She didn't come out for two weeks.
Stephanie Kassner was 8 years old at the time.
The arguing began when her mother finally exited the bedroom and re-entered her family's life.
“She'd left me to take care of all four of us,” Kassner says, “and when she came out I'd tell her she was doing things wrong with the baby. I'd say, ‘He doesn't like it that way.' ”
They argued.
Fought.
Screamed.
Threw things.
The fight expanded into other issues, and lasted seven years.
“She was mentally ill, and it was hard to grow up around the constant fighting,” Kassner says.
By the time she was 15, her parents had been divorced for three years and Kassner had run away from home several times.
The young girl had both a therapist and a probation officer.
The therapist, whose husband worked at one, suggested the teenager consider a group home.
When she told her probation officer that's what she wanted - whatever it took to get out of her mother's house - he told her with one more violation, he'd actually have no choice but to recommend she be removed and placed in a group home or foster care.
She didn't have to think twice.
“I ran away the same day,” Kassner says.
Stephanie Kassner spent 3 1/2 years in one of the Missoula group homes run by Youth Homes, a western Montana nonprofit that turns 35 years old Thursday.
Begun in 1971 - a local group determined there was a need for someplace to put troubled adolescent girls, executive director Geoffrey Birnbaum says, then inexplicably opened a home for boys - Youth Homes has grown and evolved over the years.
It now has four group homes in Missoula, three shelters in western Montana, a foster care and adoption program, and several other programs for troubled youths.
It has taken care of thousands of children in the last 35 years.
Youth Homes knows what became of Kassner. Now 27 years old, she works for one of its services, the Dan Fox Foster Care and Adoption Program, as a fiscal assistant and attends the University of Montana College of Technology.
But it wants to know how its other alums are doing.
Good or bad.
“We have alums who are approaching the age of 50,” Birnbaum says. “We have been so blessed by this community. You hear about ‘donor weariness' these days, and we have the opportunity to not use this birthday to raise money. This would be the greatest gift, if we could reconnect with these people.”
Youth Homes has 8,000 alums - some who have been in its care only a few hours or days, and 1,000 who spent large chunks of their adolescence in its group or foster homes.
The organization wants to hear from any and all - and former staff members as well.
“We'd like them to connect to us, and to each other if they'd like,” Birnbaum says.
Whether the alums have successes to brag about or their letters bear a state prison postmark, Youth Homes wants to hear from them.
“We don't quit caring just because they're not on a billable list,” Birnbaum says. “They've all been through an experience that is unique to them, and we want to know, what difference did it make that we did this?”
This is the difference it made to Stephanie Kassner:
“I made the honor roll for the first time” after moving into the group home, she says. “I did so many things I hadn't done before - ice skating, snowboarding, cross-country skiing. We took trips to Glacier and Yellowstone. There were art classes, poetry classes.”
It all happened in a structured environment. She had to be up by a certain time, showered by a certain time, have eaten breakfast by a certain time and gotten chores done as well.
There were required exercise sessions, individual counseling sessions, group and family therapy.
“Plus school,” says Kassner, who graduated from Big Sky High School in 1997.
“Like a lot of kids we see, Stephanie was forced into acting as the adult in her household when she was a child,” Birnbaum says. “When she talks about the activities she participated in in the group home - I think one thing we do is give kids a chance to go backward, to experience things other kids experience. And that lets them move forward.”
Structure reduces the amount of arguing about “mundane useless stuff,” Birnbaum says, “but it's more than having rules.”
It's about learning to trust adults again, and having a chance to discover themselves outside of a dysfunctional setting.
“There are things you don't learn at home when your parents are dysfunctional,” Kassner says. “I think I have a good picture of what an appropriate relationship is now. I feel like a very average, normal person.”
“Whether they're a success story like Steph or facing prison time for meth, no one should have to face what they had to face as children,” Birnbaum says. “But we'd love to hear from a broad range of them, and they don't have to tell us anything they don't want to.”
She is blunt about where she would have ended up without Youth Homes:
“Honestly, I probably would have committed suicide,” Kassner says. “There were more than enough times that I contemplated it when I lived at home.”
Instead, she graduated from high school, attended the University of Montana briefly, then moved to Los Angeles, where her father had gone after the divorce.
She found work in an office there, then moved to Nevada, where she landed a similar job and got involved in a relationship.
But that baby brother she'd cared for after her mother gave birth? Her mother abandoned him and the rest of the family when Mitch reached eighth grade.
“I'd always said that if anything happened, I would always take care of my brothers,” Kassner says.
So at the age of 21, Kassner again became her youngest brother's keeper. He moved to Nevada to live with his sister.
It soured the relationship she was in, but that led to Kassner and Mitch moving back to Montana, and that eventually led to her job with the organization she credits with saving her life.
She fed him, held him, changed his diapers when she was 8 years old, and she raised Mitch mostly by herself the last five years.
Mitch graduated from high school last spring. Another brother, Brett, became Mitch's father-figure after the divorce, and Stephanie would call on Brett when she felt she wasn't getting through to Mitch.
It wasn't always easy, Kassner says, for any of them. But it was worth it. Mitch has a job and a place of his own, and is trying to decide what he wants to do with his life.
Stephanie has little contact with her parents. Her father always supported his children financially, she says, but they rarely talk.
Her only communication with her mother, who lives in the Bitterroot Valley, is in written form. It just works better that way, Kassner says.
“No one can ever say, ‘I never said that' anymore,” she explains.
“Youth Homes doesn't save lives,” Birnbaum says. “But we give kids a place to settle down, calm down, stop fighting and figure their lives out for themselves.”
Stephanie Kassner is proof. She is quick to smile, has an infectious laugh. She has a job she loves, wisdom beyond her years.
Most of all, she has a future.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com
Are you a Youth Homes alum or former staff member? They'd love to hear how you're doing. Visit http://www.youthhomes.com and fill out the questionnaire that will be posted later this month. Or contact Youth Homes at 550 N. California St., Missoula, MT 59802, or call 721-2704 and request a paper copy. The questions pertain to where you're at, where you're working, whether you're married, have children, etc., but you only have to answer the ones you choose to.
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