“My name is Brezan, I am twenty-one, and I want a family.”
Brezan told the audience she had been placed in foster care at age 16 after her school found out that her father, with whom she lived alone, was abusing her. She awoke that morning, went to school, was corralled by counselors, and that afternoon was carted away to a foster home, never to see her father again. She remained in foster care and was taught the usual independent living skills to prepare for living on her own when she aged out of care. However, she was convinced that college was a better path to independence. As the congregants sat in silence, clinging to her words, Brezan explained how she was putting herself through a private college and was only one semester away from graduating. She shared that although she had done this all on her own, she still wanted a parent, so she could have one for the rest of her life. We all nodded in understanding, nodding in unison. Don’t we all want a parent for the rest of our lives, that safe place to always go back to? Someone to share holidays and birthdays with? Someone to call when something momentous—good or bad—happens?
Her case worker never told her that she could be adopted and that she deserved a forever family. It was only through her therapist that she learned she could have parents. This therapist had sought to become a certified foster-adoptive parent of a foster youth, beginning the process by taking state-mandated training classes. She happened to take these classes at You Gotta Believe and learned that older foster children are adoptable. She learned that in fact it is never too late for a family. It is never too late to find someone to love you.
She immediately told Brezan about You Gotta Believe, just one month before Brezan would turn 21 and get kicked out of the system. Brezan called You Gotta Believe, and within a few weeks appeared on Wednesday’s Child, a weekly televised program that features foster children who are waiting to be adopted.
Susan must have sensed my excitement in hearing Brezan, so when she turned to me, I asked why she was keeping Brezan from me. She smiled and said, “You know, she is the closest thing to your mini-me I have ever met.” She was right; I saw myself in the fearless but vulnerable girl at the front of the room.
After the event’s conclusion, throngs of congregants surrounded Brezan. She may not have realized it, but her courage and dramatic presentation shifted the views of many in the room. She totally won them over.
I had planned on driving home right after the event, but instead stayed, in line, waiting for all of Brezan’s new fans to exhaust their enthusiasm so I could get a moment with her. After a full hour, I realized that the only opportunity for quality time with this amazing pillar of strength was to offer to drive her home to Brooklyn, an offer she instantly seized. It beat trying to make subway and bus connections operating on a weekend schedule.
While walking to my car, I told her I was affiliated with You Gotta Believe and had aged out of foster care myself while in college back in 1987, the same way that she did 27 years later in 2014—parentless with no adult connections or resources.
As we drove down the West Side Highway to the Battery Park Tunnel to Brooklyn, I told Brezan that I recently published a memoir about how my siblings and I grew up scraping for food, bouncing in and out of the foster care system. Brezan, curious about the book, looked it up online on her phone. She immediately recognized the book cover and told me her therapist had read it and had asked her to read it too, but Brezan said she felt it too difficult to read at the time.
The rest of the drive back to Brooklyn we shared our respective stories and compared all of our similarities. After Brezan appeared on Wednesday’s Child, she was introduced to a family in New Hampshire that expressed interest in adopting her. She was days away from finally meeting them.
They had bought her a bus ticket up to New Hampshire on Christmas Eve. Since I knew she would have a long bus ride, I offered her a copy of my memoir to read on the way.
After Brezan returned from an enjoyable week with her prospective new family, I extended her an invitation to spend a weekend with me at my house on Long Island.
Contrary to most college students, who could enjoy the breaks between semesters with family, Brezan had to work. Her schedule as a home health aide limited her free time during the few weeks before the fall and spring college semesters. That was yet another reminder that as a child without parents, she had only herself to depend on to keep her head above water. Eventually, she found time to visit me, where she bonded with my cocker spaniels and enjoyed a tour of the North Fork’s beaches, farmland and wineries.
Throughout our brief 30-hour visit, I had to keep reminding myself that this confident young woman, who appeared ready to conquer the world, was actually parentless and potentially one step away from homelessness. Where others not familiar with her background would infer that her self-determination, tenacity and optimism were enough to propel her forward, I knew better. We all need a safe to place to put our heads down and adults we can count on when that ominous dark cloud tries to sneak into our lives.
Our visit ended, and I dropped her off at the rail station. I told her I wanted to be a resource for her. In foster care, when children age out, they are at risk because they are left alone at such a young age, and yet we expect them to survive. We need to get them forever homes or at the very least become a resource to them. A resource is an adult who supports them and will be available when needed. If aged-out youths have a community of resources (group of adults), they will have a safety net to help them move forward and catch them when they fall. Resources can either take the place of or supplement the adoptive parents, because the goal is to build a safe community of adults around each aging-out youth.
Now Brezan has a prospective family and an adult resource, both of which occurred only because of her initiative in contacting You Gotta Believe. Although there was no direct government involvement with Brezan’s scenario, it is still critical in augmenting and monitoring the work of not-for-profits and faith-based institutions that administer child welfare services. So what if the government could take a step back and give the parenting responsibilities to somebody else?
The U.S. has countless foster children waiting for an adoptive family. Unfortunately, we do not have enough parents willing to provide a forever home or adoptive home for our adoptable foster children. If these children are not adopted and age out of foster care parentless, statistically a majority of them will end up recipients of public assistance or members of the incarcerated or homeless population—once again a great cost to taxpayers.
States have tried to address the needs of those aging out by teaching them how to live independently or by providing them temporary housing. However, despite the resources made available to these parentless youth, thousands will end up relying on public assistance or becoming homeless or incarcerated.
The State of Colorado realized that this formula of merely providing resources to aged-out foster children was inefficient, and that the kids could be better served by being placed with a permanent family while still in foster care. This realization prompted the state’s dual-pronged effort that incorporated the faith-based community with a comprehensive assessment of how the state could better facilitate permanency.
Colorado began to address the need to find families by tapping into ready-made communities: faith-based institutions. By 2008, both the state and faith-based community were working in unison to identify permanent families for foster children who were freed for adoption. The churches’ involvement is based on the concept that congregants would be willing to act upon a request from the pulpit. So faith leaders began integrating the message of permanency into their vision and sermons. Colorado faith leaders did this by organizing an effort called Project 1.27 after the Biblical passage in James 1:27, which implies that true religion is looking “after orphans and widows in their distress.”
Through Project 1.27, the churches—in partnership with the state—built an infrastructure where they serve as liaisons between cooperative county and state agencies, and prospe
ctive and post-adoptive parents. Additionally, they not only recruit and train prospective parents but recruit volunteers from their congregations to serve as a support system for each permanent family.
According to media reports, the churches’ involvement substantially reduced the number of foster care children waiting for permanent homes from 875 in 2007 to 365 in 2010. Presently, Colorado only has 285 eligible children waiting for forever homes. Project 1.27 now serves as a model and resource for other states and cities that are interested in pursuing this model, which to date includes Washington, D.C. and Arizona.
Arizona’s involvement in Project 1.27 rose from an effort to overhaul the State Child Protective Services Agency, including how it serves abused and foster children. After learning about the success of Colorado’s Project 1.27, Governor Jan Brewer reached out to the ministers of Arizona’s largest churches. According to one of those present at the meeting, Governor Brewer said the state couldn’t parent foster children, because what they actually need is a committed parent to provide them a forever home, guidance and stability.
In response, the Arizona ministries partnered with the state and developed Arizona 1.27, affiliating churches that have integrated this vision into their sermons and developed services to support present and future forever families. In the fall of 2014, the Sun Valley Community Church held an awareness weekend and invited me to speak on a panel for five sermons at two different church campuses. The panel was moderated by the congregation’s lead minister, Chad Moore, and consisted of three speakers that included a single adoptive mother of four, a father who promoted foster care adoption to his wife (they now have two toddlers), and me as a former foster child. Throughout the weekend, I was approached by numerous congregants who told me about their newly blended families that now include biological and adopted kids. Of course, just telling me did not prepare me for what I experienced on Sunday as the church members returned for my book signing. Families lined up to introduce me to their adoptive and foster kids, from infants to teens. The line was long, and the significance was powerful because it reinforced that integrating places of worship into the need for finding forever families, rather than just relying upon government, was working in this church in Arizona as it did throughout Colorado.
Being at Sun Valley Community Church reminded me of 15-year-old Davion O., a foster child who just last year stood before his fellow congregants and pleaded for a family that could “reach out and get me and love me until I die.” Davion’s mother was incarcerated when he was born and is now deceased. He has since been raised in foster care. “I just want people to know that it’s hard to be a foster kid,” he said. “People sometimes don’t know how hard it is and how much we try to do good.”
This courageous young man put into words what so many other foster children couldn’t express—that they all deserve the unconditional love of a forever home. A family to surround them, even when they become adults. A parent who can become a grandparent to their own children. Davion has brought greater awareness to the need for forever families through his effort to publicly market himself for adoption.
Why did Davion do this? Because he knows what other older foster children know all too well: If they do not find a forever home, their destiny is solely up to them. They will sink or swim on their own. And that is a frightening and heavy burden for a parentless young adult to comprehend.
We should support and encourage all the Davions and Brezans among us, and let them know we understand how difficult life is for foster children. At the same time, we can show them we are ready to help them find the one thing that all children of any age really want: a family who will love them forever.
Two Kinds of Legacy
Jenny Milchman
This is what happened to me one day in sixth grade.
I went to school, expecting it to be pretty much like any other day. I would struggle to keep up with math and geography. (I didn’t know then—a lot of people didn’t know back then—that there were such things as learning disabilities and for me this meant that spatial things were hard.) I would enjoy language arts, but get scolded for chit-chatting with friends by my teacher, who called me Motor Mouth. (Were teachers meaner then? It seems like it.) At lunch my friends and I would play Chinese jacks or maybe have a food fight or practice our latest dance number. We were drama kings and queens.
The aforementioned friends were quiet during the morning, so I didn’t get in trouble for talking in language arts that day after all. But I didn’t have any real inkling what was going on until I headed to lunch.
Many of you probably recall those tables with the bench seats attached. The table where you sat was decided by which clique you were in. And the particular placement of your seat on the bench was decided by which position you held in the clique.
If sixth-graders ruled the world, it would be a feudal lordship.
I entered the lunchroom with the slightest tug in my stomach, which I knew wasn’t from hunger. My friends were acting weird. And kids can usually tell when something is up; sometimes it just takes a little while to face it.
I crossed the gleaming white floor—the food fights hadn’t started yet—and headed toward my table.
My usual seat was on the bench facing the entrance. Smack in the middle of the bench because I held a pretty choice spot in my group. We weren’t the most popular, sporty kids in school, but we had our own sanctified place as the drama bunch. And since my best friend, Karen, was the director of our all-kid acting troupe, I guess you could call me next-in-line to the queen.
Everyone was seated already, and it was clear my spot was no longer reserved for me. Instead there was a line of hard, implacable faces. Just in case I hadn’t figured it out, my friends all inched a bit closer as I drew near, filling in any available cracks of space until I was met with a solid wall of rejection.
Not a word was exchanged; understanding was as silent as it was instantaneous. I wheeled around, and before a teacher, lunch lady or any other adult could spot me, I exited the lunch room. I marched down the hall, head held high but feeling like a hundred pound weight. My stomach was completely done for; it didn’t matter that I was cutting my lunch period for there would be no eating that day.
I waited until I turned the corner to lean against a wall so I could try and catch my breath.
Where is there for a turned out sixth-grader to go? In class I could hide amidst my work, pretend I didn’t notice or care that no one was talking to me, and that I would never be known as Motor Mouth in that school again. But lunch was unsupervised time for children, Lord of the Flies time. My space had been quietly swallowed up as if I were no more. It was like I didn’t exist.
There was only one place in school whose inhabitants didn’t care if you were friendless.
The library.
Of course, I wasn’t supposed to be in the library during lunch. The prescribed times to check out books were more codified than our seats on the lunchroom benches, but arguably less rigid. I slipped through the door and sidled over to a shelf of books. I sank to the floor, and then, surrounded by friends truer than those who were spurning me, I began to cry.
The librarian must’ve become aware that her quiet, lunchtime-empty space was no longer unoccupied. She was an obese, warty woman who could’ve been a character from a book herself: a gnome or a troll. Yet that day, and for every day during the remainder of that long, lonely year, she looked like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio to me.
When Ms. Schultz spotted me on the carpet amidst a tumble of welcoming books, she didn’t catch my eye. She averted her head and shuffled on by. She never said hello or asked if I needed help finding something. If she didn’t acknowledge I was there, then she could just leave me be, in one place that still wanted me.
~~~~
What legacy will we leave behind, all of us? Will we be the child who turns on another kid and ruins a year of her life, or leaves her with memories so bitter, they can make her cry more than 30 years later? Will we be a l
ibrarian nobody thinks much of, but who turns out to be the true heroine of this tale?
Our legacy is cast back when we are far too young to understand such a concept, to know that such a thing even exists.
I came to school the following day, and nothing had changed. My so-called friends spoke not a word to me during class; a space was no longer reserved for me at lunch. I sometimes wonder, with the hindsight of adulthood, what would have happened if I had tried to sit down. The judgment wielded by sixth-graders is firmer than that of any high court judge. If everyone could obey the way we did when part of a group of middle-schoolers, law and order would rule the land.
For me there was no appeal, no seeking of a governor’s pardon. I accepted my sentence without even understanding the crime I’d been convicted of. I still don’t understand it. But I understand its legacy.
When I began researching this piece, I delved into online accounts of girl meanness, as well as more in-depth works of social psychology. The internet would have that one source of girl-on-girl cruelty is insecurity. By putting another girl down, especially publicly, the first girl secures a place for herself, and the illusion that she must be better, thus bolstering her own fragile, adolescent sense of self.
There is also a relational perspective to girl meanness, which says girls break the world down into associations and connections, and that deciding whom to revere, whom to tolerate and whom to ostracize is all part of spinning an understandable web of which person belongs where.
I have a daughter now, and I am constantly trying to impress upon her that the offhand comment she or a friend may fling can leave a lasting legacy on the person who hears it. It’s a large burden for my daughter to carry, I know. Not only does she have to navigate the surging seas of elementary school—apparently girl meanness starts younger these days—but her mother is imploring her to consider that the direction she swims in could have an effect years and decades later.
Legacy- an Anthology Page 17