What I Carry

by Jennifer Longo

  And now, the best for last. The redwood grove Muir rescued from destruction, safe here beside the wild California coast.

  Sean held my hand into the grove of trees towering nearly three hundred feet, most of them five hundred years old, the oldest over a thousand. We walked together in silence and near darkness, the giants obscuring weak, overcast sunlight. Mist collected in our hair, dripped from the ferns on the forest floor, and from the redwoods’ needle leaves and cones.

  We came to a bend in the trail where a park ranger spoke to a group of enraptured tourists.

  “The coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, may grow up to three hundred eighty feet tall, so you might assume its root system would be as deep as it is tall. In truth, the redwood’s roots are very shallow, which leaves them vulnerable. Alone, a sequoia may not survive to maturity. But together in thick groves, their roots spread and intertwine, even fuse together, giving them strength to withstand the forces of nature. Together they thrive in swift winds and floods, and grow taller than they ever could alone.”

  The ranger led the tourists around and past us, still rooted on the trail, staring up into the redwoods, now alone together in silence. We stood in the cool air, this boy I love and my friends and I, beneath a sky warming gold as the sun found its way through the clouds.

  “Are we ready?” Kira asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  My daughter asked me to write this book. She was born into foster care and lived in three foster placements before we met. She’s too young to remember, but who she is now was shaped by how her life began and continued within the foster care system. She said she never read a book about a life she recognized, which, according to her, meant less “people being molested all day and setting the house on fire” and more “a person getting used to new houses and people and everyone isn’t perfect or evil but sometimes there’s happiness.” A wide pendulum swing, but I got her point.

  The memoirist Mary Karr says, “Write less about how you suffer, and more about how you survive.” Still, this story was not mine to tell. I did not grow up in foster care in America. I was never orphaned or separated from my birth family or adopted, and I hesitated to write a story that was not my own. My daughter became increasingly annoyed and said, “I’m not asking you to write your story. Write mine. Listen and I’ll tell you.”

  If it is true a writer is a professional listener and question asker, the resulting narrative depends solely on whom she is asking and listening to. For this book, the voices I listened to were those of the kids actually living in or aging out of foster care.

  I also listened to my daughter. I listened to friends and family members in the foster care system. I exchanged mail with former foster youth and read their stories. I asked, and listened, and wrote, and my daughter’s story became part of someone else’s, and another someone’s. And after a long while they all became Muir’s story.

  The kids I listened to have known great joy. They have suffered and survived. They are the experts on their own lives, and they understand that the purpose of adoption is not to procure children to fulfill an adult’s desire to be a parent; that the intended purpose of adoption is to find parents and families for children who need them. They know there are adults who genuinely believe the lie that foster care is where “bad kids go” and who also refuse to acknowledge the brutal and violent history of child stealing in America, which is racially, economically, and religiously motivated.

  The kids I listened to said orphaned and fostered children are human beings, not “gifts” for adults; they are not “lucky,” and they don’t owe the world, and every remotely nice adult they meet, a debt of genuflecting gratitude by default. They said white parents have no right to erase the identity and heritage of children of color. They understand that every human is entitled to have at least one adult they can rely on, and every child is entitled to the truth of their own experiences and emotions, their own lives. They reminded me that orphans in films and books are routinely depicted as evil or “troubled” or defined only by suffering, or they are supernatural or ridiculously angelic. The kids I listened to explained to me that for a child, losing a family, losing parents in any way, is traumatic, and that a child’s joining a new family is not some purely magical, meant-to-be scenario simply because it brings the foster or adoptive parent joy. The voices of adults, well intended or not, overwhelmingly drive the myopic, adult-centric false narrative of foster care and adoption in America, talking over those of the kids in care who are screaming that no one is listening.

  My daughter wanted a hopeful, happy ending, and so I gave that to her. I gave that to Muiriel. Muir’s story is fiction, not meant to represent the norm of every, or any single, foster adoptive story. But it was born of truth from honest voices, and I am grateful they let me listen. I hope I listened well. I hope we always will.

  * * *

  —

  If you want to learn more about foster care in America, these organizations reliably amplify the voices of former and current foster youth and make life better for families and kids in and aging out of foster care. I owe them an immeasurable debt of gratitude.

  agingoutinstitute.org

  firstplaceforyouth.org

  mockingbirdsociety.org

  treehouseforkids.org

  Phoenix Ashes: Former Foster Youth Voices Community:

  facebook.com/​PhoenixAshesVoices

  First and always, thank you to Melissa White, agent, editor, writer, the best good fortune I’ve known. To Folio Literary for having me in your home—gratitude doesn’t even come close.

  To Chelsea Eberly, who always finds the true story in a bird’s nest of thousands of words in as many drafts: you are magic.

  Thank you to my editor, Jenna Lettice, lover of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, whose talent for storytelling, rivaled only by her patience, spot-on instinct, and wisdom, brought this book to life and made it sing. You were meant for this book; the best parts are all you.

  Eternal gratitude to Caroline Abbey, Casey Moses, Stephanie Moss, and everyone at Random House Children’s who read, edited, designed, or otherwise touched this book. Thank you for making Muir’s story happen. Special editing gratitude to Barbara Bakowski, Erika Ferguson, and Patricia McHugh for keeping the narrative from wandering too far into the wilderness.

  Thank you for answering my millions of questions: Charles Nelson III, PhD, professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, and research director of Boston Children’s Hospital Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience; and Harold Grotevant, PhD, Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Psychology and director of the Rudd Adoption Research Program at UMass Amherst.

  For your devotion to improving the lives of former and current foster youth, thank you to Treehouse and the Mockingbird Society in Seattle, Washington, and to Amy Lemley and Deanne Pearn, who created California’s First Place for Youth. Thank you also to Phoenix Ashes: Former Foster Youth Voices community, for your brave commitment to making the truth known.

  Thank you to my favorite social and adoption workers and foster and adoptive families, who shared inspiration, stories, and truth: Rebecca Frasier; Joellen Pinter; Lisa Hllavay; the Neuse family, Sarah, Alex, and Mac; Sarah Nelson and the Cargillova family; Litza Johnson and Bernadette; Paul Pierce; Joer Amirez; and DJ.

  Thank you to the authors—and my dear friends—Catherine Nguyen, Caitlyn Flynn, Martha Brockenbrough, and Nicole Ching. And most especially to my sister, Christine Kiekhaefer, who introduced me to my daughter.

  Heartfelt gratitude to the many generous people who shared their families’ experiences surviving the internment of Japanese Americans, especially the storytellers of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association and the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum; Delphine Hirasuna, author of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 19
42–1946; and Renee Tawa and Sheila Kern, for their reporting on the Manzanar Children’s Village, “Childhood Lost: The Orphans of Manzanar,” for the Los Angeles Times. Thank you to Mary Woodward, for your family and your beautiful book In Defense of Our Neighbors: The Walt and Milly Woodward Story.

  For inspiration and accuracy, the docents at the John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez, California. Thank you to Connie Walker for educating me about Canada’s Sixties Scoop and residential schools, which used adoption to devastate indigenous lives. Deep gratitude to authenticity readers Nata Guterson and Celia Connor.

  For help with Terry Johnson, thank you to Gretchen Landon, Dr. Julia Mulvaney, Dr. Evan Crocker, and the entire team at Mercer Island Veterinary Clinic. I love you all so much, and so do Henri and June and Henri’s left ear.

  Love-filled gratitude to my librarians, especially Linda Johns of the Seattle Public Library, Sarah Abreu at MIHS, and the staff at the Bainbridge Public Library, my home and writing refuge.

  Special thanks to Victoria Irwin and Karen Maeda Allman for immeasurable kindness.

  Love and grateful devotion to the supportive early readers and hand-holders: my Café Verité coven and my Bainbridge writers, who gave me a new home: Dawn Simon, Jennifer Mann, and Suzanne Selfors. Thank you also to Bainbridge Island’s BARN for writing support and space.

  Heartfelt gratitude for time, reading, and kind words to Deb Caletti, Jo Knowles, Martha Brockenbrough, Holly Cupala, Jeff Zentner, Kathleen Glasgow, and Joy McCullough.

  Thank you to Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and Steven Ray Morris for saving me from myself.

  To my family: you are, as always, on every page I write. Unless I say it’s not you; then it’s probably not. My older daughter, Julia J. K. Rizzle Neal. Tim and Vickie Longo, the Falletti family, Kathy and James Clark, the Temmermans, and the Kiekhaefers. Sarah Sydor, unending love. James, Henri, and June Longo, for daily writing assistance. Thank you to my Fair Oaks family: Joe, Dan, Dan’s Joe, Deanne, Beth, Aaron, Merete, Barbara, Karen, Lucy, Corey, Jeff, Amy’s Jeff, Patrick, Poe, and my sisters Lisa, Brianne, and my very own Analise Langford Clark. I would be alone without you.

  My father, Fred Belt, who would have loved this one.

  My dad, Robert Irvin, who loved them all. Who is in every word, always.

  Deep respect and gratitude for every former and current person in foster care, and to you who let me listen to your lives, who helped me to tell Muir’s story; though it will never be enough, all I know to say is thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  Tim Longo Jr. For walking me into the forest, for your love of the wilderness and of John Muir. And me. And REI. But mostly me.

  And to my own brave truth-teller: Cordelia Elanor, the reason for this book, the reason for it all. Always.

  JENNIFER LONGO is the author of Six Feet Over It and Up to This Pointe. Her storied careers as a playwright, elementary school librarian, preschool teacher, and literary associate at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre prepared her for the most humbling fortune of her life: being a foster and adoptive mother. Jennifer holds an MFA in Writing for Theatre from Humboldt State University. She lives on an island near Seattle with her husband and daughter and writes about writing at her website.

  jenlongo.com

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