A Boy Becomes a Man
One day last week I got a call from a man I know quite well, though I rarely talk to him lately. He had lived in my house from time to time when he was in foster care. It’s a long story that I’ve told elsewhere in my book Foster Mom, which was written about 20 years ago when the experience was fresh.
However, now he was a man, and he was crying. He was also looking for his older sister. I’d known him since he was six years old, so I felt I had the right to ask him some questions.
“What happened”? I asked, as he blubbered that he was sorry for crying.
He told me he had nowhere to live because he had been thrown out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend. As he continued to cry, I asked, “are you sure she won’t change her mind? Are you sure it’s over? Have you tried flowers?”
He sniffled. “Yes,” he said, “she just told me to get out.” He was looking for his sister because she had told him she would store his things for a few days till he could get together the money to get himself another apartment. I apologized for not having the room to store his things at my house, although he hadn’t even asked.
Although I did not know where his sister was at that precise moment, I could hazard a good guess since I’m still in touch with her, too. They are both part of a family I took in when their birth mother, a drug addict, became more interested in partying than in feeding them. There are four kids in that family. The oldest, now a grandmother, is not in touch with the rest of the family by mutual agreement. The next one down is the one I call my “son,” whom I’ve written about before when he got into trouble with the criminal justice system. (Is addiction genetic?” Then comes the sister he was looking for, who is herself the mother of three children. The man crying into the telephone is the youngest of the four. He’s 37.
When I picked them up from the shelter where child protective services had put them, I promised that my goal would be to keep the family together. This is a big deal in foster parenting as you may suppose. I don’t think families are separated as much today, but this was 30 years ago. Before the internet.
Anyway, I have kept my promise. From the time I met them I have always been the still point in their turning world. When my husband died, this man was eight, and CPS made me give him up, because we had not been certified for young children. Between eight and 18, he had gone on to three different foster families, but after he left my house none of his other foster parents had modeled decent married couple behavior. He had grown up very self-sufficient, but without love, and he really had never lived with a woman before.
Finally he took a chance on going into a relationship, and now he felt he had failed.
I have not met the woman. For all I know she has her own issues. This guy is a sweet man, but he admitted he said some things to her that he would like to have taken back. Clearly but he didn’t know what the consequences would be of his words. I felt so sorry for him. He needed to have the discussion boys ideally have with their fathers in their early teens. If Gerry hadn’t died, he would have gotten it, and it would have been stellar, but Gerry died.
It’s really difficult for men and women to live together and make it work, especially in the 21st century. And if someone in the couple comes from a dysfunctional family, or no family, it’s probably impossible. Relationships don’t come with instruction manuals. Perhaps they should. We had a long conversation that afternoon, during which I asked tried to be helpful, and then I asked him the question I always asked my kids and foster kids after they made a mistake.
“What’s the learning you can take from this”? And then I would make them recite the learning. He laughed when I said that. He remembered.
His situation has some favorable aspects to it, because he has a job and a car, which he knew were assets. By the end of the call he had decided he could sleep in his car until an apartment came empty in the neighborhood he was living in before. He would find his sister, and he would be all right. I offered my back patio as a place for temporary storage.
I cannot tell you how glad I was to be able to be there for him.