Foster care is a disease that spreads by contact. First, we started doing it, and next, a neighbor and a couple of relatives made poor life choices and followed our sorry example.
My wife and I were foster parents who just took babies, which in California legal-ese means a child under two years of age. About twice a month somebody would ask, “How do I get started?”
My wife’s son worked as a “Psych-Tech.” That meant he worked at a hospital for the criminally insane. “It takes a special person to do that,” was a refrain he heard over and over. Foster parents hear that one too, which is pretty much why this column is entitled Diary of a Madman.
Newborns create strong reactions: great feelings of awkwardness and incredible, supra-rational feelings of affection. Total strangers will walk up and try and sweet-talk and coo and goochie-goochie-goo at the infant. Women, especially, will walk up and start conversations with you and tell you how great you are. A few female co-workers would held the babies and went home to tell their surprised husbands how much they wanted another kid.
Mrs. Vincent, a third grade teacher, was a volatile time bomb—alternately sweet and caring--an temporary angel. At other times she could be a moody tornado. Turns out she had a problem.
“Chris, how do you adopt a baby through the county?”
I thought about this for a minute and started explaining about the six month Foster Adoptive Parent training. You get moved to the front of the adoption line if you will take a special needs baby. If you want a teenager, you also go ahead of the rest of the people in the line. If you want a two year old, the wait is considerably longer, and if you want a baby you have to wait a long time—probably more than two years. Then, you might get to keep the baby—or relatives might come out of the woodwork and press their claim to the child.
“Could you get me the number for the county?”
I said I would. “No problem.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” she mumbled. That’s what I thought she was saying. Mrs. Vincent didn’t often mumble or stare at the floor when she spoke, but she was doing it now.
She looked up and spoke a little more clearly. She and her husband had been trying to conceive with no luck. But there were people who didn’t want a baby, or didn’t want to take care of a baby, who got pregnant with ease. I told her the joke that they told at CPS: Crack and crystal meth increase fertility. She smiled a little at my bad joke. Mrs. Vincent tried, but for various reasons did not qualify to be a foster parent. The county would not have allowed her to have the child in day care, and her work schedule would have mandated that.
Hope she didn’t take me seriously about crystal meth increasing fertility. She’ll be going downtown to get some meth. Or maybe she’ll research how to cook it up on the Internet. As soon as our neighbors, Javier and Lorena, found out we did foster care they became fast friends, bringing over baby items and clothes, some new and some used. Lorena wanted to foster too. She began peppering us with questions on how to get started. She listened selectively, and instead of going through the county she signed up with an FFA, a private Foster Family Association. The county would subcontract through them to round up foster parents to take kids. This means less training and fewer rules. Training time was sped up, but they cut corners.
Lorena was sincere, idealistic and overworked. She already had four kids, but she was tough and knew she could do more.
The FFA assigned her two special needs children, a brother and sister. Now, I’ve seen Lorena get busy. She can out-lift, outmaneuver and outwork most of the tough guys I know. She was one of those take-charge kind of people who would find the world falling apart and have it fixed in an hour, an hour and a half at most.
She hadn’t done foster care before, and the FFA assigned her two special needs (developmentally delayed) children: one two years old and the other four years old. One child needed special feeding, and the other required constant supervision. I remember her complaints: physical and speech therapy, drinking water from the toilet, eating dirt and toothpaste, howling and screaming at all hours, not having time for her biological children… Whew! Lorena became overworked and eventually became very ill. After eight months, she had to quit. She probably lasted seven months, three weeks longer than I would have with six kids.
My wife had a grown son from a previous marriage named Adam. After we had been doing foster care for about six months, Adam and his wife Jessica signed up for training and even attended classes where Mary and I had the chance to be guest speakers. Within a year they fell in love with a baby and successfully filed for adoption.
My wife’s daughter, Alyssa, decided she had to join the family folly and be a foster parent too. She took in a little girl from a family with a serious history of abuse.
Beware! Caution! Sound the warning call! I’m about to get on my soapbox.
The biological mother and her boyfriend were charged with torture, a special category of torture that could result in death or serious injury. Mom was allowed to plea bargain, lost her parental rights, appealed and got her program reinstated. She could possibly get the child back. That wouldn’t be the case had the crime not been plea-bargained. Mom didn’t seem to think she did anything wrong. When the judge asked her if she learned anything, she said she wouldn’t take care of anybody else’s kids since that’s what she was doing when she was caught and arrested. She didn’t learn anything about treating kids better; she learned how to avoid getting caught. That’s what she told the judge, and the judge still gave her another chance.
If I was a politician one of my slogans would be: No plea-bargains for serious crimes against children.
Enough preaching! I’m getting off my soapbox. Breathe a sigh of relief. Ahhhh!
As a family we were united in our determination to prevent this child from ever going back to her birth mother. We came up with $6,750 in legal fees and attended several gut-wrenching court sessions. I appreciate J.K. Rowling’s description of dementors, the dark wraiths who drink the soul out of a body. That is how we felt after a court session that we lost, and we lost quite a few. In fact we lost every battle, except the last. The birth mother was stripped of her parental rights. Alyssa eventually adopted the little girl who is now an honor student and a basketball player in a special league. Still in middle school, she already has college basketball scouts looking at her. Friends and family look forward to her getting a basketball scholarship, but I suspect she will also get an academic scholarship.
We have had ups and downs, but the downs always turned back up. I think of the line from the movie, Repo Man, “Life of a Repo Man is always intense.” So is the life of a foster parent.
Run, don’t walk, to your nearest county social services organization and sign up immediately, before you have time to come to your senses.
Owner/Editor - Chris Chmielewski