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

by Beam, Cris

  In Allen’s case, Tom wasn’t around for the family team conferencing meeting with ACS when his son was removed. He was in an inpatient rehab facility. ACS removed Allen from his biological mother when she skipped out on her own drug treatment program, and Tom didn’t find out about it until several days later. By then, Allen was living with his first foster mother. That woman, the story goes, found Allen too taxing and sent him back to the agency. The next mom wanted to go to Puerto Rico and couldn’t take Allen with her, so back he went again. By the time Allen was placed with the Greens at sixteen months, he had lived with four different “mothers” and his future was still uncertain.

  Tom had followed Allen through all of his placements; he saw his son during supervised visits at the agency. He graduated from rehab and started taking parenting classes. Allen turned two at the Greens’, and then two and a half; he was talking more, smiling a lot, and running, running everywhere. And then a judge upgraded Tom’s status: he could start bringing Allen back to his apartment for weekends.

  When I asked Allyson how the weekend visits were going, she changed the subject. “The dad’s white,” she said, her face inscrutable. “You’ve seen Allen. He’s darker than me.”

  I tried to push her; was she concerned that if Tom got custody Allen would lose some sense of his heritage? Did she, like many people, resist the notion of white parents raising black children? But I had entered icy waters and Allyson wouldn’t budge.

  “The dad will call here because Allen will be crying,” was all Allyson would venture. She fussed with the snaps on Allen’s brother Anthony’s onesie; the HIV-positive newborn was, after all, allowed to come live with them, and he required much of her attention. “Allen will get on the phone and just say, ‘Mama, Mama.’”

  Sekina, as usual, was more blunt. “The dad doesn’t feed him the right food. He gives him adult food—things he can’t digest. He puts Allen in front of the TV all day. And when Allen comes back here, he’s all upset. Of course—he’s been here for a year. He’s our baby.”

  Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect—they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long—but as long as there’s no abuse, a child belongs with his blood. It’s not the state’s role to interfere with the way we raise our kids.

  And apparently, a judge thought Tom was doing well enough. As Allen inched toward his third birthday, the courts claimed that Tom could indeed have custody, as soon as he’d accomplished a few more weekend visits. Allyson was stoic about it on the surface, but Bruce unmasked her.

  “She’s gonna cry like a baby when he leaves,” Bruce said. He was eating pot stickers from the Chinese place down the street, shoveling them in quickly before one of the older kids could catch him with the takeout box and demand her share. Allyson shot him a look.

  “He will too; he talks about it every day,” Allyson said. Her prior easy acceptance of a King Solomon deal seemed to be slipping. “I don’t believe that this parent has shown overwhelmingly that he is ready, not overwhelmingly. And this child requires a parent who shows overwhelmingly that he’s ready. Because Allen’s no ordinary child. He has his issues.”

  For instance, despite all his progress, Allen still hit the other children when he got enraged. Allyson doesn’t allow hitting in the home; she had been working steadily with Allen to soothe him and had trained the other kids to react with only words. She wasn’t sure Tom had the patience to continue this trajectory. Allen also needed constant attention and reassurance; he was slightly regressed for his age, though that too had been steadily improving. Attention abounds in a house of nine older children—less so, she said, in a small apartment with Tom and his adult roommates.

  “The courts are saying that the father’s taken his classes, he’s met his minimum requirements, he’s clean—no problem,” Allyson said, forcing her tone to soften as she spoke of God’s will and prayer for right action and surrender to whatever will be. She snuggled Allen’s baby brother closer to her chest. “This is one of the reasons why a lot of people go straight for adoption, that they don’t bother with foster care. It’s because of the investment—you see your investment go down the drain in months.”

  The basic tenet of foster care, and its core complication, is that foster care is meant to be a temporary solution. It’s a waiting room, tended by temporary parents, while the “real” parents scoot off to the back quarters to try to boost their skills or mend their ways, and then come back in and retrieve their children. Sometimes the parents just walk out the back door, and sometimes a judge orders them out, and then the temporary parents get a new title and can adopt the children. With other babies, in other waiting rooms, the cases aren’t so clear. Sometimes, the birth parents won’t, or can’t, come back and the foster parents don’t want to keep the baby—they’re generally trained not to attach, and very often they don’t. The babies, however, weren’t privy to this contract and can suffer great losses when they’re shuttled off to strangers. Logically, these babies should have been put up for adoption from the start, with any of the thousands of prospective parents in this country who are eager for newborns, but the conundrum is this: no one can tell from the outset which biological moms or dads will manage to emerge from the back rooms intact and able to retrieve their kids.

  And this is where the experts weigh in. Some child advocates lean heavily on the side of social services, and keeping mom and baby together from the beginning. When a mom is homeless, drug-addicted, and mentally ill but expresses interest in keeping her child, they argue to shore up her treatment, medication, housing, and counseling. Others look upon this mother as a disaster waiting to happen—they advocate for a swift and permanent removal so the baby can be placed in an adoptive home and avoid foster care down the line. What happens, usually, is a mushy middle compromise. The mom (or dad, like Tom, but it’s usually the mom) is provided services, and the baby is removed temporarily—and placed with foster parents who don’t want to adopt. The kid ends up in purgatory—often for far too long—with no lifetime parent to attach to.

  To counter this, social workers hedge their bets. When they hear about a particularly marginal birth mother, they try to place the newborn with foster parents who might be open to adoption. With moms who seem more capable, they call experienced foster parents who won’t fall in love and can hand the child back after some months or years. But it’s all guesswork and hope.

  Sometimes, on the front end, cases seem more clear-cut. There are birth mothers who don’t want their babies but who don’t sign up with private adoption agencies either. These moms choose to sign away their rights and their children are put on a fast track to adoption, with a special type of foster parent called “foster-to-adopt.” My good friend Steve Wilson is one of these parents—a parent who wanted a kid from the system.

  Steve and I have been friends for more than fifteen years; he is unassuming, shy, and a book nerd like me, with an eye for the weird and offbeat. In the stuffy corporate offices where we once worked, Steve and I would find ourselves in the elevators alone and spontaneously dance a riotous jig, or swing each other around in a mock square dance, composing our faces and bodies to neutral just seconds before the elevator doors opened again onto a fresh group of suits, who eyed our red faces suspiciously. This game never ceased to amuse us, and I knew, one day, Steve would make a great dad. He was a kid at heart.

  Steve moved to Austin with Erin, his partner of more than ten years, so she could take a magazine design job and they could buy a house and have some kids. They wanted to raise children who were already here, who needed parents, so they planned to adopt right from the start. They named their first son Wilson and gave him Erin’
s last name, and his adoption story went smoothly. Wilson’s biological mom was a teenager who wasn’t ready to care for a baby, and although she visited Wilson some in her first year, she signed over her parental rights without a hitch.

  When Wilson had just turned four, Lutheran Social Services called Steve and Erin to tell them they had another baby available. Oliver was four months old, born to a teenage mother and a homeless father. In the several months that Steve and Erin would have to wait for the adoption to be processed, chances seemed slim that either parent would fight for, or receive, custody.

  At first, Wilson raged, slammed doors, and threw his toys all over the place at the announcement of a brother; he didn’t want to have to share a bedroom. And Oliver wasn’t an easy baby. Born with drugs in his system, he cried a lot and couldn’t sleep through the night. Wilson regressed some, stealing Oliver’s bottles and pretending to be a baby too. But Steve is a stay-at-home dad, a professional writer who works from his own bedroom, and he could nurse these grievances and tend to Oliver’s needs at all hours. He started waking up early to run with Oliver in a jog stroller, which was a way to get him to sleep, and then be home before Wilson woke up, to make him his breakfast and play with him. Slowly, the boys bonded.

  Oliver is a round baby, with slightly crossed eyes, a mop of soft brown curls, and a drooly wide grin. He wants, and needs, to be held all the time, preferably belly to belly. When he’s in his crib or high chair, he tracks Steve with his eyes and reaches for him with sticky fingers. All babies do this, but with foster babies you watch more, looking for signals of trauma, vestiges of unmet needs. Would Allen have always thrown ragey fits? Would Oliver have clung so much? the worried new parents ask. And they make up answers, trying to repair the world they’re building.

  Erin and Steve had Oliver for seven months; he started meeting milestones—crying less, clinging less. He was sitting up, then crawling. He watched Wilson with delighted, drooly glee, as Wilson marched around the house in capes and face paint, or stuck out his tongue, which was covered in chewed-up breakfast burrito from the taqueria down the street. At his low-key, hippie-ish school, Wilson was known as a troublemaker, but at home, Wilson was quickly becoming Oliver’s hero.

  I was happy for Steve, who called or wrote me e-mails about his growing family. At that time, I believed that Child Protective Services, in general, removed far too many children from far too many parents. These parents, if they were provided proper social services, could raise their own children; agencies should be in the business of supporting families rather than ripping them apart. I believed, based on my research with foster kids and my own experience, that separation from a family of origin is a wound that never heals. If the parents were so troubled that children had to be removed for a period, every effort should be made for a fast reunification. A biological parent’s rights trump a foster parent’s rights every time. Cases like Oliver’s fell outside my rubric: Oliver’s mom, Caitlin, had proved herself unfit early on, and she didn’t want the child. Some good parents, Steve and Erin, swooped in for the rescue, to raise this unwanted baby in a house filled with books, and natural light, and a stay-at-home parent. So I was happy for Steve—he had taken a risk by choosing foster-to-adopt, and it seemed he was literally saving a life.

  And then the agency started calling. Caitlin was getting better. Caitlin wanted Oliver back.

  2

  Eye of the Beholder

  FOSTER CARE BEGINS and ends with an entirely subjective, contentious little word. Abuse. One must first define abuse to see it happening and start to turn the wheels of foster care. This is a problem: abuse, like love, is in the eye of the beholder.

  The other conundrum is this: nestled next to abuse is the notion of neglect. Neglect may be harder to define because it’s an absence of action, but it’s harmful nonetheless. And neglect cases (of children’s medical, educational, emotional, hygienic, you-name-it needs) actually make up three-quarters of the maltreatment cases in this country. In reality, abuse and neglect, in practice, are not things. They’re people, harming littler people, for a reason. The reason may not be logical; the reason may be rooted in mental illness or addiction or learned behavior or accidental oversight, but there’s usually a reason, and it’s child welfare’s job to consider it.

  Take the case of baby Oliver. When Oliver was three months old, his mother, Caitlin, brought him to the doctor’s office, where he was diagnosed with scabies. A month later, she brought him back for a follow-up appointment. Caitlin had not been administering the scabies medication; Oliver also had an ear infection, a temperature of 105.5, a cough, and congestion. He appeared dirty and dehydrated, and the milk in his bottle was curdled. Medical personnel called Child Protective Services.

  Oliver’s condition was deplorable, but did it meet a definition of abuse? Of neglect? Did it warrant taking a baby away from his mother at three months old? It’s impossible to know without understanding why Caitlin was behaving the way she was. Were these signs of drug addiction, or inherent malice, or did they just signal a lack of support in a young mother’s life?

  Child Protective Services sent out an investigator and found that Caitlin was living with her boyfriend and his family in a trailer. Steve doesn’t know what the investigator saw, but apparently it was enough to necessitate Oliver’s immediate removal. Shortly thereafter, Caitlin signed away her parental rights. On a napkin.

  There are no official, systematized rules about when a child in this country is to be removed from his home. At the federal level, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act requires each state to incorporate the prohibition of child abuse and neglect into its laws, with this as its minimum definition:

  Any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation, or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.

  The “imminent risk” is the loaded gun, and it’s what child welfare investigators are looking for when they enter a home after a call reporting alleged abuse. If there are obvious signs of physical brutality on a child’s body, say, bruises or open wounds, or malnourishment, the child is likely to be removed right away. The same if there’s exposed wiring or drug paraphernalia lying about. But these cases are relatively rare. More likely, a parent might appear intoxicated, or rageful, or food might be spoiled in the refrigerator, or clothes in the drawers might be too small, or an apartment might be uncomfortably dirty, a toilet broken. Imminent risk? In whose eyes?

  “It’s a matter of fuzziness, and at ACS, it’s even fuzzier. There’s nothing written down,” says Rudy Estrada, the deputy attorney-in-charge of the Juvenile Rights Practice of the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. For more than fifteen years, Estrada has been working to improve foster care services for kids in three different states, and from multiple approaches. He says that rather than black-and-white rules about when to remove a child, there are tools, and a mental checklist that all investigators use when entering a home.

  “Part of the tool is to observe what’s in the house, and go down the list, check, check,” he said to me one afternoon at a coffee shop near ACS’s main offices downtown. The federal office of child welfare has produced its own compilation of “signs of abuse,” and state agencies pull from this list to develop their own in-house screening tools—the “checklist” Estrada described, covering a range of signs from changes in behavior to the appearance of neglect.

  “The other part of the tool,” Estrada said, “is what does your supervisor say, check, check. There’s a dialectical model built in—the supervisor might say take the child, but the worker might say, no, the home’s marginal but I think he should stay. And then we never take a child without first attempting to provide a help or service, so the other layer to this is the different intervention styles you might try. There’s nothing formulaic about it.”

  The first people to decide a family’s fate are called child protective specialists, or
investigators—people like Spencer Cruz-Katz, who worked on the front lines as an investigator and caseworker in 1999. He was hired by an agency in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, right after he graduated from college with a degree in psychology. He had one interview and was offered the job right away for an annual salary of $21,000.

  “I was thrown into it. There was no training, just a woman who drove around with me the first two weeks. Every day I’d just learn from the day before,” Cruz-Katz explained, long after he’d quit and moved on to graduate school. Current caseworkers I spoke with were reluctant to give their names or speak on the record (ACS has a tightly managed media relations department and requires that all interviews be funneled and approved through its office), but their stories were similar to Cruz-Katz’s. “I spent a lot of time driving and I spent a lot of time worrying about my safety. I was alone with the families that had histories of violence and drug abuse and I’d have to take their kids away. I’d be threatened, followed to my car. An uncle would stand next to me and say, ‘I know what you did. I know your car.’”

  Cruz-Katz played several roles in the year he worked for the agency. At one point, he was a case manager for sixteen foster families, in charge of making sure the foster parents were meeting their requirements, and removing the kids again when they weren’t. “I’d have to send the kids back to the agency—mostly because they were refusing to go to school, but I also saw stained mattresses on the floor, drugs being brought into the homes, the bio children being threatened and bullied,” he said, explaining that each time he’d have to decide whether the circumstances required a removal. “There was no handbook as to when to remove a child. If the agency was open, I would call my supervisor and ask.”