To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (29 page)

Fatimah pulled out her phone to show me the latest. “‘Be healthy in the Lord and serve him in all your faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshipped beyond the river in Egypt,'” she read. “Come on. Like that has nothing to do with what I'm going through. It's just copy, paste, send it to everyone, you know? Resend, forward.”

 

The next time I saw Dominique, she too was thinking a lot more about her biological mom. As she had predicted, her placement in the therapeutic home in Coney Island bombed. But while she lived there, she could walk by her mom's old apartment every day, and Dominique had decided
that
mom should have been her answer. When she was placed with a new family in Queens, Dominique crossed adoption off her list of goals for the first time in her life. Even though her mother was long gone, Dominique wanted to hold out for the real thing, if only in her mind.

“I've been in five pre-adoptive homes, and I've never been adopted, so I decided to take adoption off my plan,” Dominique said, as we wandered around a makeup store near her new home, picking up fake eyelashes and bottles of glitter nail polish. This meant she had decided, like the other 80 percent of kids her age in ACS, that she would just age out on her own.
“I still want a mom, but I realized God is not going to bless me because I ruined that relationship with my real mom. And honestly, since I took adoption off my list, I feel like I've been blessed with more. There isn't the pressure to find adoption, and I've learned family is about blending in with people who love me.”

Dominique wasn't sure if her new foster mom would love her, but without the stress to live with her forever, she had more hope. The first thing Dominique showed me was her new tattoo on her left hand, of a small butterfly taking flight. She'd had it done down the street.

“I didn't think I liked butterflies, but subconsciously, I liked them, because I have them all over my room,” Dominique said. I noticed that her stutter, normally so prominent, seemed subdued. “I think they symbolize freedom, because I've never seen them standing still; they're always flying. And I've always wanted that freedom—not as far as having space but as far as feeling like, ‘Dang, I'm loved.' So I don't have to think about anything. That's freedom.”

Dominique admitted that the first butterfly she ever saw was actually “standing still.” It was in a box, when she was in second grade, and her teacher had brought it in as part of a lesson about the butterfly's progress from caterpillar to chrysalis on up. But what impressed Dominique was the box.

“I felt like that,” she said. “Like I always had an obstacle surrounding me, keeping me from moving. I got this tattoo because I wanted to set down the box. Set down all of this pain, all of this hurt. Just let it go, so I could move on with my life.”

Dominique was hungry, so we left the makeup shop and the fast-food chains of Sutphin Boulevard to find something quieter and homier. Despite the winter weather, Dominique was wearing only moccasins on her feet, and her head, newly adorned with raspberry-colored hairpieces, was hatless. I thought she might be cold, but Dominique brushed me off. She liked to walk; she liked exploring new neighborhoods, and she was warm enough when she was moving.

“My mom was not perfect, but she did try,” Dominique said softly, once we had found a small Spanish diner and ordered rice and beans. A telenovela was blaring in the background, so it was difficult to hear her. “I've been in the system a long time, always looking for someone who could replace my m-m-mom, and no one has yet to. So now I'm like, maybe she was what I needed in the first place.”

Dominique's stutter returned; it cropped up when she was angry, or remorseful. She said she wished she could turn back time. She was the one who made the call to ACS and turned her mother in. If she hadn't done that, she said, maybe her mom could have continued to improve.

“It was me,” Dominique said earnestly into her rice. “It was me in my anger and me in my hatred of the situation of how she allowed my brother to get abused—it made me resent her and not really allow her to try to get back to where she could have been in our lives.”

So now, Dominique said as the waitress cleared our plates, she was trying not to speak up quite so much. Her quick mouth had ruined her chances with her own mother, and it had ruined her chances with the Greens. She was now consciously trying to stuff her feelings or, at least, not voice her fury at all the injustice she saw. But it was hard. She was feeling “phony,” and often “frozen.” To her friends, she said, “Don't tell me what you do, because I don't want to tell you something you don't want to hear,” which was making her feel, for the first time in her life, like a false friend. And with her new foster mom, who called to check up on her “like twenty times a day,” Dominique also bit her tongue. The strategy led to a more peaceful existence, at least superficially, but Dominique admitted the loss. “I'm holing things up inside,” she said. “This mom doesn't really understand me.”

 

Lei, the former foster kid who graduated from an Ivy League university, didn't have to chase her mother down. Unlike Tonya, Fatimah, and Dominique, Lei had a perfectly competent mom; she just lived in China. And when Lei turned eighteen, her mother came to her.

By then, though, it was too late. Lei had already survived foster care for five years, and the mom she missed was the mom she knew in childhood. Her father had already died, and when her mother immigrated alone, Lei said she could hardly relate to her at all. “I feel like, to this day, my family still doesn't understand what foster care really is. I feel like they think I just went to some hangout place,” she said. “As soon as I went into college, they were like, ‘You're fine.' But I was not fine. I felt like dropping out, withdrawing.”

Despite all of Lei's accomplishments, there were just too many disconnects, too many parts of her life that didn't fit together. She was at an Ivy League school, but there were no other kids like her there, nobody from foster care, nobody to understand what she'd endured. And then there was her mother, who took going to a good school as a given and expected her daughter to major in economics or business. “I come from an immigration family, so they wanted me to graduate with something where I could make money. They were not happy when I told them I wanted to be a youth worker. They were like, ‘Nonprofit, what's that?'”

When we met at the Starbucks, Lei had accomplished her vision. She had been out of school for a year and was working at an agency in Brooklyn helping low-income teenagers make plans for their futures. But despite her e-mail quote about knowledge and humanity, Lei's experiences had destroyed her faith in people. “I don't trust anyone. Even my family, mmm-hmmm,” Lei said. “I felt so betrayed. They weren't there for me when I needed them, and they pulled me down.”

So even Lei had to go back, to find the mom of her memory—the one who had been there for her way back when. About a year after I met Lei, she sent me an e-mail, to say hello. She still had the same quote on her signature line, but she had moved to Taiwan and was teaching English to school kids. She was doing fine, she said, adjusting to the heat and humidity, and to her new hectic schedule. She had moved back to the region of her childhood, where love had been constant and abundant. But she'd moved to a city she'd never seen, where she knew nobody, and nobody knew her, and nobody could break the reverie of what might have been.

 

 

 

 

THREE

We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it.

—Jane Addams,
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets

11

E
VENTUALLY ALL FOSTER CHILDREN
, if they don't go home or get adopted, will be declared legal adults and released from the system. This is called “aging out.”

In New York, there are over six thousand adolescents under ACS supervision.
At fourteen, these kids get to set their own “permanency planning goal”—meaning they, rather than their caseworkers or guardians, get to map their futures. If their biological families aren't an option, they have two choices: they can continue trying for adoption, or they can give up on the whole family idea and opt for “independent living” as soon as they reach legal age.
In 2009, ACS reported that 7 percent of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds wanted to try for independent living; the rest were still vying for adoption or to return home. By the time they turned seventeen, though, they'd given up hope: only 6 percent were still asking for adoption; most of the rest had shifted their goal to independent living.

Most foster kids I know do not use the term
independent living
. They call it getting “discharged”—as though foster care were military service. And every year, the thousand or so youths “discharged” to the streets of New York City, even according to ACS, “must rely primarily on themselves.”
They have nobody else to turn to.

ACS doesn't track the whereabouts of its kids past their discharge date, but many don't have the skills, or the money, or the education, or the support network to live on their own; it's why so many end up homeless. And they don't have the experience: 70 percent of these young people are discharged directly from group homes or institutions
—places with strict rules that hardly mirror all the options and temptations of real life in New York City.

To bridge the gap between the authoritarian world of the institution and real life, where a foster kid has to suddenly be self-motivated, independent, and responsible, most states have created a supervised living arrangement for kids in their late teens.
They're often apartments or dorms, where kids live in clusters of twos or threes and learn to cook and clean and budget for themselves, with social workers checking up on them a few times a week.

In New York, this is called the Supervised Independent Living Program, or SILP, and there are programs like it all around the country. They can vary slightly in approach and amenities, but generally kids in SILPs get money for food and household expenses, they get television and a telephone and their own bedroom and usually only one or a few other housemates, and as long as they hold down a job (any job; it doesn't matter the hours or the pay), they get to stay. Until they turn twenty-one. Critics of SILP programs say they're all carrot and no stick; kids don't learn to save money because they don't have to work for their rent, and when they're released, they only know how to order takeout and hide a party from the landlord. It's a kind of faux adulthood that's administered too young: when kids taste early freedom, they can't muster discipline later on. Proponents of SILPs say kids learn how to budget with their stipends and how to shop and cook and clean for themselves while they still have a social worker to rely on, before the stakes are raised and they're all alone.

Over at the Greens', Chanel had already gone this route; it seemed, at least to me, that she was no longer considering adoption. And after Tonya came back from her month-long runaway in the Bronx, she wanted a SILP apartment too.

“I'll probably go this week or next week,” Tonya told me confidently, her small white teeth flashing a Cheshire grin. “They already have the apartment ready for me. I just need to get a job.”

Tonya and I were talking in her bedroom with the Dora pillows, which she would probably take with her when she left. She said she met two out of the three requirements for the placement: she had a bank account, and she was in school. Although she was failing three of her senior-year classes, Tonya thought an independent apartment would actually improve her chances for higher education. “It's gonna prepare me, being on my own. I'm going to college. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Mr. and Mrs. Green have been preparing us to be independent—as in washing our own clothes and all of that. But I want the whole thing. Like what I eat is determined by how I budget my money, how I cook, you know what I'm saying? I don't know how to cook and I'm eighteen years old. I want to crash test before I go and everything falls apart in college.”

To budget herself, Tonya's only plan was to direct-deposit the money from the job she didn't yet have; that way she wouldn't spend everything in one shot. “Because I don't have to pay rent, my paychecks are just gonna stack up and stack up, and then I can just get whatever I want from an ATM,” she explained, adding that the first thing she intended to do was decorate. “My bathroom, it's gonna be brown, 'cause I want it to be warm and inviting. And I want scented candles, and not like the little ninety-nine-cent ones that you buy on the road. And in my kitchen, I want all the little magnets on the refrigerator, but not a whole bunch. And towels and curtains that match everything. For my room, I want a big flat-screen TV, with surround sound.”

I interrupted her reverie: what if the lack of structure in a parent-free apartment proved too tempting for Tonya's wilder side? I had heard stories of parties, drugs, fights, and pregnancies all occurring under SILP roofs. Tonya wasn't concerned. “It's called the Supervised Independent Living Program because basically they supervise. They come out twice a week to make sure that you don't move nobody else in with you,” she assured me. As for a roommate swaying her intentions, Tonya said the agency made its matches carefully. “They put you with someone who's your polar opposite, basically. Like they'll put me with someone who's thinking about not going to school, so I can influence them and encourage them. I'm always a good influence. And they put you with someone where your schedules are opposite to each other. Like if that person has to be at school at ten and I have to be to school at eight, I just probably won't see them. And it'll be less chaos because I can be in the bathroom alone, curling my hair, and not have to worry about someone.”