To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (19 page)

Tonya was removed from her home when she was five and someone caught on to her mother's cocaine habit. She doesn't remember much about the first foster house except that she started wetting the bed, and she and her brother, William, had to leave after a week—probably, she said, because of the soiled sheets. Next, they went into an apartment with a family that spoke Spanish, and nobody could communicate at all. Tonya continued the bed-wetting, and after two weeks they were driven to a third family in the projects, with “a nice lady.” One day, this lady drove the kids to the foster agency, and Tonya's mom was there, to take them home. By this point, Tonya said, she was just like “OK, whatever,” her six-year-old skin thickened and her mind cool and detached, more prepared for the next unanticipated hurdle.

Bed-wetting in a six- or seven-year-old can be a sign of trauma, or a stressful change in environment. (The literature suggests child abuse, a death in the family, or the birth of a new sibling.)
In the span of a few months, Tonya had moved four times, acquired and lost several siblings, and then landed back at home again. The bed-wetting subsided, but she started skipping school. Because of this, after a year or so, Tonya and her brother were back in the system again.

“We went to a lady's house who used to beat us,” Tonya said, her eyes intermittently flicking to some cartoons on TV. She said she didn't want to tell anyone about the abuse; she just wanted to stay in one place long enough for her mom to get her back like the last time around. But then, on a Christmas visit, her mom saw marks. “She was like, ‘What's them scratches on your face?' And that night, they just took us out of that house—we didn't even get our clothes or nothing. They just took us to another home.”

The new place was worse. The family was fostering an older boy, Tonya said, who used to bring her to the basement and molest her. She was eight or nine by then and knew how to keep mum. But in a kind of quiet rebellion or attempt to reach out, she started stealing from her classmates, just little things: pencils and trinkets. “I had developed sticky fingers. I don't know. I just wanted to be friends with people.” But she didn't know how.

Throughout this time, Tonya's mother was visiting the kids and promising she'd get them back. But once again, Tonya and her brother were moved to a new place, at night, in a van, like stolen merchandise themselves. Every night in every city, children are buckled into vans or police cars (like criminals), as wards of the state (like criminals), and driven to strangers' houses and told to behave. Children explain this to themselves in a myriad of ways: often, because they're children, it's because of something they did. (“I wet the bed, I was stealing at school.”) Often, the reality is bureaucratic (the foster home was meant to be only temporary, the foster parents needed different licensing). And almost always, the kids get no real explanation.

In Tonya's case, the move meant a new family with a new teenage boy—this one with a fighting fetish. He forced Tonya and another little girl in the home to beat each other up, while he watched—rooting for one or the other, in turns. In school, the sticky-fingers behavior escalated to hallway fights, mirroring what was happening in the foster home. It was Tonya's fifth school in as many years, and she “didn't like to be picked on.” Still, Tonya said the foster mom wasn't so bad; she took Tonya to a hair salon for Easter and bought her new Air Jordans, and once, when she caught the teenager picking on the younger kids, she hit him and said, “You will leave my kids alone!” Tonya smiled at the memory. “I felt like I was wanted because she said ‘my kids.' She was including us, and it felt like we were a part of something—but then we had to leave her.”

This time, Tonya knew the reason: the foster mom hadn't been taking the kids to therapy and got docked for noncompliance. Back to the van—and to a home in Mount Vernon—a city just north of the Bronx that Tonya said felt like the country, with “mad houses, and a room that was banging, with a canopy and shit.” It was so foreign, and so isolating, Tonya said, that she and her brother used to tear up the place just to see if they could.

They could, and they stayed—for four years. Until Tonya's mom found a new boyfriend and was pregnant again—and thus appeared stable enough for the authorities to return her children home. Tonya was in seventh grade and fistfighting on a regular basis, because she liked it, because she was good at it, because it helped her articulate aggression indirectly and in ways that wouldn't really matter, at least for a while.

Tonya's six-year foster care “drift” began the year Clinton's ASFA was passed, with its supposed fifteen-month cutoff for kids like her. So why didn't she get adopted or go back home earlier? Tonya doesn't know, and the case managers who do are notoriously tight-lipped regarding client privacy. Likely, her mother showed continued signs of improvement, and the drift slowed to a drag, with both the hope that the mom would get better and the fear that nobody would adopt a preteen with a record of violence.

 

As Tonya and I got closer, she confessed that she had an escape valve from the tight restrictions in the Green household that the other kids didn't. The escape was through her mom, who lived in the Bronx and still had visitation rights.

“I live a double life, basically,” Tonya said casually to me one afternoon when we were alone in the living room. She was watching TV again—this time, the Disney remake of
The Parent Trap
, a movie about rich girls duping their parents and masterminding an idealized family for themselves. Tonya viewed her mom less as a parental figure and more as a respite; when she went for weekend visits, she could party as much as she wanted to. Her mom was often not even home at all. “My mom allows me to do whatever I want—it's like going on a crazy road trip. And then I come back to reality, listen to rules.”

Freedom was something Tonya had a lot of in the four years before she came to the Greens, when she was living with her biological mom. “At first my mom was really strict, but then she started drinking and she got looser.” Tonya didn't mind the liberty that came with alcohol, but her mom got meaner too. “She used to call me all types of bitches for no reason. And she'd say, ‘You know what? I'm getting tired of seeing you all. Go outside or something.' So I did. It would be like eleven o'clock at night.”

ACS removed Tonya again and sent her to the Greens. Now, Tonya said, she was just using her mom's apartment as a crash pad—an easy place to party on the weekends. The Friday before we talked, in fact, her mom had entered another inpatient detox program, so that coming weekend Tonya would have the place entirely to herself. Because she was technically allowed these weekend parental visits, the Greens would never know about it.

Did she think her mom would actually get sober? “No,” Tonya said, laughing. “She just complies with the program because she's so damn smart she can fool all these people into believing she's doing what she's got to do. That's why we're allowed these weekend visits.”

Tonya was two months shy of eighteen when we talked, so if she wanted to, she could drop out of foster care on her birthday and live at her mother's place full-time. But, she said, she wouldn't do it—mainly because her mother can't give her what she needs or wants, which is money. That she can get directly from the agency. New York City extends foster care until twenty-one, and Tonya planned to go the distance.

“You get $80 a month allowance, plus $20 more once you hit sixteen, and $5 more for every year after that. So I get $105 a month. Plus I'm a team mentor, which means I talk to kids at night if they need to talk,” she said, and that pays too. What if nobody calls? “I just say they did and put it on my time sheet. The hours add up—no questions asked.”

Tonya used people—the Greens, her mother, her teachers and shrinks—in a careful game of cover-up and self-advancement. As a metaphor for her survival instincts, she turned again to money. “It's me before you,” she said, poking carefully with a Q-tip at an infection in her ear that she refused to get checked out. Tonya hated going to doctors. “Like if I have a dollar and you ask me for ninety cents, I'm going to say no. You can have a dime and go ask a fool for ninety cents, because they're a fool. You give a person the majority of you, and what do you have left?”

Tonya was going to work the system, and everybody in it, to her advantage. Tonya wasn't like Chanel or Fatimah, who wanted to get adopted; she was smarter than all that. Besides, she told me, she heard you got a laptop computer from the agency if you were still a foster kid on your eighteenth birthday.

 

Tonya's tumble through multiple foster homes was typical, as was her attempt to control her environment by working as many angles as she could. Foster parents like Bruce Wright in Georgia may complain that system kids act crazy and tear up his plasma TVs, and kids like Tonya may in fact steal things, get in fights, and trash their nice new rooms with the canopy beds. But the reason behind this behavior isn't crazy at all: it's a predictable response to their unpredictable past.

When a child has been screamed at, or hit, or sexually molested, she processes the trauma as a sequence of cause and effect; she'll look for ways to modify her behavior so the adult won't do it again. But because abuse is random, chaotic, and out of the child's control, kids can also learn to
provoke
the adults around them in an effort to direct outcomes. If you're going to be abused anyway, the maltreated brain reasons, you might as well decide
when
.

A kid in a foster home may be accustomed to chaos or anger or screaming, and the trauma of relocation can make him especially desperate for familiarity. So he'll push to make the “nice” home familiar, to make the new parents mad and to get the hitting or the screaming out of the way, and to place himself, the child, back in control.

Mary Keane, the foster and adoptive mom to all the Rosario teenagers, told me the story of an eight-year-old boy at her agency who was famous for getting thrown out of foster families. Wherever he went, he looked for the one issue that would make his new parents crazy; he'd find their particular hot button and then press. Hard.

“He was always looking for the limit. If he figured out one foster mom hated cursing, he'd start cursing. If another one said, ‘You can do anything, but don't steal,' then he'd steal,” Mary said.

This makes sense to me, even for kids who haven't experienced foster care or any real trauma. My two-year-old niece can sense that my laptop computer is off-limits, so this is the toy she most wants to bang against the radiator. Teenagers from conservative families flaunt new tattoos; rich kids wear rags; the preacher's son sells dope behind the 7-Eleven. We've all pushed and poked and tested at some time to say, “Will you love me anyway?”

Foster kids usually believe they caused their biological family to tumble from orbit, so of course they could dislodge a foster family too. Foster kids have found the weak spot in a universal law about parents and children; they'll keep pushing for that weak spot again and again until someone stands up and says,
“I will love you anyway. Stay.”

The problem with child welfare, Mary says, is this: “It's a tradition in foster care—that whenever you're bad, you have to go.” Even when you land with parents like Bruce and Allyson Green who want to keep you.

One afternoon, when I was sitting in the car with Bruce and his son Jaleel, I witnessed a particularly heartbreaking scene. We were parked in the shade of a leafy tree, waiting for Dominique to come out of some appointment or another, when a chubby, shy-looking kid ambled up to the front passenger window. Bruce rolled it down.

“Hi, Dad,” the boy said. He looked about fifteen, though Bruce said he was younger, and he had swirls shaved into his closely shorn hair.

“Hey, Clarence,”
Bruce chirped, a huge smile on his face. “How are you?”

Clarence muttered one-word answers to all of Bruce's questions: school was “bad”; the new foster home was “fine”; but when Bruce asked if he missed the family, Clarence's eyes filled. He looked down at the van's open window and picked at the glass in the frame.

“Clarence was with us for three and a half months,” Bruce said to me. “But he was a runner. He took his bike on the subway and ran away. Right, Clarence?”

“No. Four,” Clarence answered.

“What?” Bruce asked. Jaleel watched intently from the back seat.

“I was with you for four months. From November seventeenth to March sixteenth.”

“Well. And you'll always be my son,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “And I love you.”

Clarence, openly crying and half punching at his eyes, walked around to the driver's side to hug Bruce. “We'll see you Sunday?” Bruce asked. Clarence still showed up at the Greens' for the free biweekly haircuts, donated by a barber friend of theirs.

“Yeah, Dad, I love you,” Clarence mumbled, into Bruce's shoulder. And he opened up the back door to sock Jaleel in the stomach. Jaleel laughed as Clarence loped away.

Clarence was more than a runner. He had been in five foster homes before the Greens', as well as a psychiatric hospital. He used to tear up classrooms in his junior high school, arriving early to rip bulletin boards off the walls and destroy furniture. When he ran away, he left a note threatening to kill the family, so by law Bruce had to act. Because Clarence threatened violence, he had to be placed with a different agency, in a “therapeutic home”—with parents who had had more hours of psychiatric training. Still, Bruce said, “You don't stop being a dad just because the kid's not in your house,” and he welcomed Clarence back for visits anytime.

 

The law requires foster children to be housed in the least restrictive home possible, which means ideally, kids begin their tenure in a foster family like the Greens'. When they act out, and test, the parents can send them back to the agency and the case manager will decide: Does the child need more supervision in a therapeutic home? Sometimes, if a child has already filtered through a lot of homes (therapeutic or otherwise) or if he has exhibited aggression or psychiatric problems, families won't take him, and then it's time for an institution. Sometimes, a case manager will just decide it's time for an institution right away.