style="font-size:15px;"> The one big but? Somehow, this exposure of the children’s new living arrangements had to happen without appearing to come from us, because once the kids were back with their mom for good, she could cut all of us, even Grandma Irene, off completely. So how to move forward?
Isabelle’s foster mom had her business to run and a baby to consume her time; brisk and efficient, after caring for many dozen foster kids, she had seen it all and had a caring but more logical perspective than the rest of us did. Nothing that a judge or social worker did surprised her, and the process was just the process, in her view. So Ryan’s foster mom, Mona, would be the one to speak up, we decided. She was the one with nothing to lose, as she was in a hurry for Ryan to leave in the first place so she could settle her nieces, so she started to wonder aloud to the social worker if the kids actually were getting fed during these weekend days, because Ryan came back so hungry. Shouldn’t DSS be monitoring those weekend visits? Dropping in unannounced?
Mona raised enough doubt that the agency promised someone would drop in on the family—and, in fact, the head of our Child Protective Services unit at the time lived closer, so she would do it, rather than Kayla, the young social worker who had first worked so hard to get the children into custody and now seemed so determined to push them back out again.
And so the supervisor did stop by, on a Sunday morning, we were informed. And all was fine. Food in the cabinets. “No concerns.” Full speed ahead.
“Benny’s place is much more appropriate for kids,” Kayla quickly told me later that week while not meeting my eye. I was stunned; Mona and Grandma Irene were stunned. So Kayla had known—and her supervisor had known—that the family was at Benny’s place? Yet, in their view, apparently, Jessica had met the letter of the law—and maybe they just gambled that the law wouldn’t look. After all, I guessed, if Mom and the kids could live where she didn’t have to work to support herself, and could slide off their caseload and budget . . . “More appropriate than a trailer park—and, honestly,” Kayla shrugged, “Mom’s going to need the help.”
Also irrelevant was that neither Jessica nor Benny could drive legally, although they always had a vehicle. “We don’t get into law enforcement issues,” Kayla said.
(The only one who did care about licenses, it turned out, was the secretary of the new day care to which Jessica was slated to send Michael. She later confronted Jessica once or twice about dropping him off but having no driver’s license. And so the developmentally delayed Michael stopped going there and just stayed home or with Benny’s grown daughter instead.)
Unreal. Everyone knew—they’d just agreed to leave us out of the loop. And now, even worse, Jessica and Benny, who hated scrutiny more than anything, would know why DSS had come that weekend to check. Someone had put them up to it. Jessica, Benny, and the family social worker were all on one side, and we—Irene, Mona, and I—were on the other. Leaving the kids in the middle, obediently keeping the secret.
DO A quick search of internet comments about social worker interventions, and suddenly every commenter, left wing to right, is a Tea Party libertarian, so certain everything social workers do is government interference and overreach—“Getting in our business” is the all-purpose description. Whether it’s free-range kids, homesteading megafamilies living in tents, poverty rates of investigated families—the latest media outrage seems to bring liberals and libertarians together in judgment of social work. But at the time, when we were facing Michael’s imminent return to a new home with a sudden near stepdad, I wanted to demand: Where does all this “interference” happen? Because it sure isn’t here. Everything our social workers did, they ascribed to state codes and mandates that protect the primacy of parents’ rights, so was it really just our little agency that seemed so conscientiously cautious? So careful in their prescribed responses? So full of belief in the parental potential of people most of the rest of us would have written off? At the time I didn’t know what to believe or whom. I simply knew that my own beliefs, complaints, and hopes were entirely beside the point.
MY FEARS took deeper root when the children began to leave us—first brother Ryan, five, and sister Isabelle, almost seven, went back together to Jessica; then, two weeks later, at just over two years of age, Michael left foster care with us and joined his siblings and mother in her boyfriend’s remote, phoneless trailer, more than seventy minutes from our home. How could this be called reunification, I bitterly asked Mona, when the children were moving—I certainly couldn’t say returning—to a family configuration that had never existed, to a home in a county where they had never officially lived, to a home that was not leased in their mother’s name, and to a situation in which a judge had ordered the children should not live? At the same time, to fulfill the court’s decree the family was renting a crummier and more expensive town trailer in which they had never spent a night, paid for by government housing funds; the unused trailer was the essence of government waste, which perfectly suited the landlord.
I STILL don’t understand how this situation could have happened, but neither that supervisor nor the social worker stayed at the agency much longer. Yet, if we’d made any kind of a protest, well . . . we’d signed the foster parent agreement that we would actively support the agency’s reunification goals and never interfere.
“You’re not going to stop this,” the social worker told the director of our day care who had called to report Michael’s “belt, belt” warnings after the weekend visits. They would all go to live with the boyfriend with the ice-blue eyes and endless suitcases of Busch beer in the trunk of his car. “Nothing’s going to stop this.”
And nothing did.
NIGHT OR DAY
Our experience as foster parents was unusual. Unusually unusual, given how different each child and family’s experience can be. Michael had indeed stayed with us six months before being returned to this new incarnation of his family (Dad newly out of jail and Mom living in the next county with a much older boyfriend—hardly an uncommon relationship dynamic, I was to discover). Amazingly, we were able to remain involved after reunification, thanks to Michael’s paternal grandmother and his still-young mother, Jessica. At first I was filled with cold doubt and despair when Jessica hesitated to let me plan a visit during Michael’s first weeks back home; I didn’t know whether to blame the social worker, who might well have advised a break from us to let Michael settle, or Jessica’s boyfriend, who seemed eager to fence his new family off from any more prying eyes or interference, or my own voracious need to cling to Michael and nail down some assurance of a future with him. Most likely, it was a combination of the three that initially scared Jessica away. But after a couple of false starts, she stayed true to her word: Michael had lost enough people already, she’d often said, and didn’t have to lose Will and me. Jessica had lost plenty of special people herself, she would tell me, from her only protective and nurturing relative to the afterschool support team that had cheered her through middle school to the teachers who’d wept when she was pulled out of ninth grade to tend her siblings at home. Even the destruction of her first hard-earned car, which had been borrowed without her permission and wrecked, sounded like the soul-killing loss of one more treasured relationship. So whatever resistance, natural jealousy, or awkwardness Jessica might have faced in allowing Will and me to maintain our bond with Michael as he grew, she would not let her youngest child lose the love and support of which she had been robbed repeatedly herself. I longed to believe this, but I knew there were conditions—and that Benny held sway over all decisions.
For Michael and his siblings, home life was often chaotic, traumatic, dangerous, exciting, and unpredictable—sometimes visibly so and always weighted with secrets and adult pressures. Before, during, and after foster care, older sister Isabelle clung to the role of little mother to Michael, while Ryan and Michael often believed themselves responsible for the well-being of Jessica and Benny.
Despite how friendly and bluntly
