next day DSS called after the family’s social worker had raced from court to pick up the siblings from school and day care before Mom could zoom up and confront her. But Michael was coming with just the clothes on his back, as is commonly the case. I might want to head back to Walmart, I was warned, and pick up a couple of outfits for him to start with. In training we’d learned we could spend $160 every six months on clothes and shoes for a foster child. Walmart wasn’t required, but shopping there and at consignment stores was the only way to make that budget work, no matter how you felt about the store’s sweatshop supply chain.
I zombie-walked into Walmart for the second time in twenty-four hours, hardly able to grasp that Will was having our life-changing experience, while I was out buying a Cookie-Monster-plays-soccer outfit in stretchy gray and pajamas adorned with a red-haired Rugrat in a pith helmet. This was the dawning of yet another realization—that you have to pay a lot more for toddler clothes that don’t advertise something. And even the expensive clothes—Old Navy or OshKosh—either have a brand logo front and center or they’re advertising fake brands of surfboards or safari lodges. If you want an outfit with a plain picture of your basic steamroller—one that doesn’t have eyes and a name and well-known catchphrase—you pay a premium.
It was evening by that point. Will called to say that Michael had arrived, eaten a cut-up hot dog and some scrambled egg, and was settling with a bottle while they waited for me. I knew Michael would have had a bewildering day, and that he’d have to go to sleep soon so he’d be ready to go to his required educational day care in the morning. Yet I walked through Walmart stunned, unable to focus. I hadn’t even realized toddlers’ clothes were sized by years, months, and the letter T. Or that diapers were sized by weight—a weight I couldn’t begin to estimate. I felt like an imposter in the children’s department, and I sensed the eyes of other new parents on me as I scrutinized clothing tags and held combo outfits up to gauge the fit for a child I hadn’t ever seen. Would they peg me as a kidnapper? Or what if his mom was actually there and saw me? All the experienced foster parents had horror stories of running into angry birth parents, invariably at Walmart.
I got home at 7 p.m., turned the doorknob, and eased over the threshold, hoping to get close enough to see Michael before he saw me. I found him and Will in our bedroom, where Will was lying on our bed, flying Michael over him in the classic airplane maneuver. A half-full milk bottle stood on the nightstand. Will set the boy on his chest so that Michael was on hands and knees. I didn’t want to startle Michael because I knew he’d be wary. So I said hello, and we were silent for minutes, as he turned his blond head slowly to the left and stared at me.
Who does he think I am? I wondered. And what is he seeing? Shouldn’t I be feeling something? But ballooning stillness itself became a feeling, and my lungs filled with an immensely tranquil emptiness I’ve never found in meditation. It was the space love would rush into as soon as I let go and let the next breath in.
BY THE second morning I wanted to adopt. Could we? Was it even remotely possible? But of course we were foster parents—that’s what we’d signed up for. His mom was complying with the plan Social Services had drawn up, and Dad was temporarily “out of the picture,” in the shorthand expression that everyone I met seemed to like to use.
At first we had no idea how long Michael would stay with us, and little understanding of the stages of the court process. Terms like adjudication and stipulation were as alien to us as they probably were to the “bios”; I know of one determined foster mom who attended every hearing and always tried to find a way to slip the judge photos of the kids who were thriving in her care, hoping the judge would grasp the stakes. Other foster parents I met felt it was their duty to be present and, for the sake of the kids in their care, attended and squelched whatever discomfort they felt. Coward that I was—and completely shaken the first time I encountered Michael’s mom in an agency hallway—the notion of attending court (which is apparently more commonplace now, a decade later, as is education about the process) seemed incredibly confrontational to me. Foster parents were rarely, if ever, invited to testify, and we were pledged to support the agency’s decisions about the case anyway. Simply sitting in court, I felt, would have seemed to spell out the us-versus-them divide that we tried so hard to erase from our hearts and minds. Worst of all, to me, it seemed invasive of the bioparents’ privacy. Curious as I was, I didn’t think any bioparents would see us as their allies. If I showed up at court, I didn’t think they would ever forgive me.
For Michael and his siblings, sometimes I heard when court dates were coming up, while other times they were mentioned after the fact, in passing—a reminder of our irrelevance, was how I took this. Like everything the children’s first social worker, Kayla, said, I constantly found myself wanting to say, “Please, wait, slow down, explain.” I didn’t know if I was snooping or stupid or if it seemed like I was overstepping and second-guessing her plan. But pushy was not how I wanted to seem with a social worker, and I knew it would not get results. In hindsight, I think this worker was almost as new as I was in my very different role; still, I was relieved when another Child Protective Services director took over the office after Michael’s case closed. It was too late for all my questions, but from that point on, it seemed to me that transparency increased for the foster parents.
All I really cared about was knowing our sentence—how soon we’d have to give up our toddler. When I first heard that Michael would be with us for three months, I was baffled—what kind of change could happen in that time? The parents had split before the children were removed, his mom had a new boyfriend who planned to come to several visits, and Dad would soon end up in jail for unrelated reasons. I didn’t want to get into the family’s business, but weren’t we supposed to be some kind of partners in this? Was some kind of change not the point? Three months—twelve weeks—barely a season—seemed like nothing. I was confused, and if I didn’t know why we had Michael in the first place, how could I know what progress they were seeking? Or was it none of my business?
(“You didn’t know why they were removed?” an agency staff member asks me now, aghast. “The children’s social worker never told you?” My usual assertiveness had failed me, I’m chagrined to say, the second I thought I might displease an authority or seem a pest. And back then I’d had no comparable experience to go by.)
Later, we would hear the estimate of a three-month time frame miraculously grow to six, due to some time-consuming practical issues. Anything that meant Michael would be with us longer was manna to me. But his mother had rights, and her social worker was determined that Mom would have a successful reunification with her children, no matter what obstacles might arise. Or, as a more diplomatic staff member eventually told us, “Mom’s done everything we’ve asked her, and she deserves the right to fail. Or to succeed on her own terms, even if it’s not the future you’d most like to see.” If I’d read that in a training manual, I know I would have agreed wholeheartedly.
FROM OUR first moments face to face with Michael, we had every bit of the staggering love-and-wonder rush that I imagine every new parent experiences, and more. We always knew there was an expiration date ahead—the snapshots of memory weren’t going to be wistful nostalgia to laugh over with a teen. More like a Snapchat photo, for once that child was gone, those memories would surely vaporize: the sweet, clean, pointed face; the little sailor suit I crammed him into for a Walmart portrait; a love of chicken nuggets so great that he brought his stuffed toy rooster into the kitchen and begged me to cook it; the laughter at a bubble in the stream; his mania for cars, motors, and real, dangerous tools (this was a kid not fooled by their colorful plastic facsimiles); the “God bless” litanies I helped him recite with names of people I didn’t know; the untraceable, lingering smell of his room and hair. Every gain was a loss as well, in the moment it occurred.
SWEET HOME
During one of the hearings leading up to the reunification, the lawyer representing Luke, the children’s dad (who was in jail), told the judge that the children’s
