by Cris Beam
Arelis Rosario-Keane was in college, and she told Fannie not to bet on it. Arelis was home on spring break; she’d just trekked in the night before on the Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, and her fleshy face was rumpled with sleep. The girls were sitting at the kitchen table; the snow outside was piled in heaps.
Fannie had heard about the $5,000 voucher program that foster kids can access for college or vocational school expenses, as long as they’re in care after their sixteenth birthday. But like so many foster kids who have heard rumors of their aging-out entitlements but never had them fully explained, Fannie was misinformed. And like the rent stipend and other entitlements, the voucher program is inadequate.
In truth, Fannie could access the $5,000 whether she got adopted or not, since she passed her sixteenth birthday in care. But she’d have to choose a school with expenses that topped out at $5,000, since that’s the maximum grant—and a school that could wait until November for payment since, as of 2011, that’s when the checks were cut. And she’d have to enroll before her twenty-first birthday and finish before her twenty-third—a time frame that renders most foster kids, who age out without high school diplomas, ineligible.
Arelis scoffed, “Wait ’til you have your exit meeting. Then you’ll see. There’s no security for you.”
The exit meeting is the last formal step for a child in foster care, and it signifies her legal discharge from care. In the meeting, the kid, the case manager from her agency, and someone at ACS discuss the child’s future. The child is supposed to have somewhere to live, a safe adult she can call upon, and a written plan for income and stability. She then signs papers, and her file is officially closed.
Arelis remembered signing herself out of care at her exit meeting; she was twenty-one and hadn’t yet been officially adopted by Mary. “They make you sign this yellow paper that basically says Forget This Address. Once you sign it, it says you can’t ask them for nothing,” she explained. “But the thing is, I like to read what I sign. And on this paper, they check off everything they say they’ve given you. I’m like, ‘This is a lie!’ Like they say they gave me money for vocational training. When did that happen?”
The ACS pamphlet Preparing Youth for Adulthood claims that, prior to discharge, youth should have the opportunity to participate in internships, career fairs, and vocational training. Their agencies should train them in money management and in strategies for obtaining documents—like birth certificates and immunization records. Youth ideally should know about the educational resources available to them—where they can go on to get a GED, say, or a mentor referral.
“I kept reading and I was like, ‘I didn’t get this, and I didn’t get that’—and they were all sitting there, claiming I had gotten these things and I hadn’t,” Arelis said, the memory making her voice rise again. “And, of course, those are all the things that are supposed to make you successfully age out of foster care and know that there are other resources out there. I never heard any of that stuff before.”
Fannie was outgoing, with close-cropped hair and defined muscles, with a kind of happy, coiled energy that seemed ready to spring. She was wearing a baseball cap and a tank top, like the boys in the house. As she stared at Arelis, her strong will started to wither. Maybe college tuition was out but, she said meekly, “I heard they give you Medicaid?”
“They lied!” Arelis shouted. “They lied!”
Arelis softened her tone. “They say they give you Medicaid, but it doesn’t work,” she said, shaking her head at Fannie. Before the New York State Assembly in late 2007, Legal Aid lawyers testified that far too often, foster kids’ Medicaid coverage is simply dropped as soon as they leave care—even if they are still poor enough to qualify. ACS is supposed to help kids transition from foster-based Medicaid to community-based Medicaid, but as Legal Aid testified, “ACS and foster agency staff are woefully untrained on this vital issue.” Kids don’t realize their coverage has been terminated until they receive bills in the mail. Arelis didn’t know about any of this, but she told Fannie, “I have bills from going to get my eye checked out, and I have to pay them.”
The only preparation for adulthood and independence that Arelis received was her independent living classes, which, Arelis said, were a joke. “I had to go all the way from Yonkers to lower Manhattan to find out they just really waste your time,” Arelis said. “They just put all these kids in a room, and what do we talk about? About how long it took us to get there, and why isn’t the pizza there yet.”
Arelis made the trek primarily for the $35 stipend, but that too wasn’t worth it, because it was distributed in installments: $10 here, $17 there, along with a Metro card for her ride home. In class, the kids watched movies that felt irrelevant and obscure. “They showed us videos about how to buy an apartment—like how to knock on the walls to make sure you couldn’t hear through the other side. It was like, ‘How am I going to buy an apartment? I don’t have any money,’” Arelis said. “They set you up for failure. They really do.”
Mary’s house, and Mary herself, are antidotes to that setup. Mary doesn’t push her kids into adulthood with prescribed sets of expectations; she lets them live with her as long as it takes to grow into a kind of faith in themselves and family again. There are a few rules: no overnight guests; everybody has to go to school and do their chores. If the kids want jobs on top of that, they can save the money for themselves. When there are arguments, people talk it out. Nobody ever, under any circumstances, gets kicked out.
Jonathan, the young man with the golden eyes who lived for five years in the Graham Windham RTC, never imagined he’d wind up with someone like Mary. He didn’t think he’d want to.
“I already had my run with families, and I was like, ‘Nah, I ain’t doing that no more.’ I just wanted to get out on my own and be free,” Jonathan said to me. Like most other foster kids nearing their discharge dates, Jonathan had chosen independent living as his permanency goal.
Jonathan was placed in a SILP apartment, after five years at Graham Windham. And even though he didn’t have to pay his own rent or buy his own food, he couldn’t take it. “I thought I had already tried it with families and it didn’t work. But it wasn’t until I resided in a SILP that I realized I didn’t want to do that. I was already twenty,” Jonathan said. He knew that by his twenty-first birthday he’d be put out, and he started to panic. “I didn’t graduate from high school and I didn’t have enough money to be stable. My agency was pushing me to save money, but I was being rushed. I really felt like I wasn’t going to do well when I got discharged—like I was going to keep falling behind and struggling and struggling. I got so frustrated, I called Mary.”
Mary had talked with Jonathan several times, when he had lived at Graham Windham. “She wanted to recruit kids who were free for adoption and connect them with adults who were interested. She was always trying to introduce me to that concept,” Jonathan said. Back then, he always said no; he was rooting for the free apartment. But once he had it, he wished he’d planned differently. “I asked Mary if she could set me up with a family, just until I could get myself together. Two weeks later, she came to the apartment and said, ‘Would you like to come and live with me?’”
Four years after this talk, Jonathan was still living with Mary. He didn’t know, when he was younger, to fight for a family, he said, because he had never been in a good one. “I live in a different world now, that I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to be at peace,” he said. The straight line of his haircut looked like a lid on the top of his head. “It’s no longer a matter of run to this place, run to that place, so I can get my mind together. There’s no more discharge states for me, no more computer life—where I’m just a name and a number with an expiration date.”
And Jonathan was making up for lost time. He was twenty-four years old, taking high school classes and working nights at a Dunkin’ Donuts. “Before, mostly, I didn’t go nowhere for Christmas, didn’t go nowhere for my birthday. Actually, everything I didn
’t have before—it’s the opposite. The house, my mother, my family—now I have it,” Jonathan said. “Eventually, I’ll get my own place, but now I like this.”
When kids are sixteen or eighteen, they don’t know they have other needs than the practical. And foster care has always favored safe housing over psychological stability, so kids follow this model into adulthood too. But what Mary has found, and what the kids discover once they’ve been out of the system for a while, is that they all need to regress.
“When they get here may be the first time they’re able to go back and relive some of what they’ve lost,” Mary said. “These kids will sit on your lap, have to sleep in your bed; one of my kids had to have a baby bottle for a while. She was fourteen.”
Mary thinks the group home orthodoxy of rules and consequences doesn’t work for foster kids; it’s too standardized, and as Kecia intimated, kids are often emotionally stranded in a life stage when they were first traumatized. Said Mary, “We say an eighteen-year-old should be doing such-and-such, but you can’t have milestone expectations like that. They can’t all go at the same pace, and they’re stuck in different places. They might be twenty, but emotionally fourteen.”
This was a different day and, as usual, Mary and I were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea. One of the non-Rosarios, a skinny girl named Tamara, stumbled in, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Tamara was twenty and had lived with Mary for four years. When I was around, Tamara barely talked—she sat in the corner of the kitchen on a stool, glancing up from her hand-held video game whenever anybody said something funny or loud, but she rarely cracked a smile.
“Did I do a good job?” Tamara asked quietly.
“A wonderful job, wonderful!” Mary said, beaming at her. Tamara didn’t take her eyes from the phone she held in her hand. “I’d like to come down and see the kitchen looking like this every day.”
I caught a tiny upturn at Tamara’s lips, but she kept her gaze on the phone and shuffled away. That was what the literature didn’t promote, Mary said, once Tamara was out of earshot: intense, direct praise for even the smallest accomplishment, like a chore well done. “They have to know first and foremost that they’re loved and have value—so you have to think of one thing every day that they did well, something they can feel good about. They’re so desperate for positive feedback,” she said. In the early years, when her kids’ trauma was more raw and recent and they were regressing to baby bottles and front-yard brawls, she had to dig. “I would say things like ‘I’m so proud you went to school today.’”
But most group homes focus on responsibilities and consequences, not safety and praise. Kids start at zero and run in a deficit. Mary said all of her kids came to her “in absolute panic and fear that they were being judged.” Even if they wanted to please Mary or follow her rules, they couldn’t always prioritize the things she asked them to. “Their head was going through absolute trauma, and chores were the last thing they’re thinking about.”
So Mary grew patient and imagined where her kids were coming from. “If I knew their heads were spinning, and they were freaking out,” she said, “I could just be there for them and relax.”
And then she had to train them—something else a lot of group homes don’t consider. “If they didn’t come from a clean house, they never saw clean, so clean for them might mean push everything to one side,” she said. “You have to go in and show them, ‘This is what I had in mind.’”
I looked around at Tamara’s swept kitchen and thought—no way. Kids are crafty and self-involved; give an inch, and all that. They’ll play sick, play dumb, play any card that’ll yield them some favor. My daughter, Christina, for instance, would leave takeout containers scattered all over the kitchen and under her bed, but her own backpack was as tidy as a military locker. She had selective vision, trained on her own needs. Mary’s kids may have loved her, I thought, but they could also prey on her kindness.
Later that afternoon, though, Mary’s unofficial foster son Anthony shifted my perspective. Unlike everybody else in the house, Anthony had never been in foster care. His mother died when he was three months old, his father when he was six, and he lived with his grandmother and many cousins and other foster kids for some years after that. When this grandmother passed, some aunts and uncles scooped up the cousins, and the grandfather drove the foster children to South Carolina, but he didn’t take Anthony. He remembers waking up to an empty house one morning in 1996, after everybody else drove away. He was eleven years old.
I could almost see traces of the little boy in the face of the twenty-three-year-old man who sat at the kitchen table with me, quietly laying out his story. A dimple in one cheek and crooked teeth belied the kind of quick charm he must have had as a leggy adolescent, though his eyes were sad and serious. He wore sweatpants and a crisp white T-shirt, covered by a plaid flannel shirt buttoned once at the neck. Perched high on his head was a baseball cap, its brim carefully cocked to one side.
The cap, too, was a tease at the kid he’d been; before his family abandoned him, Anthony had played baseball. There had been money for uniforms and team dues, and dreams of the major leagues. But after the death, Anthony said, “happiness ended right there. After my grandmother, that was it.”
“It” was the streets. No school official, social worker, or government agency caught up with Anthony from that day forward; he simply fell off the grid and no one ever caught him.
“I stole drugs, hurt people, robbed people,” Anthony said, explaining how he survived. He joined the Crips for a while, lived for some time with an older teenager who’d inherited an apartment from his father who had died. “I didn’t get a job until I was nineteen, at Circuit City, because before that, I was just too young.”
Anthony didn’t like to talk about the ten years he lived on the streets; in the one year he’d been with Mary, he said, he’d changed too much, and it hurt him to look back. “Some of the things I did, I can’t forgive myself for, ’cause I can’t see myself doing it now. Every day I wake up and ask myself, ‘Why did I do that?’” Anthony said, his words determined and flat. “Now, if I see someone getting robbed, I’m going to run and help him, but I still can’t make up for what I did before.”
What he can make up for, at least a little bit, is playing the child’s role. He revels in Mary telling him what to do and at first, he affirmed, he did in fact need help learning how to clean. “Once I got here, I could only stay a night or two, and then leave, because I wasn’t good with authority or having rules,” he said. He arrived at Mary’s house directly after years of squatting in abandoned places or on the couches or floors of older friends. His brother, who had been in jail for most of Anthony’s childhood, was living with Arelis Rosario-Keane’s sister down the street, and he introduced Anthony to Mary. By then, Anthony was twenty-one. He had nowhere else to go and figured he’d give stability a try. “After a while, I started getting comfortable here because I realized this was how it was supposed to have been as a kid. I was supposed to have rules—to clean my room, have chores. I started relearning what I was supposed to get, what I missed out on. And it feels good.”
During another visit with Anthony, he told me that if we had more Marys around, the world would be entirely different. Mary’s model is unique, and if others had her patience and dedication, it could be replicated. Because even when kids age out and do well, even when they can conjure the American dream of college, they still regress. They still have to contend with lost parts of their childhoods. Arelis Rosario-Keane feels that her mom stole something crucial from her.
“I can never live up to myself because I don’t know who that is. I feel like I will always be missing a piece, no matter where I am in life,” Arelis said to me one day, her eyes briefly filling. “I think she has that piece.”
I pointed out the ways Arelis was doing so well; here she was, in college, living in Boston, living out what I imagined she always dreamed for herself. She told me she never had those dreams. “I never thought
I’d live to be this old. I never thought I’d live to graduate high school. And because I never dreamed of things like college, they still seem unreachable,” she said.
The things that do seem reachable, Arelis said, are more familiar. Before college, Arelis spent some time doing drugs, going to rehab, experimenting with the substances her mother used—things she promised herself she’d never try. “You can say, ‘I don’t want to be like my father because he was drug-addicted,’ or ‘I don’t want to be like my mother because she was drug-addicted and she did alcohol and she was just a bad person,’ but still I walked down that road anyway. I did those things anyway because I was around them my whole life, and if they were going to take away the pain, I was going to do them.”
Arelis isn’t using drugs anymore, and she’s doing well in school, but she still feels as if her life is in a fragile balance. “My brain is messed up,” she said. “You know how puzzle pieces can fit together, but they don’t belong? That’s how I feel. The pieces are shoved together. The thing functions but there are cracks—and all it takes is one bad experience and everything falls apart.”
I asked her what the bad experience might be. After all, Arelis had already been through hell and survived. She’d survived an abusive home and then foster care, and then was awarded with foster care’s one shining promise: a stable, adoptive mother who loved her. With her siblings. By foster care standards, she’d lucked out.
But it was the instability of foster care, Arelis reminded me, which couldn’t find a “Mary” soon enough and kept sending her back to her mom, that did the damage in the first place. Now the danger came from inside her. “Foster care makes you feel like you don’t deserve anything,” she said. “And now I’m the self-destruct button of myself.”
