Through the eyes of a preteen girl, a story of loss and yearning, dreams and nightmares, a stuffed hippo with a belly ring - and Cocoa Puffs
By COLLEEN JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
Published April 17, 2005
[Times photo: Lance Aram Rothstein]
Meryem Caliskan paints a sunny scene Thursday at her home in Holiday. She and three siblings were separated from their mother, now Peggy Morris, in early 2004, but Meryem and her oldest brother, Coskun, have been returned to her. "I was so happy that I felt like I was going to cry," Meryem said.
Brrrrinng. The school day was almost over when the classroom phone rang. The teacher answered, then told 10-year-old Meryem Caliskan to go to the front office.
"Did they say why?" Meryem asked.
"No."
Must be something about safety patrol, Meryem thought. She had just joined. Tucked inside her book bag was the orange patrol band with a silver badge. Maybe they were changing her post.
Or was she in trouble?
A woman met her at the office. Meryem thought she looked scary. A few moments later, her 9-year-old brother Coskun arrived. The scary woman told them she was bringing them to her office. During the car ride, Coskun started to cry. Meryem did too.
"Aren't we going home?" she asked.
"Yeah, later."
* * *
Two days earlier, Feb. 8, 2004, at Meryem's house in New Port Richey.
Three times, Peggy Caliskan issued the order to her daughter: Do the dishes.
"No," said Meryem.
She'd been giving her mother an attitude all day. Now they started to argue.
Fed up, Peggy threw an empty Publix orange juice carton at Meryem. The carton hit her in the forehead.
* * *
From the official description of an anonymous call to the Child Abuse Hotline, Feb. 9, 2004:
For an unknown period of time, the mother has been snorting cocaine several times per week. The mother has attempted to stop using but has not been successful. As a result of the mother's cocaine use, the children are left alone every night with a roommate. . . . The mother has been seen slapping Meryem across her face with an opened hand.
* * *
A Sheriff's Office child protective investigator responded that day.
Meryem had met the investigator before. Twice in recent months the woman had checked out abuse allegations Peggy and a family babysitter made against each other. Each denied the accusations. No action was taken.
The investigator's questions scared Meryem.
Did your mom hurt you?
Do you have any bruises?
Meryem mostly answered "no." She said her mom slapped her face or spanked her for talking back.
"I did get a little smack," Meryem would say later. "Little spankings. Nothing bad."
Meryem told the scary woman the orange juice carton didn't hurt. It did not leave a mark.
Peggy, 32, admitted throwing the container. She also said she had fallen asleep at her boyfriend's home the previous night while her children were at home with the roommate. She acknowledged having recently gone through a brief "bad spell," during which she tried cocaine and had a few drinks.
The investigator said she would check back on the family in a couple of weeks.
* * *
She didn't wait that long. On Feb. 10, the investigator took Meryem and Coskun from Marlowe Elementary School and drove them to her office. Their younger siblings, 4-year-old Rasim and 2-year-old Selin, showed up too.
Meryem smiled for a photograph. She felt like a criminal as a social worker took her fingerprints. Rasim and Selin fidgeted as a worker rolled their fingers across the ink pad. Meryem held them in her lap to keep them still.
The scary woman took them to McDonald's. Meryem had a cheeseburger, fries and a Dr. Pepper.
Then they drove to their father's one-bedroom apartment in Clearwater.
"Ah, are you okay?" Soner Caliskan, then 34, asked. "I'm sorry your mom has to do this stuff."
Meryem didn't feel like talking about it. She wanted to go home to her mother.
* * *
Feb. 16, 2004
Dear Diary,
I got to see my mom today. I haven't seen her in the last week. I miss her so much. I don't understand why this is happening to us. Anyways, I have to remember that my moms going to get us back really soon. She promised me and I know she can keep this promis, Whell I have to go. Good night diary. I hope my mom gets better and real soon because I want to go home. Thanks for listnig.
* * *
Soon, neither Meryem nor her father was happy. She was tired of sleeping on the floor with Selin and sick of her father's strict discipline. Their defiance annoyed him. They called him "Dad," but weren't his biological children.
On March 23, Soner asked Circuit Judge William Webb, who initially approved the four Caliskan children's removal from their mother, to place the oldest two children in foster care. The judge agreed.
"You are going to be just like your mother," Soner told Meryem that night.
It wasn't a compliment.
* * *
A week later, a social worker dropped off Meryem and Coskun at a foster home in New Port Richey. The foster mother, Miss Lisa, was on her way out to pick up a son at basketball practice. Meryem and Coskun climbed into her big, red van.
They told Miss Lisa their names and where they were from. She talked to them about Christianity and quoted the Bible. Meryem found that weird.
"We're Muslims," she said.
"Oh."
Meryem felt a little nervous about the new arrangement. But she wasn't scared.
"I knew I was coming back home with my mom," she said. "I prayed every night that I was."
Miss Lisa took Meryem to Adventure Island. She painted her fingernails. Meryem's bed was comfortable.
But she couldn't hang out at friends' houses unless they went through tedious background checks. No one did. And Miss Lisa wouldn't let her make the long-distance calls to her best friend Ashley in Pinellas Park.
Then there were the Froot Loops. If the other kids left a few pieces floating in their bowls, it was okay. But Meryem had to eat every bit. She hated Froot Loops.
* * *
Mom let her eat Cocoa Puffs.
But even to Meryem, Peggy Caliskan was not perfect. Meryem didn't like her mom's job. Peggy worked at Club Ecstasy.
The strip club part didn't bother Meryem. It was the hours. Peggy ran the front cash register from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.
"She didn't have the energy to get us up in the morning," Meryem said. "She didn't come home until late in the morning. She always had to work.
"I really missed her."
Peggy had taken the job after splitting with Soner Caliskan in late 2003 and moving in with a friend in Pasco County. Then she started dating new men. Meryem didn't like that either.
"He was mental," she says of one boyfriend.
"He was just an oddball," she says of another.
Then her mother's roommate told Meryem that Peggy was doing drugs.
"I was kind of disappointed," she said. "I'm her daughter, and I can see things better than she can."
* * *
By April, Meryem had been in three schools in as many months. Somehow she managed to maintain A's and B's.
She brought a picture of Peggy to school.
I showed all my friends and my teacher, she wrote in her diary. They say I look just like her and she's pretty.
She saw Peggy for two hours every other week. Peggy cried every time.
"I don't like seeing my mom in tears," Meryem said.
For each visit, Meryem drew a picture or wrote letters adorned with crayon hearts and flowers.
April 25, 2004
Dear Mom,
I miss you so much. How have you been? . . . I'm in a new school again called Cipres Elementery. I am in a foster home now. . . . Are you doing everything your suposed to be doing?"
After each visit, Meryem poured her thoughts into her diaries, one aqua blue, the other lavender with a lock to keep out her brother. She recorded how the family barbecued at Broderick Park in Pinellas Park or went to a ballroom dance class.
I got to see my mom on Thursday, she wrote. It was so fun.
On one of their earliest visits together, Peggy gave Coskun a teddy bear. Meryem got a stuffed hippopotamus with a belly ring. Meryem had wanted her own belly ring. She thought they were pretty.
She said it was the only belly button piercing I will ever get, Meryem wrote in her diary. Which I doubt.
Peggy sprayed her Celine Dion perfume on the stuffed animals, so they smelled like her.
Coskun started calling his bear "Mommy." Meryem decided to name her hippo "Mommy," too.
"It made sense," she said.
She slept with it every night.
* * *
Meryem rides in Miss Lisa's big, red van to Pinellas Park. She runs into Ashley's house, but her best friend doesn't want to talk. Meryem goes outside and sees a black car drive by. She goes back into Ashley's house. This time her friend is nice. Meryem sees the black car go by again. Then she is back outside, running in slow motion. She tries to scream, but nothing comes out. Three men get out of the black car. One puts a plastic bag over Meryem's head.
She blacks out.
Three nights in a row, Meryem had the same dream.
Flashbacks and nightmares are common reactions of children taken away from their homes.
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* * *
Life away from her kids had been no picnic for Peggy Caliskan either.
She missed Meryem's 11th birthday. And her fifth-grade graduation. She didn't send Rasim off to his first day of kindergarten or hear Selin's first sentence.
For a while, she found solace in alcohol. She took offense to the judge saying she had used her roommate as a "dumping ground" for her children. Peggy said her children were well dressed, fed properly and honor roll students.
"I did slap (Meryem). Once," she said. "I'm not the only parent in the world that slapped their child."
During her own childhood, Peggy spent two years in foster care. She had promised her kids they would never repeat her experience. And now this.
She vowed to get her kids back.
She quit her job at the strip club, attended substance abuse counseling. All but the first of her monthly drug tests came back clean.
She took back her maiden name, Peggy Morris.
She struggled to find stable housing and work. Then she met a supportive man. They fell in love. She moved into his home in Holiday. She got a day job at Subway. He made sure she was on time for her first day of work.
* * *
November 28, 2004
Dear Diary,
I am so happy because I finally get unsupervised visits with my mom. I couldn't believe it. I mean, we're getting so close to moving back with my mom.
* * *
Meryem was right. The unsupervised, overnight visits with her mom were a harbinger of good things to come.
So was Miss Lisa's unexpected decision to quit being a foster mom.
Meryem and Coskun spent the night of Jan. 27 with their mom in Holiday. The next day, head lice kept Meryem home from school.
So she tagged along as Peggy met with the child welfare workers.
They stopped at a cafe for breakfast. Meryem ordered a western omelet, Texas toast, extra bacon and hot chocolate. They were running late, so they had to get everything to go.
At the meeting, Meryem sat quietly in a waiting room, eating her breakfast. She passed the time drawing a crayon sketch of her mother.
Then someone brought her into a meeting room. Peggy was smiling.
She had finished her parenting classes, and Miss Lisa's retirement prompted social workers to speed up the reunion process.
"You've been through a lot," a worker told Meryem. "I just want you to know that you're going home."
Meryem had been apart from her mom for nearly a year.
"I was so happy that I felt like I was going to cry."
* * *
Then, a final irony. On March 11, an appellate court reversed Judge Webb's decision to take away Peggy's children. There was not sufficient physical evidence to find that Peggy had abused and abandoned her kids.
Such a reversal is rare. Later this month, Webb will decide whether Peggy should get her other son and daughter back.
Their lives are no longer measured in court dates. But Meryem, now 12, must deal with a mom who came out of parenting courses with a new attitude toward discipline. When Meryem talks back or refuses to do the dishes, Peggy sends her to her room.
"When you figure out what you've done wrong, you have to come out and tell her," Meryem said. "She doesn't always let us get away with everything."
The family recently bought a powder blue and white parakeet and named it Justice. But frustration lingers as they try to make sense of their difficult year.
On a recent evening, Meryem and Peggy sat at their dinner table. Meryem listened as her mother vented about their time apart.
"The sad thing is, they can't give me back a year of my children's lives," said Peggy, now 34.
Wearing her orange Tigger sweat shirt and licking chicken pot pie off her fingers, Meryem was the picture of a young girl. But later, she offered a decidedly grown-up assessment of her time away from home.
"It's taught me that when I grow up, not to make the same mistakes that my mom made," she said. "Because I don't want to miss out on time with my kids.
"Nobody's perfect. And everybody makes mistakes."
* * *
Meryem got her mom back. But the family is not whole.
Her youngest siblings, Rasim and Selin, still live with her stepdad. Meryem gets to see them only one day every other weekend. They cry when it's time to leave. She thinks they are bored without their big brother and sister around.
Meryem wants them to come home. But Soner Caliskan wants to retain permanent custody of his two children. A custody battle looms.
Like her mother, Meryem laments time lost.
"I've missed a year of their lives. They've grown so much it's not even funny."
ABOUT THIS STORY
To reconstruct Meryem Caliskan's story, staff writer Colleen Jenkins interviewed the girl, her mother, stepfather, attorneys, experts and others. Peggy Caliskan gave the Times permission to view confidential court documents related to her case. Meryem shared her personal journal entries.
