Foster Mom: Angie and Bobby as Adults
Angie moved back in with me as a high school dropout, taking the room formerly occupied by Ben, and ostensibly living with me while she got her GED, which she never finished. But she worked at Starbucks, so I was happy to have her stay with me.
However, she did get pregnant at an inopportune time after she left me, and today has three boys, 18, 11 and 12, by two different fathers. Neither “baby daddy” has made her life easier, and she had to develop her own resiliency skills.
Today she works at a supermarket as a manager. She’s not in prison, and not on drugs. That’s an incredible achievement. She is a kickass mother, trying desperately to bring her kids up in an American environment that doesn’t favor single moms. I’m being sarcastic here; we’ve never been big on helping single moms, because their biggest expense is childcare, and we have little subsidized child care.
I’m not saying we have none, because that’s not true. Just less than we need for the number of single moms I see around me. On the west side of Phoenix, Arizona alone we have only 27,000 slots for 56,000 kids. Multiply that if you must.
Only Bobby remained in a stable foster care environment until he aged out of the system. Shortly after his 18th birthday his foster father dropped him on my doorstep. I made the same deal with him that I made with Ben and Angie: either go to college or go to work and I will take you in. None of them could do college.
However, all of them, in their thirties and forties, have learned how to live in the world. On balance, we’ve been far more successful as a family than we should have been, given my lack of knowledge and preparation for the job I was undertaking.
I wonder what will become of all the other kids like Ben who are in the streets watching their parents commit slow suicide with alcohol or drugs, trying to feed themselves and growing up in a world that gives them even less preparation than I did.
After more than thirty years of trying to make a difference, I know the jury’s still out. But I’m not prepared to give up, despite the disappointments. It’s still my opinion that if middle class families do not each reach out to a child or two and try to help on a fairly intimate basis, tens of thousands of children all over America who are living in poverty and neglect will have no role models and no way of learning what they will need to know in the 21st century.
Uneducated and unloved, these kids hang around with each other, increasingly unprepared for a work environment that is highly specialized and technology dependent. Written off by their teachers, who often don’t see them enough to get to know them before they are evicted and leave for another school district, they have no one who believes in them.
If they are placed in foster care, that care may be worse, because it is strange. The most disturbing thing about foster care is its impermanence. Although I wanted us to have Ben, Angie and Bobby forever, most foster parents do not know the families their foster children come from, and have little idea how long the child will live with them. Thus, ordinary foster parents do not get too attached to any single child in the procession that comes through their homes.
Foster homes are almost like hotels or rooming houses for these road warrior children. They’re really not surrogate families. Since we were foster parents, the laws have changed to move kids more quickly to a permanent plan. While children can experience instability and uncertainty in foster care, the legal framework in Arizona is designed to move cases toward a permanent plan within about a year, with regular review hearings and oversight in between, rather than leaving children wholly in limbo between only two distant hearings.
In practice, delays can occur because of contested litigation, service provision, or difficulty finding appropriate placements, but these occur against a backdrop of ongoing court and review board involvement rather than complete inaction between the main hearings.
The other problem with foster care is that almost every foster child has an emotional problem, just by virtue of being separated from his or her family. Yet unless the foster parent is willing to commit to taking the child for counseling, most of the kids don’t receive timely behavioral health support.
National and state analyses find that even though services are available on paper, many foster youth still do not receive all the mental health care they need, due to provider shortages, waitlists, frequent placement moves, or lack of coordination.
Advocates recommend that caregivers document concerns, ask for behavioral health referrals early, and escalate to case supervisors, health‑plan contacts, or ombuds offices when promised services are delayed or denied.
And of course nobody really wants a problem child. Unless the child is so bad that he doesn’t fit into the family, he probably gets no therapy. And if he is “bad,” and the foster parent can’t deal with him, he’s thrown back like a too-small fish into a lake, or a bruised piece of fruit. Look at poor Jose, wandering from apartment to apartment belonging to different members of his extended family, with no accountability and no real home. Now he is in prison for life.
Between the problems of the foster home and the problems that come from poor performance in school, these kids feel rejected all the time. Even Ben, in a home where people loved him, in a situation we tried to make permanent, with powerful and resourceful foster parents, experienced rejection from his peers every day. And when Gerry died, he had another incredible loss.
At some point, all that rejection and loss results in attachment disorder and the child turns around and in turn rejects the world that has rejected him. While Angie, Ben and Bobby aren’t perfect today, they have attached to me, and have become part of my extended family. That makes it just a little bit easier for them to look forward to a better life.