Do Gooder: Paula Riggs

Aug 1, 2014 | People

[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Image: Jeromy Price”][/title]

Paula Riggs grew up in big, noisy family. There were seven children, four girls and three boys. What she remembers most about her parents was that they lived for their kids. Their home was as busy as a train station, one kid going here, another there. “Piano lessons, dance lessons, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, band, Little League, you name it and we did it,” Paula says. “They didn’t have a lot of money, and my mother didn’t work. They focused everything they had on us.”

There was also order in the house, due in part to her father’s military background. The year Paula entered the third grade, her family moved back to Fort Smith, Arkansas, her parents’ hometown, just after her dad retired from the Navy. Her mother, Billie, seemed to have enough energy for two people. She was president of the Girl Scouts, president of the PTA, and volunteered at the library and the Donald W. Reynolds Cancer Support House, something she continued until the day she died.

Paula’s parents gave her a guide for success as she grew up: stay busy, help all you can, keep learning. And Paula embraced it, often showing up with a stray dog or cat. She smiles remembering it, the parade of animals that stole her heart.

After high school, Paula went to college but soon dropped out. In her late twenties, she returned, intent on becoming a forest ranger. “I couldn’t handle the math, so I started looking through the course catalog and I saw the Rehabilitation degree and switched over.”

That decision made all the difference in Paula’s life. She began working with foster kids, and that led her to the WATCH program through Western Arkansas Counseling and Guidance in Fort Smith. She is now the coordinator. WATCH stands for Western Arkansas Therapeutic Children’s Homes.

“We take children that can’t really make it in regular foster care, that have been in a lot of group homes, or hospitals,” Paula says. “We try to work with them to where they can either go back home or be adopted. They have behavior problems, emotional problems, and usually they’ve been in foster care for a while before we get to that point.”

She has seen a lot in the twenty-five years she’s been working in her field. Much of it will break your heart. “None of these kids asked to be in the position they’re in. They got here due to circumstances they couldn’t control. I was drawn to the teenagers early on because they were at an age where they were making decisions about their future, about what their life would be like as adults.”

And because of that, because her heart turned so easily to teens, she adopted a fifteen-year-old boy named Tony, who’s now forty-one. “I don’t really remember the decision making process except that he needed me,” Paula says. “Life changed, of course. I couldn’t just go anywhere I wanted anytime I wanted. He never called me mom, but he had little nicknames for me. For a while he called me Moonamer. Something he made up. I am his mother, I am his family.

“He had a lot of anger issues. But he was really bright, really intelligent. He just needed some stability. At that time, he’d never attended one school for a complete year, that’s how much he moved around. So, after me, he went to Northside for three years. There were problems at school for the first year or two, but he finally settled down.”

Paula, who never married, smiles when she talks about Tony. Just before Paula’s father died in 1986, Tony asked him if he could change his last name, (this was before the adoption was final) so that he would have the same surname as the rest of the family. The gesture is not lost on Paula, from this son who means so much to her.

Tony was not the last teen Paula took in. Years later she adopted a fourteen-year-old girl who’s now thirty. Paula describes her daughter as a hard worker who was dealt a hard lot in life. Paula sees her often, and is now the guardian of her daughter’s little girl.

Paula’s sisters are in awe of the life she’s living. The call her the woman with an endless heart. She’s the favorite aunt in the family, the one all the kids gravitate to. For a time, Paula’s brother, a single dad, lived with her and she helped him with his four kids. The house was bursting at the seams but no one minded.

“I think I’m used to having people around because there were so many of us growing up. You might think it was chaotic, but it never was. There was a lot of order there. I still help out with my brother’s kids, help with Girl Scouts with them, and I’m busy with my granddaughter. All of it makes my life more fulfilling, and a whole lot busier.”

She looks again to her mother, the woman who never stopped volunteering, even until the last hours of her life. In fact, after she died, the sisters got a call from the Cancer Support House offering condolences and telling them they’d be honored to use the table decorations her mother had assured them she’d recently finished for their upcoming fundraiser, the Boot Scooters Ball. The sisters looked everywhere for the decorations but couldn’t find them. And so they spent an entire evening making them, sharing stories of their mother, reminiscing about her sweet, sweet heart.

Paula realizes her childhood is a stark contrast to the circumstances she sees working with the kids in the WATCH program. She understands how fortunate she’s been, how lucky she is to be so close to her brothers and sisters, to have such precious memories of her own parents.

One of the things she’s learned in all these years is that while life is not always fair, and that trouble often strikes innocent children, there are also good people trying to make things better. She is surrounded by them, and she sees the difference they make every day.

Paula begins to talk about the kids who’ve come through the WATCH program. Some she never hears from after they become adults. But others she sees once in a while when she’s out and about. A few days before, she’d seen one of the girls who is now a mom herself, and entirely devoted to her children.

Regularly, she receives letters from a woman in Florida, who was once a WATCH kid. She is happily married and raising a family of her own. What Paula remembers about her is how much she wanted to reunite with her biological mother, a woman so broken it was not possible. The girl ran away from foster care repeatedly, seeking out her mother, hoping to make things right. What she wanted was a happy home, a safe place, and she wanted that place to be with the woman who gave her life.

But look at the girl now, Paula says. Look at what she’s built for herself. She has a stable family. She has a grateful heart. She is bringing up her children the way she wanted to be brought up herself. It turned out to be a beautiful story.

It is one of Paula’s great gifts, this ability to see a world where bad things happen and immediately look for some small good thing. “I see successes all the time,” she says. “I get to meet the greatest kids.” She smiles, her face lights up, and she seems truly, truly happy. It is as if her story has come full circle. Paula was brought up by parents who lived for their kids, and now she lives for these children who populate her busy life, who fill her world with purpose.

Do South Magazine

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