startle Michael because I knew he’d be wary. So I said hello, and we were silent for minutes, as he turned his blond head slowly to the left and stared at me.
Who does he think I am? I wondered. And what is he seeing? Shouldn’t I be feeling something? But ballooning stillness itself became a feeling, and my lungs filled with an immensely tranquil emptiness I’ve never found in meditation. It was the space love would rush into as soon as I let go and let the next breath in.
BY THE second morning I wanted to adopt. Could we? Was it even remotely possible? But of course we were foster parents—that’s what we’d signed up for. His mom was complying with the plan Social Services had drawn up, and Dad was temporarily “out of the picture,” in the shorthand expression that everyone I met seemed to like to use.
At first we had no idea how long Michael would stay with us, and little understanding of the stages of the court process. Terms like adjudication and stipulation were as alien to us as they probably were to the “bios”; I know of one determined foster mom who attended every hearing and always tried to find a way to slip the judge photos of the kids who were thriving in her care, hoping the judge would grasp the stakes. Other foster parents I met felt it was their duty to be present and, for the sake of the kids in their care, attended and squelched whatever discomfort they felt. Coward that I was—and completely shaken the first time I encountered Michael’s mom in an agency hallway—the notion of attending court (which is apparently more commonplace now, a decade later, as is education about the process) seemed incredibly confrontational to me. Foster parents were rarely, if ever, invited to testify, and we were pledged to support the agency’s decisions about the case anyway. Simply sitting in court, I felt, would have seemed to spell out the us-versus-them divide that we tried so hard to erase from our hearts and minds. Worst of all, to me, it seemed invasive of the bioparents’ privacy. Curious as I was, I didn’t think any bioparents would see us as their allies. If I showed up at court, I didn’t think they would ever forgive me.
For Michael and his siblings, sometimes I heard when court dates were coming up, while other times they were mentioned after the fact, in passing—a reminder of our irrelevance, was how I took this. Like everything the children’s first social worker, Kayla, said, I constantly found myself wanting to say, “Please, wait, slow down, explain.” I didn’t know if I was snooping or stupid or if it seemed like I was overstepping and second-guessing her plan. But pushy was not how I wanted to seem with a social worker, and I knew it would not get results. In hindsight, I think this worker was almost as new as I was in my very different role; still, I was relieved when another Child Protective Services director took over the office after Michael’s case closed. It was too late for all my questions, but from that point on, it seemed to me that transparency increased for the foster parents.
All I really cared about was knowing our sentence—how soon we’d have to give up our toddler. When I first heard that Michael would be with us for three months, I was baffled—what kind of change could happen in that time? The parents had split before the children were removed, his mom had a new boyfriend who planned to come to several visits, and Dad would soon end up in jail for unrelated reasons. I didn’t want to get into the family’s business, but weren’t we supposed to be some kind of partners in this? Was some kind of change not the point? Three months—twelve weeks—barely a season—seemed like nothing. I was confused, and if I didn’t know why we had Michael in the first place, how could I know what progress they were seeking? Or was it none of my business?
(“You didn’t know why they were removed?” an agency staff member asks me now, aghast. “The children’s social worker never told you?” My usual assertiveness had failed me, I’m chagrined to say, the second I thought I might displease an authority or seem a pest. And back then I’d had no comparable experience to go by.)
Later, we would hear the estimate of a three-month time frame miraculously grow to six, due to some time-consuming practical issues. Anything that meant Michael would be with us longer was manna to me. But his mother had rights, and her social worker was determined that Mom would have a successful reunification with her children, no matter what obstacles might arise. Or, as a more diplomatic staff member eventually told us, “Mom’s done everything we’ve asked her, and she deserves the right to fail. Or to succeed on her own terms, even if it’s not the future you’d most like to see.” If I’d read that in a training manual, I know I would have agreed wholeheartedly.
FROM OUR first moments face to face with Michael, we had every bit of the staggering love-and-wonder rush that I imagine every new parent experiences, and more. We always knew there was an expiration date ahead—the snapshots of memory weren’t going to be wistful nostalgia to laugh over with a teen. More like a Snapchat photo, for once that child was gone, those memories would surely vaporize: the sweet, clean, pointed face; the little sailor suit I crammed him into for a Walmart portrait; a love of chicken nuggets so great that he brought his stuffed toy rooster into the kitchen and begged me to cook it; the laughter at a bubble in the stream; his mania for cars, motors, and real, dangerous tools (this was a kid not fooled by their colorful plastic facsimiles); the “God bless” litanies I helped him recite with names of people I didn’t know; the untraceable, lingering smell of his room and hair. Every gain was a loss as well, in the moment it occurred.
SWEET HOME
During one of the hearings leading up to the reunification, the lawyer representing Luke, the children’s dad (who was in jail), told the judge that the children’s still-married mother should not be allowed to take them to live with another man—and the judge agreed. It was his lawyer’s idea, not Dad’s, as it turned out: he despised Benny, the new boyfriend, but Luke hated DSS more and wanted the kids taken out of foster care and returned to one parent, that is, to their mom.
At first this ruling had meant an unexpected gift of time—instead of having the children returned to her after just three months, Jessica first would have to get a home of her own, apart from her boyfriend. This meant a long process of qualifying for a federally subsidized housing voucher, then finding one of the scarce rentals that would accept the government payments, then furnishing it using Goodwill coupons and somebody’s borrowed pickup truck, and so on. Even with the constant hurried help of her social worker, it would take months. It was a huge reprieve for Will and me. Not only would we have more days with Michael and further opportunity for him to grow and learn but, less charitably—as many foster parents know—such a delay also would mean time for the birth parent to screw up—or more time for old screwups to come to light.
JESSICA WAS always sweet and complimentary to me when she carried Michael down the stairs and buckled him into my car after the weekly supervised visits at DSS. His siblings would be rocketing around, and Jessica would talk to them sternly, calling the kids ma’am and sir as the social worker looked on approvingly. Jessica’s hair was often a completely different color from visit to visit, but she always looked like she’d made an effort to think about how she’d be seen, as I did myself.
I glimpsed small lapses, though, once the family progressed to unsupervised visits. To me, this new stage of the case plan was awkward and unwelcome, as no social workers were even in the vicinity; the agency was short-staffed that summer and I was asked to meet Jessica and Benny alone for the weekly rendezvous to drop off and pick up Michael and his siblings for full Saturday visits. Suddenly Jessica was wearing tiny halters or tube tops instead of Coke-branded sweatshirts, with her hair pulled up in a streaky knot instead of clean and brushed. She and Benny would drive off with the children to a vaguely located lake—and come back with balled-up wet clothes turned inside out, half belonging to kids unknown and half of Michael’s missing. Brother Ryan would be talking in fragmented riddles and sister Isabelle would be in a speechless huff. The swimming diapers Michael had been wearing that morning would be gone, of course, and so would all the extras; when Jessica returned him to us, he’d be shirtless and in a wet swimsuit. By the time we’d get back to our home, the padding of his car seat would be soaked in urine.
I PICKED up all three kids from these daylong unsupervised visits, because Isabelle’s foster mom ran her florist business out of her house and was minding a baby, while Ryan’s had four or five other kids to juggle. But much more unnerving than the extra driving and messy car was