two years after they’d begun fostering, the call that would change their lives came. Standing in her kitchen, Abby listened to a disembodied voice on the other end of the line describe half sisters, one seven, one nine, victims of parental drug abuse and neglect. They had been at an emergency foster home for a few days because Birth Mom’s rights were going to be terminated by court order. It had taken a little longer than anticipated, so the girls needed a foster home prepared to house them for a month or two. After that they would be up for adoption.
Looking back, Abby says, “We had calls asking us to take kids all the time, some short-term, some long-term. All I can say is this one had electricity running through it. Like it was meant.”
But it started in the same way the others did. As in previous cases, the social worker needed an immediate response regarding the home’s availability. “You do all this careful planning, all your praying, mounds of paperwork, and then none of that matters. When it really happens and they need you, there isn’t even time to think. There wasn’t time to call my husband, just say yes or no on the phone, and that was it.”
While she was driving to pick up the girls, Abby’s thoughts were consumed by the fact that this would be the sisters’ second move within the week. The product of a loving, stable extended family, Abby longed to give all her foster kids that same experience she had had, but for some reason, this pair had gone straight to her heart.
“I think I was in love with them before I even saw them,” she says in hindsight. “I’d fostered before, but this felt different.”
Different though it may have felt, the two redheaded girls who waited, clutching black trash bags—the luggage of choice for foster kids—looked scared, just like the others. All eyes and legs and cautious stares, they wore shorts, ill-fitting tank tops, and flip-flops in late October. Shy, Abby thought. Why wouldn’t they be? Two homes in one week?
What Abby didn’t learn for months, until the sisters began to open up and tell their stories, was that she and John were their ninth foster home within three years. At that moment, she swore to God that those frightened little girls would receive the stability they’d been lacking. Guidance, care, and safety would blossom into love.
Which it did. Abby and John told the girls they’d be adopting them and started the process—until Bio Mom appeared suddenly with a court order saying that the girls had to be returned to her. Again. She had stopped their adoptions before, getting clean and taking the children home, only to lose them within the year. That was why the girls had bounced so much over the past three years.
Nothing had ever felt so wrong before, this edict that their foster daughters had to go home with Bio Mom. Abby and John had returned kids to bad situations in the past, amid prayers and tears, but this time they sought legal help. When every avenue and their bank account were exhausted, they tried to explain to the girls that this return was neither their idea nor their fault. But what the sisters heard was that they were going to live with Mom again—even though they did not want to. As foster kids often do, these girls, particularly the older one, knew that if they went back, it was just a matter of time until they would leave again.
“‘And the next place might not be like you. Please don’t let them take us back.’” Abby’s voice takes on a childlike pleading and a shaky edge as she quotes the older girl. “You don’t know heartbreak until you look into innocent blue eyes like that and say, ‘I’m sorry; we did everything we could, but we can’t keep you.’ And they heard everything you said, but they’re just babies, and they ask why you don’t want them anymore; did they do something wrong?”
When she says, “Everything we could,” Abby means it. The couple considered legal and illegal plans, yet in the end there was nothing plausible to do but to obey the law and return the red-haired sisters they had hoped would be their daughters.
It is not uncommon for birth parents to swing into action when notification of a pending adoption—which perforce includes termination of both parents’ rights—reaches them, says Dale, a social worker with forty-two years of experience.
“The act of adopting disturbs the status quo and moves people in strange ways—birth moms, grandparents, everybody. They come out swinging at the last minute over children who have been floating through the system for years. You can see them holding onto their last chance to get their kids back, or trying to extort a better deal, or maybe exerting that contrary side of human nature we all have. Whatever the reason, it’s common.”
“Get used to it,” Abby advises foster parents seeking to adopt. “There aren’t any rules in this game of human hearts. If we could have adopted those girls right then and there, the first time I saw them, I would have. If we could have made it to Canada, we might be living there now.”2
Heartbroken, the couple took a hiatus, then returned to fostering. Following seven months of bed rest, with “the congregations of three churches holding me up with their prayers,” Abby also gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He has an older and younger sibling by adoption.
“God’s timing is perfect. He brought me the right children at the right time,” Abby says, cuddling her youngest in my bookstore’s armchair as he plays with a pop-up book. Born with developmental delays and lifelong medical fragility because of his birth mother’s drug habit, he fostered with Abby and John from the age of six months. Again, the social worker placing him told them that he would be adoptable within the year.
Abby snorts, then sighs. “The whole time, I was on tenterhooks inside. Would they let it go through? Would the birth father appear from nowhere? Would it really happen this time?”
It did. At the age of two, he became theirs.
The birth parents’ substance abuse is the primary reason most children are in Coalton’s foster care system; substance addiction is also the biggest source of that push-me/pull-me stress as to whether children will become adoptable. Before adoption can occur, the birth parents’ parental rights need to be terminated. But though they are addicts, they do love their children and often go through multiple cycles of getting “clean,” petitioning for the return of their children, staying sober for a time, relapsing into addiction, and losing their children again. Termination of parental rights is meant to be a process of months, but it can actually take years.3
Voluntary termination is, of course, faster than involuntary. In his late twenties when interviewed, Hutton was adopted in infancy because he was in the right place—his mother’s womb—at the wrong time—her sophomore year of university in Coalton’s largest city. Hutton’s bio mom got in touch with DSS, and soon after his birth, a couple who’d been on the waiting list for an infant (and had checked the box “either” rather than “boy” or “girl”) became his foster parents. Even with Birth Mom on board for a swift, formal termination of her parental rights, the process still took six months.
An older couple with a comfortable income and a suburban home, Hutton’s parents weren’t interested in fostering; uppermost in their minds were tales from friends who’d fostered, horror stories similar to Abby and John’s, of court-ordered returns halfway to adoption or midnight pickups of frightened children. Hutton’s mom and dad had also had friends take in kids with special needs that the new parents felt insufficiently trained to meet. As Dale often says, such tales are rampant in the public’s perception of fostering, with or without good reason.
Hutton’s mom and dad wanted to start clean with an infant who would have no chance of being yanked from their home, so they waited for a baby whose mother was ready to sign off then and there; they were not interested in whether they’d receive a stipend for their newborn because he’d been their foster child first. Most
