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

by Beam, Cris

  I first met Shawn and Noble Wilson at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in downtown Manhattan, at a recruitment event for prospective foster parents. Noble made a great poster child as he sat on Shawn’s lap at the front of the room and Shawn took questions; he was cute and snuggly, gazing up at Shawn and then grinning out at the audience of the fifty or so adults. Stationed around the perimeter of the room were about a dozen tables manned by the employees of ACS’s various foster agencies; the tables were cluttered with brochures and bowls of candy, free pens and clipboards to sign up for more information. They looked like tables for credit card offers, or cable TV.

  For most of the agency workers, this was their first time recruiting at a community center or at anything gay; more commonly they looked for fresh foster parents at churches or welfare offices. But they were all excited to be expanding their reach, as foster agencies are always fairly desperate for new, and better, parents. Nationwide, there’s a shortfall. Some states—such as Pennsylvania and Oklahoma—have roughly twice as many foster kids as they do available parents.

  What the agencies offer the prospective parents, generally, is confusing: there are benefits, but the drawbacks are built right in, which may be a reason for the shortage in supply. So it may be time to rethink the way we recruit foster and adoptive parents and teach them about what they’re in for. This is the junction where there’s so much need, and where so much goes so terribly wrong.

  To become a foster parent in most parts of the country, you have to take some state-sponsored parenting classes, have a social worker visit your home and verify that you have the requisite space and a bed, and undergo a criminal background check. Then you get the benefits.

  Front and center is the money (hence the recruiting in welfare offices), but it isn’t enough. Current monthly pay rates range from $229 in Nebraska to $869 in Washington, DC, with a national average of $568 for a sixteen-year-old kid. This falls far short of the estimated real cost of $790. Still, the money’s a draw for some parents, as nationwide, foster parents seem to be more likely than not to live close to or below the poverty line. But money’s also sort of embarrassing to talk about; after all, there’s something anathema, something maybe even biologically repulsive, about the idea of getting paid to love another human being.

  So then there’s the love benefit to becoming a foster parent, but that’s a mixed message too. Simply stated, you can get a kid (there are plenty available) and you can love him, and he might love you back. But don’t get too attached. If you want to adopt the child, be warned: the birth parents could reappear. And if you’re only fostering, keep your front door open and your heart locked tight, because these kids come and go.

  Which leaves the last argument for signing up, and perhaps the weakest. It’s the reason foster care agencies recruit in churches. You become a foster parent because it’s the right thing to do. When I’m feeling especially nihilistic, I think this argument fails because it clashes with our deeply grooved notions of ownership and industry; we don’t want children if they can’t be ours, and we expect to be rewarded, in the end, for our hard work. Other times I think no child will truly believe she’s part of a family if she knows, at heart, she’s a charity case.

  So Shawn thinks that ACS, and agencies like it across the country, should change their approach. He thinks they should launch an aggressive PR campaign to teach the general public that babies like Noble are available for adoption. Because people just don’t know.

  Shawn said, “People always see Noble, and they ask me, ‘Where’s he from?’” Noble is African American and he doesn’t look much like either of his dads; Martin’s white and Shawn is all lean lines to Noble’s round face and almost rounder eyes. “When I say St. Vincent’s, up the street, they say, ‘I never knew you could get a wonderful, healthy, cute, social kid through the city.’”

  At the beginning, Shawn didn’t know that either. He had been with his partner, Martin, for more than a decade when they started talking about kids, but he had wanted them long before that. “When I found out boys couldn’t have babies—I was probably four years old—I got so angry at God,” Shawn said, his face breaking into a grin. “I got angry at God!”

  Shawn was making me coffee one rainy October morning in his floor-through loft in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood—an open space with a white leather couch, high ceilings, and big windows facing Sixth Avenue. Toy train tracks, a plastic horse, and a tricycle evidenced Noble’s hold on the living room, and the couch, while austere, was a bit sticky with juice. Noble was at nursery school and Martin, who’s in real estate, was at work. Noble is named after Noble Frisby, an African American doctor in Shawn’s hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, who delivered Shawn in his private clinic. Shawn is a documentary filmmaker and often works from home. “I always knew I wanted kids. I realized it was not necessary for me to pass on my DNA but to pass on what my mother gave me: the nurturing, the patience, the love.”

  Shawn grew up with an older sister and his mother, who never went to school past the eighth grade and died when Shawn was nineteen. Her picture hangs above Noble’s bed, a glamorous formal portrait in black and white, her head tilted, her smile wide and wistful. “I describe her as a boat with wheels. She was ahead of her time,” Shawn said, explaining that his mother’s intuition and kindness were her strengths, and that intuition is the way that God speaks through him and guides his parenting today. He speaks of God often. “What my mother gave me—it would be a sin if it went to the grave with me.”

  At first Shawn’s partner, Martin, wanted to do surrogacy. This is, Shawn feels, the upper-class option for gay male families: the community knows it costs $80,000 or $100,000 to have a doctor inseminate a donor egg with your sperm, and to employ a surrogate to carry the baby to term. Of course, Shawn concedes, we live in an era when gay rights are traded at the state level like poker chips, and having your own genetic child is a way to ensure he won’t be snatched away in an anti-gay political sweep. But surrogacy also signals money, distinction, and, Shawn believes, narcissism.

  “I would have been able to love any kid, but because of where I come from, it was hard for me to wrap my brain around creating another life when there are so many already here who need exactly the same thing,” Shawn said, explaining that over some months, he was able to chip away at what he called Marty’s “brick façade” of wanting to be seen as an upper-class gay person. He also had to work through his partner’s fears that an adopted grandchild would not be as loved as, say, his brother’s biological children. “I commend him because he came through all that. But then initially the last place I wanted to get my kid was through foster care.”

  This was Shawn’s own “brick façade.” He believed, as many do, that a newborn from foster care would be damaged, traumatized, and unreachable. “At the time I thought a foster kid would never amount to anything because of what his circumstances were—his parents druggies, no prenatal care. He won’t have the capacity to be a smart kid.”

  Shawn laughs now at his ignorance and his own prior elitism. He didn’t want surrogacy, but he did want private adoption. This is when he started imagining the Juno scenario, with the teenage mom who took all her vitamins. “I was like, ‘Pooh-pooh on all those vanity-stricken egotistical gay guys who need to spend $100,000! I’m spending $20,000 for this beautiful WASP-y baby from Connecticut.’”

  When Shawn and Marty met with an adoption attorney, though, Shawn was put off. They had to place an ad in a newspaper for prospective moms, get an 800 number to speak with potential mothers without traceability, and build a book about themselves describing every minute detail of their histories and their plans as parents. “It felt like a shopping mall, like mothers were going to go into a Barnes and Noble, see our book, and say, ‘OK, you.’”

  The home study was the clincher. A fairly standard procedure, a home study is the process wherein a social worker examines and certifies your home as suitable for a potential child. It’s the ex
act same process foster parents go through, and when Shawn learned this, something clicked.

  “I had been talking to my friend Bruce, who was a foster parent in Georgia. I was seeing all these newborns coming in and out of his house, and he didn’t keep them because ‘Oh, they cried too much,’ or ‘Those boys were too much work.’” Shawn said he was relieved when Bruce finally decided he didn’t really want to be a dad, but Bruce did provide Shawn a critical window into the system. “He said, ‘Shawn, these newborns have been healthy. And the adoption is free.’”

  Shawn and Marty decided to check out Episcopal Social Services, simply because it was the agency closest to their home. “We were so welcomed as a couple, I guess because their need was greater,” Shawn said. “It was so different from ‘Make a book, put an ad in the paper, get an 800 number.’ They were saying, ‘Thank God you’ve arrived! We get twenty babies a month we gotta place!’”

  I’ve talked with both friends and strangers from a wide range of backgrounds who carried the same prejudices and misconceptions as Shawn originally did: if you wanted to adopt a baby, they thought, you’d never look to foster care. Some didn’t know babies were available, and some assumed the “good” ones (meaning healthy) were probably already gone.

  But this isn’t true. Plenty of pregnant women use foster care as a kind of adoption agency for their babies; they just don’t think of it that way. If they don’t plan ahead or aren’t functioning at a level to be able to surrender their newborn to a private adoption organization, they can still give birth and walk away. Safe haven laws mean anybody can abandon a baby at a hospital or police or fire station without question. All of these babies are handed over to the state. They become foster babies first, and then, if the mom doesn’t reappear after some months (usually around a year), they’re available for adoption. This means that if you want to adopt a baby through foster care, you have to tolerate your status as a foster-to-adopt parent—and you have to take the same training classes (ranging from zero required hours to twenty hours annually depending on your state) that any foster parent does.

  For Shawn, these classes were particularly frustrating, because the lessons weren’t tailored to adoption at all. They were geared toward the general foster parent population, who would be contending with, or even working toward, a biological family reunification.

  “We started taking classes every Monday for four months,” Shawn said, claiming he was very clear with Episcopal that he only wanted to adopt—not to foster a child who would ultimately leave. “They were fine with that, but—and they always said but—foster care is about fostering a child until the family is ready to reunite. So in the classes I was in a rainstorm with the fanciest raingear on, letting it all roll off.”

  Episcopal told Shawn and Marty that of the sixty newborns that the city received each year, only 10 percent would be returned to their parents. The odds were good, but Shawn said because the class focused solely on the 10 percent who would be sent back, they scared potential parents away from adopting the other 90 percent.

  So Shawn thinks the classes and the emphasis in foster care overall should shift into a more clearly defined two-prong system. “They should say, ‘We foster to get the kids who should be, back home; and the ones who shouldn’t, we adopt,’” he said, echoing the core concept of ASFA legislation. “But in the training, their job is to scare the living daylights out of you, to give you the worst-case scenario. I never in my ten weeks of training heard a best-case scenario.”

  The trouble with two prongs is this: they twist up together. Although thousands of children are available for adoption, and hundreds of agencies do concurrent foster and adoption planning, the biological parents themselves—their abilities, desires, promises, and fallibilities—change all the time. Yes, there are the moms who walk away from the delivery room and never look back, but there are also the Robbyne Wileys, who had their babies removed against their will, and who fight every day to get them home. And then there are the moms like Oliver’s mom, Caitlin, who change their minds. Agencies can’t predict the birth parents’ actions, and they don’t want to promise something they can’t deliver.

  But maybe there’s a middle ground. Maybe foster care agencies could do more recruiting among the parents who are looking to adopt privately or overseas and say, “Hey, we’ve got kids right here.” They could manage the odds, being even more careful to tease out the birth parents who don’t want to, or can’t, take care of their kids. And frame the argument in a new way: from the adoptive parent’s perspective there’s a risk, and from the biological parent’s perspective there’s a chance—but if a mom takes her baby back, you’ve provided a young person with a vital foundation. It sounds terrible, but if you lose that baby, you could try again. It sounds terrible, but that sounds a lot like pregnancy. Or like love.

  Luckily, Shawn and Noble were among the 90 percent. Noble’s biological mom left him at the hospital, and she didn’t have any plans to try to retrieve him. But she did call the agency one day, when Noble was two months old—long before the adoption could be finalized.

  “The social worker called and said, ‘Can you bring Noble to the agency at such-and-such time? His mom wants to meet him,’” Shawn said to me. “I was so nervous, but my intuition said, ‘They’re not going to jerk you around. The experience of you losing him is not meant for you.’”

  Shawn planned to simply drop Noble off for the prescribed two-hour visit, but he ended up staying the entire time. “I go in, and there’s this big woman, who limps on one side of her body, like she’s had a stroke. She didn’t recognize Noble, so I said, ‘Would you like to hold him?’” Shawn replayed the scene for me, imitating the gesture of handing over a bundle of baby. His eyes were wide, and his face was open, as though he were coaxing a child. “I felt empathy toward her, and I didn’t expect to.”

  Shawn had to encourage the woman to cuddle her son, to kiss him—not because she didn’t want to, but because she was clearly unfamiliar with infants. “One of the first things she asked was ‘Does he like salads?’” Shawn laughed. “I told her he was too little now but I’m sure he will, and she said she wondered because as soon as she found out she was pregnant, she started eating a lot of salads.”

  Noble’s mom realized she was pregnant when she checked herself into a hospital one day not feeling well. She was already five months along and had been using crack the entire pregnancy. She delivered Noble two months later.

  “She talked mostly about the tragedies in her life, all the adversity she encountered. I learned some important things, though—like she said, ‘When I see that man again,’ meaning Noble’s dad, ‘I’ma punch him in the stomach!’ And she punched really high. So I thought, ‘OK, he’s tall.” Shawn leans forward slightly when he speaks, and his voice has the cadence of a happy, sped-up lullaby. “Noble’s going to be tall!”

  Shawn also learned that Noble had two brothers, sixteen and seventeen years old, who were living with their grandmother. Shawn later met this grandmother at a court date, along with an aunt. The family thanked Shawn for keeping Noble and said that when everything was all signed and sealed, they hoped they could visit him.

  “I was like, awesome! I want Noble to hang out with his older brothers.” At the end, Shawn was glad he’d met Noble’s mom. “That was the thing; all the demonizing I had done—living on the street, drugs—dissipated. Gone. I walked away thinking she probably wouldn’t get it together to get Noble back, but she loves him, and that’s the greatest thing of all for me to be able to tell him.”

  Shawn’s story runs in sharp contrast to that of his childhood friend Bruce, the one who introduced Shawn to the notion of foster care in the first place. Just as birth parents can change their minds about keeping their kids, foster and adoptive parents can too—and no agency policy can entirely safeguard against human fallibility. Bruce also initially wanted to adopt children, but unlike Shawn, once he was paired up with a few boys who matched his criteria, he sent them back. In all, mor
e than thirty child placements failed in Bruce’s home. Bruce blames the state, but then, the state kept sending him more kids.

  Bruce lives in Cobb County, Georgia, but he met with me at a coffee shop on one of his visits to New York. He was a friendly, outgoing guy, with a soft southern accent, a shiny bald head, and a closely shaved goatee. He is the youngest of six children, he said; he grew up in a midsize Mississippi town, around a lot of kids, and he always expected to have some of his own. But he went the corporate route, becoming a human resources director at a large company. When he hit thirty-five, he realized he had the big house and all the fancy material goods, but he was still single and childless. Because of this, his siblings presumed he’d be the one to care for their aging parents. “I started thinking about what will happen if I’m sixty-five or seventy, God willing I live that long, and I don’t have any kids of my own to step in that role and help facilitate that process for me.”

  This is why Bruce started thinking about adoption. And it happened to converge with the foster care presentations at his church, which focused on the children’s needs—and what the church members could provide. Bruce started to pray about it. “God told me, ‘I didn’t place you in this huge home to be consumed with yourself and all your toys. To whom much is given, much is required.’”

  So Bruce got licensed as a foster parent, with the intention to adopt. The first two boys were simply a shock to Bruce’s system: their first overnight visit was at Christmastime, and Bruce wore himself out doling out presents and driving to the movies and the ice rink. Unfortunately, the boys’ social worker told them Bruce wanted to adopt them, but Bruce drove them back to the group home after Christmas and never saw them again. The next big chance was a baby, very much like Shawn’s son, Noble: he was a newborn, and Bruce named him Carrington. After ten months, Bruce and Carrington had bonded deeply and the county called with an ultimatum: the mother’s rights had been terminated, and if Bruce wanted to keep him, he would have to adopt. Otherwise, the county wanted the baby back, as Carrington was still young enough to place in a real adoptive home.