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By
Martha Shirk
Foster
care workers who are looking for new insights into the foster
care experience won't find them in "Foster Care Odyssey:
A Black Girl's Story," the latest memoir about growing
up in foster care.
Like
the memoirists who have covered this territory before her,
notably Dave Pelzer (A Child Called 'It': One Child's Courage
to Survive) and Antwone Quenton Fisher (Finding Fish: A Memoir),
Cameron describes a childhood that no one would wish on another.
"No
Feelings"
Unlike
Pelzer and Fisher, Cameron was never beaten or sexually abused.
She wasn't starved or locked in a closet. However, that doesn't
mean that she was unharmed by her experiences. Abandonment
by her birth family and a childhood spent in foster care left
Cameron, at least through her nineteenth year, seemingly unable
to give or receive love.
Cameron,
a 48-year-old associate professor at Arizona State University,
has nothing good to say about the human beings who make the
foster care system run. "I had no feelings about her,
either good or bad," she writes of one caseworker. "This
woman was simply one more in a long line of caseworkers, none
of whom had ever accomplished what I thought they were supposed
to do." As for the several different sets of foster parents
with whom she lived, they all made her feel "more like
a guest in other people's homes, someone who had overstayed
her welcome."
More
Insight Required
Cameron's
story ends when she goes off to college at age 19. We learn
in an epilogue that she earned a bachelor's degree from SUNY-Buffalo,
a master's degree from the University of Michigan, and a doctorate
from Harvard. Unfortunately, Foster Care Odyssey provides
little insight into how she emerged from foster care with
the intellectual and emotional tools necessary to reach such
academic heights. She attributes her success to two things:
"my constant hope that life would eventually change for
the better and the unwavering belief that others had in me
when I lacked faith in myself." Would that that was all
it takes.
The
foster care system has changed a lot since the 1950s, '60s,
and early '70s, when Cameron was growing up. Changes in federal
laws have made it less likely that children will languish
for years with little thought given to their long-term futures.
But
the system hasn't changed enough to ensure that every foster
child has a home in which he is loved - or that he can love
in return.
Former
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Martha Shirk, a freelance writer
in Palo Alto, Calif., is working on a book on what happens to
foster children when they age out of the system. |
