Stereotype

It is hard to escape stereotypes and long-held animosities, even doing foster care.

So, how do I make sense out of this? My wife, Mary, and I worked to help foster children who, in ages past, were seen as human garbage, as troublemakers, even as evil. We saw them as the future. But what about the parents? Did I, on some level, regard the birth parents as the enemy, and did they foster resentment as well?

Mary, especially, was eager to be a mentor and a friend to them. I was more skeptical, seeing them as stoners who would try and engage us in a never-ending jailhouse con. I was right, and I was wrong. Mary wished to give them birth parents an emotional “hand-up,” and help them return to parenting. This proved a complicated issue. So many of them regarded us as baby thieves who plundered their families of their children. We were different. We might be from a different race or educational level. We certainly were in a higher Socio Economic Status, and we generally had shockingly different attitudes about child rearing. It is hard enough to make a connection with someone with a similar background. Dozens of extra hurdles to working together always accompanied fostering.

We fostered Gabriela for eight months before some of Mary’s relatives adopted her. Gabriela, or Ella, as I like to call her, is slender, short and energetic. She has bright, almost jet-black eyes and short hair with delicate curls. Ever since she was a baby she was a force to be reckoned with.

“She looks Filipino,” we were told over and over, sometimes by friends and often by strangers. My barber was half Filipino and she assured me Ella was too.

So, Jessica, Gabriela’s adoptive mother, took a sample of her DNA and had her tested. She was not from Asia. She inherited genes that were partly Spanish but mostly Native American.

I was always interested in that kind of thing. I always wanted to know what my ancestors were like. Did they drink mead from the skulls of their conquered enemies? Did they invent something really useful, like fishhooks? Were they the most notorious group of horse-thieves in history? I like to think they sold guns to the Indians or revolted against some important emperor. Maybe I’m related to Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin or one of my many heroes I wouldn’t want living next door.

My wife, Mary, was adopted, and she had no interest in finding out about her ancestry. For her, her adoptive parents were the real deal. She knows she had been in three adoptive families before the final adoption. She has no memories of her birth mother.

Zollner is a German name. When I was seven we got a letter from a Jewish group, saying we had Jewish ancestry, along with an invitation to visit a local synagogue. My Dad thought it was pretty funny. He had been raised Catholic, and his ancestors were from Bavaria, a region that had ultra high levels of certain types of pathologies: rapes, incest, teen pregnancy… You name it; we were infamous for it.

Jewish sounded great! I could latch on to thousands of years of history and culture by a tenuous genetic connection. From that point on, I saw myself as part Jewish even if no one else in the family did.

My Mom’s side was more complicated. They were southern. Her father, Grandpa James, was originally from Mississippi and proudly claimed: Welsh, Norman French and Scotch-Irish ancestry. He had been a member of the Klan in his youth, and complained that all the news commentators were either “Nigras or Comma-nists!”

My Mom’s mother was a different type of southerner. Her great grandfather was a man named Major Bracken who left Texas to fight on the Union side during the Civil War.

My wife, Mary, and I lived in San Meradino, California and had a mixed family. One of Mary’s sons from a previous marriage was part African American. She has an adoptive granddaughter who is African American. The city we live in is about 60 % Hispanic, 20% African American and 15% Caucasian.

[By the way, I can never get used to that word, Caucasian. When I was fifteen a kid asked me, “What kind of a name is Zollner?” I said German. He asked if I was a half-breed. I didn’t know what he meant, and he explained, “You know—half German and half Caucasian?” I thought that was pretty damn funny, but I needed to maintain a straight face. I nodded a yes and hurried away].

Since our town was only fifteen percent white, few of our foster kids were “white like me.”

There’s always conflict, at least an undercurrent of bitterness and mistrust, or a simple stereotype we use to make quick and easy conclusions out of the complex. I had to learn that stereotyping goes both ways. Many of the birth parents had suspicions against us, not only because we were that “white other,” but because we were allegedly low-life foster parents.

During a visit, Rosanna accused us of not changing Tommy’s diaper. In our defense we changed him before we left, he couldn’t have been that soaked. I imagined a movie playing in the theater of her mind about us called Pure White Trash. I wake up and tell my old lady, “Gimme a beer, Gol durn it!” as I kick an empty beer can out of the bed. My old lady picks up her flask of generic bourbon and curses at me and says in a raspy voice, “I gotta take care of the foster kids. Twenty kids are crying in the background as she slowly picks herself out of the bed. Everything seems to tilt to one side.

“Don’t stand on that side of the room, Durn burn it! You make the trailer lean over on one side. We gonna tump over!”

She stumbles out of the room favoring her left leg, the one that didn’t get stuck in the combine and says, “Which kid gets his diapers changed today?”

Forget your southern stereotypes--I was born in Texas, but I “learnt” to read and write anyway! (Damn that evil southern typecasting)! I spent four years in four different cities in Texas, and we spent four years in Iowa and ten years in Tennessee as well. No, Dad didn’t work in a carnival. He was a salesman, and no, he didn’t sell velvet pictures of Jesus and Elvis (The King and the King). He sold manure. Well, not exactly—he worked for fertilizer companies. He actually sold anhydrous ammonia before he worked in the credit division. He loved to move. Even after he was transferred out of sales and we settled in Memphis, we would move every couple of years to a different neighborhood.

Needing a trip down memory lane and braving a blast of southern humidity—we decided to visit Tennessee and show Tommy to my parents.

We first saw Mom and Dad in the parking lot in front of the Dew Drop Inn where they were selling Elvis pictures out of the back of their pick-up.

Just kidding! Jub Jub was the star attraction. My mother always was a baby-hog, and she fell in love with Tommy. She cradled him as much as she could and ended up twisting her back in the process. She sang him an old song, “Beautiful Brown Eyes,” over and over. Dad started singing and old marching cadence, “My name is Rancho Grande/I ate too much damn candy!” (Most of the lyrics were a lot worse than that—it was a song from his days in the Army Air Corps).

“How can you say that about such a beautiful baby boy!?” Mom murmured as she kept walking around with Thomas, crooning, “Beautiful brown eyes,” trying to look disgusted at Dad and still delighted with the baby. She balanced it pretty well. She didn’t care much for me nicknaming him Jub Jub either.

I think back to the preemie we fostered, a tiny African-American girl whose skin was jaundiced into a yellow hue. Her social worker was “apoplecticized” when she realized she placed a black baby with a white couple. She seemed somewhat horrified by her mistake. The next day she set the world to rights and put her with a black foster mother. The white couple black baby taboo no longer predominated, and that was the only time a kid was ever taken away from us for that reason.

In the meantime we had lots of fun. We later took Baby Belle to see my parents. Mom must have talked to Dad about the Rancho Grande song because he didn’t sing it this time. He must have spoken to Mom about holding the baby so much that it twisted her back because she controlled herself. Belle had an advantage over Tommy; she could crawl. Mom, the baby-hog, could play around with her on the floor and make her grin. Dad got revenge on Mom for not being able to sing the racist doggerel by putting on Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?

Grandpa James had been a member of the Klan. Mom and her siblings didn’t share his views. That didn’t faze him a bit. He just told them, “You must have read the wrong books!”

Anyway, there’s a scene in Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? where the hero and his sidekicks crash a klan rally. Dad and Mom go through a routine. He starts saying, “There he is. I see him.”

“Who?”

“Your Dad! I think he’s the third one on the right!”

Mom gets up and leaves the room.

I think Dad watches the movie once a week.

When we got home from the hospital, I looked at Baby Augusta for the first time, and I gave her a temporary nickname, Pinkie. She had pretty reddish-blonde hair and her skin was so ultra white girl pink. It registered in my mind that Augusta was the first Caucasian baby we had fostered. Our first white foster child. Our city is only about 15% Caucasian. (Our foster children very nearly matched the statistics of our community, and most were Hispanic). As I placed her in the basinet in our front room, I turned to Mary and my sister, Julia, and asked, “Hey, how much can we get for a healthy white baby?”

Julia smiled. Mary wasn’t very enthusiastic about the joke—she clearly had other things on her mind. Or maybe jokes about selling babies and foster care don’t mix, damn it!

(I’ll work on developing social skills at some later date. It’s a slow process).

Janelle grew older, and before we knew it she was older than fourteen days and old enough for us to take outside of the house.

My wife is one of those ultimate Caucasians. Her skin is so light she doesn’t tan. That’s right—she doesn’t tan, she freckles or she burns. I live in morbid fear of her dying of a melanoma and buy her SPF 50 clothing. I am not an ultimate Caucasian, I have olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes, but I’m still a white guy. Even in this age of reason/enlightened time, we still got some odd looks walking around with a black baby. Some of the reactions were positive. I remember a black couple stopping us in a department store; they had to ask how this came about (NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS), and we told them we did foster care. April (no longer Augusta) watched from the stroller, and Janelle was riding in the pouch. She was a little scrunchy faced girl but not old enough to make eye contact. She was rather cute in a pushed-in-face sort of way. The lady seemed delighted and congratulated us, saying something about how beautiful the whole scene was, her black skin next to my white skin. Another time, we were making our way through a crowded shopping mall. There were a few black teenage boys walking ahead of us, and one of them didn’t like the fact that we were taking care of a black kid. He shouted, “Oh! I guess they think they’re such great people taking care of a black baby!” Well, excuse the hell out of me! Why don’t you sign up to do foster care when you get old enough, Junior Genius!

Mary met a black mother at the doctor’s office who gave her African-American skin and hair advice. Mary’s daughter lived with a black woman and there was no shortage of advice on that end.

The negative reactions were as rare as snow in July. The smiles and other positive affirmations from strangers were many.

When I think about foster care, I feel the reverberations of freedom and anticipate the hope of a better day. My cynicism goes into a quick, blessed hibernation.