Editor’s Note: How cool is this?!?! When Chris asked for Liz Hunter’s contact information, I just assumed he wanted to compliment her on a fine article. Boy, was I wrong! Unbeknownst to me, the two sat down for an interview. A fantastic idea. Kind of wish I’d thought of it. I want to give credit where it is due; Mr. Zollner knocked this one out of the park. What you are about to read is an honest conversation between two people deeply entrenched in the world of foster care. And for me, a rare treat for an editor, a look into the minds of two of his publication’s writers.
This is a conversation between two Foster Focus writers. My name is Chris Zollner, and I am a foster parent, writer and Foster Focus columnist. The interviewee is Liz Hunter who is a former foster child, a current foster parent and a foster child advocate.
What experiences did you have as a foster child that made you want to be a foster parent?
I actually ran from the prospect of being a foster parent at first. It was my husband who first introduced the idea, after overhearing a conversation between a child in care and her foster parents. It was a little girl—about the age I was at the time I was taken into care—and she was crying about what was happening in her life. He said all he could think of was me as a little girl, needing a safe place to go. When he first brought the idea to me, I rejected it. I still had a lot of resentment towards my foster care experience and the type of parenting I had received in the foster care system.
I think it was much easier to judge than to challenge myself to do any better—because if I actually walked in the shoes of my foster parents, I might have to rectify the complexities of the situation—I might have to realize that everything is not as black and white as I wanted to believe it is.
Also, at the time, I was very career ambitious and a bit of a macro level social work snob—if you weren’t doing something big, it wasn’t quite as valuable. The truth is that giving back on a larger scale (in a career) felt less threatening because if I failed, I wasn’t hurting a child whose eyes I had to look into every day.
Then, I met an 11-year-old girl who had been tossed aside for her entire life. And I knew that I had to try. I knew that the only thing that was truly going to heal this little girl was the daily care and commitment of a family. It became clear to me that the qualitative effect of directly being able to enact change in individual lives may even be more powerful than anything I could do for those lives from a distance. If I could truly write love on the heart of a child, by at least striving to be the kind of parent I had longed to have, then maybe—just maybe, I could change the entire course of a family story for generations to come.
How is your care of children different from what you received?
My parenting style was patched together by the influence of all the different homes I lived in. I felt like I got pieces of what I needed from different parents, so my strategy in becoming a parent myself was to adopt all the best parts. Some of my parents were fun, some were affectionate, some were very reliable. I never seemed to get all the things I needed in any one placement so my goal has been to consistently be all these things for my children. And to give them the one thing I never felt in childhood—adoration. All kids need that crazy kind of love—to believe they are the center of someone’s universe.
How did you feel when you went from your parents to foster care? What was running through your mind?
Terror! Though my life with my birth family was painful in so many ways, it was the only life I knew. And I wasn’t just scared for me. I was terrified for my mother and how she would survive without me because I was more like her mother than she was mine. I was scared for my brothers because they had been taken earlier in the day and they were also like my children. I didn’t know if I would ever see them again.
Everything was made worse by the fact that they sent a police car to get me. At this point, I had already engaged in robbery and other illegal activities with my mom, so I wasn’t sure if they were going to take me to jail too.
At what age did you enter foster care?
Eight, so I have vivid memories of the life I had with my birth family. My childhood was pretty equally split between my birth home and foster care, so I have a different outlook than some former youth, who remember more of one living situation than the other. Foster care—though a traumatic cesspool of rejection and alienation—was, undoubtedly, the very thing that saved my life. I was not and never would have been better off in my birth family.
Did you receive abuse in the foster care system as a child?
It’s sad, but my first inclination is to say, “The only abuse I experienced in foster care is…” This is because I know that many other kids have had it much worse in this respect. But yes, I was physically/emotionally abused in two different placements. One was by a teenage boy in a residential setting, who was incredibly jealous of the foster youth his parents took in.
The other was in the only relative foster placement I had. This person hated my mom and reminded me that I looked like and acted like her on a daily basis. So, I lived up to her expectations. I somehow conned a store into selling me a pack of cigarettes at the age of 9. When she caught me smoking them, my punishment was to eat the cigarettes. At some point, in all the gagging and puking, she had mercy and allowed me to soak them in a glass of water to make the dry chemical easier to swallow. She completed her attempts as exorcising me of my demon by retreating outside to smoke a cigarette herself.
Was your main goal of becoming a foster care parent a decision to tackle the big percentage of child abuse in the foster care system?
That was just one part of it. As I reflected on my own story and that of countless others, I began to see perhaps an even bigger problem in the foster care system—which was the idea of it being a temporary holding tank for kids in transit. Under this idea, we were grooming foster parents to think of themselves as mere babysitters, who are just there to keep the child safe until someone else (birth or adoptive parents) is found to step up to love them. We ignored the fact that kids need love and commitment every day of their upbringing. Just because we hit the pause button on their life with their birth family does not mean the pause button has been hit on their growth and development. By the time I became a foster parent, I knew my task was so much bigger than just protecting a child from abuse. It was about connecting that child to human relationships—to the true experience of having parents—no matter how temporary those relationships might be.
Did some of your foster parents stand out as examples to follow?
Absolutely! I met many good people along my journey. One set of foster parents showed me a perfect example of what a loving committed marriage looks like. Before disruption, I asked them to keep many things, including a wedding picture of him removing her garter. Some of the things I kept from each home crack me up, but I think I was gathering mementos of the life I hoped to someday have.
How many homes were you in? Is that typical?
Seven. It was more typical back then because I was in care before the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act. My generation was aging out by the masses because the law was ambivalent about permanency at the time. We weren’t terminating parental rights, but we also weren’t returning many kids back home for fear of their safety. All this changed with ASFA and its acknowledgement that kids need to be connected, as well as protected. Average length of stay in foster care has decreased drastically, but unfortunately, there are still too many kids who find themselves being raised by a system.
What happened when you turned eighteen? Were you on your own?
Yes and no. I remained connected to my adoptive family after leaving home (in terms of having a place to go on holidays), but I did feel completely on my own financially. I was informed that my adoption subsidy would expire upon graduation from high school. At the time, I still had braces and more dental work that needed to be done, and my adoptive parents—for whatever reason—felt they could not help me in this respect. I contacted my placement agency to see if there was any way to keep my medical card. The reply I got from the social worker on the other end was to “have a baby.”
What well-meaning things did foster parents do that you would never do?
Make me promises that they couldn’t or didn’t keep. I had terrible nightmares for years. To calm me down at night, I had a foster parent who promised me repeatedly that I could stay with her forever. She probably thought she was giving me what I needed, but her Band-Aid of empty words created deeper wounds than she would ever have to know. Her promise expired one year later when she found out she was pregnant with her first birth child.
What kind of foster care made your life better when growing up?
The thing I needed more than anything was a parent who wouldn’t give up. But second to that, I needed some freedom to be who I was instead of feeling forced to fill a certain role for each new family. I was artistic and overly talkative and intellectual and way too mature for my age. The families that made the biggest difference are the ones who respected these things about me, rather than try to make me fit. My final family was good about allowing me to grow from who I was.
Have you learned anything about your limitations doing foster care?
So much! Mostly, I learned that attachment is a two way street. Humans often crash into each other while driving down that street. We all have attachment barriers that we bring into our relationships, no matter where we come from. Luckily, I was insightful enough to identify what mine were so that I could keep myself from projecting them onto my children. That is our job as the parent. We need to help more foster parents understand that placement disruption is often as much about them as it is about the child and that many of these issues can be worked through so that healthy attachments can be formed.
Owner/Editor - Chris Chmielewski