with the saying “In a small town, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing, because somebody else does.” When Kim and Hutton saw it during her interview, she laughed.
“That,” she says, pointing. “That.”
Kim left home on extended-family couch-surfing adventures more and more as the years rolled by—not least because she found an ally next door to Kristin’s in her maternal grandmother’s husband, the man who with his wife had raised Janice (Kim’s older sister). Grandpa and Grandma owned the farmhouse whose yard hosted Kristin and Jim’s trailer.
“I loved him from the minute I met him. The first time I met him, we were at a birthday party, one of those crazy times with the whole holler there, family, friends, kit and caboodle, and I walked up to him and said, ‘I bet you don’t know who I am,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I do, you’re my granddaughter Kim.’ And I loved him from that minute on.”
Kim stayed with Kristin most of the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school. One afternoon she came out of the house, upset from a phone call with Annette. Grandpa was sitting on the porch, drinking beer. He listened to her tale of woe and then said, “I wish I’d taken you in myself.”
Kim started crying.
“It was one of the best conversations I ever had with him, over beer. He loved his beer.” Kim’s smile speaks volumes as her eyes fill again with tears.
Emphysema took Grandpa the next summer; Kim went home and remained there until two weeks after her eighteenth birthday, during her senior year of high school. Then she moved back in with Jim and Kristin, remaining through graduation. Annette told her husband they would not attend their daughter’s ceremony after such a display of ingratitude and disrespect. By this time, Jim was terminally ill, but the man responsible for Kim’s leaving home at the age of three came in his wheelchair, Kristin pushing it, to watch Kim graduate.
“Family is weird,” Kim says. “That’s all.”
Kim recognized that more than one rite of passage lay at hand. Her maternal grandmother (widow of her beloved Grandpa) hugged Kim at the graduation party and said, “Now you’ll come join us for good.” Although she had moved back after her birthday with that intention, Kim felt in the moment of that hug that her decision wasn’t just about where she was going to live or who her mother and father “really” were. The time had come to accept or break with the patterns repeating around her. To ignore the community judging Rick for returning early from his stint in Iraq to look after Annette when she contracted cancer. (When he pointed out that Annette couldn’t look after their daughter alone while sick, fellow members of his church said, “She’s not your daughter. You should’ve stayed and done your duty.”) To reject living like Kristin, who took in and raised her husband Jim’s grandson after he had refused to help raise her daughters. Not to be like her sister, Janice, whose oldest child was adopted by his foster family and her second son placed with Kristin after she petitioned the court via KinCare.
“That holler was one big merry-go-round of people taking care of everybody else’s kids, and a community acting fit to judge everybody else for it.” The generation that didn’t raise their own kids wound up raising their grandchildren.
Realizing that “the only way to make money there for a woman was build a meth lab or become a nurse,” Kim followed in her father’s footsteps and joined the army. Packing in as much travel and education as she could, she made friends with people from very different places, got informally adopted by the family of her best friend in Canada, and turned herself into a stable adult. “It was me or nobody who was going to make that happen. So I did it.”
The tension with her mother never resolved. “She was proud of me. My dad was proud of me. But we never really got it together.”
After her army stint, Kim returned to the back holler filled with relatives but soon got herself an apartment in Walker City. Her job in a medical office—“Yeah, I did become a nurse, so there,” Kim says with a laugh—introduced her to Hutton. Kim was twenty-seven, married, and mother to a little girl when her mom died. Soon after Annette’s funeral, she and Hutton left the baby with a friend while they stopped at Food City for groceries. As they shopped, Kim said, “I wonder what Mom will have to say about us leaving Jessie with the neighbors just to run an errand.”
Hutton froze, a green pepper in his hand. That’s when she remembered.
For an instant, Kim thought, Dang it, I don’t have to worry about what Mom thinks anymore; I’m finally free. Then she burst into tears in the produce section.
That’s what family is like, isn’t it? Make jokes about the holler and the complicated mess of Appalachian kinship systems if you will, but one of the most basic relationships on earth still boils down to crying in public because your judgmental mother won’t ever yell at you again. It’s a little frightening to realize that our deepest interactions and needs reduce to a phrase as simple as that ready-made Facebook relationship status, “It’s complicated.”
Bio or adopted, welcome to the messy side of family.
3
Through the Eyes of a Child
I still remember the day I knew everything was going to be all right. My foster mom had her [birth] son in the car when she picked me up after school, and they were sick. I mean, they puked, and I don’t know what they’d been eating, but the puke was bright orange and really, really disgusting. And I was grossed out at driving home with puke in the car, but I didn’t say anything, and sure enough, that night I puked too. My foster dad came and cleaned up my room, twice, when I puked. And I knew then we were family, because nobody had ever, ever cleaned up after me before. You have to really love someone to clean up their puke. Then I knew they loved me and it was going to be all right.
—e-mail from an adopted foster child
“COMPLICATED” MAY describe family at large and the foster care system in detail, but survival within either breaks down to one simple principle for the kids passing through: learn the rules of the house you’re going to and abide by them. (And remember that principle’s converse: if you’re going to break those rules, make it good and final.)
Foster parents tend to view the whole process quite differently, which isn’t surprising. Not every foster family’s goal is adoption, but the caseworker’s ultimate goal is, and most children—even when they say otherwise with crossed arms and belligerent voices—long to be adopted. How often the stated goal influences where a child lands in care is a debatable point. Foster homes may be looking to adopt, providing a temporary service out of compassion, or doing a job for which they feel entitled to payment.
Take a matchmaking service for parents and kids, throw in the love-hate broken promises of bio parents and family, pour money on top, and start the countdown clock. At its most basic level, think from a fifth grader’s point of view what it must feel like to enter a house full of strangers when she knows she’s being auditioned for the role of daughter. Or when she’s one among many residents with no permanent status. Children in a vulnerable frame of mind go to prospective homes on a trial basis—and they know they’re losing their cuteness factor with every year that passes after about the age of eight. Prospective parents know as well. It can get dark inside the system, very dark indeed.
Now might be a good time to give a broad overview of how kids come into foster care in the first place, for those who don’t have experience with the phenomenon. From a group of social workers who’d agreed to a collective interview, I asked
