To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (3 page)

 

In Belize, Allyson was raised primarily by her grandmother, along with thirty-two brothers and sisters (“My father was a bit of a rolling stone,” she admits), and her grandmother had dreams, too. Her grandmother's dreams were prophetic, or instructive, so Allyson learned from an early age to trust their messages.

Allyson's dreams were full of children, sitting on the floor with her grandmother. Her mother served them homemade apple juice. “I said, ‘Ma, why are you giving them that? They don't want that stuff.' And my grandmother says to me, ‘It's not what they want; it's what you have to give them.' And finally I got up and understood.”

We were sitting in the living room, which, like most of the house's common areas, seemed designed more for quiet contemplation than for entertaining children. The couches are low and comfortable, the lights dim and soothing. In the bathroom, a tile mosaic covers the large domed ceiling, and candles circle the tub. Allyson interpreted the apples in her dream to be symbolic of appreciation and knowledge, the gifts you give a teacher. “I'm here to be a teacher to these children—the same thing that was given to me by my grandmother, I'm supposed to give back.” Allyson told Bruce she wanted more children and the depression went away.

But what of her desire to be free, I asked, to live her own life? Allyson sighed and shook her head. “My will was to do what I wanted to do, but God's will—God's will was for me to do what I'm doing.”

So Bruce and Allyson called the agency. Per Sekina's request, they told them they wanted to adopt a little girl. Or maybe two. Somewhere between the ages of six and ten, but definitely younger than Sekina.

“But they called us with a baby, sixteen months. A boy,” Allyson remembered, saying that at first they wanted to decline. “But when they told us he had been in three different foster homes already, it hit something in me. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, no. Bring him.'”

The baby was Allen. Sekina loved him right away; he was a baby after all. But then the agency kept calling. Their real emergencies were teenagers; couldn't the Greens take in a few more kids?

Unfortunately for Sekina, the calls coincided with more of Allyson's dreams. She dreamed of a woman saying, “This is my daughter; you have to take care of her.” That daughter was the Greens' first teenager, Chanel, nearly two years older than Sekina. Then Allyson dreamed of a girl who looked like her niece, and a foster child named Fatimah showed up. And a white man, who was “spaced out” and followed Allyson everywhere. That was Russell,
an autistic teenager. The dreams, and more kids, kept coming. Sekina never got her little sister; all the kids, save for Allen, were older than she was.

But Allyson couldn't resist her dreaming. “Because when I resisted it, that's when I got sick,” she said. “And ultimately, it's not what you want, it's what you're supposed to do. This is what life is supposed to be. We're supposed to be of service.”

So Sekina, in losing her place as the oldest child, became perhaps a little bit bossier, a little more specific about her position with her siblings. “I tell them all the time they're not just adopting parents, they're adopting a
family
, and if it weren't for me, if I didn't let them be here, they'd be out on the street,” Sekina told me one afternoon early into that next spring. She was straightening her hair, heating up the comb on the stove. The pink and purple streaks were gone, and she had decided, for the moment, to go for a natural brown. One of Sekina's four foster sisters was sitting on the kitchen stool watching her, and she rolled her eyes. Sekina caught the look. “It's true. But I like to help people. That's why I want to be a pediatric nurse.”

Sekina had a particularly proprietary hold over baby Allen, claiming to anyone who would listen that he was the only foster child she originally wanted. And Sekina, maybe even more than Bruce or Allyson, was terrified of losing him.

“I'll go crazy if Allen goes to his father's—did you hear about Allen's brother?” Sekina said, her eyes flashing as she ran the comb through her hair. “He's HIV positive—and he was in the system before he was even born! They called us and asked if we wanted him and my mother said yeah, but the thing is, unless Fatimah gets adopted or something, we already have too many people here.”

Sekina was right: Allen did have a new baby brother, born to the same drug-addicted mother and a different father, neither of whom wanted him. The logical placement choice for this baby would be with the Greens, so Allen and his brother could grow up together. But there was the issue of space: even with four thousand square feet, the Greens were already at the legal maximum capacity with all of their foster kids. And there therewas the issue of Tom, Allen's biological father: if he got custody of Allen in a few months or years, he'd separate the boys, potentially adding more trauma to Allen's young life.

Sekina wasn't the only one on DeKalb who adored Allen; in a house full of teenage tension—especially a house with such strict rules about staying indoors—a toddler was a welcome distraction. That spring and summer, Allen could bumble around the warm house clad in only his diaper, reaching for anyone who would pick him up or keep him from bumping into the big glass table in the center of the living room. On nearly every surface there's a sculpture or painting or something equally appealing for a toddler to yank on; Allyson says decorating is her way to de-stress. A wooden elephant stalks the center of the table; a curlicued stand draped in gray cloth props up a painting of a lion; a gold Buddha perches atop the television screen. But Allen focused on people more than things. He was a quiet child, and trusting, sticking one of his feet into a conversation with a half-smile on his face and then running away, hoping someone would engage in a game of chase. If no one did, he'd scramble back, still without a sound, and climb into an open lap, settling his head into a chest or neck to suck his thumb. Everybody loved Allen, but he wasn't an easy baby at first.

“He used to cry a lot, and he was always angry—I've never seen a child who was so little with so much anger,” Allyson said, remembering that the first week he was with her, he only wet his diapers and didn't soil them once. She thought he was constipated because of the poor diet in his last foster home. She still felt bad that a kid so young had been through so much change.

There are a lot of reasons that kids, even babies like Allen, end up shuttling from foster home to foster home before they get adopted or go back to their biological parents. In New York, the conflicts and the chaos start within twenty-four hours. After the child has been removed and placed with either relatives or strangers, the parents have the right to plead their case. The parents do this with ACS in a meeting called “family team conferencing.” The biological family, the ACS caseworker, and a community advocate together determine what would make the home safe enough for the child to return. Does the stepfather need to move out? Could Grandma move in? Does the family need help with food stamps or vouchers to get heat and hot water? Does the mother need anger management or rehab? The team draws up a plan and they set a date, generally several months away, to pre-­ sent it to a judge. If the parents disagree with the plan, they can get their own lawyers, to fight for their side. After this come the court procedures, the promises, the reunifications, the battles, the multiple placements, and all the things that foster care is famously bad at, which is safely sailing a child through a temporary boarding while everybody waits for a fairy-tale ending.

In this time period, which can be months or many years, everybody gets a different social worker—the child, the biological parents, and the foster parents. In this time, more lawyers step in and draw up more plans: How often will the parent see the child; what will visitations be like? Where will visits be held; what are the milestones toward reunification? Throughout this, a judge, who in New York City sees about fifty family court cases every day,
makes the binding decisions as to who must do what by when.

Meanwhile, the kid has been living in a real house, with real foster parents, placed at a moment's notice. If the foster family is a bad fit, if the kid doesn't like her new family, if they don't speak the same language, if there's abuse, if they live across town (and sometimes across state lines), if the foster parents practice a different religion, send the kid to new schools, have unfamiliar styles of discipline, or if the kid simply misses her biological parents, there can be conflict. Foster kids run away; foster parents terminate relationships. It's not unusual, while waiting for somebody to kiss the frog and the real parents to come home, for a foster child to live in ten or twenty different houses.
Fatimah, Bruce and Allyson's sixteen-year-old daughter, had been in twenty-one homes since she was five years old—and before she was placed with the Greens.

In Allen's case, Tom wasn't around for the family team conferencing meeting with ACS when his son was removed. He was in an inpatient rehab facility. ACS removed Allen from his biological mother when she skipped out on her own drug treatment program, and Tom didn't find out about it until several days later. By then, Allen was living with his first foster mother. That woman, the story goes, found Allen too taxing and sent him back to the agency. The next mom wanted to go to Puerto Rico and couldn't take Allen with her, so back he went again. By the time Allen was placed with the Greens at sixteen months, he had lived with four different “mothers” and his future was still uncertain.

Tom had followed Allen through all of his placements; he saw his son during supervised visits at the agency. He graduated from rehab and started taking parenting classes. Allen turned two at the Greens', and then two and a half; he was talking more, smiling a lot, and running, running everywhere. And then a judge upgraded Tom's status: he could start bringing Allen back to his apartment for weekends.

 

When I asked Allyson how the weekend visits were going, she changed the subject. “The dad's white,” she said, her face inscrutable. “You've seen Allen. He's darker than me.”

I tried to push her; was she concerned that if Tom got custody Allen would lose some sense of his heritage? Did she, like many people, resist the notion of white parents raising black children? But I had entered icy waters and Allyson wouldn't budge.

“The dad will call here because Allen will be crying,” was all Allyson would venture. She fussed with the snaps on Allen's brother Anthony's onesie; the HIV-positive newborn was, after all, allowed to come live with them, and he required much of her attention. “Allen will get on the phone and just say, ‘Mama, Mama.'”

Sekina, as usual, was more blunt. “The dad doesn't feed him the right food. He gives him adult food—things he can't digest. He puts Allen in front of the TV all day. And when Allen comes back here, he's all upset. Of course—he's been here for a year. He's our baby.”

Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect—they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long—but as long as there's no abuse, a child belongs with his blood. It's not the state's role to interfere with the way we raise our kids.

And apparently, a judge thought Tom was doing well enough. As Allen inched toward his third birthday, the courts claimed that Tom could indeed have custody, as soon as he'd accomplished a few more weekend visits. Allyson was stoic about it on the surface, but Bruce unmasked her.

“She's gonna cry like a baby when he leaves,” Bruce said. He was eating pot stickers from the Chinese place down the street, shoveling them in quickly before one of the older kids could catch him with the takeout box and demand her share. Allyson shot him a look.

“He will too; he talks about it every day,” Allyson said. Her prior easy acceptance of a King Solomon deal seemed to be slipping. “I don't believe that this parent has shown overwhelmingly that he is ready, not overwhelmingly. And this child requires a parent who shows overwhelmingly that he's ready. Because Allen's no ordinary child. He has his issues.”

For instance, despite all his progress, Allen still hit the other children when he got enraged. Allyson doesn't allow hitting in the home; she had been working steadily with Allen to soothe him and had trained the other kids to react with only words. She wasn't sure Tom had the patience to continue this trajectory. Allen also needed constant attention and reassurance; he was slightly regressed for his age, though that too had been steadily improving. Attention abounds in a house of nine older children—less so, she said, in a small apartment with Tom and his adult roommates.

“The courts are saying that the father's taken his classes, he's met his minimum requirements, he's clean—no problem,” Allyson said, forcing her tone to soften as she spoke of God's will and prayer for right action and surrender to whatever will be. She snuggled Allen's baby brother closer to her chest. “This is one of the reasons why a lot of people go straight for adoption, that they don't bother with foster care. It's because of the investment—you see your investment go down the drain in months.”

 

The basic tenet of foster care, and its core complication, is that foster care is meant to be a temporary solution. It's a waiting room, tended by temporary parents, while the “real” parents scoot off to the back quarters to try to boost their skills or mend their ways, and then come back in and retrieve their children. Sometimes the parents just walk out the back door, and sometimes a judge orders them out, and then the temporary parents get a new title and can adopt the children. With other babies, in other waiting rooms, the cases aren't so clear. Sometimes, the birth parents won't, or can't, come back and the foster parents don't
want
to keep the baby—they're generally trained not to attach, and very often they don't. The babies, however, weren't privy to this contract and can suffer great losses when they're shuttled off to strangers. Logically, these babies should have been put up for adoption from the start, with any of the thousands of prospective parents in this country who are eager for newborns, but the conundrum is this: no one can tell from the outset which biological moms or dads will manage to emerge from the back rooms intact and able to retrieve their kids.