CHILDPROOF
I thought I had no illusions. I thought I might be the first person who’d bought into the official DSS line. After many years of pleasing teachers, I could parrot the workbooks right back: the actual goal of foster care is that children will go back home again. Reunification. A mouthful of a term I found oddly impersonal from the start. I learned that food cabinets could be filled and support services found to fit a family’s needs; I believed that drug addictions and abusive relationships were problems weak parents sweated out, talked through, and moved on from. Not problems that some just got better at hiding. Ever the compliant student, I had the notion that foster kids were like library books taken briefly out of circulation, improved with new binding and taped-up pages, then returned to a rebuilt, sturdier shelf. At that point, I assumed, my real life would resume with its movie dates, trail rides, and the spontaneous girlfriend weekends I’d read about in Oprah.
I didn’t want to adopt. I’d said that up front once we started the licensing process—a conviction that would change the instant a real child was in our home. Until that point, I saw foster kids as theoretical beings in transit—souls in purgatory—whose wait might be made more pleasant by a stopover in our home. But what would make the next decade so wrenching—seeing children going back to seemingly unchanged situations, again, again, again—was largely absent from my early fantasies.
For Will the thorny issue about foster parenting was rules: he’s a true product of the sixties, who endears himself as a teacher by never doing anything the way he’s supposed to. He was not about to change that approach for this foster parenting venture driven by state regulations, court orders, and restrictions, which include not being allowed to introduce foster children as foster children (“our friend who’s staying with us right now” was the trainer’s suggestion). I knew that Will would be fantastic with actual kids, but his resentful reluctance to accede to requirements like getting twelve hours of training per year even while we were waiting to get our first placement, or taking the deadbolt off the front door as the fire marshal required, was already causing tension between us. Entirely predictable tension, but I constantly feared he might back out of the whole endeavor.
MIDWAY THROUGH that winter of 2005, we finally got a call from Gerri, the social worker who’d licensed us. She knew I’d be terrified to start with an older child, no matter how she’d tried to dispel my wrong belief that the youngest children were blank slates psychologically. Today I understand that even a fetus can experience stress, connecting shouting voices with surging cortisol, even if Mom is not punched in the stomach or pushed down stairs. Before these babies are even born, their reflexes are set.
But, okay, it was our first time out, and there was a sixteen-month-old, Michael, who had two older siblings—all were with a relative for the moment, but when she went back to work in a few weeks, Michael would come to us, Gerri said. No county foster home was available that could take all three children, plus Michael had to-be-expected developmental delays and might benefit from individual attention. (It was almost funny that I’d expected those delays to be emotional: He needs to learn to bond, to love, to trust. Instead I was shocked at the prosaic nature of his preschool services worker’s goals for him: “We want him to learn how to hold a spoon. To drink from a cup.”)
WERE WE ready for this?
Between grading midterms, Will got caught up on his HBO and snow shoveling, while I calculated how to rework my teaching schedule, plugged up the electrical outlets, and figured out the puzzles of child locks and stair gates—all good preparation for working the mystery latches and Möbius straps of a car seat. Two days later, though, Gerri called back and said stop, don’t buy anything yet—at the first hearing, the judge sent the kids back.
That was the first big “huh?” of our lives as foster parents. One day parents are unfit and the next day they aren’t? A different judge can turn things around just like that?
Judges seemed to be the wild card in every birth and foster family’s outcome. And this was months before another foster mother told me about an infant who had recently left her care: the three-month-old had arrived with twenty-eight broken bones and a terror of bathwater; the detectives were still trying to pin this abuse on the birth father when a judge sent the baby back to the grandmother’s home, next door to the father’s place, on one hour’s notice.
ONE HUNDRED
I didn’t expect to hear anything more about Michael or his family—I assumed we’d just go back on the roster of families open for a placement. Then the night before the end of our spring university semester, a new, young social worker called. “Mom isn’t doing what she’s supposed to” was the worker’s only tight-lipped remark. Something had happened; I never found out what. (It’s the first thing everyone wants to know, however obliquely they ask . . . and you can’t tell anyone anyway. Later, the question changes to “So, is she doing better now?” She always means “Mom,” while people rarely ask about the dad. Like our opinions would make any difference. Like we could be the judge.)
Michael, now a full-fledged toddler, would be brought to our house from day care the next day, while his brother and sister would be taken on to be placed with two other families. Zero to one hundred: nine months in one night. My head was reeling. We went directly to Walmart and got diapers, two baby bottles, a sippy cup (a term I couldn’t believe I’d hear so many adults say with a straight face), and a crib, which Will spent most of that night piecing together. He would wait at home to greet Michael while I was teaching my last class.
I got through that class in a fog, pinching my forearms with excitement. Would I think back on this, like a movie character, as a true before-and-after moment? One of the few in life you could distinctly recognize? This was the day my life would change—maybe. I thought this in actual words, yet words were all they seemed to be.
The next day DSS called after the family’s social worker had raced from court to pick up the siblings from school and day care before Mom could zoom up and confront her. But Michael was coming with just the clothes on his back, as is commonly the case. I might want to head back to Walmart, I was warned, and pick up a couple of outfits for him to start with. In training we’d learned we could spend $160 every six months on clothes and shoes for a foster child. Walmart wasn’t required, but shopping there and at consignment stores was the only way to make that budget work, no matter how you felt about the store’s sweatshop supply chain.
I zombie-walked into Walmart for the second time in twenty-four hours, hardly able to grasp that Will was having our life-changing experience, while I was out buying a Cookie-Monster-plays-soccer outfit in stretchy gray and pajamas adorned with a red-haired Rugrat in a pith helmet. This was the dawning of yet another realization—that you have to pay a lot more for toddler clothes that don’t advertise something. And even the expensive clothes—Old Navy or OshKosh—either have a brand logo front and center or they’re advertising fake brands of surfboards or safari lodges. If you want an outfit with a plain picture of your basic steamroller—one that doesn’t have eyes and a name and well-known catchphrase—you pay a premium.
It was evening by that point. Will called to say that Michael had arrived, eaten a cut-up hot dog and some scrambled egg, and was settling with a bottle while they waited for me. I knew Michael would have had a bewildering day, and that he’d have to go to sleep soon so he’d be ready to go to his required educational day care in the morning. Yet I walked through Walmart stunned, unable to focus. I hadn’t even realized toddlers’ clothes were sized by years, months, and the letter T. Or that diapers were sized by weight—a weight I couldn’t begin to estimate. I felt like an imposter in the children’s department, and I sensed the eyes of other new parents on me as I scrutinized clothing tags and held combo outfits up to gauge the fit for a child I hadn’t ever seen. Would they peg me as a kidnapper? Or what if his mom was actually there and saw me? All the experienced foster parents had horror stories of running into angry birth parents, invariably at Walmart.
I got home at 7 p.m., turned the doorknob, and eased over the threshold, hoping to get close enough to see Michael before he saw me. I found him and Will in our bedroom, where Will was lying on our bed, flying Michael over him in the classic airplane