Counting Down
Описание книги
When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster fifteen years of involvement with a traumatized yet resilient birth family. They fell in love with Michael (a toddler when he came to them), yet they had to reckon with the knowledge that he could leave their lives at any time. In Counting Down , Gold tells the story of forging a family within a confounding system. We meet social workers, a birth mother with the courage to give her children the childhood she never had herself, and a father parenting from prison. We also encounter members of a remarkable fellowship of Appalachian foster parents—gay, straight, right, left, evangelical, and atheist—united by love, loss, and quality hand-me-downs. Gold’s memoir is one of the few books to deliver a foster parent’s perspective (and, through Michael’s own poetry and essays, that of a former foster child). In it, she shakes up common assumptions and offers a powerfully frank and hopeful look at an experience often portrayed as bleak.
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COUNTING DOWN
A Memoir of Foster Parenting and Beyond
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For two or three weeks, apparently, Isabelle was not allowed to eat with her brothers, and she had to sit apart at the Little Tikes table. With the whole family in the car, Benny drove her down the road in the dark and threatened to keep driving her right back to the foster home where she’d had to eat all her food and go off to her room if she wanted to cry. Then, abruptly, still attributing what Isabelle had said to revenge for being denied potato chips, Jessica and Benny sent Isabelle to live with Irene, where she remained, going back only for visits. And given the strange lifelong tension between Benny and Isabelle, Jessica must have sensed her daughter would be much safer growing up there.
Once Isabelle was gone, I held my breath, elated for her liberation despite the loss of her dream. Plus, she had been especially close to her father’s mother, so it seemed like a natural fit that could provide the family comfort she seemed to have been craving. “I think the kids are all coming out of there,” said a friend’s cousin who knew the family through a different service agency. Maybe it would all be over, just like that! Maybe my months of fearful longing since Michael had moved home and out of DSS custody had all been a necessary nightmare. Maybe we’d paid our dues karmically, and Michael—maybe even his brother—would be back with us for good!
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