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Through the Eyes of a Child

I still remember the day I knew everything was going to be all right. My foster mom had her [birth] son in the car when she picked me up after school, and they were sick. I mean, they puked, and I don’t know what they’d been eating, but the puke was bright orange and really, really disgusting. And I was grossed out at driving home with puke in the car, but I didn’t say anything, and sure enough, that night I puked too. My foster dad came and cleaned up my room, twice, when I puked. And I knew then we were family, because nobody had ever, ever cleaned up after me before. You have to really love someone to clean up their puke. Then I knew they loved me and it was going to be all right.

—e-mail from an adopted foster child

“COMPLICATED” MAY describe family at large and the foster care system in detail, but survival within either breaks down to one simple principle for the kids passing through: learn the rules of the house you’re going to and abide by them. (And remember that principle’s converse: if you’re going to break those rules, make it good and final.)

Foster parents tend to view the whole process quite differently, which isn’t surprising. Not every foster family’s goal is adoption, but the caseworker’s ultimate goal is, and most children—even when they say otherwise with crossed arms and belligerent voices—long to be adopted. How often the stated goal influences where a child lands in care is a debatable point. Foster homes may be looking to adopt, providing a temporary service out of compassion, or doing a job for which they feel entitled to payment.

Take a matchmaking service for parents and kids, throw in the love-hate broken promises of bio parents and family, pour money on top, and start the countdown clock. At its most basic level, think from a fifth grader’s point of view what it must feel like to enter a house full of strangers when she knows she’s being auditioned for the role of daughter. Or when she’s one among many residents with no permanent status. Children in a vulnerable frame of mind go to prospective homes on a trial basis—and they know they’re losing their cuteness factor with every year that passes after about the age of eight. Prospective parents know as well. It can get dark inside the system, very dark indeed.

Now might be a good time to give a broad overview of how kids come into foster care in the first place, for those who don’t have experience with the phenomenon. From a group of social workers who’d agreed to a collective interview, I asked for an outline, starting with home removal and ending in adoption, “to make it easier for people reading this book to understand.”

They were strewn across couches and folding chairs in the children’s recreation room of their facility. As if on cue, the social workers took strategic bites of pizza. Mouths too full to respond, they glanced at one another with bemused smiles.

Only one responded. “Your readers want a step-by-step guide for that process? Oooh, me too. That’d come in handy.” A couple of them giggled.

Another added, “I do this for a living, and I’ve not seen an adoption happen twice the same way.” Around the room, heads began to nod.

Keeping that caveat in mind, we can describe a few common patterns. Here’s what the group came up with:

Social workers get involved when a teacher, neighbor, or other adult calls and reports something wrong in the home. The most common complaints include: there’s no running water or food in the home; the kids are neglected, showing up to school hungry, dirty, inadequately clothed; it appears that somebody is hitting or otherwise hurting them, and the child has told an adult or the adult has observed repeated injuries.

Following up on these complaints, Child Protective Services (CPS) visits the house. If a worker for this division of DSS sees evidence of something wrong—injuries, overt fear beyond shyness, severe hygienic neglect, to name a few—they can choose between putting a safety plan in place or removing the child.

Elizabeth (“call me Liz”) is a Family Preservation Services worker. She explains, “CPS prefers not to take a child without warning. We want first of all to leave the child in the home if that’s realistic, not just that day but always. To do that we create a family management plan. This involves the family in making decisions about how best to keep the children safe in the home while correcting problems that may take longer to resolve. That is our first goal.”

Failing that, the social worker on the scene will ask the mom or dad if there’s a relative who could come take the children to their house and look after them until things at home can be cleared up or fixed. In rural parts of Coalton, it is common for extended-family members to live near one another, so Mamaw or Sis may show up within minutes. The children go home with them so long as the answers to a few simple safety questions are satisfactory, and if required they promise that the person who has caused the removal doesn’t go near the kids.

Only at times of crisis does a family specialist (the job title varies) take a child out of his or her home or extended family immediately. Even if it looks as if removal may come later, the safety plan serves as a holding pattern, and the social worker may still try to pull people together for a family-management-plan meeting, asking various extended-family members to hold one another accountable for behaviors or attend counseling on anger management or other topics. Meanwhile, parents fearful of losing their children sometimes disappear between CPS visits.

If a child must be moved and a relative is not available, the ultimate goal is to find a place that will be more stable than the one the child is leaving. The CPS worker will call her supervisor, who will authorize the removal and an emergency placement or a short/long-term foster, as appropriate. The office has lists of prospective homes on file. Ideally, there will be time to do a little matching. In reality, most social workers carry a handful of names and phone numbers in their heads, of people whose homes the social workers know have spaces, or of families looking to adopt who will take in kids on short notice and have worked hard to ensure one of those memorized numbers is theirs.

Not to put too fine a point on it, CPS people don’t want to drive back to an office with children terrified into hysterics kicking the backs of the car seats, puking and pooping in distress, if they will have no place to take them from there. The CPS worker hopes to limit the children’s sense of unrest. It’s not easy to be the person trying to reassure distraught young’uns when they see you as the person who just yanked the rug out from under their lives. That’s not a pleasant situation for anyone.

There are exceptions, Liz adds. She has removed kids who were “so used to it, they sat waiting for me with their siblings lined up alongside them, each one of them clutching their favorite toy. They knew what was coming. Some have clung to my neck as I carried them out, saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ One child handed me a piece of paper, cool as a cucumber, and said, ‘I’m supposed to tell you to call Mee-maw.’”

Nine of Liz’s home visits to date have resulted in removals, and she can remember every single one of them. “You do not forget.”

A CPS worker will remove a child immediately if there seems to be imminent danger, including hunger, severe illness, threat of flight, or visible signs of abuse. Workers don’t often have police backup but could call for it, depending on the reputation of the family, whether there have been prior complaints and visits, and how the family reacted to those—assuming any of that information is known. Not all visits are prebriefed. Notes are not always available at the time a call is made.

Until recently, most Coalton removals happened because a teacher called from school. Social workers estimated anecdotally that until recent years this used to describe perhaps 90 percent of all investigations, but that’s all changed now.

“Now, with the drug culture and that so-called war on drugs ongoing here, CPS workers are riding along in the patrol cars on midnight raids. Which means we remove kids in the middle of the night with all the trauma of arrests and search-and-seizure going on around them, sirens blaring, guns drawn, parents screaming and getting handcuffed. Then those kids are going to the ER to get checked out about half the time, and then back to somebody’s office and crying themselves to sleep on a couch with a coat thrown over them, and we’re sitting there beside them until daylight when we can start calling people.”

The calls begin with colleagues in DSS, social workers specializing in family placement, foster-care specialists, adoption coordinators—again, the titles vary but the job remains the same: find a place the kids can go that matches the foster parents’ preferences with a child’s needs. A DSS questionnaire listing preferences like gender, age, personality, and physical traits is supposed to help in this effort. Parents fill it out when they go through the licensing procedure for fostering.

Liz laughs; there is no mirth in the sound. “Sounds great, right? Tell me what genius thinks after I’ve spent ten minutes with these traumatized children, I can look through the thirty-two of these [questionnaires] we have on file and find the ones that match. This child is sitting next to me, crying. ‘Do you like dogs, honey? Look up so I can see what color your eyes are.’” Liz waves a hand in frustration, then seems to catch herself. “Of course, odds are strong we know these kids already, so it’s not that bad. Plus, we take them to the ER to get checked out so we get more info right away.”

Still, CPS workers try to avoid crisis placements. If they suspect that one might be coming, they keep a list of potential matches in mind, reviewing available homes for preferences or even calling foster parents they know to have a casual chat about “what might or might not happen.”

“Then you pray for their availability the day it happens,” Liz shrugs.

The availability of thirty-two licensed homes doesn’t sound too bad in a county that last year had just under a hundred foster kids needing placement, does it? Yet the social workers say they use about ten of them, returning to those over and over. There are many reasons why, but a big one is the number of people who check “single child under six” on their preference forms.

“I can place them via phone, driving down the mountain,” Liz says of children at that young age. “But what do you do with the six-, eight-, and thirteen-year-old siblings, and that oldest one cussing you up one side and down the other? How many homes have room for three at once, plus take kids in the teen years?”

Enter option number two. If DSS is willing to pay a supplemental fee, no fewer than seven private agencies in a three-county area of rural Coalton are contracted to work with the state to place children in therapeutic care; in urban areas, that number climbs. Many of these agencies deal with regular placements as well, which still cost the state more because they involve a fee for the agency to have trained and prepared the parents. DSS policy is to start with its own office’s lists to find parents available for regular care, but often the social workers wind up calling private agencies.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to how those calls go out. The DSS social worker puts the fishhooks in the water, describing the children as best she can to her counterpart at the agency. The private agency’s social worker looks over his list of available homes and starts making phone calls. The first one to call back gets the kids.

“It’s just about what you could imagine,” says Cody, a director of one of those private agencies. “A friend at DSS called me last week at midnight; had three-year-old twin boys in her backseat . . .” Cody launches into a story.

The boys had been chewing on wood in their home because they were suffering from pica—a nutritional deficiency that causes people to eat nonfood items—and acute malnutrition. That “behavioral problem” made the twins eligible for placement via therapeutic foster care. Cody placed them within the hour, and a day later he got a call from another friend at a different agency.

“He says to me, ‘We wanted them! We’ve had parents waiting a long time!’”

Around the room, social workers roll their eyes, look away, shake their heads, throw loaded facial expressions Cody’s way; one gives a snort that might be interpreted as The only reason you’re getting away with telling that story is you’re the supervisor.

Cody notices. “Yeah, it’s a little unseemly how that part goes. Because that sibling group of three and the oldest one’s a teenager? Yeah. They’re gonna get split up.” Workers nod, sigh, and refill their soda glasses.

From here, the process can turn murky. If the parents follow the family management plan put in place to help things at home—running water is installed, Uncle Bobby’s put on a restraining order, Stepdad goes back to counseling, and the therapist cites progress—the kids might be returned. If Mom goes into drug treatment and the extended family have custody, the kids will go back after Mom gets out. If the state has the kids during that time, Mom is supposed to pass a drug test and appear in court. When all goes according to protocol, should she lose her sobriety later, the kids will be taken again for temporary placement until she gets clean. This is often how bouncing through the system begins for the kids.

Things happen in the order they’re supposed to, or they don’t. People do their jobs, or they don’t. Parents get clean and stay that way, or they don’t. Children go to a foster home, back to Mom, to a foster home, and back to Mom in stretches lasting three months to a year, depending on the family court’s availability, Mom’s progress, and the attention of the guardian ad litems and caseworkers to the nonstop flow of documents across their desk. (A guardian ad litem is someone appointed by the court to represent the legal interests of the children; sometimes they are therapists or other professionals, and sometimes Child Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA volunteers.)

There’s nothing to stop the ebb and flow of returns and removals except a somewhat fluid set of court expectations or the advocacy of the ad litems. In the states within the Coalton area, a third party’s being prepared to step in as parent can facilitate the termination of parental rights (voluntary or involuntary). Judges by far prefer seeing proof that adoption is imminent to making a child a ward of the state for any lengthy period.

The involuntary termination of parental rights requires proof that a parent has abused or neglected his or her child(ren) sufficiently to endanger the child’s life and health, and that “reasonable efforts” to resolve these parental problems have failed. Each court visit tends to have deadlines attached to it, and the United States has a twenty-four-month deadline for enacting termination—but when the clock starts on that deadline can vary by judge. One of the stories in this book involves an involuntary termination that occurred within two months. Another took six years.

Dale, who was not at the “pizza meeting,” later pointed out one reason for such variations. “Drug addicts lose their ability to provide a safe home for their children, not their wish to provide it. They’ll fight. They’ll try to get clean. They’ll either make it, or they’ll relapse. Which means the whole thing starts again.”

It’s a hard dance to watch under any circumstances, but when the clock is ticking toward the point when adoption is allowed, the waiting is the worst part for the child in question, her family, and her caseworkers.

“Once they realize Mom or Dad is never going to get it together, these kids long to be adopted. They want stability. And they know the older they get, the less likely adoption’s going to take place. Once they hit double digits, their chances are melting away, and they’re very aware of this, so they put on this hard veneer, act out trying to push people away, but you can see it. They’re desperate to belong in a family before it’s too late.” Cody shakes his head in frustration.

Cami agrees. She’s an eighteen-year-old college student who hit the foster care system at the age of four. She came to my bookstore to talk about the journey she and her younger sister, Debbie, began when Deb’s biological father overdosed in front of them.

The girls, their mother, Bonnie, and Deb’s dad, Al, lived in Troutdale, a town of one thousand residents that can really only be described as “dying.” Their small cinderblock apartment sat in the middle of a row of three jutting over a flowing mountain stream, with upmarket fishing cabins dotting the hill on the other side. Troutdale hoped to save itself with sport tourism, but the cabins are owned mostly by local lawyers or bank managers.

Bonnie and her husband were frequent drug users. One day, Al fell without warning onto the kitchen floor. Cami’s mother dropped to her knees and shook him, shouting, “Wake up. Al, wake up!”

Likely, these shouts-turned-to-screams alerted neighbors to phone the police; Cami doesn’t remember anyone in their apartment making the call that brought sirens. Two or three ambulance people rushed into the room, while a large policeman grabbed Deb and Cami, one under each arm, hauling them outside.

Did that frighten her, you wonder?

“No, I was used to policemen coming to our apartment. They’d always been nice to us, just yelled at Mom and Dad a bit. What scared me was, I looked over his shoulder and saw them giving Al mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I don’t think I knew what it was then, but it scared me. I could tell it was something awful. Final.”

The girls rode in the ambulance beside comatose Al and their sobbing mother. The mask on Al’s face in the ambulance (one assumes it was for oxygen) had impressed both girls, so while they sat in the waiting room, they tried to make one from magazine pages.

Without warning, the police stormed in, heading straight for Bonnie with an unequivocal (and loud) message: she wasn’t fit to be a mother; they were taking her children; she deserved to lose them. Bonnie cried, the hospital staff stared, and the police yelled. Cami and Deb forgot their paper masks and sat down, making no noise or movement. Experience had taught them that when adults were screaming, invisibility worked best.

But the instant the cops turned toward the girls, Deb went from wide-eyed silence to the kind of shriek only a toddler can produce. She ran from the officer, toward her family. (Cami is certain that no social worker was there, and she doesn’t know why; that’s not how these things are meant to go, according to social workers.) The police reassured both girls that it was okay, that they were taking them to a safe place. The officer tried to hold Debbie safely yet securely as he carried her out of the hospital, but the three-year-old, sensing rather than understanding that the world as she knew it had tilted into chaos, slid into a full-fledged flailing, kicking, terror-fueled meltdown.

“They had bruises. I guarantee it.” Cami pauses, sitting on the green couch in the bookstore’s classics room, and stares at the titles on the shelf across from her. She is a quiet, think-before-speaking girl, her brown hair cut in a no-nonsense bowl. Working summers as a lifeguard has left her skin almost as brown as her hair. “I think people watching would have described it as dramatic. I remember being embarrassed because everybody was staring at us.”

It wasn’t until another officer picked her up and headed toward the door that Cami realized—with a child’s swift and certain clarity—what Deb had already grasped.

This time was different.

“And I think Bonnie did too, because she started crying even more and acting crazy like I’d never seen before, and then I don’t remember anything until we pulled into a parking lot and an old lady met us and said we should get in her car.”

Within a day or so, Cami and Deb had figured out that they were in some kind of temporary shelter, going back to their mother’s “soon, but not today,” and that the little old lady was “kinda nuts but in a sweet way.” The rules were simple: be good, and on Saturday you got a new toy. Other kids came and went; the sisters stayed.

Time flows differently when you’re four; Cami doesn’t know how many months they were there, just that she started school and joined Deb in calling the lady “Mom”—which really upset Bonnie when she phoned. Cami and Debbie didn’t know that she was trying to get clean and get her daughters back; when their weekly news report included, “Mom made us brownies,” Bonnie shouted back down the line, “She’s not your mom!”

Sometime in the spring, the girls went back to Bonnie’s apartment overlooking the stream. That became the pattern; she sobered up and got a job; they returned; she’d get high or in trouble with the law; and they’d be taken away from her and go to a foster home until she got them back again.

A kid doesn’t necessarily notice patterns. Each move is just what’s happening then. Cami thinks it might have been six placements over the course of three years, but by the time she was seven, it had dawned on her that she and her sister would never live at home for any length of time again. Looking back on those bounces, Cami wonders, “Why didn’t all those judges giving her custody have a lick of common sense between them?”

Cami describes with something between disgust and sorrow how her mother once went to the courthouse bathroom, took a pill, passed out, and hit her head on the sink. A few minutes later, Bonnie walked into family court with a paper towel stuck to her bleeding head, said she had slipped on wet tile in the bathroom, and swore she was drug-free and able to look after “my girls that I love more than life.”

Cami doesn’t know why a drug test wasn’t involved. Protocol dictated it should have been. Hearing the story later, Cody suggests a couple of possibilities. “I wasn’t there, I don’t know, but it could have been the ad litem was sick, or late. The judge was in a hurry. They’re not into returning kids to drugged-up parents, so something sure went wrong. It happens. It’s not supposed to, but supposing it does, how’s a little kid gonna tell the judge, ‘Excuse me, Your Honor, you’re supposed to check her hair and her pee’?”

Reflecting on that moment, Cami has one wish. “As an adult now I want to go back and ask the judge what was on his mind that day. Lunch?”

Bonnie was trying to get it together. But as any who have suffered it personally or by proxy know, the illness of addiction overpowers instinct and reason alike. It also cripples love, but who wants to admit that? Addicted people tend to be incapable of looking after anybody, themselves included, so court-ordered removals are less about who loves whom than about a child’s safety. Lots of people loved Debbie and Cami, including their bio mom and extended-family members on both sides, but the task of providing them with a safe, warm place to grow up would fall to a succession of foster homes—some up to the job, some not.

Cami and Deb had maternal family in the region who declined to take custody, and the only comment Cami offers on this was that she and her sister would have liked to have avoided a few of the homes that fostered them. She does not talk about most of her foster homes. It is embarrassing to be a victim.

“Any way you slice it, by the time a child enters foster care, they’ve been rejected more than some adults are their whole lives,” Cody told me once. “They should all be in therapeutic care. What they’ve had to endure wouldn’t leave some grown-ups standing.”

He could have been describing Cami and Deb. Stability for the sisters was out of the question in the bouncy castle of foster care that followed. Sometimes safety was too. Working hard to create their own security as much as possible, they tried to play by the rules—whenever they could figure them out.

“We tried to be good,” Cami says, straight-cut bangs flopping into her dark eyes as she shakes her head and shrugs. Each place had a different set of rules; what was fine, even expected in one place might be forbidden in the next. Things like using the stove unsupervised, choosing which television shows to watch, being expected to complete chores that you hadn’t done before and thus didn’t know how to handle.

In one home that meant vacuuming. Cami had never used a vacuum before.

“She had to explain it to me. And she kept saying how awful it was that I didn’t know, kind of overly sweet, ‘It’s not your fault, dear.’” Cami’s jaw tightens.

Some foster homes said clearly what was expected; in others, the girls had to figure it out. At first, Cami and Deb tried to be good because they wanted to go back home to Mom. Then they were good because they realized that Mom was never going to get it together, so they needed to get adopted. Good kids get adopted first.

More precisely, Cami thought that they needed to get adopted. Deb lost interest. If this was going to be life from now on, then . . .

Cami’s eyes roll toward the ceiling, and her face lightens with a bemused smile. “I love my sister. I loved her then; I love her now. Oh, but she could be a real devil.”

One of their foster homes included the family’s bio daughter, a blond like Debbie of just about the same age. The two took an instant dislike to each other, probably fueled by Deb’s overt envy of her anti-twin. One day, Deb took the scissors from the drawer only adults were allowed to open and barbered the heads of every doll the bio daughter had.

Straight to the car, I bet, Cami thought when she saw what her sister had done. Sure enough, the caseworker showed up, but only to give everyone a talking to about safety. The sisters didn’t leave for another three months, when Bonnie had enough of a clean streak going to petition for return.

Stories about the tensions and alliances between birth and foster children could fill an entire book. Comedy and tragedy rage in these situations. At another home, Deb broke a house rule and got mad at the foster mother over losing TV privileges. She sneaked into the dining room, took the china plates that were Foster Mom’s pride and joy from their special cabinet, and smashed them in a big pile on the dining room floor. Cami took one look, went to their room, and packed garbage bags for both of them. Sure enough, Foster Mom called their social worker, in tears.

In the car, as the caseworker drove away from that former placement in grim silence, Cami turned and pummeled her little sister. “You jerk! I liked them!” Deb grinned and retaliated. The girls slapped and punched until the social worker threatened to pull the car over.

“Now that I know social workers have to do case notes on the time they spend with foster kids, I wonder what that poor woman wrote that night,” Cami says, grimacing.

That’s the way it went for a while, with Deb pulling the strings and Cami playing the good girl. Despite Deb’s antics, usually the sisters didn’t get kicked out of homes; they just went from foster parents to Bio Mom and back to fosters as Bonnie got clean, blew it, and tried again. Ironically, the other time Cami remembers when a difficult behavior precipitated their removal, the blame fell on her.

“I love animals, all animals. The family had this puppy, and it was so cute, but I was maybe eight or nine, and I didn’t see it and I backed up and stood on the puppy’s leg and broke it. Then the woman called and had us taken out of the home. They wouldn’t believe I hadn’t done it on purpose. I still swear to you—it’s like ten years later we’re talking about this, and I still swear—I didn’t mean to. I would never have done that on purpose. I love animals. I just didn’t see the puppy. But we were out.”

That particular foster home had been looking for an excuse to send them away, the girls knew. Unable to have children of their own, the couple wanted to adopt. Cami and Debbie weren’t yet available for adoption; besides, these foster parents wanted just one child, and younger. Although sometimes it’s just a personality mismatch—you are not the child these foster parents are looking for—in other cases those seeking to adopt get frustrated that the kids in their house are not available because someone is trying to regain custody.

Eventually, an unspoken message wafts through the home: hurry up and leave so we can find our forever kid. It’s not unusual for kids to pick up on such clues in the vibe of a house. In fact, foster children who lack the skill to discern what kind of place they’re in might have a rough row to hoe. Cami swears she got so good at it, she could tell on the car ride to their new location whether these were people fostering with the intent to adopt, for a paycheck, out of kindness, or for some other reason.

A parent who drives in silence may not be emotionally invested. The silent ones might be interested strictly in the minimum they would be required to provide without getting their license pulled—in which case, start hiding food in your room right away. Or they could be more the “don’t bother me and here are the rules and there’s the fridge, now let’s just get along” types. Others might say differently, Cami added with her characteristic caution, but in her experience the silent drivers rarely turned into forever family.