by Cris Beam
Steve, Erin, Oliver, and Wilson live in East Austin, in a neighborhood of bungalow-style cottages from the forties painted in wild shades of turquoise and pink. There’s a taqueria on the corner, and Wilson’s daycare, named Habibi’s (“beloved” in Arabic) Hutch, is a few blocks away. It’s the kind of place that sends kids home covered in mud or paint from a day of playing, and where Wilson is indulged in acting the superhero or in pretending that the juice he’s drinking is really pee, so he can scream in delight and gross everybody out.
When Erin picked me up from the airport on a Friday night, it was nearly midnight, but she had to drive back to the local Moose Lodge where she and some friends were stenciling lettering and a moose’s head onto the side of the building. Erin is a graphic designer with her own firm, but even with two kids and a full-time business, she has time to indulge her great sense of camp.
Early the next morning, Erin trooped off with Wilson to actually paint the lodge (Wilson loves paint), and Steve settled in with me to talk.
“The mom signed away her rights on a napkin—that should have been our first red flag,” Steve said, handing me a cup of coffee. “Still, it was notarized, so we didn’t worry about it too much.”
We drank our coffee and the sun made dappled patterns on the bright living room rug. Steve continued. “Right after we got him, they warned us that sometimes the investigators can get a little idealistic about taking the kids away. Our social worker started saying, ‘Hopefully this will work out, but sometimes it doesn’t,’” Steve said, catching Oliver as he tumbled into his lap. He said that perhaps he and Erin were overconfident because of the way things had worked out with Wilson, which is to say, without a hitch. They had found out about Wilson through a friend—a teenage girl was pregnant and looking for smart, sensitive parents to raise her child. She didn’t want to go through an agency, and when she met Steve and Erin, she was thrilled. Although Child Protective Services had never seen a case where the parents made the agreements outside their jurisdiction, they approved the arrangement and stamped the papers. After Wilson was official, Steve and Erin understood the system in one way: they saw it as a functional kind of bureaucracy, the kind they could work with. And they saw themselves as helpful to society: as people who raised the kids whom others couldn’t.
Steve said to me, that day on the floor, miserable and self-effacing, that maybe he had “a bit of a savior complex,” but really he didn’t want to add to the problem of overpopulation. He wanted to do the right thing; he had time and money and love to shower on a few kids abandoned to the system. He didn’t bargain to stand between a mother and her child. That was never part of the plan.
On the day Steve was scheduled to drop Oliver off for a visit with Caitlin, he was promised one thing: he wouldn’t have to meet her. Steve was to leave Oliver in a waiting room, where a social worker would be the intermediary. This is standard procedure in most places, as tension or arguments can break out between the various parents and in front of the children. Fighting is saved for the courtroom. But when Steve pulled into the child services parking lot, an old man in a tank top immediately marched up to the car.
“Did you ever read Executioner’s Song? The guy reminded me of my mental image of Gary Gilmore. He was all grizzled and making faces at Oliver, saying, ‘I’m the grandpa!’” Steve later found out this was Caitlin’s boyfriend’s father, who had lived with Oliver in his first few months. “It was kind of scary. I wasn’t ready for that kind of contact.”
As they walked into the building, Steve said, a pretty teenager with wide-set blue eyes and curly blond hair lunged at him and grabbed Oliver from his arms. This was Caitlin. An older woman was close behind, shouting, “Give the baby to me! He’d rather be with me!” and “Can you take a picture?”
Steve was overwhelmed and concerned by the chaos, and he didn’t have a camera, which seemed to upset everybody. The social worker, who was supposed to coordinate the handoff, finally came out and told Steve to leave; she’d drive Oliver back in a few hours.
When Oliver got home, Steve said, he felt a tinge of worry: Caitlin and her in-laws had used up all four of the diapers he’d provided for the two-hour visit and not nearly enough of the baby formula. Aside from being tired, though, Oliver seemed fine.
The next week, after Steve made the two-hour drive to the welfare office, Caitlin didn’t show. “I was so happy,” Steve said. “She was screwing up, just like people said she would.”
But then Caitlin made the next visit, and missed the next, and it was off and on like this for the next few months. There were excuses—it was raining, the family didn’t have gas money, someone had a doctor’s appointment, and so on. Usually they called, but sometimes they didn’t, and Steve wasn’t sure whether, to a judge, Caitlin’s unreliability would look like unfit parenting or progress from her prior state.
At Oliver’s next hearing, he found out. The judge upgraded Oliver’s visits to overnight stays. When this happened, Steve said, both Caitlin and her boyfriend’s mom, Jill, got nicer. They reintroduced themselves, Caitlin noticed the similarity in Steve’s and Oliver’s curly hair (claiming the two even looked a bit alike), and Jill started the hard sell on her maternal instincts.
“Jill talked to me for about an hour,” Steve said, gently imitating her Texan drawl. “She said, ‘I wanna tell you what I’m all about. I make my own baby food, I take my kids to Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald’s ’cause you gotta treat ’em right.’”
Steve said, at the beginning, he tried to extend goodwill; he plainly had more education and money than Jill and Caitlin, but he also knew that wouldn’t make him a better parent. Still, there was the complicated issue of love and letting go. Steve, Wilson, and Erin were already deeply attached to Oliver, and Oliver to them. And Steve didn’t want to release Oliver into a family that would be dangerously irresponsible. His radar was up.
“Jill did say one thing that made me feel a little better,” Steve said, handing Oliver a bottle. “She said, ‘I know Caitlin’s young—but if anything happens, if she tries to take that baby out of my house, I’m calling CPS and I’m calling you.’”
Just as Oliver was getting fussy and I was getting hungry and the morning sun was shining hotter through the window, Erin and Wilson bounded through the front door, Wilson covered in paint.
“I painted a moose!” Wilson said, and then, “Can we get tacos?”
Oliver threw his bottle to the floor at the sight of his brother and toddled toward him, arms outstretched and grinning madly. Wilson barely gave Oliver a glance and ran to the other room for some paper, suddenly struck with a new idea. “Mom! Will you draw me a truck? No dogs, no cars, and NO BUTTOCKS!”
Buttocks was Wilson’s new favorite word, something he picked up at Habibi’s Hutch. Most of Steve’s and Erin’s days were spent in the swirl and tumult of the thousand immediate feeding, sleeping, playing, and drawing needs of two small children—for the past several months, Steve had tried not to think too deeply about what it would feel like, or mean, to his family if Oliver had to leave for good. He and Erin had spoken to lawyers who said that they couldn’t fight for custody anyway until Oliver had been with them for a full year; at that point, and only then, could they argue that so much emotional bonding had taken hold that it would be in Oliver’s best interests to stay. When I visited, Oliver was still a few months shy. So Steve simply reported what he saw when Oliver came home from Caitlin’s, or when she missed appointments, and he hoped, somehow, that everything would work out, whatever that meant. In a way, he relinquished control, but he also became a bit of a spy.
“It’s awkward because I’m friendly with these people, but I’m also tattling on them,” Steve said. Steve started meeting Caitlin and Jill at a restaurant parking lot midway between their two towns, and in the handoff learning more about their lives. He discovered Jill couldn’t read, and that there was a pit bull in the house, for instance. He called a social worker to check on the dog, which was later kept on a leash. Caitl
in told Steve she took Oliver to Golden Corral for his own chocolate cake, and Jill fed him tea and sugar water, which Steve didn’t particularly love, but which wasn’t particularly illegal either. Neither was the smell of cigarette smoke on Oliver’s blankets, which Steve also reported. The car seat they were using, he felt, was too big for Oliver, but he wasn’t really sure. Caitlin, he found out, was stabilizing a bit economically, as she had landed a job at McDonald’s, and he took solace in the fact that under the “Goals for Child” section of Caitlin’s file, she had written “college.” But Jill confessed to him that Caitlin’s moods were unpredictable. It was hard to get a complete picture, and Oliver couldn’t talk.
“That’s the hardest part of letting go,” Steve said. “Because we have this vision of what we could give him—not to sound egotistical or whatever—but what kinds of schools he could go to, what kinds of opportunities he could have.”
Steve struggled to find words. “But who’s to say our lifestyle is any better than theirs really? Maybe they’ll have a different parenting approach, like they’ll talk to him in a more shrill voice or they’ll be watching a lot more TV and there won’t be too many books, but maybe he’ll thrive in that environment in a way. He could become one of those disadvantaged kids who gets motivated to improve himself, instead of us just handing him everything.” Steve paused. “Maybe he’ll have a good, happy life.”
He sounded as if he was convincing himself, his voice lilting and unsteady. Steve tried to picture Oliver growing up in the town where he’d been dropping him off; he’d looked at the teenagers there and imagined. “He may be some kid who wears NASCAR shirts and it might be a big deal if he graduates from high school. It’s hard—you have this one vision of what can happen, and then he’s going to have a totally different life. But then, it’s like he’ll be living, and I think he’ll be nurtured and stuff.”
One thing that did concern Steve was Caitlin’s claim that Oliver was a “difficult baby.” According to Steve, he wasn’t. He needed to be held more than some children, but he wasn’t an excessive crier, and he was engaged and friendly. Couple this with Caitlin’s reported mood swings, and a case report that she once hit Oliver for grabbing the television remote, and Steve worried that she still wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle the curiosity and constant demands of a growing child.
“If that mom thinks he’s difficult now, just wait until he’s suffering from the attachment problems that’ll come when he loses Steve and Erin,” my partner said when I got home from Texas and told her the story. My partner, Lo Charlap, PhD, is a psychologist and a professor of social work at NYU, and she teaches what therapists call “attachment.” She says that the reason that Oliver regresses every time he gets home from seeing Caitlin (returning to the bottle and refusing solid food, clinging to Steve, getting anxious when Steve leaves the room, and so on) is that attachment is being disrupted. Attachment theory, in simple terms, goes like this: Ideally, in infancy, a child connects deeply with an adult who can intuit and then meet his needs and soothe his emotions. This is called a “secure attachment.” As he grows, this child internalizes this adult who has taught him to manage his urges to scream or kick or rage, and he can begin to contain difficult internal states, rather than act them out. If attachment is ruptured, or never there to begin with, a child doesn’t trust that there’s anyone constant to soothe him, and there’s no internalized, subconscious mom or dad to maintain impulse control. That’s why, my partner says, nearly every kid in foster care is diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or even Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD)—they don’t have impulse control, because they never had proper attachment. Unfortunately, the system tends to tackle the symptoms rather than the cause, by medicating the children for their hyperactivity or aggression, without addressing the underlying loss, which can take years to repair.
In the case of Oliver, my partner worried, he’d develop ADHD or ODD, and instead of facing a difficult baby, Caitlin would be facing a difficult kid and perhaps an impossible teenager. For his psychological development, my partner believed, Oliver should stay where he was—regardless of the better schools, or the pit bulls, the Habibi’s Hutch versus the Golden Corral. And if he did go to Caitlin, both she and Oliver would need a lot of ongoing counseling to manage the mayhem that would come from breaking such an early and important attachment.
But still, I argued—a mother deserves a chance. Just because she screws up in the first year of her child’s life, should she be banned from her own baby forever?
“Depends on whose side you’re on: the mom’s or the kid’s,” my partner said. “If she really loves her son, then she should leave him where he’s already attached.”
Child welfare, in general, has been soaking up attachment theory since it was first developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the fifties and sixties; it’s why states shifted from keeping babies in orphanages to moving them into individual homes. It’s the primary theory in the scientific papers on foster care’s child-parent dynamics, and it’s the reason experts leverage when they argue for fewer removals and fewer placements once in care. A child’s bond with her parent, especially in her first few years, is almost unspeakably critical.
And yet, once a child has been removed and the damage to the attachment has already been done, it’s pretty tough to argue that a new attachment to a foster or adoptive parent like Steve trumps any biological claim. Mostly, I’ve found, the experts don’t try—they won’t be as bald or assertive in their published papers as my partner was from the privacy of our living room. In one article for the Juvenile and Family Court Journal, the authors claimed family courts and judges were too often focused on young children’s physical safety rather than their attachments. They described the case of a baby who had been in one loving pre-adoptive home for ten months, but because of some personal family problems, she was removed and placed in a second pre-adoptive home for four months. The first parents resolved their issues, and in the end, both sets of parents wanted the baby. The authors argued she should stay in the second home where she appeared to be thriving; a second rupture in attachment was just too big a risk to take.
The baby in this story was a composite of several cases the authors had overseen, so conveniently there was no biological parent to contend with. Still, the underlying message was to stick with the latest and best connection if, as my partner said, you were really rooting for the kid.
But I didn’t know. I thought about all the kids I knew who mourned the separation from their biological parents and acted out all kinds of terrible things from that loss too. And I thought of Steve, hugging me goodbye at the airport, bracing himself to lose the baby he loved, who would clearly grow and flourish in his care. The court date for Oliver was two weeks away; I wished Steve luck and I meant it.
3
Timing Is Anything
BABY ALLEN’S BIOLOGICAL DAD, Tom, learned about parenting from his own family—and if Tom had been left to raise Allen by himself, there would likely have been a lot more physical aggression. I found this out from Tom himself one sultry summer day when I stopped by DeKalb to chat with Allyson. I was surprised to see him; last I’d heard, Tom was meeting the Greens for steely handoffs at child visitation meetings in a downtown Manhattan agency.
They’d recently realized they were living within blocks of one another, and ever since then, Allyson and Tom had been getting along great. If Tom ever wanted to see his kid, Allyson said, he could skip the agency mediation and just come on by.
We sat under a big umbrella on the porch above the carport, and Tom told me about the ways his views on corporal punishment diverged from Allyson’s—but he was shifting.
“A couple of weeks ago, Chanel was putting the baby to sleep and Allen went right up to her and whacked her in the face,” Tom said, referring to one of the Greens’ older foster daughters. Allen had recently turned three. “Next thing I know he comes running out to me crying, saying, ‘Nell hit me!’ I was li
ke, ‘What did you do to Nell?’”
Tom is white, bald, and looks to be in his mid-forties, though he may be younger. He’s tall and thin and has no front top teeth—a fact he tries to hide by tucking his upper lip over his gums when he talks or smiles. When he laughs, he covers his mouth with his hand. That afternoon on the porch, Tom was wearing glasses with one earpiece missing, and he leaned forward in his chair as he told his story, glancing every few seconds at Allyson, who was placidly staring at the table. “Turns out Nell had popped his hand after he hit her.”
Allyson wasn’t home for this episode, but when she did get back and Tom relayed the details, Tom said she was upset. “She said, ‘No one hits the baby!’ But I reminded her of a story that was in the paper. There was a child that hit some guy’s girl and the guy choked the child. I don’t want that happening to AJ,” Tom said, referring to Allen by the name he prefers. “I’d rather Chanel, Sekina, Mrs. Green discipline him now—pop him in the hand, pop him in the butt, tell him not to do it. Because if he whacks the wrong person, he’ll get hurt.”
Allyson took a deep breath. “So I tell Tom that you’re dealing with a child that has anger. Hitting him is not teaching him the proper technique for handling anger—because if he sees you do it, he thinks, ‘OK, I’m angry, I hit you.’”
Tom didn’t look convinced, but he nodded, slowly, in Allyson’s direction. Both he and Allyson were punished as kids with whippings: Tom with a belt and Allyson with a switch. Still, Allyson said, “I was the oldest and I wasn’t allowed to discipline my sisters by hitting them. You have to go to the adult and let the adult deal with it because you let a child discipline another child and it goes someplace else.”
