To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (28 page)

To hear Tonya tell it, Allyson was all love and “How are you, baby?” when she called her from the agency. And Bruce yelled, “Don't move!” into the phone and rushed to the Bronx in the family van.

Allyson had a sterner version of things. “I told her that what she did was unacceptable,” Allyson told me on the phone, two days after Tonya returned, “and that our curfew was reinstated. She can't have any more weekend visits with her mom, and if she breaks the rules, she can go back to the agency and find somewhere else to live.”

If that happened, I thought, Tonya would probably return to her mom's place, despite the way she believed her mom's substance use affected her own. She had lived there, after all, for about half of her eighteen years.

Mike Arsham, the executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project in New York, told me that as foster kids gain their independence and thus run out of options, they often return to their birth parents. “ACS and the court seem oblivious to these persistent relationships because the case record says something different. Yet it is not uncommon at CWOP to see women raising the children of children to whom they lost their rights years prior,” Arsham said. “The system lives in denial of this reality.”

I've certainly seen kids reconnect with their biological parents beneath the agency's radar. For example, my foster daughter, Christina, to my ongoing dismay, would repeatedly visit her mother and return shipwrecked and furious, nicking her arms with a razor in self-contempt and confusion. And even though Dominique believed her mother had long since passed away, she'd still wander past her mom's old apartment in Coney Island, “just to look.” I know another Domineque, in California, who's serving twenty-four years in a maximum-security prison for armed robbery. It wasn't the foster care that screwed her up, she thought, though that had delivered its share of traumas. It was the desire to understand her own mother, to really
find
her, on some primal level—and to do that, Domineque had to do the things her mother had done. She had to commit the same crimes, ingest the same drugs, feel the same terrible way about herself, to locate her mom inside. Just like Tonya, she had to go back to her mom.

The agencies and the foster parents (myself included) don't know how to manage what every single foster child seems to need—that need to go back. Because, whether physically or psychologically, they will go back to their parents and what hurt them, if only “just to look,” as Dominique says. We need to get better at this part of the foster care trajectory because that journey back is land-mined for self-destruction.

 

The next time I really got to sit down and talk with Fatimah Green, a full year and a half had passed since her adoption. She wanted to meet me at the far corner of DeKalb, opposite the house, because she wasn't living there anymore. She had moved in with her “whack” mom. The adoption—while technically finalized—had fallen apart. But she needed to go back to the Greens' and pick up one last thing—her mom's drawings, which still hung on the walls. She wanted me to go with her.

I was happy enough to act as a buffer for Fatimah's art heist. I didn't understand what had happened in the adoption breakdown; I only knew she'd been missing for the past six months and then turned up at her mom's. In the year before she ran away, we had barely spoken; mostly, she just wasn't around when I came by the house, and she never returned my calls. In that time, Allyson told me, her grades were slipping; Bruce told me she had become “more materialistic” and was picking fights with him. Once I spotted her on the way to the Laundromat wheeling a cart stuffed with clothes, her hair tied back with a bandanna. She gave a tired wave and pushed on but didn't want to talk. Another time I caught a few minutes with her at the Baptist church that the family had recently joined, one Sunday that Allyson invited me along. Fatimah whispered that things had been “pretty bad.” In the past week, she said, she slept at three different friends' houses for three different nights “as an experiment” to see how other people lived.

Fatimah knew how other people lived. She was a foster kid, with twenty-one placements in her past. But I couldn't remind her of this because we were in church and were supposed to be quiet. And we couldn't talk about it later, because then Fatimah ran away for good.

We met on the corner one morning in January. Fatimah had lost weight since the last time I'd seen her, and she was wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans, with a thin black trench coat, cinched at the waist. The SpongeBob necklace was gone. Her teeth chattered as she clacked up to the door in her low-heeled boots; it was freezing outside.

Allyson was expecting us, and she barely glanced up from her place on the couch where she was busy stuffing Anthony into his baby snow parka. “We're about to go out,” she said, leaning her face up for my greeting kiss on the cheek. “Happy New Year.” Fatimah disappeared, hunting for a bag in which to carry out her mother's artwork.

Anthony, looking like a puffy marshmallow doll, reached for Fatimah as she whizzed by. “Feemah!” he said.

Fatimah paused. “How's he know my name?” she asked, angling toward Allyson. “You been showing him my picture or something and saying that's your sister?”

Allyson ignored her. Anthony's and Allen's adoptions still hadn't been formalized, despite the latest promise of the prior November. Allyson told me the boys' maternal aunt had suddenly turned up, wanting to take the kids, “but the courts said no way. They're staying here.”

The surprise appearance of a biological family member had stalled things and inspired the judge to ask that one last newspaper ad be placed for the biological mom since her rights, at least for Anthony, had not been terminated. The mom hadn't responded to the ad, Allyson said, and the termination would happen in three days. And then, finally, the adoption proceedings could really begin. Allyson sighed. “I've had to become more faithful since the kids came to me.”

I know, I told her; I'd seen it.

Even Allyson's grandmother, who always featured strongly in her dreams, was now delivering more direct religious communication. “The other night, I had a dream where my grandmother brought me a black box and on it was written ‘Romans 4:6–16.' I didn't know this verse,” she said, settling back into the couch. Fatimah had come back into the living room with her mother's artwork wrapped and bagged, and she perched on the edge of the loveseat. Allyson stared hard at Fatimah. “At the time of the dream, I was very worried about this or that child running away.”

Fatimah didn't flinch. The verse was about Abraham, Allyson explained. “The verse said that righteousness doesn't come to you by what you do; it comes to you by faith. Against all hope, Abraham became the father of many nations,” she said. Anthony squirmed, overheating in his coat. “That freed me up to know that I can continue in my faith, and God will handle the work. My calling is to have faith and to take care of the children in that way.”

Allyson noticed Anthony and scooped him up. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go pick Sekina and Charles and Bruce and Jaleel up from school.”

She waited at the front door for Fatimah and me to go out before her; it was clear we wouldn't be staying in the house alone. As we bent to gather our things, Fatimah whispered, “How's she gonna pick Sekina up when she's on her way here? How come she doesn't see
that
in her dreams?”

It was true; as soon as we hit the stoop, we saw Sekina on the corner, her hair newly bleached white and pink and shaved up the back of her head. Fatimah ran up to her, happily shrieking her name.

“Her hair looks
horrible
,” Fatimah said, once Allyson had pulled away and Sekina had disappeared again around the corner. She pulled out her cell phone to show me the dozens of Twitter messages the two had been exchanging all day, as well as the night before. A few were from two in the morning. “Sekina didn't come home last night, and she wasn't in school. How's she in school if she's on Twitter with me all the time?” Fatimah was thirsty and she paused to take a sip from a grapefruit juice I had in my bag. She'd never tasted grapefruit juice before. “Ugghh! That's disgusting! Anyway, how are Miss Green's dreams real if she doesn't know about her own daughter?”

It was a complaint I'd heard often, from Fatimah, Dominique, and Tonya: they said Sekina also snuck out and broke house rules, but because she was a biological daughter, her parents looked the other way. I never knew how much jealousy was tingeing these grievances, but I had certainly seen Sekina flaunting her status. In any case, Fatimah believed all of Allyson's dreams were lies, manufactured to elevate anxiety in her children and keep them in line.

Fatimah's loss of faith in Allyson's integrity was only part of the reason she ran away. The final straw came when both Bruce and Allyson forgot the anniversary of her adoption.

“On June seventeenth, the day I had been adopted in the previous year, they didn't even remember it. They didn't say anything about me, about it, or anything. That's the anniversary and you don't remember that? So that's the day I ran away,” Fatimah said. “My friend, she told me about a quick way to get money. It was during Regents week, and I would have done so good if I had gone, but I didn't.”

The Regents are the state examinations that every New York high schooler must pass to be granted a diploma and considered for college. They're administered in June, August, and January, and by the time Fatimah and I met, she had missed every one.

By this point we'd hailed a cab and were heading toward the ritzier part of DeKalb, in Fort Greene, to a South African restaurant Fatimah had been to once. Fatimah lowered her voice, so the driver couldn't hear. For those missing six months, Fatimah had gotten herself into heartbreaking trouble, which she now doesn't want to talk about anymore. When she did talk about it that day, her voice was monotone, her former lisp almost entirely gone.

I must have looked sad as Fatimah spoke, because she told me not to make her cry. “You're supposed to pretend that it's OK,” she said. “What I do is: everything that robs me I smile about it. That's what I've been doing all my life. It stops me from crying. It stops me from getting mad or angry. I always smile and laugh and try to make people happy.”

 

When Fatimah got sick of the trouble she'd found, she called her mother.

“I guess I missed her,” she said. Or she missed the idea of her. When Fatimah's mom said, “I know you been going through something; why don't you come and stay with me?” she took it as a sign. Maybe her mom had changed; she'd been sober for eight years, though Fatimah conceded she'd relapsed the year before. And maybe this was the chance to save her little sister, Kimberly,
who was eight years old and lived at home. At least, with Kimberly, she'd have something to live for.

Fatimah pulled out her phone to show me a picture of Kimberly. She said their mother was either depressed or barking orders, and both were ineffective at getting Kimberly to bed on time or to do her homework. Fatimah felt it was up to her to get food in the cupboards and to walk Kimberly to and from her elementary school; she'd recently applied for food stamps because her mother had been too depressed to bother. She also had to prod her mother to attend her AA and NA meetings because, after the relapse, ACS was closely monitoring the family.

“You know, I had plans but it's hard for me to—I'm struggling with money,” Fatimah said. She hadn't been back to high school in months but planned to re-enroll in February. She didn't want to write her book anymore, now that it didn't have such a happy ending, but she was still interested in becoming a writer; her newest idea was to create her own magazine about international families. “My intention is to travel across the world to report on how families live in Afghanistan, how families live in Uruguay. It'll be a magazine about the different kinds of chances people take.”

But for now, Fatimah had to focus on more immediate crises. “I have to feed Kimberly. I have to feed myself and, like, make sure that everybody's happy. That's why I go crazy,” Fatimah said, playing with her new hair weave that cascaded to her shoulders. “Sometimes I just want to go in the bathroom and cry, but it's like I told my little sister: don't ever cry.”

Fatimah felt bad about dispensing this last bit of sisterly advice. “Now, when she gets hit, she laughs about it. In class, the teacher says, ‘Stop talking,' and she laughs. When she's yelled at, she thinks it's funny. And now they really want her to go into a facility for it because she's acting so crazy.”

Fatimah had been worried about other things too. The other day, she said, she caught Kimberly torturing the dog. She had dragged him into the bathtub and was burning him with the tap water. She also found Kimberly sifting through porn on the Internet, which Fatimah thought was a little intense for eight years old.

But Fatimah didn't have many places to turn for help. ACS was the only agency she knew of with resources for kids, and she viewed them as a terrorizing force, one that had pushed her through twenty-one bad homes and was casing the apartment as we spoke. If Fatimah talked to anybody official, they'd likely tip off ACS. Fatimah's biological mother was no help; she was teetering on her own kind of edge. And her adoptive mother, Fatimah felt, didn't have any answers either. Since Fatimah had left DeKalb, Fatimah said, Allyson never called her, even though she had left her new phone number several times.

“She's just focused on the babies. And scripture. Even if you ask a question about something, she'll answer, ‘What does the Bible say?' No matter what it is. I have a headache. She'll say the reason's in the Bible.” Fatimah rushed her words. “The only thing she does is send me fucking Gospel texts.”