by Anne Moody
Sandra never took us up on the offer of supervised office visits. The next time the girls and I saw her was many months later in a courtroom, at the hearing to terminate her parental rights. But I could never get her out of my mind. I found myself routinely looking for escape routes wherever I happened to be, just in case she suddenly appeared with a knife. After that frightening visit, I devised a bizarrely comforting plan to push a dresser in front of my second-floor bedroom door and escape out the tiny window onto the roof if I heard Sandra coming in my front door. Dubious as that plan sounds, it reassured me—but only until my daughter was born. After that, I had to realize that I had no plan that could extricate us both from the Sandra-delivered dangers I imagined. My baby and I were simply vulnerable.
I was a very happy new mother, but also a worried one. During my daughter Erin’s first year, I spent a great deal of my time either focused on protecting her or on terminating Sandra’s parental rights—trying to protect those daughters as well. But I was also very much aware of the inequities between my life and Sandra’s, and now that I was a parent, my attitude toward my clients grew more complicated.
I remember the first time I transported a baby to foster care. She was a darling, quiet eighteen-month-old whose mother had been extremely neglectful; I was a twenty-five-year-old who hadn’t even done much babysitting. Even with my advanced degree, I knew very little about child development or attachment theory. So I assumed that since the baby never cried, she must not be suffering too badly. I also assumed that the people who designed the foster care system knew what they were doing, and I could just blithely carry out my job. Not until I had my own child did I grasp how devastating it is for children to experience a break, let alone repeated breaks, in their attachments—especially in the first years of life. When I became a mother and learned about what is normal for children, I began to understand the enormity of the consequences of my clients’ abnormal lives. I found it heartbreaking to have to place an infant in a foster home knowing that (at the very least) that child would remain there during the crucial months when it should be bonding with its parents. If the baby was later returned to its parents, the bond it had formed with the foster parents would be broken. Either way, the child was harmed, sometimes irreparably, if the pattern of broken attachments continued, as it often did.
When my daughter was born, I was overwhelmed by her unscathed perfection and by the fact that I had the responsibility/power to do everything possible to make sure that life continued to be good for her. I wanted someone to have that same responsibility/power to make good lives for the children on my caseload, and I had to admit that that was a far cry from what I was doing. I was, for the most part, just maintaining a dismal status quo.
As my daughter got older and I became more attuned to children who were her age, I found it increasingly troubling to drive them to and from visits with their parents. I would never have allowed anyone to take my child away, yet I was routinely doing that to other mothers. And worst of all: generally, neither the child nor the parent seemed all that upset about it. There were rarely tears or protests by parent or child. I tried out the idea that perhaps these parents didn’t love their children as much as I loved mine, as proved by their lack of emotion over these forced separations and by their not doing what the courts required them to do in order to regain custody. But the reality was much more complicated, and much more painful: I think they allowed and endured separation from their children because they truly believed that they had no other option. They couldn’t grasp the concept of actually having enough control over their lives to prevent, or fight back against, misfortune. They felt completely powerless—as, soon enough, did their children. After enduring a few months of abuse or neglect, and the severing of their emotional bonds, the babies developed that same hopeless outlook. Why cry if no one responds? Why fight against something when doing so is futile? That quiet baby I was transporting—and who came to symbolize my entire caseload of children and adults—was placid, in other words, not out of contentment but out of despair.
Becoming a parent made my views about foster care much more radical. One would think that a new mother would have an increased awareness of the inviolability of the bond between mothers and babies. And I certainly “got that” on both an intellectual and an emotional level. But I was also struck by the realization that everything that happens to a baby has an impact not just on how well the baby is doing at that moment but on the rest of its life as well. Babies thrive in all sorts of situations, and there is no one best approach to child rearing. There are many and diverse ways to be a good parent, but the core of all good child rearing is allowing for the development of strong and consistent bonds with caregivers. And while there are many successful variations in caregiver relationships, and they don’t have to be between biological parent and child, they do have to be consistent. Babies need consistency in order to learn to trust the world, and children need continued consistency in order to keep that trust alive.
More and more in my work, I found it impossible to find a reasonable way forward for the kids on my caseload. Do we risk leaving them in dangerous situations in order to preserve their bonds to abusive parents? Should we immediately terminate parental rights when a baby is born to a mother whose long-term mental illness makes it impossible for her to safely parent? Should we set rigid rules about just how long a baby can be in foster care before the parent’s rights are terminated? And what would the magic number of weeks or months or years be before too much harm had been done? For that matter, how would we decide how much harm is too much? I came to understand that even if I could have fully understood/answered these questions, it still wouldn’t be possible to eliminate the damage done by the disruption in the parent/child bond that is inherent to the foster care system. The history of child welfare work is littered with new theories, new approaches, new answers, but there seldom seems to be any truly significant improvement for the children and parents who are most in need of help. Some things just aren’t fixable.
Eventually, Sandra’s parental rights were terminated. Jessica reduced everyone in the courtroom, except her mother, to stunned silence or weeping when she described how Sandra would tell whoever the current “boyfriend” was to “use Grace or Annie” when she wasn’t interested in having sex herself. Jessica, whose beauty couldn’t have been an asset in that life, could never acknowledge that she had been the victim of any abuse herself, but her testimony left the judge with an easy decision. I was ecstatic at the knowledge that the girls would never have to return to Sandra’s “care,” but I was also aware of the loss they all suffered. Despite her extreme cruelty to them, Sandra had somehow managed to nurture an abundance of lovely qualities in her daughters; it made me believe that she must have done at least a few good things as a mother.
Shortly after they became free for adoption, Jessica and Annie went to live with a couple who hoped to adopt them both. Annie had developed a chronic medical condition that the foster family didn’t feel capable of handling, so they were not considered as an adoptive home for the girls. Sadly, after only a few months in the new home, Jessica, who was now fourteen, decided she couldn’t make the adjustment to this new sort of life. She asked to return to her foster family without Annie, and not too long after that she became pregnant, presumably by her thirteen-year-old foster brother. Years later I learned that Jessica had been sexually active with an eleven-year-old boy who had also been placed in the home and that he could have been the father of her child as well. Grace became pregnant at sixteen, married the baby’s father, and set up housekeeping with the help of her foster parents. Things went relatively well for her for at least a few years. Meanwhile, I watched in awe and delight as Annie transformed into the beloved child of two of the most amazing people I have ever met.
But the crushing odds against the children on my caseload taught me not to trust foster care stories with happy endings. Now, almost forty years later, Google-empowered, I t
ried to find out what happened to Annie and her adoptive family without being intrusive. (Grace and Jessica, no doubt now with different names, proved impossible to find.) Although I found many entries about Annie’s parents and their good works and successes, which are truly impressive, there is no mention that they have a daughter. And I am just flat-out terrified to find out why.
8
Making My Escape
Working with children who were in the foster care system was overwhelming. I was always aware of how lucky I was to have work that was rewarding, meaningful, and virtually never boring or pointless. It mattered a great deal to me that my efforts actually made a difference in someone’s life, and I was grateful to have work that felt useful. At the same time, the job often left me awash in heartbreak and frustration. After my daughter was born, I found the disparity between her life and the lives of the children on my caseload truly distressing. I spent my time with my own child making sure that her life was just the right combination of comfortable and stimulating. I made sure that her clothes were of the softest fabrics and her baby books had the sweetest illustrations, and I was vigilant about protecting her from any possible discomfort, let alone harm. And my husband and I delighted in everything she did. Meanwhile, at work I was faced with children whose troubles seemed bottomless: an eighteen-month-old whose mother routinely pulled out all of her teeth as they came in, a ten-year-old whose mother prostituted her for bottles of beer, and the older siblings of a three-year-old who had starved to death. Most of these kids’ best hope was just to avoid attracting parental attention (although I guess the three-year-old might have benefitted from any attention at all). Certainly, no one seemed to have been delighting in anything the children did—at least not in any appropriate way. Any normal person had to fight the urge to scoop them up and head for the hills.
Truthfully, though, I wasn’t going to head for the hills and complicate my happy, easy life for these kids, except in theory. In reality, I needed to keep some distance. The toddler with golden hair, bright blue eyes, and no teeth also had numerous broken bones and cigarette burns. The rail-thin older siblings of the starving three-year-old had suffered years of neglect, had significant developmental delays, and were unlikely ever to be able to form normal relationships. The ten-year-old was an incredibly brave, endearing and stoic little girl. Their lives, and the lives of all of the other children who were entrusted to my care, were filled with enormous suffering and turmoil.
With my new baby daughter and my bizarre escape-from-Sandra scenarios running through my mind all the time, I began to feel more and more that my work was distorting my life. This hit me with particular clarity one night at yet another party attended solely by my coworkers and our spouses. I was struck by how isolated from “normal society” I had become—how my social life was essentially a function of my social work, largely because the things I had to talk about were things only social workers could fully understand, stories that people from mainstream society would find profoundly disturbing.
I had now spent the first six years of my career focused on an area of social work that I had never intended to pursue. Against all my expectations, my desire to pursue any sort of career was being overshadowed by my desire to be with my daughter (a desire not unrelated to my hyperawareness of all the horrible things that can happen to children). I was beginning to look for an exit. And I wasn’t the only one: in the office, we often talked about leveraging our skills and experience into finding a dream job—and the dream job we focused on was a school social worker position. The school social workers we knew seemed relatively stress free—and they had summers off. Every time one of these positions came open, several acquaintances of mine would apply, and, gradually, a number of them moved on to that happier world.
I was standing back at a party, watching the conversations, and thinking about how my little girl would be growing up in this isolated world of horror stories and moral distortion when I tuned into a story Lou Ann was telling.
Lou Ann, as it happens, had gotten one of those dream social worker jobs at a high school and was thus the envy of our group. The story she was telling was about one of the first kids referred to her in her new job. “He looked like a nice kid,” she said, “He came in, sat down, greeted me politely, and waited for me to say something. I had looked over his grades and attendance and didn’t see any reason for him to have been referred to me. ‘You seem like a nice kid,’ I said. ‘Your grades are good, there aren’t any attendance or behavior problems . . . Why are you here?’”
She paused, for dramatic effect, then delivered the punch line: “He answered right away: ‘I fuck rabbits.’”
I don’t want to say that that’s what drove me out of Michigan; it was more that it kind of brought clarity and closure to a debate I had been having with myself for a while. By the next morning, I was talking seriously with my husband about moving back to Seattle, safely removed from the Sandras in my life. It wasn’t much longer before I decided to leave foster care behind and try to start a new career in the happily-ever-after world of adoption, and to do it in Seattle.
II
Agency Adoption
9
The Home Study Process
Returning to Seattle was wonderful. But as nice as everything was, it took me a while to adjust to my new life. I’d grown so accustomed to the sort of hypervigilance that my previous job often demanded that normal, peaceful living didn’t come naturally to me anymore.
It’s hard not to get jaded when you work in the foster care system. It happens almost imperceptibly, as the horror stories mount and you begin to find that you aren’t as horrified by them as you used to be (and should be). For me, cynicism filled in for the missing horror, along with the conviction that danger could lurk anywhere or under anyone’s pleasant surface. It wasn’t a good state of mind and it wasn’t exactly realistic, but it got me through those years with the Department of Social Services. I wasn’t even aware of how much I’d changed until we were back in Seattle and, slowly, the tension eased, and I began to see the world as a more benign place. Once we left Michigan, I no longer felt nervous about running into my clients on the street or seeing their names in newspaper articles about awful crimes. I no longer drove by houses where I knew children had been abused and were likely to be abused again, and it was no longer my responsibility to try to figure out how to help them.
Before we left, I contacted an adoption agency in Seattle about a job. I was hoping for part-time work, and an interview was scheduled shortly after we settled into our new home. First I met with the director, and a couple of weeks later, I met with the real power players in the agency for further screening. These were two women who were technically volunteers but whose collective energy, charisma, and commitment overshadowed everyone else. They were especially effective at hosting informal introductory meetings for prospective adoptive parents; the fact that each of their lovely homes was full of thriving and adorable children, most of whom they had adopted, made them that much more effective at creating an extremely desirable picture of adoption.
The agency was growing rapidly in the early 1980s, and several other counselors were hired when I was. We had a few group training sessions and then were sent out to meet with families. It wasn’t hard to follow the format for interviewing and writing “pre-placement reports” (the official name for home studies), which all families need in order to be approved for adoption. Also, there were regular meetings and training sessions, so I soon felt competent. I was able to arrange my schedule so that I worked primarily in the evenings and on weekends, while my husband worked from a home office, for the next four years. It was tricky financially for a while, but in every other way, it was fantastic. We reveled in parenthood, and a second daughter, Caitlin, was born just before Erin’s third birthday.
My new employer, an adoption agency called the Washington Association of Concerned Adoptive Parents (WACAP), soon to become the Wo
rld Association of Children and Parents, had been started in the 1970s by a group of activist adoptive parents who wanted to take greater control of the adoption process. Historically, the majority of adoptions had been handled by the state, by church-affiliated agencies, or privately by doctors and attorneys. The notable exceptions were agencies (Holt Children’s Services being one example) that had been founded expressly to facilitate international adoptions—in Holt’s case, the adoption of Korean children in need of homes after the Korean War. Other private agencies that focused on international adoptions emerged over the years, often as the result of a connection with a particular “placing” country or, as with WACAP, by founders who hoped to make use of, and improve upon, what they had learned from their own adoption experiences.
Although WACAP was created by adoptive parents, its mission was always to find homes for children rather than to find children for families. The agency’s vision, as stated in their promotional information, “goes beyond traditional adoption services to include child assistance and sponsorship.”1 WACAP grew rapidly and dramatically over the years and became one of the largest and most highly respected adoption agencies in the country. Current statistics show that the agency has placed over ten thousand children in adoptive homes and has provided assistance to another two hundred thousand children.
My job as an adoption counselor with WACAP started in 1981, and I stayed with the agency for the next ten years. Most of the families I worked with were adopting internationally, with the majority of children in the early years coming from Korea, India, or Colombia. The agency also handled in-country placements of children coming out of the U.S. foster care system, and there was an innovative infant placement program, Options for Pregnancy, that provided counseling to pregnant women who were considering adoption for their babies. During my last four years with the agency, I took on a supervisory role in the Options program.
