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

by Beam, Cris

  “The basic tenets of foster care are good,” Lowry said. She’s distinguished-looking, with a silver bob and a direct expression that indicates she’s very busy, but she’ll take all the time she needs to express precisely what she intends. “It’s the implementation that isn’t working—and that’s what causes the slow destruction of a person, a kid, as he goes through the system.”

  For Lowry, what child welfare needs overall is more oversight—to make sure everyone is just following the rules. “There are no magic bullets,” she said, answering a question I’d asked about some innovative new programs I’d read about. Her office walls are a sunny yellow, and all around are oversize black-and-white photos of the kids her organization has served—some smiling, some desperately grave. “There are nuances to programs and so on, but really we just need to implement the basic modes of social work: providing services, making individual decisions, following a case through.”

  For Lowry, a situation like Allen and Tom’s would require a good social worker, doing what she’s paid to do: provide Tom with rehabilitative services and then, if he relapses, do the extra legwork to find out where Allen was previously placed. But Tom and Allyson had been through their slice of the system too, and they didn’t trust it. Tom listened to Allyson’s fears, she said, about his potential relapse. He worried that Allen could get placed with some random family instead of the Greens. So by the end of that year, Tom became the generous parent in the King Solomon story. He decided to sacrifice the baby to a safer circumstance, rather than risk sacrificing him altogether.

  “Tom came to his senses,” Allyson told me over the phone several months after we all met on the porch. Her relief was palpable. “Tom has had this trust issue; he hasn’t trusted people, but he started to trust us.” While Allyson was watching Tom, she said, Tom was watching the family. “He’s seen how we’ve been with Charles, that we adopted him but he still sees his mom, and that he could still see Allen if he was with us. He knows that the best thing is for Allen to stay with us. He’s already talked to the court.” Tom had agreed to sign over his rights and do an open adoption.

  It was almost a year before I saw Tom again. He had continued to visit Allen and play video games with the other Green children and eat Sunday dinners with everybody, but our paths had never crossed. Allen continued to make progress with his anger and impulse control; Allyson said he never hit the other children anymore. He was also gentle with his baby brother, Anthony, whose HIV status had recently reversed without any drugs. Allyson called it a miracle.

  In the carport, baby Anthony was practicing his walking. Allyson had made a barricade of plastic lawn furniture to keep him out of the driveway, and she gently scooped him up each time he tumbled. Allen, who was four, was stomping on an empty Capri Sun packet to propel the straw into the air.

  I asked him what he called his game.

  “Balloon Blaster!” Allen shouted, without missing a beat.

  Once the straw landed on the dirty ground, Allyson told him he couldn’t stick it back in his mouth to re-inflate the juice pack. Allen pouted.

  “You’ll have to throw it away,” Allyson said.

  Instead, Allen climbed to the top of a dirt mound in the corner of the carport, left there after some construction. He fell and scraped his hand, and started to cry, holding it out for Allyson to kiss.

  “What happens to children who don’t do what adults tell them?” Allyson admonished, delivering her boo-boo kiss.

  “They fall down,” Allen said miserably, examining his tiny scrape.

  As Allen ran inside to find something new to play with, Allyson watched him admiringly. He was tall for his age, his limbs long and rubbery; his face was already losing the chub of babyhood and taking on the serious, almost adult lines so curious in children. “He’s so creative; he can make something out of anything,” she said.

  Allen returned with a small blue bottle and a rubber band. “This is my Blue Shooter!” he shouted happily and scurried up the stairs next to Bruce, who was on the front stoop, to aim at the two concrete lions.

  Tom, Bruce told me, had skipped out on the adoption hearing where he was supposed to formally turn over his rights to the Greens. The hearing had been canceled—but that hadn’t stopped Tom from coming around the house. Bruce said he didn’t harbor any bad feelings. He knew it was hard to sign that last paper.

  “Tom’s like a kid himself; he comes over, watches TV, has food, and gets to have family and community,” Bruce said, adding that he and Allyson weren’t worried about the botched hearing; if anything, it had reinforced their status as stable providers. This was September, and the next “final” court date had been arranged for November—with or without Tom, and long past the ASFA deadline.

  “Daddy!” Allen shouted. And there Tom was, as though summoned by our discussion, grinning at the bottom of the stairs. He’d replaced the missing earpiece on his glasses. Tom nodded his hellos, and Allen jumped on his back to piggyback inside the house.

  In steamy Bell County, Texas, Oliver’s custody hearing had been slated for the middle of August. In the two weeks since I’d left Texas, Caitlin had missed both scheduled visits with her son. One time, she didn’t have gas money, and another, she called Steve in the middle of the night saying her boyfriend, Rick, was in the hospital being treated for a potassium deficiency; she couldn’t possibly make it the next morning. Surely, Steve reasoned, these blunders would count against her.

  They did, but not enough to terminate her rights; the judge decided to give Caitlin one more chance. At the hearing, he scheduled another court date for October, six months shy of the ASFA cutoff, admonishing Caitlin with a warning: if she skipped even one more visitation, she would lose her son. Even for work? she asked. At that point, Caitlin was still living with Rick and his parents. Rick’s mother testified that Rick had lost his job; Caitlin’s shift at McDonald’s represented the household’s sole employment. The judge wasn’t swayed; he told her plenty of good parents survived on welfare.

  So at first, Caitlin made her visits. Caitlin didn’t drive, but Rick got himself a car, thereby doubling Caitlin’s chances of appearing (Rick’s mother was her other chauffeur). But then, during one drop-off, while Steve was informing them of Oliver’s switch from formula to milk, Rick’s mom interrupted. She was hosting evacuees from the latest hurricane, she said proudly.

  Steve immediately called Oliver’s guardian ad litem, the person hired by the state to represent Oliver’s interests; nobody was supposed to be in Caitlin’s house without having a criminal background check. The guardian ad litem sent a social worker, who discovered Oliver didn’t have a crib. The guardian ad litem also checked up on Caitlin’s therapist, who was tracking her emotional health.

  The therapist, who had originally recommended the overnight visits, had been observing Caitlin’s interactions with Oliver since April and had issued a report for the court. In it, she claimed that Caitlin “did not know how to properly parent a child.” This, Steve wrote to me, might finally do it; even the therapist found Caitlin unfit. Still, he said, “We’re not getting our hopes up. The judge might extend again. This just represents how the system sits on its ass until the last second and plays with everybody’s emotions on every side until it’s all over.”

  The path to terminate a parent’s rights may seem endless—and it often does take months or even years —and yet it’s possibly the most critical, and certainly most contentious, stage of foster care work. Parental termination even sounds oxymoronic: parenthood is supposed to be the one job you can’t quit. Experts rarely weigh in on individual cases when they aren’t privy to all of the particulars, but it’s at moments like these that they tend to have a lot of opinions. Mike Arsham, the executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in New York, calls parental termination the “death penalty of child welfare.” CWOP is an advocacy organization that helps biological parents work with the system to regain their kids and have more influence on agency decisions overall. C
WOP and Arsham look deeply at the ways poverty, racism, and limited social resources inhibit parenting, and they argue passionately against parents taking the fall for society’s failings. Other people, like Elizabeth Bartholet, a law professor and the faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, who has worked with the NAACP and is a well-known voice in child welfare, sees things differently. In a book and several articles, Bartholet also links abuse or neglect to poverty and urges for better and more preventive services for moms like Caitlin, but she cautions against late-stage preservation efforts. She argues that adoption—after kids have endured abuse and neglect and then bonded with a new family—is better for those kids. She points to the potential for reabuse if they go back home and says there’s an awareness outside of child welfare that “parenting is more about bonding than blood.”

  Some think that the family termination hearings can be biased. Family courts don’t have juries or prolonged hearings; a single judge hears testimony from each side and makes his decision. And he makes it fast: in many jurisdictions all across the country, family courts—their dockets jammed with divorce, child custody, and child welfare cases—are the most crowded courts of all. So it’s widely held that judges will follow whatever recommendations the child welfare agency makes; the agency, after all, compiles the data on the family and produces the reports. But it is the agency that targeted the parents in the first place and removed their kids; parents rarely feel the agency is on their side.

  In the end, Steve was right: the judge did extend. At first for a week—and then for another three months, claiming Caitlin needed more psychological evaluation. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) had been sending a therapist out to Caitlin once a week—to help her, but also, ultimately, to determine her aptitude as a parent.

  The final hearing would be in January. Caitlin’s visits with Oliver were downgraded from overnights to supervised one-hour appointments. Although the delay jangled Steve, it did bump his case into a kind of magical territory where, everyone said, he could finally get a lawyer and be allowed to take the stand. By January, Oliver would have been living with Steve and Erin for a full year, at which point they could argue that it was in Oliver’s best interests to stay where he was bonded. Finally, Steve thought, he could step into view.

  “Caitlin made some weird comments afterward that intimated she may just want to end the process, but that may be just wishful thinking on my part,” Steve wrote to me a few days after the judge’s extension. He recognized that the screws were tightening on her, and she was likely feeling the pressure.

  Two weeks later, Caitlin was in the hospital. She had threatened suicide if she didn’t get her son back. When she was released, she fought with her boyfriend, Rick, and moved out of the trailer. By early December, Caitlin was contacting her social worker, saying she wanted to see Oliver, but then missed her visit because she didn’t have gas money. She made up with Rick and moved back in but still felt depressed. She then told her therapist that she wanted to sign her rights over to Rick’s mom.

  But by December, Rick’s mom didn’t want Oliver anymore; she didn’t think he’d be safe in the trailer with Caitlin around. The therapist, too, wrote that she did not feel Oliver “would be safe in the home and is recommending termination.” By the end of December, when Protective Services had to submit its final report for the hearing in January, they were reporting “concern about Oliver’s safety if left alone with the mother.” In the end, the DFPS recommended parental termination and “unrelated adoption.”

  For the final hearing, Steve and Erin prepared photo albums of Oliver playing with the cat, smiling in the sun, and wearing face paint alongside his brother, Wilson. They brought a bulging file documenting all interactions with Caitlin and her inadequacies and mistakes. They brought a lawyer. The DFPS report is eight pages long, and it details Caitlin’s psychological deterioration, failure to keep appointments, and the incidents of hitting Oliver, for instance, when he grabbed the remote control. It describes the various interventions the department made. It says nothing specific about Steve or Erin or even Oliver—about their compatibility, the progress Oliver had made, the way Steve ran with him every morning, or Wilson drew him pictures. Steve and Erin are only briefly mentioned as “foster parents trained to take care of a child Oliver’s age.”

  On the morning of January 13, when Steve was dressed in his best suit and ready, finally, to publicly plead his case, he never got the chance. Caitlin didn’t show. The judge terminated her parental rights, on real paper rather than a napkin, and it was over. Oliver was theirs. Steve sat in the courtroom watching the next cases, about a woman with a kid acting up in daycare, and another mom in a prison jumpsuit and cuffs arguing for her rights, in a kind of daze.

  I’m grateful, for Oliver’s sake, that he will never know what judges and caseworkers and even family members have said about his biological mother being unfit to parent. When he’s old enough to start asking questions, Steve and Erin can devise careful answers about her past. But kids who are old enough to remember their biological parents suffer differently. When you’re being abused or neglected, that’s one thing. When you’re removed from the danger, and people start to talk, you have to split yourself in half.

  I can’t speak to living with strangers, but I do know about compartmentalization. When I lived with my mother, her kind of crazy was the only life I knew. I didn’t know it was bad until I left, but once I did, I could no longer survive with that memory intact. I had to cauterize off entire interior landscapes, to become somebody new. I had to accept a new mother, with new mother clothes, new mother breath, new mother words—words that told me my old mother, my real mother, was unfit, my life before was unfit, I too was unfit. But it was when I left my mother’s unfit home that I no longer could fit anywhere at all.

  My mother gave up on me, the adult voices said, and I believed them. Even ten years later, or twenty, different adults have tried to designate proper roles: “She was the mom and you were the child,” they say. “Your mother was too ill to care for you properly. Otherwise, she would have reached out to you after all these years.” And I’ve believed those voices too. Except. Except for the part of me that remembers, the part that lives in the cauterized landscape, in the childhood that never knew to call itself abuse. That part also remembers a mom who brushed my hair and made me lunches. That part remembers loving her and remembers walking away. Yes, my mother gave up on me, but that small part knows I gave up too. And that part is very, very broken.

  This is why I know it’s different to talk about terminating a parent’s rights when the kids are older. Older children remember. Older children have guilt. Older children are abused, older children need sanctuary and fostering and outside adoption, but older children, no matter how brutalizing or diminishing their home lives are, won’t want to leave. And if they do, a part of them will always stay behind.

  “If you have the choice of being abused by your mother or abused by a stranger, you’d choose your mother. It’s abuse either way.” This came from Arelis Rosario-Keane, a twenty-two-year-old college student and a veteran of the foster care system, referring to the likelihood of getting mistreated in care. (As an example, an Indiana study showed that children in group homes experienced ten times the rate of physical abuse and twenty-eight times the rate of sexual abuse of kids in the general population. A study of kids in Oregon and Washington State foster homes showed one-third being abused by an adult in the home. ) Arelis now sees a therapist regularly and knows that all kinds of people develop deep psychic ties to their abusers. “Then again,” she said, “I was being victimized back then.”

  Of all the foster kids I’ve talked with over the years, Arelis and her seven biological siblings have endured some of the worst, and perhaps most sadistic, abuse I’ve ever heard recounted. The Rosario kids I know have been starved, beaten, locked in closets, abandoned in shelters and hotels for weeks at a time, and yet they were repeatedly remov
ed and then sent home again to live with the mother who abused them. Arelis speaks now from a position of relative safety; her mother’s rights have been terminated, and she and several of her siblings have been adopted by a kind and fiercely intelligent woman named Mary Keane. Arelis admits, though, that before Mary came along, she would have told any social worker who visited that she wanted to be returned to her mother.

  It can be difficult to tease apart signs of abuse from signs of a parent’s external stressors in infants, but recognizing abuse in children who are old enough to talk is especially tricky. Older children will lie out of fear or a desire to protect their parents, or they won’t know how to express the problems at home. For them, the problems are the only reality they know.

  After cycling in and out of foster care several times, the six youngest Rosario kids were abandoned for good. The two oldest girls were already separated from the family: one had had a baby and run off with a boyfriend, and the other had been stranded in a shelter and picked up by ACS. That left Arelis, at fourteen, to care for her siblings, ages eleven, ten, eight, seven, and four, in their father’s empty apartment; he was serving time. Before their mother left them there, she went grocery shopping and filled the cupboards with food. Unlike the other times she’d skipped out for weekends or took gambling trips to Atlantic City, she left the doorknob attached so the kids could come and go. At the beginning, Arelis said, they watched a lot of Murphy Brown since that was her favorite TV program and she had control over the remote. They figured their mom would come back eventually, but the weeks kept ticking by. Arelis said it “wasn’t within my mind to grasp, ‘Let’s all go to school together,’” but some days she would walk the youngest ones to the library and read to them. It also wasn’t within her grasp to call ACS—and none of them wanted to go back to that, largely because there were so many of them and the chances of them being placed in the same home were exceedingly slim. They’d been separated before, and Arelis said she felt tremendously worried and guilty. So when the food started running out, they stole from grocery stores. Pretty soon, the electricity was shut off. And then the water. They lasted for six months, until finally they called their older sister Aileen, who was in foster care, and she told them to call ACS.