A quick search of internet comments about social worker interventions, and suddenly every commenter, left wing to right, is a Tea Party libertarian, so certain everything social workers do is government interference and overreach—“Getting in our business” is the all-purpose description. Whether it’s free-range kids, homesteading megafamilies living in tents, poverty rates of investigated families—the latest media outrage seems to bring liberals and libertarians together in judgment of social work. But at the time, when we were facing Michael’s imminent return to a new home with a sudden near stepdad, I wanted to demand: Where does all this “interference” happen? Because it sure isn’t here. Everything our social workers did, they ascribed to state codes and mandates that protect the primacy of parents’ rights, so was it really just our little agency that seemed so conscientiously cautious? So careful in their prescribed responses? So full of belief in the parental potential of people most of the rest of us would have written off? At the time I didn’t know what to believe or whom. I simply knew that my own beliefs, complaints, and hopes were entirely beside the point.
MY FEARS took deeper root when the children began to leave us—first brother Ryan, five, and sister Isabelle, almost seven, went back together to Jessica; then, two weeks later, at just over two years of age, Michael left foster care with us and joined his siblings and mother in her boyfriend’s remote, phoneless trailer, more than seventy minutes from our home. How could this be called reunification, I bitterly asked Mona, when the children were moving—I certainly couldn’t say returning—to a family configuration that had never existed, to a home in a county where they had never officially lived, to a home that was not leased in their mother’s name, and to a situation in which a judge had ordered the children should not live? At the same time, to fulfill the court’s decree the family was renting a crummier and more expensive town trailer in which they had never spent a night, paid for by government housing funds; the unused trailer was the essence of government waste, which perfectly suited the landlord.
I STILL don’t understand how this situation could have happened, but neither that supervisor nor the social worker stayed at the agency much longer. Yet, if we’d made any kind of a protest, well . . . we’d signed the foster parent agreement that we would actively support the agency’s reunification goals and never interfere.
“You’re not going to stop this,” the social worker told the director of our day care who had called to report Michael’s “belt, belt” warnings after the weekend visits. They would all go to live with the boyfriend with the ice-blue eyes and endless suitcases of Busch beer in the trunk of his car. “Nothing’s going to stop this.”
And nothing did.
NIGHT OR DAY
Our experience as foster parents was unusual. Unusually unusual, given how different each child and family’s experience can be. Michael had indeed stayed with us six months before being returned to this new incarnation of his family (Dad newly out of jail and Mom living in the next county with a much older boyfriend—hardly an uncommon relationship dynamic, I was to discover). Amazingly, we were able to remain involved after reunification, thanks to Michael’s paternal grandmother and his still-young mother, Jessica. At first I was filled with cold doubt and despair when Jessica hesitated to let me plan a visit during Michael’s first weeks back home; I didn’t know whether to blame the social worker, who might well have advised a break from us to let Michael settle, or Jessica’s boyfriend, who seemed eager to fence his new family off from any more prying eyes or interference, or my own voracious need to cling to Michael and nail down some assurance of a future with him. Most likely, it was a combination of the three that initially scared Jessica away. But after a couple of false starts, she stayed true to her word: Michael had lost enough people already, she’d often said, and didn’t have to lose Will and me. Jessica had lost plenty of special people herself, she would tell me, from her only protective and nurturing relative to the afterschool support team that had cheered her through middle school to the teachers who’d wept when she was pulled out of ninth grade to tend her siblings at home. Even the destruction of her first hard-earned car, which had been borrowed without her permission and wrecked, sounded like the soul-killing loss of one more treasured relationship. So whatever resistance, natural jealousy, or awkwardness Jessica might have faced in allowing Will and me to maintain our bond with Michael as he grew, she would not let her youngest child lose the love and support of which she had been robbed repeatedly herself. I longed to believe this, but I knew there were conditions—and that Benny held sway over all decisions.
For Michael and his siblings, home life was often chaotic, traumatic, dangerous, exciting, and unpredictable—sometimes visibly so and always weighted with secrets and adult pressures. Before, during, and after foster care, older sister Isabelle clung to the role of little mother to Michael, while Ryan and Michael often believed themselves responsible for the well-being of Jessica and Benny.
Despite how friendly and bluntly honest he could be, I was terrified of Benny, whose background check had not raised concerns at DSS: his record showed prison time and lost driver’s licenses—but no substantiated child abuse. The same boyfriend taught the boys one of their favorite sayings—“It’s not a threat, it’s a promise”—and never went anywhere without a knife pouch on his belt. To this day, the teenage Michael hates walking in the dark, even if he is holding my hand, because he remembers running for his life from Benny’s shouted threats through the night, pulling his mom along as she stumbled. Benny’s white-blue eyes shock even now when called up on a computer image search; in a nonstop stream of talk, he’d enumerate for any stranger the elements of his swirling inner turmoil, an uproar that Michael came to believe only he could quell. And when Michael was a teen and at last in our custody, he would ask if our family could get into the witness protection program, although we were never part of any case against Benny.
Also unsettling was that Jessica was almost young enough to have been my daughter, while Benny and I were of the same generation, albeit worlds apart culturally and economically. And I eventually heard that before their removal, Michael’s siblings had seen Benny and their father fighting and supposedly trying to stab each other in a parking lot; for years the boys revisited this story, insisting it was “over a dog.” They later admitted seeing Benny choke their mother as well, but they knew to keep that a secret from us. From fear of Benny, but even more, I guessed, of betraying the family and losing the mother they had only recently regained. The idea that such violence might cause her to leave Benny and take the children with her was not the simple option it might appear, no matter how much help she was offered; the kids seemed to know that keeping their mom was a package deal, bound to the very force that might destroy her.
These children breathed fear on a daily basis—fear mingled with the ever-present cigarette smoke so its scent was no longer detectable, just part of the air. Unsurprisingly, that was how Benny said he had spent his childhood as well, trying to protect himself and his mother from alcohol-fueled violence, and never knowing safety or freedom until he’d grown big enough to fight back. That such cycles repeat is news to no one; the question of how to stop them in the next generation is what confounds parents of all kinds.
Back before reunification, I thought I understood why Michael needed to return to his mother and siblings—so long as Jessica fit my version of single-mom nobility. So long, I guess, as her choices of how and where to live and with whom were not hers to make. But, of course, those choices were all part of the basic American freedom package of having her life and kids back. And I shared the social worker’s muttered doubt that still-fragile Jessica could handle and financially support three spirited kids on her own.
IN THE PICTURE
At DSS you learn that every birth parent is called “Mom,” or, more rarely, “Dad,” as in “Mom was appropriate” or “Dad’s in jail” or “We’ve given Mom a month to get it together.” Maybe it’s shorthand that saves the trouble of remembering names; or maybe all clients have somehow blended into one dysfunctional parent. It’s this way as well, we learned, in school, mental health, and juvenile court counselors’ offices, where the kids always have first names, often infamous ones, and the parents don’t; where Mom and Dad get pronounced with practiced neutrality. “But Mom’s got to do her part,” social workers will warn, or, more charitably, “We can give Mom some vouchers.”