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

by Beam, Cris

  When we went to pick Dominique up from therapy, she was ready to talk. She’d tamed her hair, put on makeup, and seemed interested in having someone new around—meaning me—to listen to her point of view.

  “I always like my opinion to sound different from other people’s, so I’ll say the opposite of what you’re saying no matter what,” Dominique said, leaning in toward me conspiratorially. We were sitting together in the back seat of the minivan.

  Bruce cut in. “You like to be the devil’s advocate.”

  Dominique narrowed her eyes at him and made sure he could see her in the rearview mirror. “No,” she said brattily. “I’m talking about something else. For example, you might say Kanye West is the corniest rapper, and I might agree with you, but once you say it, I’ll tell you I love him.”

  Bruce threw up his hands and Dominique spoke more quietly, so he couldn’t hear. She said her attitude comes from her anger, of which she has a lot. “Every time I trust someone or love them, they leave. So I can’t trust,” she whispered. “That’s why I’m angry.”

  Dominique was removed from her biological mother’s house at five, already physically and mentally scarred from the iron her brother had burned her with and from the crack she said her mother had smoked throughout her pregnancy. She then went through a few long-term placements that ended in rejection and loss.

  Allyson worked to temper her children’s past traumas and their attendant misconduct through religious guidance. Every Sunday, in lieu of church, she held a long Bible study for all the kids at home. She called it her class, and that day, after Dominique’s therapy, she gathered everyone together.

  “I practice forgiveness so that I may be forgiven. I will serve joyfully and peacefully, for it is the will of Allah,” Allyson said, reading from the notebook she prepared throughout each week—jotting down stories, quotes, and parables that she organized into themes focused around whatever household trouble had been brewing. While Allyson and her lessons are unequivocally Christian, she’ll sprinkle in a few “Allahs” for broader appeal; foster kids in New York have often been exposed to a range of religions. These lessons are usually thinly veiled, say the kids; this week’s directive was aimed at Dominique, and the focus was on obeying one’s mother and father. “Whatever goodness I expect of others, I will be that goodness.”

  Allyson stood behind the kitchen counter; Dominique, Fatimah, and Chanel perched directly in front of her on barstools. Beyond them, around the dining room table, were the biological kids—Jaleel, Bruce Junior, and Sekina—and the adopted nephew Charles, along with the foster kids Russell and Tonya. Only Allen, being so young, was exempt. Sometimes these lessons lasted an hour; sometimes, the kids said, they could go on all afternoon. Today, Allyson was starting with Creation; it could be a long one.

  She described the Garden of Eden, saying that God simply spoke life into all the plants and animals, but he took extra time with the humans. She said he breathed their thoughts into them, so, “We can learn what?”

  “Right from wrong,” the kids all answered in chorus. They’d heard this before.

  “Who’d like to be in a garden right now?” she asked.

  “I wish I was on a cruise to the Bahamas,” Dominique mumbled, her head in her hands. She knew this was about her, and she looked miserable.

  Allyson took the bait. “Well, when you get something, you don’t just inherit it,” Allyson said, careful not to look directly at Dominique. She didn’t want to embarrass her.

  “So God says to Adam and Eve, ‘You can have everything in this garden’—like we say to you, ‘You can have everything in this house,’” Allyson said, still standing in her high-heeled boots and shifting her weight. “Except he told them, ‘Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge.’ It’s like your mother and father saying, ‘You can have everything but you have to come straight home.’” Like her grandmother in Belize, Allyson had a throng of children at her feet, soaking in her stories and morals. “Your friends might say, ‘Don’t go home—lie to your parents—they won’t know.’”

  Dominique peeked up at Allyson with one eye. The other kids seemed to be listening closely. Allyson continued. “God said to Adam and Eve, ‘Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge,’ but they did. And what happened? They had an increase of pain. You have consequences.” Allyson lowered her voice. “If you have consequences from the Creator, why shouldn’t you have consequences when you are placed in the home of a mother and father who are placed in authority over you?”

  The Greens’ trinity of religious instruction, strict rules, and family unity had a slow but steady impact on the longer-term foster kids. As an example, Bruce pointed out Chanel, their first, and now oldest, foster daughter.

  “Now, if you’da met Chanel a year ago, if she’d seen a stranger sitting in the house, she’d have cut her eyes at you. Isn’t that right, Chanel?” Bruce said, after Allyson’s Bible class.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” Chanel answered, cutting her eyes at me. Chanel was eighteen—a pretty, quiet girl with a face as inscrutable as stone.

  “But now,” Bruce continued, “Chanel’s doing well in school, and she has more trust.”

  “And they’re going to adopt me,” Chanel said, over her shoulder and to no one in particular, as she left the kitchen and headed outside to sit on the stoop with her sisters.

  Whether the kids truly felt more trust than they had before I couldn’t yet tell, but they called Allyson and Bruce Mom and Dad, and they all wanted to stay. Fatimah, who had been with the Greens almost as long as Chanel, was also hoping they’d adopt her.

  After the Bible lesson, as the younger kids were eating pizza and drinking juice, Fatimah and I also headed outside to talk. She told me she was writing a book called Until November, since that was the month the Greens would be formalizing her adoption. The book would be about her years in care, and the twenty-one homes she’d lived in, but it would have a happy ending: it was September then and the court date for her adoption was only two months away.

  Fatimah was about five foot five, compact and muscular from running on her high school track team. Her style was fairly plain, just jeans and a T-shirt; her only adornment was a gold SpongeBob charm on a chain at her neck. Fatimah loved SpongeBob. She talked so fast sometimes it was hard to understand her, as if her mouth couldn’t catch up with her mind, and she had a lisp. This was new, she said as we settled in on the top step—a holdover from the five months she didn’t speak after a particularly traumatizing experience—which she told me about but asked me not to repeat—in one of the foster homes. When she finally started talking again, her voice was entirely different—more high-pitched and fast, with a stress on her s’s and l’s.

  “Wanna see my grades?” Fatimah suddenly asked, and bounded inside. In the house, in the foyer and stairwell, hung framed drawings by Fatimah’s birth mother. One was of a man playing the trumpet, and one was of a feminine face surrounded by feathers, and both were quite good.

  Fatimah’s mom struggled with alcohol and drugs, and she had signed away her parental rights when Fatimah was five. Still, she strung Fatimah along with occasional promises. Throughout her childhood, Fatimah said she remembered various foster parents dropping her off at the agency for visits with her mom. The agency was in downtown Brooklyn, with a view of the subway through its window. “I’d watch the trains and think, ‘She’s probably on this one.’ I’d watch all these trains go by and she’d never come.” Fatimah was sixteen on the day we talked, and the disappointment with her mother had calcified into a kind of resignation. “I never got what I was promised,” she told me, adding that she rarely visited her mom anymore even though she lived close by. “That’s why it’s hard to believe I’m really gonna be adopted.”

  Fatimah had returned to the stoop, clutching her grades. I looked at the photocopied sheet, while Fatimah beamed and picked at her cuticles. All As from her charter school, except for a B in history. With Fatimah, topics tend to jump all over the place, and she told me that when she
first arrived at the Greens’, she had been dating but she’d stopped thinking about outside relationships entirely.

  “I’m not going there right now,” she said. “You see what it’s like—this is a Christian house.”

  So she closed that part of herself down. She was used to it, she said, having to sacrifice one part of herself for another, and right now, having a stable home—which she’d never experienced—and parents who wanted her eclipsed any other needs. She wanted desperately to go to college, so she said she kept her mind focused entirely on school. She played with the SpongeBob charm. “I can’t really think about that in this kind of house.”

  Just then, Dominique pushed past us to talk to Bruce, who was also now sitting on the lower steps of the stoop. She asked him if she could sit for a while in the backyard. When he turned in the other direction, she promptly marched off toward the corner store. I braced myself for a brawl.

  When Dominique got back, Bruce was distracted and talking to his other daughters, so she quietly slipped past them and came to sit with me. Dominique is tall and curvy and prone to wearing bright colors. She speaks with a slight stutter, which is intensified when she’s excited or upset, and her face can transform in an instant from delight to rage. “They do things that are very weird,” Dominique said, about Allyson and Bruce. In her most recent foster home, she had no curfew at all—and, she said, the Greens don’t seem to understand that she spent seventeen years of her life living in a particular way, and children just can’t turn on a dime. For instance, the other day, her best friend, Diamond, was over at the house. The other Green children don’t generally ask to bring friends over, because like many kids in the system, they don’t like to admit they’re in foster care. But Dominique doesn’t care. “It’s like Diamond’s been in my life for four years, but you recently came into mine, and you’re trying to exert control? They try too hard to be parents. It’s fine with their own children, but not with me.”

  I asked her if she thought she’d stay, if she wanted to stay, and she said she will, and she does. But if it’s so difficult, I persisted, why would she want to? To this she had no answer; she was frustrated with her new family, but she wanted to continue living with them.

  It’s just that with so many people in the house all the time, she said, she gets overwhelmed. Sometimes she needed to get out, to clear her head and think things through. It’s not to break a rule, but to break away from the noise. She looked at the trees across the street and said, “When I have my space, I find myself.”

  Suddenly Bruce interrupted. Bounding up the steps from the street, he demanded, “How do you get along with your biological father?”

  Dominique’s face went dark. “We’re not talking to you.”

  Bruce was unfazed. “I know your dad was stricter than I am.” He squatted so he was nearly eye to eye with Dominique. “You have problems with male authority figures.”

  At this, Dominique’s voice went shrill. “See! This is what you always do! You always interrupt! That’s being disrespectful!”

  In my own head, I conceded that Dominique had a point. But Bruce wasn’t finished. “What do you call what you do? Coming in at 1:30 in the morning—and then now—saying you’re just going to the backyard—and when I go to look for you you’re not there?” Bruce’s tone was intense—not exactly angry, but at her level. “This is how you’re always starting arguments.”

  Dominique threw up her hands in disgust and looked at the sky. A gurgly sound escaped her throat, and then she sucked her teeth. “Well, I don’t argue with people I don’t love.”

  Bruce jumped up from the step, a look of glee widening across his face. He bounded down the stairs and out into the street. The other sisters, Fatimah, Chanel, and Tonya, who had been gossiping together on the bottom step, exchanged embarrassed glances. Bruce was ecstatic.

  “She loves me, she loves me—Dominique said she loves me!” Bruce was shouting and doing a kind of football touchdown dance in the middle of the street. A passing car had to stop and wait for him to finish. “It’s only been three months, and she says she loves me!”

  “No I didn’t!” Dominique shouted back. “I said I only fight with people I love. I didn’t say I love you.”

  “Same thing!” Bruce retorted, skipping around. Some teenage boys from the projects across the street were leaning against a tree and watching the scene unfold. But this was Bruce’s territory; he grew up here, and everyone knew him. “You argue with people you love, and you argue with me. So you love me. I been telling you I love you every day, and finally you said it back.”

  At this, Bruce moved out of the way so the car could pass, and he started a little singsong dance at the curb. The girls all shielded their eyes with embarrassment, as though they could block him out with their hands. “My daughter loves me, my daughter loves me, my daughter says she loves me!”

  Despite herself, Dominique let out a laugh. “You so crazy,” she said.

  “I may be crazy,” Bruce answered, “but I love my Dominique.”

  7

  Chutes and Ladders and Chutes

  THE ROAD TO FULL assimilation in a new family is a treacherous one; the “I love you” confession was a good step for Dominique, but I knew she’d probably continue to struggle. Allyson explained it to me like this: “They can say I love you but they don’t know how to love you wholly because they’re scared of losing you. They build walls within themselves and you’ve got to try to chop at the layers.”

  Bruce thinks the walls he’s seen in his kids come not so much from the abuse in their original homes but from all the placements they’ve endured afterward. “A lot of times these children go into homes where they never get to understand what happened to them emotionally and then they’re gone into another home,” he said. “So I don’t know what your issues are, you don’t know what your issues are, but you can’t act them out—and nobody’s taking the time to put it all together.”

  The Greens’ second foster daughter, Tonya, is a good example of what happens to a child when she rebounds through multiple foster homes. Tonya didn’t (or couldn’t) “act out” the trauma she was experiencing directly, but signs of her suffering seeped out, and intensified, with each new placement. And Bruce was right. Tonya couldn’t begin to identify or integrate all the pieces.

  Tonya appears tougher than Dominique at the outset because she’s quieter. She’s pretty in a kind of straightforward, unprissy way; she’s thick in the thighs and slim in the face, with a square chin and small white teeth, bright against her dark skin. She straightens her shoulder-length hair but doesn’t get manicures; her hands are marked with the scars from her many fights with boys and girls alike. Although her laughter comes easily, it’s a hard laugh and her eyes stay flat and far away, whether from disinterest or distrust, I can’t tell.

  Tonya was removed from her home when she was five and someone caught on to her mother’s cocaine habit. She doesn’t remember much about the first foster house except that she started wetting the bed, and she and her brother, William, had to leave after a week—probably, she said, because of the soiled sheets. Next, they went into an apartment with a family that spoke Spanish, and nobody could communicate at all. Tonya continued the bed-wetting, and after two weeks they were driven to a third family in the projects, with “a nice lady.” One day, this lady drove the kids to the foster agency, and Tonya’s mom was there, to take them home. By this point, Tonya said, she was just like “OK, whatever,” her six-year-old skin thickened and her mind cool and detached, more prepared for the next unanticipated hurdle.

  Bed-wetting in a six- or seven-year-old can be a sign of trauma, or a stressful change in environment. (The literature suggests child abuse, a death in the family, or the birth of a new sibling.) In the span of a few months, Tonya had moved four times, acquired and lost several siblings, and then landed back at home again. The bed-wetting subsided, but she started skipping school. Because of this, after a year or so, Tonya and her brother were back in the
system again.

  “We went to a lady’s house who used to beat us,” Tonya said, her eyes intermittently flicking to some cartoons on TV. She said she didn’t want to tell anyone about the abuse; she just wanted to stay in one place long enough for her mom to get her back like the last time around. But then, on a Christmas visit, her mom saw marks. “She was like, ‘What’s them scratches on your face?’ And that night, they just took us out of that house—we didn’t even get our clothes or nothing. They just took us to another home.”

  The new place was worse. The family was fostering an older boy, Tonya said, who used to bring her to the basement and molest her. She was eight or nine by then and knew how to keep mum. But in a kind of quiet rebellion or attempt to reach out, she started stealing from her classmates, just little things: pencils and trinkets. “I had developed sticky fingers. I don’t know. I just wanted to be friends with people.” But she didn’t know how.

  Throughout this time, Tonya’s mother was visiting the kids and promising she’d get them back. But once again, Tonya and her brother were moved to a new place, at night, in a van, like stolen merchandise themselves. Every night in every city, children are buckled into vans or police cars (like criminals), as wards of the state (like criminals), and driven to strangers’ houses and told to behave. Children explain this to themselves in a myriad of ways: often, because they’re children, it’s because of something they did. (“I wet the bed, I was stealing at school.”) Often, the reality is bureaucratic (the foster home was meant to be only temporary, the foster parents needed different licensing). And almost always, the kids get no real explanation.

  In Tonya’s case, the move meant a new family with a new teenage boy—this one with a fighting fetish. He forced Tonya and another little girl in the home to beat each other up, while he watched—rooting for one or the other, in turns. In school, the sticky-fingers behavior escalated to hallway fights, mirroring what was happening in the foster home. It was Tonya’s fifth school in as many years, and she “didn’t like to be picked on.” Still, Tonya said the foster mom wasn’t so bad; she took Tonya to a hair salon for Easter and bought her new Air Jordans, and once, when she caught the teenager picking on the younger kids, she hit him and said, “You will leave my kids alone!” Tonya smiled at the memory. “I felt like I was wanted because she said ‘my kids.’ She was including us, and it felt like we were a part of something—but then we had to leave her.”