To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (12 page)

Brooklyn's Family Courthouse is a boxy building the color of stone on the corner of Jay and Myrtle in downtown Brooklyn. Inside, the five family court judges can oversee upwards of fifty cases a day; like the caseworkers and lawyers who represent the kids and parents, the judges are overworked and don't have time to mull over nuance. They've seen what works and doesn't in many families, and they often apply quick formulas to complicated family groups that result in a lifetime of positive bonds, or fractures and separations. And these formulas often revolve around drugs.

On one wintry November Tuesday, I spent the day with Lawrence Robinson, a lawyer with the Brooklyn Family Defense Project, which provides attorneys and legal counsel to about half of the several thousand cases that come through Brooklyn's family court each year.
Lawrence has since left the job, but at the time he had a rotating caseload of around a hundred clients, and when he was in court, he could attend five or six trials a day. He worked every weekend and kept extra suits and ties in his office, for the times he spent the night. He earned $51,000 a year.

On the day we spent together, Lawrence had five trials on his calendar. Two were with a “good” judge, two were with a “bad” one, and one case was being settled out of court, because everyone was amenable to the case plan, and both sides needed to simply agree on the details. With so few judges, Lawrence explained, each one developed a reputation; some are known for siding with ACS and keeping kids in foster care or terminating parental rights (these are the bad ones in his eyes), and others are more likely to try to keep biological families together.

Relatively speaking, very few parents are ever brought to trial for crimes committed against their children.
For one thing, there's the widespread sentiment that losing their kids, even temporarily, is punishment in itself. And then there's the practical reality of criminal court: for a person to be convicted, his crime must first be proved. Child abuse is considered a crime against the state
rather than against the child, so a state attorney's office decides which parents to prosecute based on which cases they think could succeed. Mostly, these cases don't stand up well; there's often too little evidence, and child witnesses are notoriously challenged on their credibility. Also, a child has to testify against her parent, which can be traumatizing, and the parent, like any citizen, has the right to self-defense—which can lead to brutal cross-examinations.
Often criminal prosecutors don't want to put these kids through any more hell.

This means that nearly all child abuse and neglect cases are settled in family court (and even after a criminal case a child's placement is determined there too). In family court, protocol and precedence rule the day. For instance, Lawrence says, judges often automatically order parents to undergo drug testing as soon as they show up in front of his bench—regardless of the circumstances that brought them there.

At one of Lawrence's afternoon cases, a family investigation had been launched because of a phone call from a toddler's grandparents. These grandparents didn't like their daughter's live-in boyfriend, so, with the hope of getting him thrown out, they called protective services. The courtroom for this case felt like a bad wedding, with the aisle dividing the two parties in the beige windowless room. The mother, her lawyers, and a few of her friends sat on the benches on one side of the court, and the grandparents, the ACS lawyers, and witnesses sat grim-faced and rigid on the other. Before we had even entered the room, the lawyers threw barbs at one another.

“You sure you don't want to just drop this case?” the lawyer for ACS, a man in a rumpled suit clutching a pile of folders, said to Lawrence.

“You sure you don't? My client
did
leave her child with a sober adult,” Lawrence shot back.

“I'm sure he wasn't sober when she left,” the ACS lawyer said.

“You don't know that,” Lawrence retorted sharply, and entered the courtroom.

When ACS responded to the grandparents' call and went to investigate the apartment, I learned during the trial, only the boyfriend was home. The door was unlocked, and the boyfriend was passed out on the bed, with the baby sleeping next to him. The cop who was with the ACS investigator was on the witness stand.

“How many beer bottles did you see in the room?” the ACS lawyer asked the cop.

“I don't know, there were some,” the cop answered.

“Did you see any on the floor?”

“Maybe.” The cop looked up to the ceiling, as if searching his memory.

“Did you see any on the windowsill?”

“Yes, maybe two.”

“OK,” the lawyer said. “So there were four or five beer bottles in the room with the baby.”

“Yes,” the cop answered, still looking a little unsure.

The case that day was actually a follow-up to the first hearing, held shortly after the investigation, when the child was removed from the home. At that time, it was determined that the boyfriend was unsafe, and he was ordered to move out. The mother, who had no prior convictions, displayed all of her child's medical records, and had never been accused of abuse or neglect by anyone aside from her parents, was required to take a drug test as a matter of course. She tested positive for marijuana.

The mother, Lupe,
was pretty, with rosy cheeks and lip gloss, chubby in her maternity jeans and her peach cable-knit sweater. Unlike some of the other parents Lawrence represents, Lupe met Lawrence at his office half an hour before the trial to talk about strategy and provide him with even more medical records to prove her maternal diligence. She had followed the instructions from the last hearing to the letter: she had thrown the boyfriend out and not seen him again, she had attended drug treatment and graduated, and her urine test was now clean. She claimed the grandparents' call to ACS was based on an old family feud, and she rarely smoked pot—only with friends sometimes to relax, and never in front of the baby. She was a good mom, she said, and she was desperate to get her child back.

Still, the details of the trial focused on the long-gone boyfriend.

“Did your boyfriend tell you how many beers he would drink?” the ACS lawyer asked Lupe when she took the stand.

“Did he tell you if he preferred marijuana?”

“Did he tell you how many beers he drank when he smoked marijuana?”

“Did he tell you what his drink of choice was?”

“Did he tell you what his drink of choice was and if he would drink that when he smoked marijuana?”

“Did he drink his drink of choice along with beer when he smoked marijuana?”

The questions felt endless. This mother was no longer involved with the person in question, and I was confused: why wasn't ACS trying to reunite mother and child when clearly this mother had jumped through all her hoops and then some? I thought about friends of mine who had also smoked pot here and there while raising children. The difference was, my friends' parents didn't think to use Child Protective Services as a weapon in their personal family battles. And my friends didn't get caught.

Was it ACS's job to fight against this mother, on the chance that this child could be harmed, and Lawrence's job to fight for her because he was paid to do so, and the judge's job to see the whole picture and make the right decision? But judges see fifty cases a day—how whole could their picture possibly be?

This judge was a “good” one in Lawrence's eyes, and he ordered the baby back into Lupe's care, as long as she continued to take her drug tests and come up clean. Lupe's eyes welled, and she turned to hug her friend. Her parents walked stiffly from the courtroom.

5

F
OR PEOPLE LOOKING TO
adopt kids out of foster care,
drug-addicted
can be a very good set of words. They were for Shawn Wilson (no relation to Steve), who, along with his partner, Martin, was hoping to adopt a baby they would later name Noble through Episcopal Social Services of New York. Shawn and Martin picked Noble up when he was six days old, after Episcopal told them about the mother. Shawn was ecstatic.

“They told me she was a homeless woman who had been living on the streets, who had been doing drugs, with a history of mental illness, and I was like, ‘Yes, yes, yes! Thank you, God! She's not going to be able to get him back!'”

Shawn hadn't always felt this way. Like most people who consider adoption, he originally imagined a young, healthy birth mother for his child. “My vision of the perfect mom was this: she's sixteen, she's on her way to college, because she wants to be a doctor, but she accidentally got pregnant,” Shawn said, laughing lightly at the memory. Shawn is a strikingly handsome African American man in his mid-thirties, with a narrow face and a shiny shaved head. He can seem both elegant and silly at once somehow, as if he belongs behind a university podium, but also on the playground rumpusing around with a bunch of kids. “She takes all her vitamins, and all I have to do is talk to her mom and dad and it'll be just like
Juno
!”

It wasn't like
Juno
; Shawn and Martin ultimately chose a path that he now wishes more parents would consider—New York City alone processes about sixty newborns a year who need adoptive parents. Noble, like many of these babies, was born with cocaine in his system, but so far Shawn says there haven't been any real problems. I met Noble when he was two, and he was an outgoing and friendly child, running around with a shirt on his head that he called his hair and eating pizza from both fists. As far as developmental milestones go, Noble may be slightly behind, but Shawn says he isn't concerned.

“I use those milestones as a loose guideline as to what I should expect from Noble,” Shawn said, emphasizing the
loose
. “Your kid's gonna walk. Your kid's gonna talk. We've been doing that for millions of years! I disagree with a lot of that milestone stuff too—because it talks very little about empathy, sympathy. What about a milestone when your kid can have empathy for another kid, or not lash out? Those are the kind of milestones I want to create.”

Noble's first clear words were
thank you
. The only vestige of trauma from his time in utero, Shawn thinks, might be the way that he eats. As with the pizza, Noble always has to pack his food into both fists, then suck just a little bit out and close the fist up tight again. “Someone who's doing a lot of crack is not eating a lot,” Shawn theorized. “So when something came down the pipeline, Noble was eating as much as he could—holding, saving. He spent months not knowing when the next food was coming, so now, so what if he has food in each hand? Eventually he'll know he doesn't have to do this.”

 

I first met Shawn and Noble Wilson at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in downtown Manhattan, at a recruitment event for prospective foster parents. Noble made a great poster child as he sat on Shawn's lap at the front of the room and Shawn took questions; he was cute and snuggly, gazing up at Shawn and then grinning out at the audience of the fifty or so adults. Stationed around the perimeter of the room were about a dozen tables manned by the employees of ACS's various foster agencies; the tables were cluttered with brochures and bowls of candy, free pens and clipboards to sign up for more information. They looked like tables for credit card offers, or cable TV.

For most of the agency workers, this was their first time recruiting at a community center or at anything gay; more commonly they looked for fresh foster parents at churches or welfare offices. But they were all excited to be expanding their reach, as foster agencies are always fairly desperate for new, and better, parents. Nationwide, there's a shortfall.
Some states—such as Pennsylvania and Oklahoma—have roughly twice as many foster kids as they do available parents.

What the agencies offer the prospective parents, generally, is confusing: there are benefits, but the drawbacks are built right in, which may be a reason for the shortage in supply. So it may be time to rethink the way we recruit foster and adoptive parents and teach them about what they're in for. This is the junction where there's so much need, and where so much goes so terribly wrong.

To become a foster parent in most parts of the country, you have to take some state-sponsored parenting classes, have a social worker visit your home and verify that you have the requisite space and a bed, and undergo a criminal background check.
Then you get the benefits.

Front and center is the money (hence the recruiting in welfare offices), but it isn't enough. Current monthly pay rates range from $229 in Nebraska to $869 in Washington, DC, with a national average of $568 for a sixteen-year-old kid.
This falls far short of the estimated real cost of $790.
Still, the money's a draw for some parents, as nationwide, foster parents seem to be more likely than not to live close to or below the poverty line.
But money's also sort of embarrassing to talk about; after all, there's something anathema, something maybe even biologically repulsive, about the idea of getting
paid
to love another human being.

So then there's the love benefit to becoming a foster parent, but that's a mixed message too. Simply stated, you can get a kid (there are plenty available) and you can love him, and he might love you back. But don't get too attached. If you want to adopt the child, be warned: the birth parents could reappear. And if you're only fostering, keep your front door open and your heart locked tight, because these kids come and go.

Which leaves the last argument for signing up, and perhaps the weakest. It's the reason foster care agencies recruit in churches. You become a foster parent because it's the right thing to do. When I'm feeling especially nihilistic, I think this argument fails because it clashes with our deeply grooved notions of ownership and industry; we don't want children if they can't be
ours
, and we expect to be rewarded, in the end, for our hard work. Other times I think no child will truly believe she's part of a family if she knows, at heart, she's a charity case.