Tracey turns 19

“You’re wearing my sneakers.” The voice—hard, flat, insistent—is coming from behind us in the line at the A&W in the food court at Scotia Square. I turn to see who it is. She’s a big girl, probably in her late teens, blonde hair pulled back tight against her skull, a belligerent, don’t-fuck-with-me look permanent-markered onto her face. She pays no attention to me.

“I want my sneakers,” she menaces Tracey. “Take ‘em off. Now.”

Tracey doesn’t flinch. She’s half the other girl’s size, almost waif-like, delicate but not really. How could she be, considering? She looks the other girl in the eye. She’s not defiant, but not cowed either. “Heather said I could wear them,” she replies evenly. “Until I get my own.”

Heather, it turns out, is Belligerent Girl’s sister. Heather’s letting Tracey stay in her apartment until Tracey gets her first welfare cheque next week. She also let Tracey borrow her sister’s sneakers because… well, because Tracey’s last boyfriend gave away all her clothes.

That’s another story. There are lots of other stories. We’ve come here today so I can hear a few.

By the time Tracey’s Crispy Chicken Burger combo arrives, Belligerent Girl—seemingly uncertain how to respond to Tracey’s Zen-like calmness—has retreated to a nearby table where she continues to complain loudly about the sneakers to a seatmate.

Despite the fact Tracey has no money for food and probably hasn’t eaten all day, she picks at the meal I buy her. She’s lost 50 pounds in the past two years, she tells me. “I moved from place to place a lot,” she explains. “And I didn’t eat.”

“So,” I ask Tracey, not sure where to begin, “why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to since the last time we met?”

That was more than two years ago, in the summer of 2007. I was researching a story for The Coast (“Lost Children,” Oct. 25, 2007) about kids who’d fallen through the cracks in the child welfare system. At the time, Tracey was just 16, and a poster child for the gaping abyss that system had become.

Back in 1999, when she was eight, Nova Scotia’s Community Services Department took Tracey away from her mother because—it claimed—it could do a better job raising her.

That shouldn’t have been hard. Tracey’s mother Alison was in foster care herself when she became pregnant for the first time at 15. By the time she was 21, she’d had four children by four fathers. Tracey, her third, was the only one she parented for long. During Tracey’s first few years, they lived in five provinces with more men than Tracey can remember, at least two of whom Tracey witnessed assaulting her mother.

When Tracey was six and living in a Dartmouth welfare hotel with Alison and an ex-husband who wasn’t supposed to be there, social workers scooped her up and placed her in temporary care. Two years later, a judge made the provincial custody order permanent.

But Community Services did no better—perhaps worse—than Tracey’s mother as her “parent.” She was shuffled from foster home to foster home (six or seven by her count), and when those options were exhausted, into one group home after another.

At first, authorities refused to allow Tracey and her mother to see each other. When she was 12, they finally gave Tracey permission to write letters to her mother, but didn’t let her read her mother’s replies—or even tell her she’d written back.

Mother and daughter finally found each other in the winter of 2005—to the chagrin of social workers who got a court order to keep mother and daughter apart, and then threatened to charge Alison with kidnapping after Tracey ran away from her group home to be with her.

That’s when Tracey started acting out. Though she’d never been in legal trouble before, Tracey began racking up criminal charges soon after she was returned to the group home. By the spring of 2007, she was facing 32 criminal charges, all related to her behaviour at the group home.

In court, her lawyer told the judge Tracey needed intense, daily psychiatric treatment on a long-term basis. Since that treatment wasn’t available in Nova Scotia, the lawyer said, the only person “who can do anything” to help Tracey was Judy Streatch, the then-minister of community services and the official legal guardian for all of the 2,000 children in care in Nova Scotia. So the frustrated judge ordered Streatch to personally attend a case conference to discuss how to make sure Tracey got the help everyone agreed she needed.

Demanding a cabinet minister personally come to court to deal with the case of an individual child created the predictable political firestorm; the order was rescinded.

In the end, Tracey eventually pleaded guilty to the charges and was placed on probation until December 2008.

After that… she disappeared again, and—though no one would admit it—the simple truth is that the authorities gave up wanting to find her. She’d become more trouble than she was worth.

At first, Tracey tells me, she moved in with her boyfriend’s family in Spryfield, but “we were fighting too much and the police got called,” so the family told her to leave.

She ended up—briefly—at her mother’s apartment. Her mother kicked her out in the middle of the second night. “We were sharing the pullout couch—her boyfriend was sleeping on the mattress—and she got mad because I was rubbing my feet together. That’s how I get to sleep. But it made her mad.”

Tracey had to walk barefoot back to Spryfield where her now ex-boyfriend’s family let her live in a tent in the backyard. But she wasn’t allowed into the house to shower or wash her clothes. “I had to go downtown for that.”

To make matters worse, she and the ex-boyfriend got into another fight. “There were, like, six police cars and they had police dogs.” The police packed her off to Bryony House, an emergency shelter for abused women and children. Then to Adsum House, which provides housing and support to women and children, as well as young girls over 16 with no place to go.

“It didn’t work out,” Tracey tells me simply.

So she went to Alberta to spend time with a sister she’d never met before. That lasted three weeks. “I got blamed when $1,700 disappeared, but I never took it,” she insists. After that, Tracey made her way to Ottawa to renew acquaintances with the father she hadn’t seen in 10 years.

“It felt weird at first,” she tells me. “He looked way different. I thought he was tall, but he wasn’t. And he’d gained a lot of weight. And lost a lot of hair.”

Still, she recalls those two months with her father with what now seems like nostalgia. “We’d walk the dog together everyday,” she says. “And then in April we went to Weed Day on some hill up in Ottawa. After, we went to one of his friends’ houses and he made us burgers. Then we went home and watched TV.”

But Tracey missed her friends back in Halifax—the street kids who are the only real family she’s ever known—so one day in late June she simply hopped a bus back east. “I left my dad part of my welfare cheque for rent,” she tells me.

Back in Halifax this past summer, another boyfriend gave away all her clothes after she decided to break up with him. Now she spends Monday and Friday afternoons slowly replenishing her wardrobe from the bins at a local shelter. “I’m particular about my clothes,” she tells me.

Today, she’ll need to look for sneakers.

But her main task is to apply for her first adult welfare cheque. In early October, Tracey turned 19, which meant she was finally, officially, free of the child welfare system.

Where was child protection services while she was wandering, unprotected, across the country, I wonder?

Tracey says she met with her social worker a few times a month whenever she was in Halifax, mostly to get her cheque—roughly $150 a month. “We’d have coffee and sometimes she’d drive me to wherever I was staying,” Tracey explains. “And I could call if I needed help.” Her last social worker, a woman named Jackie, “was the best one.”

What’s next? “I’m a woman now,” Tracey says simply. “I have to take care of myself.” But she admits she’s “scared… it’s going to be tough.”

Once she gets her first welfare cheque, she says, she plans to find an apartment, and then apply for a passport and her beginner’s licence, and begin looking for a job.

It won’t be easy. Officially, she dropped out after Grade 9; unofficially, she admits she’s tested at a Grade 5 or 6 reading level. She’s tried alternate school programs but gave up. “I’d rather be with my friends,” she tells me.

Part of the problem is that Tracey can’t concentrate—she never did get the help her lawyer said she needed—which will inevitably become an issue whenever she applies for a job. “I can’t work fulltime.”

It’s hard not to ask yourself whether Tracey, in the end, is any better off for having spent a decade as a ward of the state.

“Do you think you’ve gained anything at all, being in care?” I ask her finally.

She takes a bite of her burger, chews, considers. Finally, she shrugs. “Not really,” she says. “Not really.”

  1. As for the drug comments . Yes I admit I was doing heavier drugs for 3 years but next year will be 10 years sober and my life right now is pretty good.

    Reply

  2. I replied to Lisa’s comment but it didn’t get approved for some reason . So I’ll cut it down to a shorter version. Lisa lied saying I stole the money. She wrote me a few years after the $1700 went missing. She wrote me saying that her ex that she was with at the time admitted he stole it and she apologized to me for it. We were talking for abit after this but then her and our mom talked as Lisa says since she had a baby
    Which is something else id like to point out . Lisa told me she wasn’t able to have kids because of something that happened due to drugs. I told her the names I would pick if I had a kid. Years later turns out she did have a kid … A little girl. Guess what Lisa turned around and did. Yep that’s right she went and named her daughter what I would have named my daughter but sure Lisa claims she’s not jealous. Why did she even bother coming to comment when she didn’t even want to talk to me at our nanny’s funeral in 2015. She even turned out younger brother against me when him and I were on good terms but that changed when he talked to her and she shared some story with him.

    As for saying this story is not true and attention seeking . Lisa was adopted and had a wonderful life growing up . Something that I didn’t have since I was moved around because no one could handle my behavior. She had everything but yet it seems like it’s just not enough for her.

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  3. Here’s the rest…..

    Alison- Let’s talk truth now as of today! You may leeched your way into my families lives but you really haven’t won me, I know that it was you who introduced Tracey to crack, go ahead and deny it and have her deny it but I and others know that right after her meeting you in Alberta that she lost enough weight to lose a baby but in fact was on crack because of you and your fucked up partner who actually took your 1,700 dollars and you blamed Tracey for taking it. Never think Tracey will forget this but she has no right to be that way when she actually stoled from me and others but the message is, I know that you introduced Tracey to crack out of jealuosy, you know it as much as I know it. Go ahead and make trouble within my family against me because my mother and sisters know that I’m on the up and up as to not really knowing who you are,really…..your a scumbag who needs help and i mean help….to give your own sister crack out of jeaulousy,your a fucked up kid who was raised by jan and dan kunkle. must be nice not to have to work a day in your life selling crack to who you feel are below, to get ahead in life but your a evil scumbag and I will alkways know you to be one…..I HATE YOU WITH ALL OF MY HEART AND SOUL – SCUMBAG WHO IS CALLED, LISSA KUNKLE…..thank God that your not a Hoffman, wouldn’t want you to tarnish my father’s name in any way, shape or form…….FUCK YOU AND TERRY KINGSBURY, who buy the way, if you didn’t know is exactly like you, too bad that you hate him, might want to change your opinion, CUNT

    So there you have it, the real Alison. Not sure if she was drinking vodka while writing me or not but either way, she has some serious issues. I hope she finds the psychiatric help she so desperately needs.

    Reply

    • I never told her it was you who gave me drugs. Again this information got twisted. To confirm my half sister didn’t give me drugs. I had a friend named Lisa, easily mistake to confuse the two with having the same names… Just spelled differently.

      I know one day my mother will see this comment and be even more upset with me but what else is new. I’m not here to be pleasing anyone but to spread the truth.

      Our mother can be a angry person but that’s because of everything she’s been through but that doesn’t mean she should be expressing it every day, just drags you down. We have all been through rough patches and some can be strong enough to get past it, while some others struggle. It’s not a race, we all make mistakes , we are all learning still to this day and will continue to do so. I might not have a relationship with my mom right now but I’ll still love her no matter what because she is my mom but I have had to remove her from my life because I can not have people who bring me down around me, its not healthy or good for my mental health.

      As for my half sister… I forgive her for the things she has said, done and accused me of. I hope that one day she is able to find peace and move on with her life. I don’t ever want to be apart of her life or even my half brothers life but I’ll always wish them the best health and success in life.

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  4. Below is the real Alison, don’t be fooled by her poor me bs. I’m her first born daughter aka “Angie” in the Lost Children article. She sent this to me when she found out I had a baby. But wait, there’s more!! She also accused me of feeding my sister CRACK while she was apparently pregnant and claims that I made my sister lose a baby because as she states, I was “jealous of their relationship.” There’s nothing to be jealous of and I always knew that growing up. I did accuse Tracey of stealing money, I admit that and to this day still know that she did. She can deny it until the end, doesn’t change what I know. I feel all of these articles are very misleading and attention seeking with zero accountability or remorse. Sickening!!

    Alison- Tracey and Daniel aren’t your family. Don’t you recall when you told my mother that you weren’t my daughter because you were adopted?????? Say that to Tracey and Daniel….I bet you don’t have the balls to. I though with ALL of that education that you received that you had more brains than that….obviously NOT! Can’t you just go away and live your life with your parental kidnappers and your husband/baby and leave what didn’t want you in the first place??????? My mother was ashamed when I made her a grandmother you DEMON… FUCK OFF AND DIE…YOUR DEAD TO ME AND ALWAYS WILL BE SO JUST GO AWAY! You honestly believe Tracey wants to be around you or Daniel….neither of them have time or day for you or my mother but my mother does somewhat because you are buying car parts her business every week. Oh by the way, whatever insecurities Janet is always having ( since you both had a good conversation recently about your baby ) , let her drunk’n lying ass know she has got it all and more and to let her know that I hope that she and Dan are proud of their accomplishments in LIFE! I look to ALL of you being Judged ACCORDINGLY by God.

    Does it feel good to get all the materializations from kidnapping parents….obviously so….doesn’t take much to buy your soul huh….Cainly?????? FUCK OFF!!

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    • Are you for real Lisa ? First off I don’t know where our mother got her information about me being pregnant because that is false. Yes, I admit I had a drug problem but I never said it was because of my sister . My mother mixed up the information and I’m guessing this is why my half sister is so upset but that just made her gullible. Lisa you turned my younger brother against me with your bs lies, around the time of our nanny’s passing . I’m sure with the type of person you are aswell you showed him this article and replies. Why you so obsessed with me ??? Also, Claiming I stole that money from you but you then tell me a few years later, that it was actually ur partner who admitted to you that it was him and then blamed me and you apologized to me in a FB msg but sure don’t mention that lol . Did u magically forget that ? Let’s not forget the fact you said you couldn’t have children because why ? Oh that’s right because u had a bag of coke up ur taco . Why did you have to put it up ur taco ? coz you were trying to hide it from the cops and the docs said you couldn’t have kids . Do you remember telling me that ? Then you do have a kid and what did you do as my older HALF sister … You stole the name that I said I would give my baby daughter one day, Serenity. Sounds like a jealous sister to me. Lol . Also, you don’t know what it was like for me in care or even on the streets. You got adopted and had a wonderful life growing up but still some how it just seems like it wasn’t enough for you ? I don’t know why you have so much hate towards me but that’s on you. If you choose to keep living life hating on people, you’re only hurting yourself in the end. You’re how much older then me and you still had the nerve to come and post on this last year. Abit sad if you ask me but eh paint the world a picture of yourself here 🙂

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  5. I also have serious concerns of how Stephen Kimber implicates of how Child Protection initially became involved.Mr.Kimber first indicates in Lost Children that my ex started an application for custody when things went bad in our marriage…this is not true whatsoever…there is no such application that was ever filed anywhere in Nova Scotia that exsist that will support Mr.Kimber’s claims to this.

    Then in this article,Mr.Kimber claims that Child Protection initially becomes involved while were in a welfare hotel where my ex-husband wasn’t suppose to be….again this is not true…we were in this hotel the last two weeks of January/1998 after a social worker interferred with our housing back in Saint John (long story to tell),but we landed in Nova Scotia and got a two bedroom February/1998.

    Child Protection initially became involved because the worker in Sain John made false allegations,which were proven by me in court but altimately were ignored by the judge.

    As far as a cabinet minister ignoring a judges order (another long story),but altimately,I was at my daughter’s bail hearing on October 16/2006 but was lied to when everyone involved including the judge deliberately reset my daughter’s bail hearing to Nov/2006 just to get me out of the way so that they could deal with the bail behind my back without notifying me…instead of releasing my daughter to my custody they put her back with the people who were causing her problems…this is why I bought that bottle and lost it!

    So much to tell…one can email me at alisoncook2008@live.com..if interested to hear the truth!

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  6. Glad to finally see a response from Tracey but unfortunately she is incorrect with her truths once again. Tracey, not only informed me but many others,including her dad,that she had no intentions of giving her dad any money but just decided to leave on a whim (without any notice),like she did again to the lady in this story who was helping her out.

    As far as Stehen Kimber goes regards to writing this story he never once came to me to clarify any information, we actually have had email conversations regards to this because I took a very big offense to two situations Tracey misled in her story;

    The night I kicked her out and the real reasons why; she wanted to go back to her abusive partner and when i would object she became out of control by slamming doors at 1am in the morning;

    As far as how many relationships I’ve had in the last 20 years was only Dan Whalen and Mike Cook…government files will accomodate this fact along with the fact of why I really was transient…Courts have a tendency of making orders but won’t enforce them when the custodian parents breaches the order and runs and hides with the child,it is left up to the parent with access who is expected to locate the child on their own and bring forth an application in that jurisdiction.

    As Stephen Kimber quoted in his edition of Lost Children,last paragragh;
    Tracey it seems…is telling the truth this time when she claims that she’s finished with DCS and vice-a-versa.

    Tracey’s credibaility is one of many concerns I have about her character.

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    • why is it that you change storys to make yours seem like ur always right , either way theres always two sides to a story .. no one is perfect . i simply said what has been going on in my end . i really dislike that you and i are always getting into fights , but then again u always claimm its my fault . i have come a long way and have a great life now 🙂 which i love .

      Reply

  7. Well I am the Girl they are talking about and yes this is true what he says but i did not say i gave my dad half the check i said i was going to leave it to him but ended up not doing so , i wanted that cleared up !
    There is more to this story way more and for asking alison my mother would only be gettin another half of the story . Myself would know more about this then any one .

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  8. i agree with christine,theres more to this story than what’s being said.i would like to know how a cabinet minister can over ride a judges order.if any one of us refused to attend court after being court ordered to,there would be a bench warrant out for an arrest!is this story really going to make us believe that cabinet minister’s are above the “law now”,please don’t insult nova scotia’s intellegence!

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  9. i’ve been keeping track of this story and believe that there’s more to this story than what is being said as i know other parents who have gone through this agency and have learned that a lot is kept hush,hushed.i would like an opportunity to speak to the mother,alison and hear her side of the story in great depth,is there any way of contacting her?

    christine

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