Fall or Fly. Wendy Welch

      3

       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