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

by Beam, Cris

  ACS doesn’t track the whereabouts of its kids past their discharge date, but many don’t have the skills, or the money, or the education, or the support network to live on their own; it’s why so many end up homeless. And they don’t have the experience: 70 percent of these young people are discharged directly from group homes or institutions —places with strict rules that hardly mirror all the options and temptations of real life in New York City.

  To bridge the gap between the authoritarian world of the institution and real life, where a foster kid has to suddenly be self-motivated, independent, and responsible, most states have created a supervised living arrangement for kids in their late teens. They’re often apartments or dorms, where kids live in clusters of twos or threes and learn to cook and clean and budget for themselves, with social workers checking up on them a few times a week.

  In New York, this is called the Supervised Independent Living Program, or SILP, and there are programs like it all around the country. They can vary slightly in approach and amenities, but generally kids in SILPs get money for food and household expenses, they get television and a telephone and their own bedroom and usually only one or a few other housemates, and as long as they hold down a job (any job; it doesn’t matter the hours or the pay), they get to stay. Until they turn twenty-one. Critics of SILP programs say they’re all carrot and no stick; kids don’t learn to save money because they don’t have to work for their rent, and when they’re released, they only know how to order takeout and hide a party from the landlord. It’s a kind of faux adulthood that’s administered too young: when kids taste early freedom, they can’t muster discipline later on. Proponents of SILPs say kids learn how to budget with their stipends and how to shop and cook and clean for themselves while they still have a social worker to rely on, before the stakes are raised and they’re all alone.

  Over at the Greens’, Chanel had already gone this route; it seemed, at least to me, that she was no longer considering adoption. And after Tonya came back from her month-long runaway in the Bronx, she wanted a SILP apartment too.

  “I’ll probably go this week or next week,” Tonya told me confidently, her small white teeth flashing a Cheshire grin. “They already have the apartment ready for me. I just need to get a job.”

  Tonya and I were talking in her bedroom with the Dora pillows, which she would probably take with her when she left. She said she met two out of the three requirements for the placement: she had a bank account, and she was in school. Although she was failing three of her senior-year classes, Tonya thought an independent apartment would actually improve her chances for higher education. “It’s gonna prepare me, being on my own. I’m going to college. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Mr. and Mrs. Green have been preparing us to be independent—as in washing our own clothes and all of that. But I want the whole thing. Like what I eat is determined by how I budget my money, how I cook, you know what I’m saying? I don’t know how to cook and I’m eighteen years old. I want to crash test before I go and everything falls apart in college.”

  To budget herself, Tonya’s only plan was to direct-deposit the money from the job she didn’t yet have; that way she wouldn’t spend everything in one shot. “Because I don’t have to pay rent, my paychecks are just gonna stack up and stack up, and then I can just get whatever I want from an ATM,” she explained, adding that the first thing she intended to do was decorate. “My bathroom, it’s gonna be brown, ’cause I want it to be warm and inviting. And I want scented candles, and not like the little ninety-nine-cent ones that you buy on the road. And in my kitchen, I want all the little magnets on the refrigerator, but not a whole bunch. And towels and curtains that match everything. For my room, I want a big flat-screen TV, with surround sound.”

  I interrupted her reverie: what if the lack of structure in a parent-free apartment proved too tempting for Tonya’s wilder side? I had heard stories of parties, drugs, fights, and pregnancies all occurring under SILP roofs. Tonya wasn’t concerned. “It’s called the Supervised Independent Living Program because basically they supervise. They come out twice a week to make sure that you don’t move nobody else in with you,” she assured me. As for a roommate swaying her intentions, Tonya said the agency made its matches carefully. “They put you with someone who’s your polar opposite, basically. Like they’ll put me with someone who’s thinking about not going to school, so I can influence them and encourage them. I’m always a good influence. And they put you with someone where your schedules are opposite to each other. Like if that person has to be at school at ten and I have to be to school at eight, I just probably won’t see them. And it’ll be less chaos because I can be in the bathroom alone, curling my hair, and not have to worry about someone.”

  Tonya said she often worried about people in the Green household, and she felt burdened by them coming to her with their problems. “Everyone comes to me because I’m the most able to be talked to without giving out information. And I give good advice, which is one of the reasons I want to be a psychiatrist,” she said. “But I need to learn how to say no sometimes. In my own apartment, I won’t have to say no, and I won’t hurt anyone’s feelings.”

  Mainly, Tonya wanted to say no to her mother, who, she said, was constantly calling the Green land line, as well as everyone’s cell phone, to track Tonya down. That was the reason she never got a cell phone herself. “If I’m on my own, then she won’t be able to reach me at all. Like, I don’t want to hear any negative things while I’m trying to get myself together,” Tonya said. Her mother’s drinking was the subtext, though she didn’t mention it outright. “It’s a way to get away from everybody. I won’t have to worry about anyone until I’m mentally stable. It’s so I can grow. You know how you get one of them trees that’s laming and you build a net so they won’t fall? That’s how I am. I’m really fragile, even though sometimes I don’t show it. On the inside, I’m kind of crumbling.”

  Allyson thought that giving Tonya her own apartment was a terrible idea. But Tonya’s social worker didn’t work for Allyson or coordinate goals with her. She just worked for Tonya.

  “They’re telling her she’s going to live in her own apartment, but she can’t even handle school?” Allyson fumed, when we were alone in the kitchen. Tonya had blown a scholarship to Virginia State, contingent upon her completing high school with top grades. Allyson had been the person to place Tonya in the charter school, encourage her on her homework, tell her she was smart. “The children don’t listen to me, but I have to understand that what they’re doing is not against me,” Allyson said. “If they don’t pass their classes, it’s affecting who? Not me. So I teach them—I pick out pieces of information from the Bible and show them what will happen to them if they go down that road.”

  Still, that the agency could promote a road that was so counter to the one she and Bruce had been paving for years enraged her. “They tell her to get a job at Victoria’s Secret on 59th Street—but she’s supposed to be in school from eight to four. She wants to party, to be with boys, and they’re allowed to go out as late as they want in these apartments.” Allyson sighed, deep and long. “Now, you tell me the system is not designed to fail.”

  Another person in the Green family who seemed destined to failure at that particular moment was a teenage foster boy named Russell. Among all the screech and squeal of the girls in the house, it was easy to overlook Russell; he was a quiet but lurking presence, and he had perhaps the broadest set of needs of all.

  Russell moved into DeKalb around the same time as Tonya, Fatimah, and Chanel, diagnosed with autism, Asperger’s, and something called a “developmental disability not otherwise specified,” which Russell carefully wrote out for me on the back of an envelope. He also, in my (unclinical) opinion, suffered from some type of delusions. And yet, like Tonya and Chanel, Russell was being encouraged to go the SILP track.

  The first time I met Russell, he had just gotten caught stealing books from a Barnes and Noble. He was eighteen at the time, and han
dsome, with long straight hair that he pulls back into a ponytail. Russell talks a little like a nursery school teacher, in a high-pitched monotone; he sounds patient and gentle, though he can slam into rages when he doesn’t get what he wants—a hallmark of both the autism and Asperger’s. He stole the books largely because he didn’t understand why he shouldn’t; he didn’t have the money to buy them and he had fines on his library card so he couldn’t check out books there. Morals and consequences were a tough sell for Russell’s psyche; mostly he just knew he had to avoid the security guard. When the Greens checked Russell’s bedroom that night, they found fifty-nine more stolen books. They were all history and religious texts; he said he wanted to get smarter.

  “Russell wants to get his own apartment, but he can’t because he’s autistic,” Allyson said when I talked to her about it. I remembered the way Russell had panicked when Fatimah once showed him a new route to school; like a lot of people with autism, he needed a strict ritual order in his life. Surely, I said, he’d find the demands of an apartment, a job, a real adult life, overwhelming to the point of breakdown?

  “Of course,” Allyson answered. But Russell was nineteen already, and his agency was pressuring him to move into the next phase for foster kids who come of age without getting adopted. The problem is, the kids usually don’t have enough money saved to sustain the apartments once the gig is over; many haven’t graduated from high school, their job prospects are grim, and they have no families to fall back upon. For a kid like Russell, the problem is even more layered; although he was going to college, his disabilities prevented his grasping a sense of consequence, or even cause and effect. (I want the books, I take the books, his logic goes.) So, while he could perhaps hold a menial job with few stressors and no daily alterations, he couldn’t handle things like budgets, bills, and a refrigerator without premade sandwiches tucked inside. Foster care does poorly by kids who reach adulthood with all their survival skills intact; those with disabilities can face even steeper challenges.

  But that didn’t stop Russell from wanting to live on his own. Unlike the other Green children, who have had to temper their demands for the latest sneakers or video games, Russell often gets his wishes granted, Allyson said, because it’s easier than managing his outbursts.

  “Everything Russell wants, Russell gets, but he’s still not satisfied,” she said. “He’s happy for the moment, but the minute you turn around, he starts flipping again.”

  She knows this is part of his disability, or his spectrum of disabilities; after all, Russell was placed in foster care after he physically assaulted his biological mother and had to spend time in the psych ward. And Allyson was taking baby steps with Russell, preparing him for the life he said he wanted. She was trying to teach him some basic budgeting—by giving him $10 a day and talking to him about saving it. So far, though, it hadn’t worked.

  “My girls, I teach them how to shop, how to buy good-quality clothes and make their money work. They’ve begun to embrace this. But Russell—he’ll take his money to Taco Bell and eat so many burritos. He doesn’t know how to do anything constructive with what he has.”

  Several times, I had patiently indulged Russell’s monologues about moving out on his own, complaining that he was an adult and was tired of being babied. He was going to college, after all, and the other students in his classes had their own places, or lived with roommates. He also told me it was probably time for him to start having sex; he had urges, it was natural, but he thought maybe God and Mrs. Green wouldn’t like it. (Russell didn’t recognize the standard filters in social conversation—another hallmark of autism or Asperger’s.) He did know, however, to whisper when he told me that the chairs around the dining room talked to him and told him what to do; many inanimate objects spoke to Russell—he heard voices all the time. He named the voices after cars; one was Dodge Caravan, one was Ford Crown Victoria, another was Ford Van, and so on. He said everything talked to him, “cars, faucets, soaps, chairs, doors, the trucks,” and these voices would “be talking on the phones to their own imaginary friends.” Although it got pretty noisy, Russell said the voices kept him “preoccupied and happy,” and he claimed to have heard them every day of his life since he was two. I wondered about a secondary diagnosis of psychosis or some sort of schizoaffective disorder (Russell said his doctor gave him “psychotropic medication” that controlled his mood swings but didn’t take away the voices), and I just nodded mutely along with Russell’s dreams of independence.

  Inside, though, I was worried. Bruce and Allyson knew Russell far better than I did, and they didn’t even let him go to church with them because he might act out.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Green say I have to wait for church until the time is right,” Russell told me one afternoon. He was wearing a white T-shirt onto which he’d scrawled the letters ECW, which stood for Extreme Championship Wrestling. Russell was obsessed with wrestling. “I always used to get angry at church, and also I get bored sometimes and I hate when that happens.”

  Russell talked about God with whoever would listen. “Mr. George, he’s this guy who used to give me the 411 on religion, and he said religion has no validity to it. Is that true?” Russell asked, with his characteristically quick but monotone speech. I deferred with something cheap and hobbled—I was no expert, everyone has his own experience, blah blah—but Russell pressed on. “This guy I’m interested in says religion is a form and a fashion. What does that mean?”

  I paused. I had misunderstood him. I thought he said, “a form of defense.” It would have made sense; Russell told me Allyson had been getting more religious lately, confirming my periodic observations with his more continual ones. I wondered if he made the connection: Allyson was defending against the increasing difficulties at home with a fortress of scripture. Then I realized Russell’s complaint was more concrete: she now had the television tuned to the Word Network all the time, and it interfered with his wrestling.

  “I just can’t get enough of it,” Russell said, though he conceded that wrestling was better when he was younger and the sport was more extreme. “Now there are about twenty-nine good wrestlers left, including on TNA. TNA is a little bit more violent. I like them in tights—that’s what makes me feel good.”

  Russell never stayed on one topic very long; he talked a lot about living independently but would easily switch over to wrestling or celebrity gossip, and in this way, too, I was concerned that Russell couldn’t sustain focus without the Greens watching over him. “I’ve been praying to be able to have sex soon. I’ve been praying and praying and it still hasn’t happened yet,” Russell said to me the day we talked about church. Then he quickly changed the subject. “The Undertaker is still in the WWE. He’s been wrestling for almost nineteen years—that’s a long time.”

  Russell thought he would go to hell for being gay; throughout our conversation he kept bringing up the ideas of hell he’d gleaned from books or from Allyson or from an aunt of his who was very religious. Then he told me his plan to get to heaven: it came from what his voices, the cars, told him.

  “You know Ralph Fiennes? He killed almost sixteen million people,” Russell said, as though he were discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast. The comment came after a perfectly lucid discussion of Russell’s desire to join a gym. “He keeps killing all these people because I didn’t get what I wanted soon enough. That’s what my imaginary friends tell me.”

  What Russell wanted was to have sex, as well as to find a white boyfriend, for whom he’d been waiting for “more than sixteen years.” He also wanted unlimited access to free books; Russell still didn’t understand why he couldn’t simply take them from bookstores when he didn’t have the money, and he confessed that he’d stolen even more from a Barnes and Noble. But Fiennes’s murderous rampage would stop, he said, as soon as these injustices were reversed.

  “When I get what I want the most, he’ll die, and I’ll go automatically to heaven,” Russell explained. “What could happen is I could change my ways, I co
uld be the richest person, and get a girlfriend. Instead of liking boys, I could start liking girls again.”

  Thankfully, right around the time Fatimah ran away, something shifted. Maybe Allyson’s talks sank in. Maybe his social worker caught on to the depths of Russell’s struggles. But Russell stopped talking about independent living and switched to something more reasonable.

  “They’re going to put me into assisted living, which means they’ll help me with certain things and give me SSI [Supplemental Security Income],” Russell said. He was a little fuzzy on the details as to how and when this might happen, but he had relinquished the dream of following Chanel and Tonya to SILP apartments. And then, shortly thereafter, ACS announced it would stop funding the SILP program entirely by the end of 2010; the agency believed kids were better off with families as they aged out of the system. Elsewhere in the country, however, Independent Living Program apartments are very much alive, and someone like Russell, with his disabilities, can go right from them into a free fall of independence, or else be institutionalized well into adulthood. “I’m scared because they say I’m in for a rude awakening. They’ll have me doing a lot of things—cleaning, cooking, washing, working, traveling back and forth to the places I need to go. Here, I clean up my room. I take a shower every day, brush my teeth, I do my laundry, and that’s it.”

  Russell wasn’t so keen on leaving anymore for any kind of new housing, because a new foster kid named David had moved in; room had opened up for another foster kid with Dominique gone. “Guess what?” Russell gushed, eager to change the subject from assisted living. “I find David handsome!”