These are the confessions of an unlikely foster parent.
One day my wife, Mary, said, “Let’s do foster care and just take babies.” We had no idea what dealing with the birth parents would be like. They resented us. In their minds, Mary and I were The Baby Thieves.
[Reader’s note: I intended the previous two paragraphs as a fixed introduction to the column].
“Are you crazy?”
That was my reaction when my wife proposed the idea of doing foster care.
It sounded like a boiling cauldron full of problems, and besides I wasn’t perfect enough to be much of a father.
Mary would bring up the fostering idea every so often. She knew her idealism would eventually triumph over my lack of conviction.
Steps that led to our improbable involvement in foster care:
• Elizabeth was born. Elizabeth was the child of Mary’s son from a previous marriage.
• We didn’t know if Elizabeth would make it. She was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Elizabeth wasn’t breathing and had to be resuscitated. For a while we were not sure if she would make it.
• Mary agreed to take care of Elizabeth during the day when mom and dad were at work. I agreed, blissfully unaware of how that could change my life.
• I fell in love with baby Elizabeth.
After work I found myself rushing back home to spend time with Elizabeth.
Playing with Elizabeth was better than any movie or roller coaster ride I had ever experienced. If her mom came and snatched her away early I was crushed.
• Mary was patient and cunning. Innovate! She smiled, at me one day, knowing my answer in advance, “Let’s do foster care and just take babies.”
• How could I resist? Of course, I said yes. I couldn’t wait.
There are two phases to the training: foster care and adoption.
We weren’t about to adopt—no way, no how.
First Call
Two in the morning, and we got our first call.
Things started happening quickly, in a blur—like dominoes clattering in the fog. Olivia was a fourteen-month Hispanic girl, and Harvey was an intake worker. He didn’t remove the child from the family, but he placed them in a foster home.
Olivia gave shocking new meaning to the word scream when he brought her inside. She shrieked and cried and glanced around desperately in our half-lit front room.
Harvey held Olivia in one arm and half a dozen plastic bags filled with unwashed baby clothes in the other. Mary, my wife, took the baby in her arms, but Olivia started reaching out for me. For whatever reason, this baby liked guys better.
She clutched at me wildly, desperately, like she thought I would drop her, or heaven forbid, ignore her. She stopped crying and caught her breath, hyperventilating about twenty times before she calmed down. Her tiny fingers were still clinging tightly to the thermal shirt that served as my pajama top on all but the very hottest of southern California nights.
Harvey and my wife were doing all the work while I tried to coo and cuddle and bounce the baby. [Not a division of labor I was expecting]. She finally smiled—a half smile, part fearful, part hopeful. I was a cynic, but she was a charmer. She had chubby cheeks and short black hair, and I heard Harvey tell Mary something—did I hear that right—something about alleged anal rape.
Two-thirty in the morning doesn’t prevent a bath when a child smells like Olivia did—I have a high tolerance for odors—allergies can be a blessing sometimes, but enough is enough! I placed Olivia in the tub while Mary put her clothes in the washer, alternating between domestic and paperwork duties.
Harvey was a quick mover who seemed to do three things at once. I’m a jumpy striver, but this guy was a hyperactive step ahead of me, eliciting my grudging respect and astonishment as he and Mary made time slow down and get forty-five minutes of work done in seven and a half.
Before the bath was run he had helped Mary load the washer and guided her in signing about fourteen forms.
“She likes you,” he managed to tell me in the midst of the slowly deescalating chaos.
“Just take care of that little girl,” and he was out the door and back to the midnight grind of a Child Protective Services worker—I got a whiff of his outrageous schedule as he zoomed away to the next human interest story.
Order had been restored, for a time.
Somehow we managed to get her dressed in some of Elizabeth’s pajamas. The clothes could wait ‘till the morning in the drier, and uncharacteristically I called in the electronic spin system for a substitute. I am a teacher who believes that if I am not there every day, the students will not learn and will be unemployable someday, experiment with drugs, prey upon the elderly and the infirm and buy baggy pants.
But tonight I was arranging for a substitute and was gearing up to set sail, aimless and rudderless, for adventures in foster care. It’s tough being married to an idealist who drags me into do-gooder, la-la land. She persists under the delusion that she can change the world, and what’s more, that I will help her do it.
Mary looked for the best in people, however I’m the ultraviolet to her infrared, and I had a knack for cynically sizing people up and coolly accepting their present for their future.
As a teacher I suspended my judgment on children who, unlike adults, could change for the better and often did. (But that’s different—that’s me)! I had a vague notion that to make idealism work, it was necessary to be a realist. I didn’t see how the reverse might also work wonders.
Owner/Editor - Chris Chmielewski