age thirteen
In my life,
we had to hide the knife.
In your life,
you grew up right.
In my car,
we couldn’t drive too far.
In your car,
you could probably go for a tour.
In my kitchen,
they talked of snitchin’.
In your kitchen,
all you could smell is chicken.
Near the trees
is where we grew the weed.
Near your trees,
you could hear the bees.
On my land,
there were lots of beer cans.
On your land
is a box of sand.
I
A FOSTER FAMILY’S INITIATION
Zero to One Hundred
AFTER A long and contentious spring semester, I was cleaning up the chaos of my university office. Our creaky old asbestos-ridden Language and Literature building was due to be renovated, and in the interim we were all getting moved across campus to a still older, creakier building pervaded by an untraceable smell of mold. Rumor had it that once renovations were complete, some newer, trendier departments might actually snap up our original building and trap us for good in that crummy location; the hallways were full of sniping and suspicion, which my staticky office radio couldn’t block out. Tired of the grumbling, most of all my own, I just wanted to pack up my file cabinets—back then in 2002 most of us still had massive, dog-eared files and sheaves of Xeroxes and brittle newspaper clippings—and get things ready for the moving crew. At least we didn’t have to do that part ourselves. Outside my windows, the pear trees were in blossom. I couldn’t wait to get out into the mountain sunshine. I was ready to forget everything and launch into summer freedom.
Finishing up a publicity archive for our department’s film series, I still had several newspaper issues to go through before I felt I could quit for the afternoon. All the local papers did was reprint verbatim the press releases we sent them, but I felt obliged to keep a record to show to potential donors or at least the department chair during my upcoming annual review. But as bored as I was restless, I stopped to read the lead article in the previous Sunday’s Sentinel. As it was Foster Care Month and almost Mother’s Day, the article profiled Laurie Marsh, a florist by day, who ran one of the county’s longtime foster homes with her husband, an auto mechanic. Photographed holding her grandchild on her knee, she spoke of the dozens of children who had come through their home, staying anywhere from overnight to two years, and even returning as teen parents with their own infants; with Laurie’s help they could learn to care for their babies before aging out of the system. Later I learned that Laurie framed a photograph of every foster kid who passed through their doors, eventually covering an entire living room wall. She spoke of offering a safe place to damaged children on the worst days of their lives. She didn’t claim to save or fix or do anything more practical than offer a clean shirt, a dry diaper, or a hug, and she shrugged off the opportunity to condemn the parents whose actions had caused their children to be there.
At that time, fifteen years ago, I’d hazily imagined foster children as blank-eyed, abandoned waifs who were hopscotching between group and family homes while waiting for an adoption that might never come. Everything I knew I’d learned from TV, so it was no wonder I conjured up stereotypes: elfin boys hiding sullenly behind swept bangs, blonde girls with dirty cheeks clutching Band-Aided teddy bears, and of course the babies—the fabled stream of needy, crack-addicted babies so many of us yearn to have placed in our outstretched arms the moment the foster home license arrives in the mail. But where we lived, that’s not what the need was.
I was surprised to read that many more children were removed because of neglect than because of abuse. But what did neglect even mean nowadays? I pictured a thin boy in an Oliver Twist tunic who was peeling lead paint off the walls and watching endless episodes of Cops on TV. That couldn’t be right, I knew, but abuse sounded like the photographable, fixable stuff of TV movies, while neglect sounded more amorphous, lacking any concrete remedy.
I was intrigued by the article. Something clicked: maybe I could be a foster parent. I was all about fixing, as misguided as we’ve been told that is when it comes to spouses. As a university teacher, I fixed students’ papers all day, didn’t I? And found professionals to fix the students themselves when crises hit. I’d once saved a neighbor’s horse from choking on a plastic bread bag by reaching down her throat, and I’d gotten certified in CPR every year since it was introduced, just in case I was ever the only one in a crisis who knew it. Fixing was not something I thought I could do better than others, but I was not afraid to try. I couldn’t do much worse than your average Good Samaritan, could I? Especially when the odds already seemed stacked against success, whether that was reviving someone in cardiac arrest or, as a future foster parent, helping a girl avoid motherhood at fourteen.
How badly could I screw up something that had started out already broken? “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent,” the foster/adopt ad campaign says, although in the naive dramas of my imagination, I privately suspected I might be. Plus, like every foster parent I came to know, I viewed myself as being fairly organized and didn’t mind tracking down information and calling strangers on the phone—basic advocacy skills—fueled by a useful middle-class presumption that the person on the other end of the phone ought to listen to me. And although I mostly ignored my carbon footprint, there was something ecologically pleasing about the notion of repairing something—someone—already here on Earth. Not that I had much choice about that, since I’d recently learned, in my late thirties, that I couldn’t have children of my own. As I read that newspaper article, I decided I was ready to start foster parenting that day.
Right that day, without the first thought of licensing, training, fire inspections, or what my new second husband might think. The temporary nature of foster placements even sounded like a good thing—like some clear-cut work project with deadlines and spreadsheets, a sense of accomplishment and finality. Fixed, submitted, filed—then time for a vacation break or instantly produced screenplay before the next thing. No prob, Bob, in the words I’d later learn from a big-eyed backhoe on TV.
PUTTING OFF cleaning my office, I read the article from start to finish and was full of spring possibility and that end-of-semester rush of energy that made it feel like anything would be possible in the next twelve weeks—writing an entire novel, losing thirty-two pounds by running a marathon, and, most of all, enjoying the ecstasy of sleeping like a normal person instead of writing sure-to-be-ignored margin comments in tiny crabbed letters until 2 a.m.
At the end of the article was a phone number and the name of a social worker to call for information about becoming foster parents; dissemination of that information was the true purpose of this profile. So the next day, after my husband’s equivocal maybe, I found myself sitting in my university office, dirty beige phone receiver in my clammy hand, heart pounding sickly—as it would so many times, for different reasons, in future
