To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (33 page)

This was a different day and, as usual, Mary and I were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea. One of the non-Rosarios, a skinny girl named Tamara, stumbled in, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Tamara was twenty and had lived with Mary for four years. When I was around, Tamara barely talked—she sat in the corner of the kitchen on a stool, glancing up from her hand-held video game whenever anybody said something funny or loud, but she rarely cracked a smile.

“Did I do a good job?” Tamara asked quietly.

“A wonderful job, wonderful!” Mary said, beaming at her. Tamara didn't take her eyes from the phone she held in her hand. “I'd like to come down and see the kitchen looking like this every day.”

I caught a tiny upturn at Tamara's lips, but she kept her gaze on the phone and shuffled away.
That
was what the literature didn't promote, Mary said, once Tamara was out of earshot: intense, direct praise for even the smallest accomplishment, like a chore well done. “They have to know first and foremost that they're loved and have value—so you have to think of one thing every day that they did well, something they can feel good about. They're so desperate for positive feedback,” she said. In the early years, when her kids' trauma was more raw and recent and they were regressing to baby bottles and front-yard brawls, she had to dig. “I would say things like ‘I'm so proud you went to school today.'”

But most group homes focus on responsibilities and consequences, not safety and praise. Kids start at zero and run in a deficit. Mary said all of her kids came to her “in absolute panic and fear that they were being judged.” Even if they wanted to please Mary or follow her rules, they couldn't always prioritize the things she asked them to. “Their head was going through absolute trauma, and chores were the last thing they're thinking about.”

So Mary grew patient and imagined where her kids were coming from. “If I knew their heads were spinning, and they were freaking out,” she said, “I could just be there for them and relax.”

And then she had to train them—something else a lot of group homes don't consider. “If they didn't come from a clean house, they never saw clean, so clean for them might mean push everything to one side,” she said. “You have to go in and show them, ‘This is what I had in mind.'”

I looked around at Tamara's swept kitchen and thought—no way. Kids are crafty and self-involved; give an inch, and all that. They'll play sick, play dumb, play any card that'll yield them some favor. My daughter, Christina, for instance, would leave takeout containers scattered all over the kitchen and under her bed, but her own backpack was as tidy as a military locker. She had selective vision, trained on her own needs. Mary's kids may have loved her, I thought, but they could also prey on her kindness.

Later that afternoon, though, Mary's unofficial foster son Anthony shifted my perspective. Unlike everybody else in the house, Anthony had never been in foster care. His mother died when he was three months old, his father when he was six, and he lived with his grandmother and many cousins and other foster kids for some years after that. When this grandmother passed, some aunts and uncles scooped up the cousins, and the grandfather drove the foster children to South Carolina, but he didn't take Anthony. He remembers waking up to an empty house one morning in 1996, after everybody else drove away. He was eleven years old.

I could almost see traces of the little boy in the face of the twenty-three-year-old man who sat at the kitchen table with me, quietly laying out his story. A dimple in one cheek and crooked teeth belied the kind of quick charm he must have had as a leggy adolescent, though his eyes were sad and serious. He wore sweatpants and a crisp white T-shirt, covered by a plaid flannel shirt buttoned once at the neck. Perched high on his head was a baseball cap, its brim carefully cocked to one side.

The cap, too, was a tease at the kid he'd been; before his family abandoned him, Anthony had played baseball. There had been money for uniforms and team dues, and dreams of the major leagues. But after the death, Anthony said, “happiness ended right there. After my grandmother, that was it.”

“It” was the streets. No school official, social worker, or government agency caught up with Anthony from that day forward; he simply fell off the grid and no one ever caught him.

“I stole drugs, hurt people, robbed people,” Anthony said, explaining how he survived. He joined the Crips for a while, lived for some time with an older teenager who'd inherited an apartment from his father who had died. “I didn't get a job until I was nineteen, at Circuit City, because before that, I was just too young.”

Anthony didn't like to talk about the ten years he lived on the streets; in the one year he'd been with Mary, he said, he'd changed too much, and it hurt him to look back. “Some of the things I did, I can't forgive myself for, 'cause I can't see myself doing it now. Every day I wake up and ask myself, ‘Why did I do that?'” Anthony said, his words determined and flat. “Now, if I see someone getting robbed, I'm going to run and help him, but I still can't make up for what I did before.”

What he can make up for, at least a little bit, is playing the child's role. He revels in Mary telling him what to do and at first, he affirmed, he did in fact need help learning how to clean. “Once I got here, I could only stay a night or two, and then leave, because I wasn't good with authority or having rules,” he said. He arrived at Mary's house directly after years of squatting in abandoned places or on the couches or floors of older friends. His brother, who had been in jail for most of Anthony's childhood, was living with Arelis Rosario-Keane's sister down the street, and he introduced Anthony to Mary. By then, Anthony was twenty-one. He had nowhere else to go and figured he'd give stability a try. “After a while, I started getting comfortable here because I realized this was how it was supposed to have been as a kid. I was supposed to have rules—to clean my room, have chores. I started relearning what I was supposed to get, what I missed out on. And it feels good.”

During another visit with Anthony, he told me that if we had more Marys around, the world would be entirely different. Mary's model is unique, and if others had her patience and dedication, it could be replicated. Because even when kids age out and do well, even when they can conjure the American dream of college, they still regress. They still have to contend with lost parts of their childhoods. Arelis Rosario-Keane feels that her mom stole something crucial from her.

“I can never live up to myself because I don't know who that is. I feel like I will always be missing a piece, no matter where I am in life,” Arelis said to me one day, her eyes briefly filling. “I think she has that piece.”

I pointed out the ways Arelis was doing so well; here she was, in college, living in Boston, living out what I imagined she always dreamed for herself. She told me she never had those dreams. “I never thought I'd live to be this old. I never thought I'd live to graduate high school. And because I never dreamed of things like college, they still seem unreachable,” she said.

The things that do seem reachable, Arelis said, are more familiar. Before college, Arelis spent some time doing drugs, going to rehab, experimenting with the substances her mother used—things she promised herself she'd never try. “You can say, ‘I don't want to be like my father because he was drug-addicted,' or ‘I don't want to be like my mother because she was drug-addicted and she did alcohol and she was just a bad person,' but still I walked down that road anyway. I did those things anyway because I was around them my whole life, and if they were going to take away the pain, I was going to do them.”

Arelis isn't using drugs anymore, and she's doing well in school, but she still feels as if her life is in a fragile balance. “My brain is messed up,” she said. “You know how puzzle pieces can fit together, but they don't belong? That's how I feel. The pieces are shoved together. The thing functions but there are cracks—and all it takes is one bad experience and everything falls apart.”

I asked her what the bad experience might be. After all, Arelis had already been through hell and survived. She'd survived an abusive home and then foster care, and then was awarded with foster care's one shining promise: a stable, adoptive mother who loved her. With her siblings. By foster care standards, she'd lucked out.

But it was the instability of foster care, Arelis reminded me, which couldn't find a “Mary” soon enough and kept sending her back to her mom, that did the damage in the first place. Now the danger came from inside her. “Foster care makes you feel like you don't deserve anything,” she said. “And now I'm the self-destruct button of myself.”

The work at Mary's was slow, ineffable, improbable. Mostly, it took place in the kitchen, with kids long past the age when the system had let them go. And even when they insisted, as Arelis did, that they were past saving, I watched the steady hand of unconditional love work its power on them. I saw the healing inherent in what Mary provided, and in what they gave to each other. This was beyond any system or program or mandate; it was, as Kecia said to me in the prison, just the humanness of things.

 

One day I was talking with the three men of the house: Anthony, who'd grown up alone on the streets; Jonathan, who'd grown up in group homes and RTCs; and Arelis's brother Jay Jay, who'd used his sisters as mother figures for most of his life. They'd lived together for a year and, so far, Jay Jay and Jonathan considered Anthony family, but Anthony couldn't go there.

“Me and Jay Jay are really cool, but I can't trust yet,” Anthony said, nodding in Jay Jay's direction. Anthony's hands lay open in his lap, and his eye twitched with grief as he described his yearning to return to childhood, so he could fix what had hardened him against these men who clearly loved him. Jay Jay, leaning forward, nodded back. “I mean, my own family did this to me, so imagine what a stranger could do.” Anthony looked at Jay Jay straight on. “I would love to trust you one day but . . .”

Jay Jay, despite his round belly and soft face, did look as if he could be Anthony's less muscular brother. They shared the same skin tone and similar deep brown eyes. Jay Jay tried to rescue him. “I have a hard time trusting too,” Jay Jay said, “because people have stabbed me in the back so much.”

But Jay Jay had a girlfriend, Anthony countered. There's no way he could risk that. “I mean, it's kinda bad for me—I'm twenty-three years old and I don't have a girlfriend, not that I don't want one,” he said. “I don't know if I'm going to be faithful, I don't know if I'm going to hurt her; I don't know how I'm going to react in any situation, so I distance myself.”

Jonathan, strikingly handsome with his honey skin and gold-flecked eyes, didn't have a girlfriend either. But he thought trust was something different. He looked at Anthony with a kind of tenderness that bordered on maternal. Outside of a church or a funeral, I had never seen American men this soft, this gentle, with one another. “At a certain point in your life, I think it's worth it to trust,” he said slowly, measuring his words for their effect on Anthony's face. “Because you can be more at peace with yourself and with others. You gotta trust yourself first. I think I can trust myself first. I can live with my own skin.”

Anthony considered this. “That's what I want, I'm hoping,” he said; his faith had been buoyed by the growth he'd experienced already in the year and change he'd been at Mary's. “You can now give me $100 and tell me to put it in your drawer. I can do that.”

It was his own gut-level, instinctive reactions, he said, that he couldn't predict. He'd been in survival mode too long; it was hard to slow down and imagine his impact on others. Or imagine that they'd care. “I don't mean to say anything about you guys, but I like to keep to myself. I don't want to hurt nobody.” He looked at his hands. “If I had trust, I could have a lot of things. Like I would love to have an enemy. Because you have to trust to have even that.”

Despite Anthony's assertions that he couldn't connect deeply to anyone, at least not yet, he listened carefully to both Jonathan and Jay Jay, as we sat talking for more than two hours. When Fannie came through to get something from the cellar and Jay Jay locked her down there, giggling all the while, Anthony calmly crossed the floor and unhitched the latch to set her free.

And when Anthony talked about his mother, and divulged his long-nursed suspicion that he was responsible for her death, I thought he should reconsider his narrow parameters for trust; what was trust, after all, if not sharing one's earliest, most fragile secrets over a kitchen table?

I kept these musings private; I know the almost mythic power of believing oneself impervious to loving. On the day we talked I may have been especially vulnerable to intuiting connections between non-blood family members; I needed them myself. Five days before I made the trip to Yonkers, I received a call from a lawyer telling me that my mother had died; he was looking for next of kin. She'd already been dead fifty-six days; I had missed the funeral. Though I hadn't seen my mother in twenty-five years, I felt lost and strange, and infinitely to blame—my child self returning to me in waves.

But when Anthony said that his birth probably killed his mother, I spoke up. “You might have always felt that way, even if you weren't a baby when she died,” I said. “I just found out my mom died on Tuesday, and I feel guilty too.”

Jonathan chimed in. “It's so weird, right? Getting a call from a stranger saying your mom is dead?” For Jonathan, the call came from his agency six years earlier, when he was sixteen. He didn't go to a funeral either; the news, once it had filtered its way to Jonathan, had come too late. “It's like, how am I supposed to feel?”