can’t be the only time you do this, I remember instructing myself, amazed that even off duty and living two floors below, I’d waken at 3 a.m., seconds before the baby cried from the crib beside her parents’ room. I’d hoped to mold her into an adventurer and so hauled her in the baby backpack up through the fragrant, urban hillside eucalyptus groves and pushed her stroller through the endless avenues, past the Asian fruit stores, and along the perpetually cold and foggy beach. I heard her first word, leaf, spent $25 for her to ride a pony around a ring, and watched her learn to toddle-run through the Jurassic carrot-top palms in the arboretum. Whatever my future held, I resolved I’d have this kind of experience again.
Years later, I had it to some degree when my stepson, Vince, would come to visit—although more often Will would drive a day and night to see him—but he and Will were so fiercely enfolded in their tent of time together that the best I could do was trail along on their outings and bite my tongue at their daily trips to Walmart to buy more worthless plastic, as even they called it. (To his lasting delight, Michael would inherit a whole closet full of those Lego pieces, Hot Wheels, netherworlds, and minigarages in the years to come.)
So a decade later and a continent away from my nanny days, with a home and barn filled with rescue pets, I was excited to move back to the human dimension—at least so long as no one brought us a teen as stubborn and secretive as I had been. (That karmic wheel spun around much later.) The thing I didn’t realize then is that it’s not just hardened teens or older children that people fear—by the time a baby is born, the damage can already have been done. For every baby who hears the poetry of Robert Frost or Goodnight Moon read to her in utero, dozens hear shrieked curses instead, dozens have synapses permanently frayed by alcohol. They don’t just “move on.” Whatever chain of misfortunes has landed them in foster care has already marked them and sent them careening down the very first game board chute, while everyone else their age is scrambling up the ladder.
BEFORE WILL and I could even start the training required for prospective foster parents, we ran into obstacles. First, the emotional kind—Will was basically on board, but obtaining the agreement of his then preteen son, who lived halfway across the country with his mother, was painful. Vince had sobbed over the phone, unable to bear the idea of another boy’s getting so much time with his dad—time that Vince himself had missed. Impatient as I was to get a foster child in our home, I felt awful for provoking this.
But the physical obstacles were what made me gnaw my knuckles with frustration. We lived in the mountains, where pure springwater is bottled and sold region-wide, yet the environmental bureaucrats in the polluted, chlorinated state capital had deemed this very same mountain springwater unsafe for foster homes. Period. Our only alternative was to spend thousands drilling a well. So much for the supposed abuse, neglect, hunger, and epidemic meth and opioid use in infamous Appalachia. The problem was the premium mountain springwater. Miraculously, a state senator spent months pushing a bill through the legislature that relaxed the water restrictions, freeing us and scores of other families in the mountain counties to pursue foster care licensing.
I’m not one of those people who believe that everything happens for a reason, much as I wish I could. But if we’d been able to jump into fostering with no obstacles and delays, we’d likely have had a different child or two in our home already by the time Michael was removed, and then what would have become of him? Would my now beloved Michael have gone instead to one of our new friends? Would we ever even have met him? Sensed a cosmic missed connection? The whole thought of such a miserable parallel universe made me dizzy.
Will and I went through the standard foster parent training with an unusually small group—two single-mom best friends—led by the awesome social worker we now called Gerri, with her cynical optimism and equally awesome wardrobe of gypsy skirts. In addition to leading training for new and renewing foster parents, she was the one designated to assess and license homes, to find and make the best possible placement for a child coming into foster care, and to serve as foster families’ liaison to the agency, offering ongoing support and addressing foster parents’ questions or concerns. (A birth family involved with the agency was assigned a separate worker to serve as the family’s advocate and guide.) With Gerri, we worked through six booklets; learned to inventory needs and strengths and to recast one as the other, like sides of an algebra equation; heard the words love and logic linked for the first time; went through background checks, for which we held our breath over Will’s teen years and I thanked God for all I had gotten away with during my pre–midlife crisis in my twenties. Last stop was the sheriff’s department, where we rolled our fingerprints over the new touch screen. Will’s usual jokes went unreciprocated, while I studied the list of criminal charges posted on the wall, amazed at all the gradations.
As we finished the training, we grew ever more energized at the prospect of seeing the composite children in our workbooks, their strengths, needs, and behaviors neatly charted, come to life in three dimensions. We were ready, we thought, for bedwetting, fire starting, tears, crayoned walls, and tentative hugs. We were ready to dump massive quantities of abstract, unconditional love on a kid, despite having been warned that this was not the universal fix.
We were ready to respect the bioparents, as Gerri called them, as wounded grown children still dealing with their own unmet needs but always doing their best to cope. We were ready to accept that, no matter what, they were the parents “our” children would always love and need the most. Good students that we were, we believed such understanding could override our instincts.
AFTER CONQUERING the water situation, we did not expect trouble from the fire inspector. We’d thought we were ready for him as well—our ingenious, custom-built 1980s house had previously housed a family with disabled children and seemed perfectly safe; our smoke alarms worked only too well and could detect a bag of slightly singed popcorn before you’d even opened the microwave. We had our fire extinguishers, upstairs and down—okay, no problem to get bigger ones and fix them on mounting brackets. The door to the hot water heater had to be vented. The closet next to it had to be permanently emptied (and was every time we got a relicensing inspection). Thank goodness they did not measure the length of the dryer hose, which snakes its way through the basement before venting outdoors. But an upstairs bedroom window was a few inches short of standard width.
Who knew that becoming a foster parent would involve recutting a window so it would be wide enough for a fire ladder to fit through its frame? (Never mind the bigger question: Would that ladder truck, stationed in the center of town, actually get here in time?) In an endeavor driven by heart, soul, compassion, and angst, who would think so much comes down to measurements?
I understand, of course, why foster homes have to be physically safe in every aspect. And I understand why the inspections have to be picky. I understand why smoke detectors have to be placed seven feet high and not five, since smoke rises to the ceiling and then drops down. I just wish that the regulations went both ways, so that when foster children return to birth homes—where everyone smokes, does their own wiring, and produces heat by opening the oven doors, lighting unvented kerosene heaters, and stoking woodstoves illegally installed in trailers—those birth homes would have to have at least one working smoke detector with an unexpired nine-volt battery that hasn’t been filched for use elsewhere. But there’s no such requirement.
Eight hundred dollars and five months later, the fire marshal okayed our beautifully vented water heater door and a new window in a bedroom we hadn’t even planned to use.
THAT WAS summer 2004, more than two years after I’d first read the newspaper story about Laurie Marsh and her husband. We were ready. Ready to begin waiting.
All those websites and billboards about “waiting children”—with their dark-ringed eyes, dropped teddy bears, and reproving stares? Well, that waiting went both ways, we learned, especially as we were licensed by a county’s social services agency. Thankfully, our local social workers were conscious of the need to make a good match, especially as we were just starting out, but we understood they couldn’t predict when birth parents would mess up so badly that a judge would approve intervention. Even then, we knew from our licensing classes that social workers were required first to search for family members who could handle a kinship placement.
So we were