Fall or Fly. Wendy Welch
to nine foster kids, past and present. They were the smallest group of interviewees.
WHO ARE THESE STORIES FOR?
Like foster parents and social workers, Appalachia is a sitting duck for judgment from people who watch life there unfold in dysfunctional hi-def from the coziness of an armchair. In Coalton, blaming the victim and suspecting those who came to help have both been elevated to art forms. If this book produces mission-like zeal toward adopting children out of Appalachia, as a couple of child advocates from outside Coalton have suggested it should, then Fall or Fly will have failed. The last time a wave of do-gooders swooped in to rescue children from communities deemed unfit to raise them? Ask your nearest Native American friend how that worked out.
First and foremost, this work intends to honor social workers. Their words shape its core. If honesty about what they face every day comes across as negativity, let that vented anger stand as its own tribute to those who expressed it. God bless any woman trying to make life better for children she did not bear, and any man who did not biologically father the child he seeks to help.
But this book also seeks to offer appreciation where blame-the-victim mentalities run rampant, such as with the urban poor or in ethnically cohesive communities, as well as in the Coalfields of Appalachia. If you’re from a place targeted by other people trying to tell you what you’re supposed to be and why you aren’t up to that benchmark, please hear this message: the problems within a community are not only solved by those who live in that community but also should be defined by that community. We who live with the problems know when something works and when it doesn’t and where priorities need to lie.
This book is dedicated with love and respect to Coalton’s residents, especially those who were or are foster children. I hope it answers questions for anyone who has asked, “I wonder what it would be like to foster a child?” Foster parenting is tricky, yet you might be the only chance some children will ever find, the sole source of stability and affection they will come to believe in or learn from. Herein lie depictions of how several parents, children, and social workers felt about their ride on that bucking bronco. It is for you to decide what role, if any, you might play in this rodeo. (P.S.: Dale would like to hear from you if you decide you’re interested.)
WRITING OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES
Coalton is a small place made up mostly of tiny towns and rural municipalities, so the stories told here have been scrambled to protect the identities of the tellers. All of them are true, but I’ve rearranged where they happened, to whom, and when so as to render the main characters invisible where they live. Secrets shared here are often “open” ones—meaning that everyone knows, but no one names names. Scrambling ensures that those who spoke with brave honesty aren’t rewarded with public criticism.3 As one participant put it, “Everyone dealing with the foster care and adoption world should get cut a little slack.”
Speaking of slack-cutting, the writing style in this nonfiction work is called storytelling journalism for several reasons. Although as a former journalist I wanted quotes to be the exact words of the interviewee, I removed distinguishing speech characteristics such as repeated profanity, dialect, colloquial grammar, and verbal tics. In the few instances when interviews were not digitally recorded, quotations fleshed out from notes were rendered as accurately as possible. If a pseudonym was assigned and the person used a real name, the pseudonym has been substituted without brackets. This also applies to place names, all of which are fake. Descriptions are of the real locations.
Interviewees participated firsthand in the events they described to me; barring a few exceptions, I was never present at those events. In some cases, I could approach others involved for corroboration; sometimes trust deepened, and return interviews closed holes in the patchwork of the first telling. When that happened, the events may sound as if I’d been standing there. But sometimes there was no way to get more detail. Circumstances varied. If the story reads more like journalism, quoting one person, it’s because there was no way to reach deeper than a single source.
And while it may seem odd to put a conclusion in the opening of a book, permit me to summarize with (or introduce, if you prefer) five words that will resonate throughout the interviews, stories, and thoughts that describe adoption and foster care in Coalton: Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. You will hear echoes of these words as you read, and we will return to them near the end of the book.
Read it and laugh. Read it and weep. Read it with one of my favorite Dr. Seuss quotes in mind: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
1
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