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

by Beam, Cris

  Her primary advocate at Graham Windham was a woman named Doris Laurenceau, whose job title was Director of Family and Permanency Planning Services, which meant that she guided the older kids toward a final, or permanent, goal. Unlike many executives in congregate care, who deem group homes or RTCs the last stop for teenagers, Doris still believed in finding them lifelong families.

  Doris thought that Glenn and Mindy would be a good match for Oneida. She hadn’t met them in person yet, but she’d read their file, and she reasoned they were fit for a challenge. Oneida had been acting out, but she had a conscience and she could be saved; what she needed was someone to pay attention to her. Glenn and Mindy had family dinners at home every night, and their quiet suburban block could be a welcome respite from the urban distractions that were getting Oneida in trouble. Plus, while Glenn and Mindy were waiting for all the paperwork on Oneida to go through, they had started weekend visits with another foster child, a quiet honor roll student named Nayelly. A smart, bookish sister, Doris thought, could be a good influence.

  Doris knew how adoption, even later in life, solidifies one’s sense of self and belonging, because she herself was adopted at thirty-eight. By Mary Keane.

  In the way that new communities or cultures can seem enormous at first, but tiny once you’ve gained some traction and familiarity, child welfare in New York City sometimes feels like a small town. I met Pat and Chester at You Gotta Believe! long before I ever met Mary Keane, simply because I had read about their work and was intrigued. Then several friends and colleagues from different circles directed me toward Mary; they’d all heard about this remarkable woman in Yonkers who’d adopted a bunch of kids. When I finally did meet Mary, I found out she was training parents for You Gotta Believe!—and then, over tea one day at her house, in walked Doris Laurenceau.

  “I first saw Mary when I was working at Harlem Dowling; my job there was to connect teenagers to adoptive parents,” Doris said. This was in 2001, she said, and secretly she had long wished for an adoptive parent of her own. Doris had been a foster child and she was already in her thirties at the time; she was married, working on a graduate degree, and trying to get pregnant. Maybe it was this last detail that accentuated the yearning for a maternal lineage, but, Doris said, when she saw Mary, “I thought to myself, ‘That’s gonna be her.’”

  Mary was running groups for teenagers then, helping to acclimate them to the idea that they could find families. “I started going everywhere Mary was going; I was stalking her actually,” Doris told me, conspiratorially, with a laugh. Doris’s dimples carved half-moons into her cheeks, and with her pink hoodie and ponytail, she looked like a girl of twenty-five instead of a woman edging her way to forty. “I’d find out from the kids where Mary was going to be, and wherever it was, I’d be there.”

  “I was really honored,” Mary said softly. She morally adopted Doris some years after the stalking, when Doris’s own daughter was four. The legal adoption would come later. “It was a real wake-up call for me. It never occurred to me that somebody like Doris—married, with a child—would want somebody.”

  “The time I needed the most parenting was when I was an adult,” Doris answered, saying that Mary helped her through a terrible divorce shortly after the moral adoption. Her story spoke to the notion that a state can’t raise a child, because the state deposits that child squarely into isolation at adulthood. And while that brand-new adult may well make it on her own for a stretch, at some point she’ll need backup.

  Having a mother had changed everything for Doris. When I saw her again at her office at Graham Windham, she was hoping to carve a similar path for Oneida.

  Glenn and Mindy drove the forty-five miles from Staten Island to Graham Windham after work one Friday in April of 2009. They were excited, but both dressed casually, in jeans and black T-shirts, though Mindy’s was studded with rhinestones. Diamond rings glinted from each of her ring fingers, and her jet-black hair was cut in a shag to her shoulders. Glenn and Mindy were scheduled to talk with Doris first, in her office, to discuss Oneida’s background and the steps to adoption. Then Oneida would be brought in, to meet them.

  “I always tell the kids that they’re the ones in charge at these meetings, they’re the ones interviewing the parents,” Doris said, after Glenn and Mindy shook her hand and we all settled around a small conference table in her office. “This isn’t a pet shop where parents get to pick out a kid. And it’s not a guarantee on either side.”

  Glenn and Mindy smiled and nodded: of course. They said they had seen Oneida on “Wednesday’s Child”; they expected to like her, and they were ready to answer any of her questions. Doris relaxed her face and gave one of her characteristic dimpled grins. “You seem like a happy couple,” she said.

  Despite Doris’s introduction, I knew the pressure was on: Oneida was seventeen and scheduled to be released from Graham Windham in a month. After that, Doris wouldn’t have any jurisdiction over her anymore, and she could be sent anywhere. Oneida didn’t have any other prospects for permanent parents, and without Glenn and Mindy, Oneida would most likely age out of the system on her own. Privately, Doris had told me she had to make this adoption work.

  “OK,” Doris said with a sigh, “I’m going to tell you everything that’s been written in Oneida’s file—some of which may be true.” Behind her, giant windows revealed the first pink streaks of a sunset, reflecting off three jars of honey on the sill. “She’s half Italian, half Cuban and Dominican, with a lot of domestic abuse before the age of five. She has two brothers, both in care, but she was separated from them. The older brother is quite high-functioning. She was first placed in one home, then removed to go into a paraprofessional home, funded through the Office of Mental Health—which is supposed to be for kids going in and out of mental hospitals, because she was labeled depressed. She did well there—”

  Suddenly, in the middle of Doris’s speech, the office door burst open. There stood Oneida, her eyes wide and expectant, taking in the scene at the table. She grinned and looked down at her hand. She was clutching an umbrella. “Um, is this anyone’s umbrella?” she asked quickly. “I thought maybe someone forgot it.”

  “Oneida!” Doris quickly reprimanded, her tone low and stern. “You know you have to wait outside! We’ll ask you in soon.”

  Oneida popped back out the door, still grinning, and once she closed it, we all laughed. Clearly, she had just wanted to check Glenn and Mindy out. “After that, she had another four or five foster homes,” Doris whispered. “And she got into stuff, like partying. She did admit to drinking, and she tried marijuana. She stopped going to school, and she got caught writing on a wall. She also ran away. Maybe I’m minimizing this, but in foster care, two or three days running away is not so bad.”

  Mindy, who had been nodding along with Doris’s story, stepped in. “OK, but you know what? It’s all understandable.”

  Doris looked relieved. “Yes. She’s not an angel, but she doesn’t deny anything,” she said. She told them that Oneida had also forged signatures to get out of work and had once stolen her boyfriend’s credit card. “She’s a very loving child, and she’s excellent at taking her consequences. And if she’s connected to you, she won’t want to disappoint you.”

  As Oneida was welcomed back for her official introduction, I felt a terrible anxiety strike my heart. In some ways, Glenn and Mindy were similar to Allyson and Bruce or Mary Keane: they wanted a teenager, they wanted to give her hope and new roots. But they were also very different: they had never fostered before, and they were expecting to love and adopt Oneida, sight unseen. I worried that they were enacting what Francine Cournos at Columbia warned about: jumping into the marriage without the courtship. And yet, I knew YGB was right—a kid like Oneida also needs adoption, needs parents like Glenn and Mindy to say, “I want you, forever.”

  After her second entrance, Oneida was shyer. She’d abandoned the umbrella and sat quietly at the table, fiddling with a set of pink headphones. She wore jeans, a w
hite sweatshirt, and rectangular glasses festooned with pink and purple geometric designs. She was still smiling, but she glanced around nervously. Doris touched her arm. “What would you like to say?” she asked.

  “Ummm, I eat Italian food,” Oneida said hopefully. Doris nodded for her to continue. “I like music. My favorite stations are 103.5 and 105.1, the Spanish music, obviously. I like having different types of friends. I like to cook different kinds of food, Spanish food . . .” Oneida trailed off. What can a kid say to people who might, if she played her cards right, want to be her parents?

  Glenn smiled at her. He was more soft-spoken than Mindy and had a gentle, reserved demeanor. He was somebody who could be alone for hours a day, as he had delivered mail his entire adult life and was now the postmaster for his region. Mindy was chattier; she worked in sales for a T-shirt manufacturer. “When you cook Spanish food,” Glenn asked, “is it spicy?”

  “No,” Oneida said, uncertain, searching Glenn’s face for the correct answer. The she reconsidered. “Well, maybe only the meat.”

  “Dinner is very important to us,” Mindy said earnestly.

  “My favorite thing to eat is cheesecake,” Oneida answered.

  “Well, there are two ways to make it,” Mindy said, happily steering the conversation onto baking—a pastime she hoped to share with a daughter. Her accent, like Glenn’s, was thick, old-school Brooklyn. “The easy way and the hard way.”

  This seemed to stump Oneida, so she started chatting about the people who were important to her: her brothers and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, she said, was a poet, and he drove a car and had parents. Her gaze flicked quickly from Mindy to Glenn and back again, gauging their reactions. “I also like to read,” she said. “I’m reading a book right now called The Dirty Truth. It’s about a murderer and people who sleep with a lot of people. Oh, and in the morning, I just eat cereal.”

  “Breakfast is very important. Even if it’s just a Pop Tart,” said Mindy.

  “Yeah, and I do my homework. I like to be home on the weekends, and I like to shop,” Oneida said, sitting up straighter in her chair.

  Mindy’s eyes widened in pleasure. “Oh, I hate shopping,” she said sarcastically. “But I guess I could do it for you.”

  Oneida grinned; the meeting was going well. Mindy asked her what she was looking for in her life. “A permanent home,” she said quickly. “I mean, throughout the years, I’ve been through some hard times in all the homes. And then I wrote a heart on a wall and got paroled to some Jamaican lady who wouldn’t let me eat the same food her own kids ate, and after that there were no more homes for me. Now that I’m getting old, I really don’t want to move anymore.”

  Glenn asked Oneida how she would feel about a sister, and she said she would love to have someone to go shopping with. Oneida asked about house rules, and Glenn told her that honesty was the major directive in the household. “All the rules we have are based on love,” Glenn said.

  Oneida considered this and squeezed her eyebrows together; love wasn’t something she was used to talking about, at least not right away. “I’ll probably watch the news with you, every night, while you cook,” she said.

  Her enthusiasm was catching, as Glenn and Mindy’s descriptions grew more concrete and Oneida clung to the idea that she just might go home with them. “Do you like to swim?” Glenn asked. “We live in a development with two Olympic-size pools.”

  “Cool!” Oneida gushed. “I used to swim a lot. But it was only in the bathtub, and then I got too big. I’ve never been in a pool.”

  Pity, or something like it, flickered briefly across Mindy’s face. If Oneida caught it, she didn’t show it. “Do you like to travel?” Oneida asked.

  “Well, I love cruises,” Mindy said, conspiratorially, leaning in. “I’ve been on forty-two of them. And we’re about to go on my forty-third—to Italy and Greece!”

  “Oh,” Oneida said. She looked at Doris; this might be a snag in the plans. Parents can’t just go off on cruises—or admit it to officials like Doris—with teenagers living in the house. But Doris saved the moment: maybe Oneida could finish out the school year at Graham Windham, she suggested, so Glenn and Mindy could have their vacation, and then she’d make the move to Staten Island. The trick would be getting ACS to approve the cost of an extended stay; if they didn’t, they would send Oneida to another foster home and Doris would lose her, when the court order that sent Oneida to the RTC was up in May.

  “Or . . . maybe I could come visit?” Oneida asked, her voice suddenly small and shy.

  “Of course we want you to visit!” both Glenn and Mindy said, practically in unison.

  Oneida grinned, relieved, and there was an awkward silence. Doris prodded her. “Is there anything else you want to say?”

  “Um,” Oneida said, looking at Doris for backup, “could I come this weekend?”

  Glenn and Mindy exchanged glances; this was happening awfully fast. In the parent training, they tell you to expect a certain process: first you’ll meet a child in a neutral setting, then maybe the child will come to visit you at your home. This could lead to an overnight, and then to a weekend visit, and then maybe a longer weekend, and if all goes well, you decide to permanently welcome her into your family. On paper, this gives parents time to adjust (and squeeze in a final cruise) and helps the child smoothly transition from one placement to another. In reality, there often isn’t such wiggle room. Kids need to leave unsafe or, as with Oneida, expensive placements when the state says it’s time.

  Everybody knew adoption was on the line; it’s what Glenn and Mindy signed up for. I knew, though, that Mary Keane had adopted her kids when they were ready, after years of building trust. Two of the Green kids had run from adoption when pushed too soon. And Glenn and Mindy were ready right now. I felt as if I was about to witness a grand experiment, or duel. On one side was Oneida, embodying Cournos’s idea that trauma blocks attachment, even if she didn’t know it. On the other were Glenn and Mindy, with Kecia, chanting, “You’ve got to rock with a kid, all the way.” And everybody wanted to win, together.

  Mindy turned her chair toward Glenn and started brainstorming. This weekend wasn’t a possibility. There was the barbecue, and the other foster daughter coming to visit; they would need to prepare her. But maybe next Friday—couldn’t Glenn leave work early and pick Oneida up from school? Oneida whispered to Doris, “This is like a fantasy. Make them take me.”

  And then, suddenly, it was decided: Oneida would come the next weekend, for a full three days; Doris would get her excused from school. Glenn and Mindy would take their cruise, and then, after that, Oneida would move in. For good.

  14

  Touching the Elephant

  GLENN AND MINDY HAD TO JUMP so fast with Oneida because foster care and juvenile justice were separate divisions at that time. When Oneida painted the heart on the bodega wall, she was removed from ACS and handed over to the state as a juvenile delinquent. Doris worked for the state and couldn’t advocate for Oneida once she completed her sentence—at which point she would be returned to ACS and sent to any number of agencies and any family, rather than to Glenn and Mindy, who wanted her. There are problems with merging foster care and juvenile justice, but one united agency would have benefited someone like Oneida. She could have had one social worker, one judge, one set of files following her through her many transitions and buying her the time to ease into Glenn and Mindy’s life slowly. Instead, the trio had to close their eyes to the less savory details (Oneida’s history of lying and abuse; Glenn and Mindy’s lack of experience). They all wanted a family and believed it could work. They jumped.

  Combined criminal and foster services would have helped Tonya over at the Greens’ as well. The next time Tonya ran away to her mother’s house, she hooked up with an old friend from the Bronx, took a road trip through a few eastern states, and ended up in jail.

  When Tonya stood before a criminal court judge in Pennsylvania, she wasn’t the Tonya with a thick child welfare fil
e, longtime foster daughter of Bruce and Allyson Green, former star student, and first-time offender. She was a more anonymous adult black female, caught on a ShopRite videotape stealing powdery white toiletries with which a drug dealer could cut cocaine. This Tonya spent one month in a women’s penitentiary. Had the judge been privy to a fuller story and to her resources as a ward of New York, Tonya may have been able to avoid this fate altogether.

  Then again, Tonya committed her crime across state lines; I don’t know that a Pennsylvania court would care that in New York, foster care could handle her. And even now that the system has merged its foster and juvenile justice divisions, it will likely still miss the obvious opportunities to help kids before they stumble into trouble. I wonder, if someone in Tonya’s life had caught on to her bed-wetting, her stealing, her fights, as signs of trauma and unmet needs rather than inconveniences and misbehavior, whether she would have faced that judge.

  Oneida was also in foster care for many years before she went to Staten Island to be adopted, and she wasn’t given enough help. And it was foster care’s lack of services that Glenn and Mindy now blame for the entire disaster.

  To get to Manhattan’s leafiest and least-populated borough without a car, you have to take a ferry. Then there’s one subway line, timed with the ferry’s landing, which runs tip to tip along Staten Island. If you’re a kid, you take a bus to get to a strip mall or the movies. If you want to get to Brooklyn, it takes about two hours.

  This was Oneida’s first big beef with the place, Glenn told me as he picked me up from the train station in his white Toyota. “Oneida used to call it carajo-land,” he said, waving his hand toward the white houses with trim lawns tucked along the quiet streets. “She missed the bodegas in Brooklyn.”