Siblings find a true haven

LINCOLN — With five adult boys, their 16 kids, one great-grandchild and the seven great-nieces and great-nephews who are starting to call her “Mom,” there’s no telling how many will gather around Aunt Tiny’s table today.

Phyllis “Tiny” McCaul, so named because of her size at birth and still-diminuitive 4-foot-11-inch height, will cook for however many show up. She knows to count on at least seven besides herself: Cheyenne, Makayla, Kennedy, Shawnee, Levi, Justice and Willow.

They are the youngest of the nine Staton children whose father made headlines when he abandoned them at an Omaha hospital last year. They are now permanently under McCaul’s care.

As this big family eats and gives thanks, there won’t be a lot of space. Only six will get a chair at the table. The rest will squeeze on to love seats, with plates on laps, or eat in shifts.

But this family has never defined home as four walls and a roof.

Home is where the family members are, when they are all together.

McCaul gave thanks in 2008 that she could take in so many of her late niece’s sons and daughters.

Today, with the final adoption approved this month, she is grateful to have put the stress and mechanics of the state’s child welfare system behind her. She is grateful to have seven children now her own and a new chapter for them all ahead.

It hasn’t been easy, and the challenges sometimes have been resolved only to have new ones take their place.

First, it was logistics.

McCaul was sitting in her rocker in a basement apartment she shared with a son when the children’s step-grandmother called one September night in 2008, crying: “He did it. Gary gave up the kids.”

McCaul hadn’t tuned into the safe haven debate, was fuzzy about the law but said, “I’ll take them all.”

She had grown up the sixth of nine children in an Omaha family that struggled. She had raised her five sons by herself after her husband left her.

She hopped into her car, drove to Omaha and spent a harried few days trying to round up the Staton children. The oldest four initially were put into a group home, and the youngest five were placed with a foster family.

Then came the task of convincing the Nebraska Health and Human Services System that she, their great-aunt with a full-time job working for the agency, should take the kids who wanted to come.

The oldest two boys already had chosen to stay in Omaha.

The state gave its initial approval, pending McCaul’s move to a bigger place. McCaul borrowed a friend’s empty two-bedroom home and filled the bedrooms with air mattresses.

Not big enough, said the state. Each child must have his or her own bed, said a judge.

While McCaul was fighting to get temporary custody of the children, the children were reeling.

They had lost their mother to a cerebral aneurysm 18 months earlier, and the older ones were angry at their father, confused and hurt.

Cheyenne, now 16, remembers Sept. 24, 2008, “as if it were yesterday.”

She’d come home from the after-school program at King Science and Technology Magnet Center on top of the world from having made the school’s tackle football team. The petite Cheyenne looks more like a cheerleader, but she’s quick and tough and prided herself on logging 27 tackles.

Her father told her to look up the bus route from their rental house on North 19th Street to Creighton University Medical Center. She recalls hearing instructions to eat and to “get ready.”

“What are we doing?” she had asked.

Her father, Gary Staton, didn’t answer right away. He finally said she and her brothers and sisters were going to “talk to some people about your mother’s death.”

Staton gave bus money to the four big kids: Jessey, Dakota, Cheyenne and Makayla. They took the No. 18 to the north Omaha transit center and boarded the No. 35 to the hospital.

When they arrived, Cheyenne saw her father, separate from the younger kids and 21-month-old Willow alone on a bench.

“Dad,” she said, “you forgot Willow.”

And then it hit her: They were all to be forgotten. She said her father had threatened before to leave the children there. Cheyenne couldn’t breathe and started to shake.

The children were taken to a room, given hospital bracelets with their names, dates of birth, the day’s date and a bar code. They were told to eat.

Jessey, who was 17, told Cheyenne she had to calm down; she was frightening the little ones.

A counselor asked Cheyenne about school, football and friends. A nurse said she was sorry, that she couldn’t know how Cheyenne felt.

“Where’s my dad?!” she recalled asking, her brown eyes flashing anger even now.

She wanted to punch the wall.

“But I punched my brother instead.”

* * *

That first week, when Aunt Tiny walked into the group home, Makayla, then 13, felt a mixture of relief and anxiety. Glad to see a familiar face. Scared to leave Omaha for Lincoln.

The family already seemed split up. Dad in Omaha. Oldest sister Amoria, the only one too old to leave at the hospital, in Omaha. Jessey and Dakota, staying with a guardian in Omaha because they wanted to remain in their same high schools.

But Makayla and Cheyenne, just 14 months apart, had been close their whole lives and were glad to be going together, especially with the rest of their siblings in tow.

They moved with Aunt Tiny into the two-bedroom house in Lincoln, bringing little more than the clothes they had worn to the hospital.

There had been no time to swing past their old house in north Omaha that, when it wasn’t being watched by TV crews, had been broken into. Things were smashed. McCaul rescued only a couple of dressers, a deep freeze and a keepsake of Cheyenne’s.

McCaul scrambled to get clothes, coats, bedding and supplies. Two days after bringing the children home, she got a visit from the children’s guardian ad litem. He asked where the kids slept, if they were enrolled in school and what the school plans were.

“I was trying to make everything OK,” McCaul explained.

Later, she got a call: The judge wanted to place the kids elsewhere until she could get better-situated. And then another call: The state would buy the beds; the kids could stay.

While that was a huge relief, McCaul still faced days with an endless to-do list and nights of children waking in tears after bad dreams.

For help, she turned to Mourning Hope, a Lincoln organization that caters to grieving children.

McCaul finally landed the four-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment she has now.

It’s a walk-up with a small, rectangular communal space that features kitchen cabinets on one wall packed with slow cookers, a griddle and mega-size containers of food.

On the opposite wall are the TV and front door.

In between sit a table with six chairs, three love seats, a TV, a computer on a card table and a curio cabinet holding an urn of the children’s mother’s ashes.

A narrow hallway flanked by bedroom and bathroom doors includes coat hooks at child level, the penciled-in height marks of all seven children and a plaque that reads: “LORD HELP ME HANG IN THERE.”

* * *

That has proved to be a useful motto.

The school-age children have heard it from counselors. McCaul tells it to herself each time something crops up.

And there’s always something.

Back surgery for McCaul, broken arms on two boys, applying for Social Security survivor benefits for the children. ...

The court hearings were always traumatic, particularly the one on Aug. 18. It was supposed to have been adoption day, a happy occasion. But then Kennedy spontaneously burst into tears and told the judge he wasn’t ready. The judge approved six adoptions and delayed the then-11-year-old’s hearing.

Kennedy got an earful from his older sisters, who teased that his social worker was his mom now.

McCaul was heartbroken until she realized that Kennedy didn’t want a new family that could be broken apart again.

So McCaul steeled herself for the Nov. 13 hearing. Kennedy smiled and the judge gave the OK and closed the family’s case. Kennedy wrapped an arm around McCaul and called her “Mom.”

* * *

After living together more than a year, the family has shared the big moments: a summertime family reunion, first days of school, birthdays and the adoptions.

Mixed in were everyday joys, disappointments, laughs and simple quiet times: Makayla stroking her pet hermit crab, the little kids crashed in front of a “Backyardigans” video, Cheyenne’s purple fingernails tapping the computer keys as she zips through MySpace updates.

Of course, there is always the typical large-family chaos: the “Mom! Mom! Mom!” rapid-fire of Levi and Justice waving their school pictures in McCaul’s face; McCaul buttering 22 pieces of bread for grilled-cheese sandwiches; Shawnee correcting Kennedy on the exact way to mimic Austin Powers.

McCaul at one point throws up her arms in faux exasperation and invokes the words of mothers everywhere: “We have a person named ‘Nobody’ who does EVERYTHING here!”

* * *

Things could be better.

Overwhelmed by the children’s needs and eager to step into her new role, McCaul retired early from her 17-year job serving as a community liaison between the state and mentally ill people. They’re living off her pension and a state stipend for the next five years until her Social Security retirement benefits kick in.

The kids’ late mother’s Social Security survivor benefits will amount to about $42 for each child per month, but the benefits haven’t come yet.

This means they eat a lot of grilled cheese. This means McCaul can’t pay to fix the heater in her 1997 Ford Escort, let alone buy something larger that could ferry more than four kids at a time.

There’s no quiet spot for homework, the bikes get stored under the porch, and there’s little room to spread out, let alone eat. One kitchen chair is broken.

The tight quarters don’t seem to bother the kids. So used to bunking together, even with the extra beds purchased by the state, Cheyenne and Makayla choose to curl up together on Cheyenne’s single bed under drawings, poetry and “Twilight” posters.

McCaul, who served homemade chicken noodle soup with the grilled cheese sandwiches, delays her own dinner until after the kids’ 8:30 p.m. bedtime. She doesn’t cry as much anymore. She sips cold Pepsis for fuel.

The children’s pain over their losses is still present.

Cheyenne resents having to move and make new friends. Makayla has taped her safe haven hospital bracelet to her bedroom wall. When asked about his life by a middle school reporter, Kennedy showed his peer a newspaper article about his father.

“I said, ‘Kennedy, that’s not about you. That’s about your dad,’” McCaul told him. “‘When they want to know about you, they want to know you like wrestling, you’ve got sisters at the same school.’”

Levi and Justice have struggled to read and write.

Little Willow, her blond hair just now long enough to brush her shoulders, is the only one who seems oblivious. She delights her aunt with toddler spontaneity.

When offered something, she chirps, unprompted, “Thank you!”

* * *

Things also could be worse.

Makayla thinks being with Aunt Tiny is more stable, more comfortable.

“I get to talk about Mom more,” the 14-year-old said. “Dad wouldn’t really let us talk about Mom.”

After her mother died, she said, “life got really hard. Everything went crashing.”

But: “My dad’s not horrible. He had a lot of kids.”

Makayla is grateful to be at the same school for two years now.

“I haven’t really done that,” she said, counting at least five different Omaha public elementary schools she attended before.

She knows what Aunt Tiny is up against with all of them. But she also feels secure in who Aunt Tiny is: someone who has done this before.

It certainly looked that way on a recent visit.

A relaxed McCaul made dinner, oversaw the big girls’ leaving for an overnight stay at a relative’s home, gushed over the little boys’ school pictures and Levi’s certificate of achievement in school and bragged about Willow’s social graces.

“I didn’t plan ahead,” she joked. “I didn’t think I’d give birth to SEVEN children at the age of 60.”

But looking affectionately around the room, she says, “They’re worth it.”

Contact the writer: 444-1136, erin.grace@owh.com