|
Two
new and highly readable books about foster care show the experience
from different perspectives: a foster parent's and a foster
child's. Both provide insights into the foster care system
that help front-line workers and policy-makers, along with
ordinary readers, better understand what makes foster care
work so well for some children and so poorly for others.
Another
Place at the Table, by Kathy Harrison, is a memoir about
Harrison's 13 years as a foster mother to more than 100 children
who had been placed in the custody of the Massachusetts Department
of Social Services. If only every child forced to spend time
in foster care could benefit from the attention of a temporary
mother like Harrison. Harrison is a model for what every foster
mother should be: smart, nurturing, patient, creative and
able to get by on just a few hours of sleep. It's not surprising
that she and her husband, Bruce, were recognized as Massachusetts'
Foster Parents of the Year in 1996.
She's
No Pollyanna
Harrison
can also write. I finished her 225-page book in one day and
was sorry to see it end.
One
part of Harrison's appeal is that she isn't a Pollyanna about
her job. She readily admits to feeling ambivalent about the
whole notion of foster care, partly because she's held her
own adoptive daughters night after night as they "sobbed
in anguish" over having been wrenched from their families
of origin. "As much as we loved them, we couldn't help
but wish there had been another, less painful option than
foster care for them when their birth mother couldn't cope,"
she writes. "It felt odd to choose to entangle ourselves
in a system that, despite its honorable intentions, often
seemed to do as much harm as good."
Yet
when Harrison learns that a whole-body X-ray of an infant
who had been brought to her in the middle of the night shows
five freshly broken ribs and several healed fractures, she
realizes that there will always be a need for people like
her. "I could make a difference, a real difference in
a child's life," she tells herself. "This baby would
never know about me. Still, because I had loved him, cared
about him, I was a part of him."
Harrison's
fallibility - along with her willingness to acknowledge her
shortcomings - is what makes her as good a foster mother as
she is. She admits to sometimes feeling jealous over a child's
continuing attachment to her neglectful mother. She admits
to liking some of the children in her care more than others.
And she even admits to not liking some of them at all - 6-year-old
Dan, for instance, who couldn't be left alone with other children
because he would try to molest them.
When
Dan finally moves in with a prospective adoptive family after
nearly two years in her home, Harrison is happy to see him
go. But she cries because she realizes that she has not changed
his life in any substantive way. "He had come to us with
what he was wearing and was leaving with a bike, some books
and puzzles, his trucks and Legos," she writes. "He
had a better wardrobe and toothbrush, but I wanted it to be
so much more: self-esteem and a sense of family, words for
how he was feeling, the ability to cry. ...After nearly two
years with us, I had only taught Dan more about what he already
knew: how to say good-bye."
Another
Side
In
her memoir, Like Family, Paula McLain tells another
side of the story - what it's like to be the child whom the
foster mother doesn't love, or even much like.
McClain
and her two sisters, one older and one younger, went into
foster care soon after their mother left for a movie and never
came home. (Years later, the girls would find that she had
moved to Michigan and built a new life.) Their grandmother
and then an aunt had taken care of them for a while but couldn't
commit for the long haul.
The
sisters' early years in care were tough. One foster family
was clearly in it for the money. Another was loving and kind,
but moved and had to give up the girls. The longest early
placement was with the unlikable Clapps. The girls' stay there
ended abruptly when McClain, then 7, finally told Mrs. Clapp
that Mr. Clapp had been molesting her for two years. "The
next day, she called [the social worker] to say we'd have
to be placed elsewhere immediately," McClain writes.
"She had back problems, chronic, incurable, and needed
quiet now, a good long rest."
The
girls spent the rest of their childhoods with a single foster
family, whom McClain calls the Lindberghs. A stable placement
like that is just about always the goal for children in long-term
foster care, yet often impossible to arrange, so the girls
were lucky. From the start, however, Hilde Lindbergh, the
foster mother, and McClain seemed to dislike each other. McClain
describes her foster mother as a "mom-sized armadillo,
all shell and no shelter. I simultaneously wanted her to love
me, and hated that I cared."
Apart
from occasional paddlings with a broom handle, which are,
of course, indefensible, Hilde Lindbergh seems to have provided
a decent home. McClain's complaints about her are really not
much different from those many teenage girls would make about
their biological mothers - too strict, too demanding, crazy.
A
Decent Home
And
except for an isolated, out-of-character attempt to kiss McClain
on the lips one birthday, Bub Lindbergh seems to have been
a terrific foster father. He buys each of the girls her own
pony, joins them in singalongs, builds them a backyard fort
and takes every opportunity to try to shore up their self-esteem.
"He wanted us girls to plan big—the bigger and broader
and least ordinary, the better," McClain writes.
By
the time she was 13, McClain writes, "their house felt
as much like home to me as anything I'd known. …I began
to believe that the Lindberghs were likely it for us, where
the marble had stopped on the parent roulette wheel. It was
a relief to think we wouldn't have to move again."
Each
of the sisters ended up staying with the Lindberghs until
she finished high school, and probably could have stayed longer
if she wanted. When McClain announced that she wanted to move
out, Bub gave her $500 to use as a deposit on a rental house.
Keep
Siblings Together
There
are many lessons in both books for both foster care workers
and youth workers who work with foster children—the need
for better screening of foster parents; the value of treating
foster parents as allies, not adversaries; the importance
of recognizing the deep hurt and anger that most foster children
feel somewhere deep inside. Perhaps the most important lesson
is the benefit of keeping siblings together.
"Every
time I had to endure a sleepless first night in another new
room, I could, because a few feet away, or behind a thin wall,
my sisters were curled, scratching their feet just like I
was, saying the tired thread of a prayer that Granny had taught
us as soon as we could talk," McClain writes near the
end of her foster care odyssey. "The world had happened
to us simultaneously."
Reading these books back to back, I was left wondering how
Paula McLain might have felt about her foster care experience
if she'd had Kathy Harrison as a foster mother.
|
