by Cris Beam
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?”
Anthony leaned in, encouraging him. “It must be so many emotions coming at you at once,” he said, but Jonathan shook his head. No, that wasn’t quite it. Anthony tried again. “Or like, ‘Is she really gone?’”
That was more like it, and both Jonathan and I nodded. How do you mourn a ghost? How do you let go, really let go, of someone who left you long before? I had been searching, that week, for a model—for some mold of emotion to pour myself into and feel safe. I tried crying for my mom, but I felt false, hysterical; when I’d spent a quarter of a century defending against her memory, the sudden intrusion was alien and sharp. I tried anger but could muster only a thin puff against the lawyer, who’d been too cool and methodical in his delivery. I knew “dead mom” the movie, and “dead mom” the TV show, but I didn’t know dead mom in my heart; she hadn’t lived there in so long. Or maybe she did, but the vision of her had been so shot through with my guilt, she was almost unrecognizable. For the first time in the strange days since her death, after accepting awkward condolences I didn’t deserve, I felt reflected in my confusion by three men nearly half my age.
“You know what’s always been told to me by some random person?” Jonathan asked, the razored edge of his haircut making him look more severe than he was. “That you should have thanked your mother for being alive.”
“Whaaaaat?” Jay Jay retorted, disdain souring his voice. Jay Jay hated his mother.
Anthony said he was “highly jealous” of all three of us for even remembering our moms; bad memories were better than none. Jonathan looked back at me, still bonded over the discovery that we had missed our mothers’ funerals.
“I feel gratitude for her that I’m alive,” Jonathan said. “I just don’t know how else to feel.”
I smiled at him and was quiet again. Like Anthony, I hoped I could reach Jonathan’s state one day. My loss was fresher then, but the gratitude escaped me.
13
Experiment
MARY WORKS FOR AN improbable organization with an improbable name. It’s not a foster care agency, though it does train and license foster parents. It is not an adoption agency, though it does connect around sixty hard-to-place teenagers with permanent families each year. It’s called You Gotta Believe! and what it is, is a kind of bridge: You Gotta Believe! pulls hard-to-place kids from their group homes or RTCs and connects them with adoptive parents their agencies said didn’t exist. It calls itself a homelessness prevention program, and according to the founder, Pat O’Brien, it’s the first and only organization of its kind in the country.
What Mary and YGB do is find other people like her to adopt the kids the way she’s adopted. In a way, YGB has had to create something entirely outside of the system because it’s the system that’s damaged the kids; it’s the system that claimed teenagers would be fine on their own.
I visited You Gotta Believe! on a cold winter morning, stepping off the train to the smell of the ocean and the view of Coney Island’s carnival rides, shut down for th
e season. The headquarters are located a few blocks off the boardwalk, near a Golden Krust, a Mexican deli, and a place called Hair For U. The office was cluttered with file cabinets and file boxes; a box of Raisin Bran perched on the front counter next to a bucket of salt for melting sidewalk ice. The front door advertised the organization’s services. “Adopt a Teen!” a poster read, alongside prices for faxing, copying, and enlisting a notary public.
“The whole system is cockamamie,” YGB founder Pat O’Brien said by way of introduction. Pat is a gregarious white guy in his forties, with curly hair and a mustache, who spent his early career at a foster agency working to get older kids adopted. “We placed mostly preteens at that agency; the average age was eleven because everybody thought nobody wanted older kids.”
These older kids—both then and now—could legally decide at age fourteen that they no longer wanted to find an adoptive family, getting themselves placed on the independent living track and aging out on their own. Because ACS and the Department of Homeless Services are entirely different governmental branches, it’s hard to get accurate statistics about the flow from one into the other, but Pat, along with several credible studies, estimates that about 50 percent of the current homeless population were once in foster care. This is why Pat describes YGB, above all else, as homeless prevention.
“The system comes up with all these crazy programs for teenagers—shared parents, bridge parents, lifetime connections, resources, mentors—all this crap that’s not going to keep the kids from being homeless when they age out of care. They come up with every cockamamie answer under the sun, except the only answer,” Pat said, describing various adolescent programming offered around the country. “And the only answer is to get a kid a family.”
“The secret to our approach is to find out who cares about this kid,” said Chester Jackson, the associate executive director of YGB. Chester, a tall, broad African American man with an intelligent face and a slight limp, joined Pat when he started the organization in 1995. He explained that YGB staff reach out to group homes and RTCs to identify the teenagers who need and want permanent parents; they contract with every foster agency in New York City and several upstate. Once they have a teenager, Chester said, the YGB staff interview her and then conduct simple detective work to locate one person from her present or past who might want to take on a more prominent role. “We’ll say, ‘Who visits you? Who’s in your life?’ We’ll talk to the kid’s social worker and say, ‘Who comes to see her?’”
Pat and Chester have been friends since college, and they tumble and barge into one another’s sentences constantly. “We’ve placed kids with everybody. Professionals from their lives—teachers, therapists, lawyers,” Pat said. “And family members! I mean, you terminate a kid’s rights, you’d think you’ve killed the whole family. But it often happens there are loads of family members who were too young to take a kid when he came into care, but are old enough now—including older siblings and cousins and . . .”
“Neighbors!” Chester interrupted. “Even if you’re living in foster care, you’re living somewhere. Sometimes you live in a lot of somewheres. You’re next to people—you may go next door and watch TV every day at the same person’s house,” Chester said, nodding to Pat.
“And we’ve placed with those people,” Pat interrupted back.
Finding people that the child has loved wouldn’t be so hard, I thought, but the next step, getting them to commit, was tougher to picture. I imagined Pat and Chester, both so eager and assured, calling up some kid’s former teacher, his bus driver, his older sister, and saying, “Guess what? You’re pregnant! With a teenager!”
So they take it in steps. They first explain the teenager’s need, and his chances for falling into trouble or homelessness, and then they encourage the potential parent to “take a learning experience,” or enroll in the ten-week licensing classes required by the state to become a foster parent. Technically, You Gotta Believe! parents do become foster parents, except in the classes that YGB offers, they’re encouraged—or mandated, really, if they do house the child—to become “forever parents.” Whether they eventually legally adopt or “morally adopt” is up to the kids and the parents. But they’re in it for life.
“We don’t have all the answers, because family life is hard, but we happen to have the only answer, which is this: You need somebody that’ll say, ‘I’m that kid’s parent,’” Pat said, an old Brooklyn accent flattening his vowels. He offers YGB classes eleven times a week all over the five boroughs, and unlike the standard classes elsewhere where parents have to wait for a start date, they can jump in at any part of the ten-week cycle. Once YGB has identified a potential parent, they want to catch him fast. “All we’ve got to do is get one. If we hit the jackpot, there’s two. But that’s all you’ve got to do.”
Pat and Chester and their staff find last-minute families for around sixty kids a year. It’s undoubtedly beautiful work, but it’s also triage; they’re saving the kids teetering at the edge of crisis, and without better system intervention earlier on in their lives, the teenagers will just keep coming. Over time, though, YGB may be expanding awareness about foster care, by expanding the onus of accountability. Rather than continuing the legacy of treating foster kids as other people’s children, or as the state’s problem to be institutionalized and hidden away, they’re connecting deeply with the community. Like the old-time outdoor relief, they’re asking the kids, “Who do you know?” and bringing the help to them.
Still, a commitment to lifetime parenthood can be a tough sell, and even after all the sleuthing and mining of contacts, some kids end up without a single prospect. Sometimes YGB teenagers don’t know anyone at all who will take them in. For such cases, Chester produces a weekly cable-access television show, where kids can tell their individual stories and ask flat-out for families.
In general, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with these kinds of public displays: they’re a little too close to human auctions, where minors advertise their attributes and hawk their cuteness, their vulnerability, their need. Children aren’t products, and they shouldn’t be featured on commercials as such. I worry that the clips raise false hopes, but I also know that exhibitionism like the Heart Gallery project, wherein professional portraits of foster kids are displayed in malls or galleries along with their adoption information, has led to some five thousand adoptions. “Wednesday’s Child” is a weekly clip of a hard-to-place foster child, featured on the evening news in five major cities. More than 1,500 kids have been adopted through “Wednesday’s Child,” and forty-two thousand viewers have called up with questions about becoming a parent.
But does this really work? Can the older kids, tired and traumatized by a decade or more in foster care, really jump into adoption with someone they’ve never met? And can parents promise to adopt a stranger without a trial run? When I talked with Pat and Chester, I worried that the expectations were too high, the damage too deep.
And then I met a couple who were willing to take the risk. Their names were Glenn and Mindy, and they lived in Staten Island. Glenn and Mindy saw a sixteen-year-old girl named Oneida on “Wednesday’s Child,” and they were intrigued. On the news, Oneida was taking a salsa lesson in a fancy red dress and informing the newscaster that she “wants a family that’s hardworking and understanding that will be there and support me and make me smile when I don’t have nothing to worry about. That would be the happiest thing in my life, if I was to receive a family.”
We could do this, Glenn and Mindy thought when they saw the news. Glenn’s biological daughter had just left home for college; her room was empty and Oneida seemed so great, if terribly unlucky. On TV, Oneida’s social worker boasted that Oneida “tries to reach the highest goal she can within everything.” Oneida, wearing her curly dark hair pinned back with a red flower and big hoop earrings, backed her up. “I want to become a professional dancer, I want to work in movies,” she said, grinning. “I want to become a foster parent, a social worker, and a
lawyer.”
By the time I met Glenn and Mindy, they had completed their classes at You Gotta Believe! and they trusted the program. They believed that teenagers needed “forever families,” that no one was too old for adoption. Glenn and Mindy had attended support groups for adoptive parents, had completed their home study and been approved by the city, had swapped survivor stories with other foster kids to better understand their bruises and fears. They were ready to adopt a kid like Oneida. They were ready, in fact, for Oneida. The only thing left was to meet her.
In her regular life, which didn’t ever include salsa dancing (that was set up for the television broadcast), Oneida lived at Graham Windham—the same RTC where Jonathan had “rested his head” for five years. In her regular life, Oneida preferred Spanish pop to salsa, and, although she really was a foster kid, she had come to Graham Windham through the courts: for partying too much, staying out late, and spray-painting a heart onto a bodega wall.
Her primary advocate at Graham Windham was a woman named Doris Laurenceau, whose job title was Director of Family and Permanency Planning Services, which meant that she guided the older kids toward a final, or permanent, goal. Unlike many executives in congregate care, who deem group homes or RTCs the last stop for teenagers, Doris still believed in finding them lifelong families.
Doris thought that Glenn and Mindy would be a good match for Oneida. She hadn’t met them in person yet, but she’d read their file, and she reasoned they were fit for a challenge. Oneida had been acting out, but she had a conscience and she could be saved; what she needed was someone to pay attention to her. Glenn and Mindy had family dinners at home every night, and their quiet suburban block could be a welcome respite from the urban distractions that were getting Oneida in trouble. Plus, while Glenn and Mindy were waiting for all the paperwork on Oneida to go through, they had started weekend visits with another foster child, a quiet honor roll student named Nayelly. A smart, bookish sister, Doris thought, could be a good influence.