Читать книгу Fall or Fly - Wendy Welch - Страница 10

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Looking for Love—and Babies

We tried IVF. No luck. We discussed adoption, researched, found lots of very expensive ways, and some exotic ones. We did not have big bucks to spend, plus heard horror stories of highly paid attorneys selling babies, which later had to be returned. Sounded scary. We checked out Chinese adoption; we had friends who did that successfully. Only cost about $4,000. We could swing that. Signed up, had an extensive home study, then we waited and waited. After spending about $1,500 and waiting more than a year, we received a letter telling us the wait was going to be years longer than first advised. We were distraught.

Out of the blue a few weeks later, we got a late-night phone call from my wife’s parents. A friend of theirs who had heard casually that we were looking to adopt was a social worker at a hospital in a neighboring town. A college student had shown up about to deliver just before Christmas. Her parents did not know of the pregnancy, and the girl wanted to finish college before starting a family. She said if the social worker could have the baby in a good home by Christmas, she would give the child up for adoption. The home must be with parents of good repute who were educated and immediately available.

All of this we learned at 11:00 p.m. Our attorney was in the hospital with documents for the girl to sign at 8:30 the next morning, and the agreement was made. Our daughter was in our arms thirty-six hours after we learned of her existence.

—adopting dad

PEOPLE BECOME foster parents for a surprisingly small number of reasons that tend to fall into a handful of broad patterns: couples who are unable to have children of their own; empty nesters who want to do the whole parenting cycle again; those who want to do good in the world; and people interested in money, free labor, or other things besides the best interests of the children they take in.

Although that last group hogs quite a bit of bandwidth in the public’s perception, social workers unite in saying that first among equals are the couples unable to conceive. In many parts of America, childless hopefuls look not only to costly infertility treatments (such as in vitro fertilization [IVF]) but beyond the country’s borders. Russian orphans and baby girls from China head this list in American public awareness, but IVF and international adoptions are rare in Coalton, mostly because both require serious cash. Coalton’s people tend to be poorer than the average working-class person, the bulk of salaries hovering at around 120 percent of poverty level,¹ except in University City. Costly paths to becoming a parent are out.

This includes third-party domestic private adoptions, which can be expensive and explosive to navigate. “Third-party” here means outside of one’s extended family; a woman’s adopting her sister’s children is not a third-party adoption. Domestic adoption inquiries are the first crossroads where Dale’s hopes meet those of infertile couples because fostering a child can place you first in line to adopt. The difficulty of getting information out to people, not to mention the understandable fact that most couples want infants, is the main factor that seems to stymie the process of getting children without homes into homes without children.

“People who can’t have kids go into the system until they find the children that fit what makes them feel like a family, and then they adopt them and get out,” says Beth, a former social worker who left after five years on the job. “But they go in looking for babies, so they either wait a long time, or they fall in love with an older child they foster while they’re waiting.”

Beth works now as a legal secretary in sleepy little Riverside, a town of about two thousand residents where Main Street boasts more lawyers and hairdressers than retail shops. Historic buildings sit empty or have pop-up thrift stores spread in their showcase windows. Behind the row of nineteenth-century buildings sits an ancient mountain wall, bright green in the spring, powdered white in winter. Beth and I saw both as we met week after week in a family-owned bakery on one corner.

Beth suggested that location because she could walk to it from her office and got only an hour for lunches. The first time I walked into the bakery, the large sign on the back wall caught my attention: “Families are like fudge—mostly sweet with a few nuts.”

She laughed when I pointed out the sign to her. “I never thought of that being portentous. I like their salads.”

Beth reiterated that she was participating in the interviews because of Dale’s desire to recruit foster parents. She thought it important to get out the word that foster kids may be eligible for a modest-to-significant stipend through a legitimate state agency, something the general public doesn’t always grasp. Not only do prospective fosters and adopters not pay service fees in state adoptions, they might also receive financial help for the child’s care. The amount depends on the child’s age and needs. The needs classification that Beth worked with most often was “therapeutic.” This means the child has special needs, usually based on medical fragility, developmental delays, or the behavioral health effects of long-term bouncing through the system. Therapeutic designations can raise monthly support to as much as three times what a child without one would receive; for teenagers, the monthly therapeutic stipend would be $1,800, as compared to $671 for teens not considered to have the same needs.

It’s one of those ideas that looks good on paper, Beth added, but a discerning reader can see quickly where inappropriate attraction might occur. The stipends pay more for people to keep “undesirable” kids who are considered less adoptable, in hopes that the foster parents will fall in love with that troublesome young’un as time goes by. People fostering because they can’t have children of their own want babies, or at least kids under six, but they also want to love someone. Sometimes they do fall in love with an older kid while waiting for a younger one to become available.

That’s what happened with Abby and her husband, John, people Beth suggested I talk to. Abby agreed to meet me at my bookstore in Great Rock and tell her story.

She and John married at age eighteen for her, nineteen for him, in a little wooden mountain church with a steeple, full of friends and flowers. Let’s call their sprawled-out hamlet of eight hundred residents Valleyfield, since it climbs the slope of one of the prettiest valleys in Coalton. Excited at the prospect of a family Abby fully intended would bloom with a new child every other year, she miscarried twins thirteen months later. Her family doctor told her after a barrage of tests that she would be lucky ever to carry a baby full-term.

A haze of confusion and questions followed. Devout Christians, Abby and John wondered if her condition were a test from God of their faith, and if they just needed to believe He would send them a child after all. Or could something be done medically? The undercurrents of Abby’s physician’s warning tugged at their plans: it wasn’t impossible for her to conceive; it was dangerous. And if she could give birth, the infant would probably have significant health issues.

The young couple went numb. Abby heard the voices of family and friends, the prayers of her community, and her own frantic thoughts as a long tunnel of words and sounds, far removed yet claustrophobic, encasing her in noise. From this miasma a few voices emerged with clarity, those of friends at church who told them about foster care.

Those friends probably said several things then, but John and Abby heard one specific and succinct message: fostering would be the quickest way to adoption. That began to feel like a combination of their last hope and Divine Guidance.

Abby and John moved from tiny Valleyfield to Walker City (population 3,500) where John’s career prospects improved. They didn’t it know yet, but that relocation probably also increased their chances of fostering. Valleyfield’s ancient water and sewage systems contained lead pipes, straight pipes, and suspect wells. Other would-be foster families in towns similar to Valleyfield had seen their foster home applications rejected over water quality.

The requirements for fostering include far more than good sewage systems. Abby and John underwent a psychological profile and answered personal questions about their finances, marriage, and mental-health backgrounds. They submitted to a criminal background check. They had blood tests (to rule out tuberculosis and HIV). And they attended night classes in CPR, blood-borne pathogens, and parenting. Another home visit ensured they knew how to work their fire extinguisher and didn’t have any porn magazines lying around, among other things. The inspectors measured the crib-slat widths because the couple had asked about getting an infant, and the bedrooms’ dimensions because they’d agreed to take more than one child at a time.

“It was invasive. We didn’t have anything to hide, but it still felt like getting turned inside out,” Abby recalls. “We knew it was important, and it wasn’t personal; but some stranger sits asking you questions about your husband, you’re going to get antsy.”

Eventually, all those tests turned into the piece of paper they coveted: a license to be foster parents. Abby left her job to stay home and wait, and soon the phone rang. They took in boys and girls, babies and ten-year-olds in rapid succession, most being what is called “temporary placement” kids—that is, children who need a safe place for a time but aren’t available for adoption. The few who were available didn’t seem to fit John and Abby’s home style.

“We weren’t being picky, but you know what you know. We believed in God’s guidance.”

About two years after they’d begun fostering, the call that would change their lives came. Standing in her kitchen, Abby listened to a disembodied voice on the other end of the line describe half sisters, one seven, one nine, victims of parental drug abuse and neglect. They had been at an emergency foster home for a few days because Birth Mom’s rights were going to be terminated by court order. It had taken a little longer than anticipated, so the girls needed a foster home prepared to house them for a month or two. After that they would be up for adoption.

Looking back, Abby says, “We had calls asking us to take kids all the time, some short-term, some long-term. All I can say is this one had electricity running through it. Like it was meant.”

But it started in the same way the others did. As in previous cases, the social worker needed an immediate response regarding the home’s availability. “You do all this careful planning, all your praying, mounds of paperwork, and then none of that matters. When it really happens and they need you, there isn’t even time to think. There wasn’t time to call my husband, just say yes or no on the phone, and that was it.”

While she was driving to pick up the girls, Abby’s thoughts were consumed by the fact that this would be the sisters’ second move within the week. The product of a loving, stable extended family, Abby longed to give all her foster kids that same experience she had had, but for some reason, this pair had gone straight to her heart.

“I think I was in love with them before I even saw them,” she says in hindsight. “I’d fostered before, but this felt different.”

Different though it may have felt, the two redheaded girls who waited, clutching black trash bags—the luggage of choice for foster kids—looked scared, just like the others. All eyes and legs and cautious stares, they wore shorts, ill-fitting tank tops, and flip-flops in late October. Shy, Abby thought. Why wouldn’t they be? Two homes in one week?

What Abby didn’t learn for months, until the sisters began to open up and tell their stories, was that she and John were their ninth foster home within three years. At that moment, she swore to God that those frightened little girls would receive the stability they’d been lacking. Guidance, care, and safety would blossom into love.

Which it did. Abby and John told the girls they’d be adopting them and started the process—until Bio Mom appeared suddenly with a court order saying that the girls had to be returned to her. Again. She had stopped their adoptions before, getting clean and taking the children home, only to lose them within the year. That was why the girls had bounced so much over the past three years.

Nothing had ever felt so wrong before, this edict that their foster daughters had to go home with Bio Mom. Abby and John had returned kids to bad situations in the past, amid prayers and tears, but this time they sought legal help. When every avenue and their bank account were exhausted, they tried to explain to the girls that this return was neither their idea nor their fault. But what the sisters heard was that they were going to live with Mom again—even though they did not want to. As foster kids often do, these girls, particularly the older one, knew that if they went back, it was just a matter of time until they would leave again.

“‘And the next place might not be like you. Please don’t let them take us back.’” Abby’s voice takes on a childlike pleading and a shaky edge as she quotes the older girl. “You don’t know heartbreak until you look into innocent blue eyes like that and say, ‘I’m sorry; we did everything we could, but we can’t keep you.’ And they heard everything you said, but they’re just babies, and they ask why you don’t want them anymore; did they do something wrong?”

When she says, “Everything we could,” Abby means it. The couple considered legal and illegal plans, yet in the end there was nothing plausible to do but to obey the law and return the red-haired sisters they had hoped would be their daughters.

It is not uncommon for birth parents to swing into action when notification of a pending adoption—which perforce includes termination of both parents’ rights—reaches them, says Dale, a social worker with forty-two years of experience.

“The act of adopting disturbs the status quo and moves people in strange ways—birth moms, grandparents, everybody. They come out swinging at the last minute over children who have been floating through the system for years. You can see them holding onto their last chance to get their kids back, or trying to extort a better deal, or maybe exerting that contrary side of human nature we all have. Whatever the reason, it’s common.”

“Get used to it,” Abby advises foster parents seeking to adopt. “There aren’t any rules in this game of human hearts. If we could have adopted those girls right then and there, the first time I saw them, I would have. If we could have made it to Canada, we might be living there now.”²

Heartbroken, the couple took a hiatus, then returned to fostering. Following seven months of bed rest, with “the congregations of three churches holding me up with their prayers,” Abby also gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He has an older and younger sibling by adoption.

“God’s timing is perfect. He brought me the right children at the right time,” Abby says, cuddling her youngest in my bookstore’s armchair as he plays with a pop-up book. Born with developmental delays and lifelong medical fragility because of his birth mother’s drug habit, he fostered with Abby and John from the age of six months. Again, the social worker placing him told them that he would be adoptable within the year.

Abby snorts, then sighs. “The whole time, I was on tenterhooks inside. Would they let it go through? Would the birth father appear from nowhere? Would it really happen this time?”

It did. At the age of two, he became theirs.

The birth parents’ substance abuse is the primary reason most children are in Coalton’s foster care system; substance addiction is also the biggest source of that push-me/pull-me stress as to whether children will become adoptable. Before adoption can occur, the birth parents’ parental rights need to be terminated. But though they are addicts, they do love their children and often go through multiple cycles of getting “clean,” petitioning for the return of their children, staying sober for a time, relapsing into addiction, and losing their children again. Termination of parental rights is meant to be a process of months, but it can actually take years.³

Voluntary termination is, of course, faster than involuntary. In his late twenties when interviewed, Hutton was adopted in infancy because he was in the right place—his mother’s womb—at the wrong time—her sophomore year of university in Coalton’s largest city. Hutton’s bio mom got in touch with DSS, and soon after his birth, a couple who’d been on the waiting list for an infant (and had checked the box “either” rather than “boy” or “girl”) became his foster parents. Even with Birth Mom on board for a swift, formal termination of her parental rights, the process still took six months.

An older couple with a comfortable income and a suburban home, Hutton’s parents weren’t interested in fostering; uppermost in their minds were tales from friends who’d fostered, horror stories similar to Abby and John’s, of court-ordered returns halfway to adoption or midnight pickups of frightened children. Hutton’s mom and dad had also had friends take in kids with special needs that the new parents felt insufficiently trained to meet. As Dale often says, such tales are rampant in the public’s perception of fostering, with or without good reason.

Hutton’s mom and dad wanted to start clean with an infant who would have no chance of being yanked from their home, so they waited for a baby whose mother was ready to sign off then and there; they were not interested in whether they’d receive a stipend for their newborn because he’d been their foster child first. Most healthy infants don’t receive state support, at least not for long; drug-free babies available for immediate adoption are rare, yet what most childless couples start off wanting. Private agencies charge fees just to let parents know such an infant has become available. (When anyone contracted with a state agency or working for DSS does so and gets caught, that’s a different matter.)

Hutton’s mom, a teacher, and dad, a lab technician, jumped to the head of a queue because money changed hands. This fast track is not open to everyone in Coalton. Would-be parents in Coalton who can find a way to be first when a baby is up for immediate adoption will do so; often this involves personal connections rather than money, as was the case in the story that opens this chapter. Those who can’t get to the top of the list by using these means can do so by fostering, while praying for adoption to become a quick option.

Hutton’s delighted parents conceived four years later, presenting him with a little brother. The boys grew up on the outskirts of the city where Hutton’s mom graduated from university, surrounded by brick houses and professional families who knew Hutton was adopted. Did that affect the family dynamic, internally or in the minds of the community? Hutton considers the question carefully before answering.

“Not the community, no. I mean, our church, our neighbors, everybody knew I was adopted. We lived in the suburbs, so it was no big deal. There were several other kids around me who were adopted. I wasn’t some anomaly challenging the social order, so to speak.”

Internal to the family, it wasn’t so much that being adopted didn’t make a difference as that the brothers didn’t care that it did, or allow it to. Dad was Dad. Mom found it harder not to favor the bio brother, but now that the boys are fathers to their own families, “We laugh about it when it’s just us. Yes, there’s a difference; we just don’t care that there’s a difference.”

As Hutton comments about growing up in the suburbs, he nods to his wife, Kim, who is sitting next to him in the bookstore while he tells his story. Kim is also adopted, but her childhood spent growing up in a back hollow of Coalton was very different from Hutton’s—and the next chapter in the larger story of adoptions in Coalfields Appalachia.