tell my clients not to bring their children with them to court—it was distracting and it seemed like a breach of decorum—but I had long since realized that many didn’t have another option.

  The young woman stood tall as the judge asked her why she hadn’t paid her child support. She looked him right in the eye as she explained her case matter-of-factly. She had missed a court date because she didn’t get the notification in the mail in time. Her ex-husband had gotten custody of their child because she had missed that hearing. When the court gave him custody of the child, they also ordered her to pay child support. It took several months for her to correct the error and win back custody. She hadn’t realized that she had been ordered to pay child support until recently. She now had custody of her child again, she explained, and she was working to pay the child support obligation.

  She had first found out about the missing payments when the state took away her license because she owed back child support. Around that same time, her car had broken down—it was old and unreliable—and she had no money to fix it. With no license and no car, she had lost her job—the only source of income for her and her children. She was struggling to find a new job: She told the judge how she had walked three miles, with her children in strollers, to town last week to look for one. She wanted to pay the child support that was back due, but she needed more time.

  She said all of this almost defiantly. I recognized that look in her eyes. I had come to realize that it often covered up a sense of shame. This young mother was choosing to be defiant in the face of this system rather than let it make her feel less than human. The judge just thought she was being a troublemaker.

  I almost jumped up to help her. I was sitting in the front row and she was standing so
close to me that I could see the color of her ponytail holder. But there were rules in court. I couldn’t just pop up and start speaking on her behalf. I hadn’t even talked to her; I didn’t know if she wanted my help. I told myself that I would find her later, in the hallway, to ask more about her situation.

  The judge scheduled a contempt hearing and told her to come back in a couple of weeks. He threatened her with jail time, and she looked afraid. My case was called next, and I rushed through the hearing, eager to find the young mother in the hall. As soon as I finished I ran out of the courtroom and looked for her, but she was already gone.

  * * *

  —

  The spring of my first year at Legal Aid, I went to New York for the annual Skadden Fellows Symposium. We fifty or so Skadden Fellows are scattered throughout the country, working on legal issues that affect people living in poverty. Once a year, the foundation brings all of the fellows to New York to talk about their work. I felt invigorated, surrounded by so many bright young lawyers making such a tangible difference in the world. It was also nice to be back in a city, even though I no longer felt fully at home in that environment. I went to an exercise studio and worried that the New Yorkers would be able to tell that I was a tourist, an interloper in their city.

  What I remember from that symposium was how difficult it was trying to explain all of the issues facing poor people in the rural parts of Kentucky. A lot of the fellows were based in large cities—New York, D.C., San Francisco. And with good reason—there is a lot of poverty in these cities and a lot of clients in need of legal representation. But the urban-based fellows’ practices were very different from mine. When they talked about partnering with other nonprofits, I explained that many of the counties I worked in had no such nonprofits. When they talked about referring clients they couldn’t help to other legal organizations, I tried to make them understand that we were the only stop for most of our clients. If I didn’t take their case, they would navigate the legal system alone. I told them about one judge in rural Kentucky who refused to enter a divorce decree until after a client of mine gave birth; a local lawyer told me, “Judge don’t want to be makin’ no more bastards ’round here.” Rural Kentucky is, I explained, a different world.

  I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about whether poverty in rural or urban America is worse. They look different, and they carry different challenges. They should both be remedied. But I was beginning to learn the unique face of poverty in rural Kentucky, and it was uglier than I had expected.

  Constantly being around these dire circumstances was draining. My clients would call me on evenings and weekends, when their visitation exchanges occurred and crises most often arose. My stomach did a tiny flip-flop each time my phone rang. I never knew what would be on the other end. Once, I had to phone 911 for a client when she called me while her husband was assaulting her. Another time, an elderly client called me while she was having a stroke.

  Sometimes, my clients just wanted someone to talk to. They were worried about their safety, about their children’s safety. They wanted someone to tell them what to do, and many of them thought I had answers. “No, it’s okay,” I told one client who called me at ten o’clock on a Friday night. “I can step out and talk to you.” I was wrapping up an evening out with my friends, but the young mother was crying and I didn’t want to turn her away. I didn’t know if she had anyone else to call.

  I recognized that it was a privilege for my clients to trust me with their children, their marriages, their lives—for them to stand silently beside me in court and let me speak on their behalf. But sometimes I resented this obligation that I had willingly taken on. My life didn’t feel fully mine anymore. I was irritable a lot of the time.

  “Can you believe I’m going to trial just to get my client possession of a dump truck!” I complained to a co-worker when I was working late one Friday. “A dump truck! It doesn’t even work!”

  But then, after the trial, I saw how happy my client was to have won this small victory, to have taken something back from her abusive partner. “I guess the dump truck was worth it,” I told that same co-worker. “But Lord knows what she’s going to do with it.”

  * * *

  —

  My cousin Melissa was experiencing the stress of family court in a different way. Shortly after Billy was born, Melissa had left him at her parents’ house. She moved in with a boyfriend, and she didn’t see Billy often. She divorced her first husband—Billy’s father—and remarried. She went through three more husbands in the next six or so years. Melissa’s parents—Dale and Mabel—raised Billy as their own.

  Then, one day, Melissa showed up and said that she was taking Billy with her. Billy didn’t want to go, and Dale and Mabel didn’t want to let him. I wasn’t surprised. At that time, Melissa and Billy’s relationship seemed strained to me. When Dale bought Billy a toy car that he could drive around, Melissa scowled. She complained to Dale, “You never bought me the Barbie car I wanted growing up.”

  Melissa and her parents took the matter to the local family court. Eventually, Dale and Mabel agreed to give her primary custody; they got visitation with Billy every other weekend. Billy now lives with Melissa most of the time. He’s gotten more quiet over time. Last Christmas he told me that he sometimes stays up until two or three in the morning, even on school nights. When I asked him what he did that late at night, he shrugged. “Play videogames. Be on the Internet,” he answered.

  I didn’t talk to Dale or Mabel much about the custody case. I discussed it casually, but I didn’t feel right getting involved. My views on Melissa had shifted over the years, become more complicated. I still questioned her choices and how those choices affected Billy. But I saw more clearly the ways that others’ decisions had affected her. I’ll always believe Melissa had a part in the situation with Billy and her parents, but I also didn’t want to work against her. Although we found ourselves in divergent positions now—playing different roles in the same system—I couldn’t shake the childhood feeling that, in a lot of important ways, we were still the same.

  Part of me felt at home in Kentucky. My work was always challenging and sometimes rewarding. On good days, I felt like I was making a difference. But this sense of meaning wasn’t enough to make me fully forget the ways that I had come back an outsider. When I was finally done with work, I would go home to my small apartment in the young-professional section of town, and I would want to tell someone about my day: the way I had felt foolish in court when I cited the wrong rule, how honored I was when my client gave me a hug after the hearing, how nauseous I felt when a new client told me her story of abuse.

  Most evenings I was stuck rehashing these events by myself. A few of my friends from Berea had ended up in Louisville, but they all had husbands and babies. None of them had much time to sit and talk through my workday. Even the rare times when they did, it felt as though there was a gulf between us. Many of them had stayed close to home, connected to one another for the past decade, while I had gone away. Over time we’d all shifted and changed. I couldn’t just snap back into my former life like a missing puzzle piece. I now belonged to a different puzzle.

  It wasn’t easy to find new friends. A lot of people my age had lived in Louisville their entire lives. They were still friends with the same group they had hung out with in high school, and they weren’t terribly interested in meeting new people. I envied these deep connections, these friendships that carried a sense of permanence and gravity. I had moved around so much that when it came to friendships, it sometimes felt like I had sacrificed depth for breadth. For a while, I wondered if seeing the world had been worth it, since it left me feeling so alone.

  I thought dating might be the answer. I’d been single for several years, an intentional choice after bouncing from relationship to relationship in my early twenties. I had embraced the chance to focus on myself, make choices based on my goals alone. That path had led me
to a place I was happy with: home in Kentucky. Still, I was starting to think that a life partner would be nice.

  Aunt Ruth was one of the few family members who didn’t pressure me to date. Every holiday she would ask, “You find you a man yet, Cassie? It’s okay to take your time. I took mine findin’ Sonny.” She wanted me to feel comfortable carving my own path. Even still, she would add, “But you let me know when you git bit by that love bug!” She would pat Sonny’s leg affectionately as she laughed.

  It turns out most of the men I went on dates with had no idea what to think about a woman with multiple Ivy League degrees. When I told one guy I had gone to Yale, he responded with “Well, I could’ve gone there too, but I chose not to because the teaching there isn’t that great.” Another looked at me like I had just announced that I had a secret extra head. At the end of the date, he remarked how surprised he was that I had seemed “mostly normal to talk to.”

  I hit a low point a few months after moving back to Louisville. It was my thirtieth birthday, and I was alone. That part wasn’t unique—I felt alone a lot those first few months in Louisville. But this was my birthday, and thirty seemed like a big deal. I had pictured a day of fun, friends; maybe a nice dinner out or a fun concert. Instead, I had dinner with my parents. We had a nice meal at a quiet restaurant, but it wasn’t exactly the “end of an era”–type celebration I had envisioned. After they left to drive home to Berea, I spent the rest of the evening on the couch with my dog. At one point I put a birthday hat on her to feel more festive. She looked up at me with sad eyes and fell asleep.