To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (6 page)

One of Rittner's parental terminations was with a mother with schizophrenia who threatened to kill her daughters with a knife. A second had already killed one child and severely injured another. Another mother dropped her kids off at the child welfare office, had coffee with Dr. Rittner, and simply walked away; and the fourth just disappeared. Dr. Rittner believes most parents want to do right by their kids, and it's the state's job to help them do that. Removing children, she believes, is often damaging to the kids, and it's always demoralizing to the parents—often taking away whatever will they had to get better in the first place. When Rittner told a variation of this story to a room full of social workers at a conference in New York City, she received a huge round of applause.

For several years, Rittner had worked on a parental termination unit, and she said her decisions were fueled by experience: the biological families stayed connected whether she terminated rights or not. They found each other on Facebook; they reunited after high school graduations; and so on. Her approach, she said, was to motivate parents to be the parents they inherently
wanted
to be.

For me, Rittner's approach is too idealistic, as I've known people who don't love the children they have, or who are so broken themselves they can't access that love in this lifetime, no matter the resources you throw at them. For me, it's nearly impossible to judge a parent's ultimate potential by her words, or even her actions, because we can't truly peer inside the wreckage.

 

And yet, some are forced to judge. Which brings me to Oliver, my friend's baby. I don't know if Oliver should have been placed in foster care. I do know removals are based less on actual abuse and more on the experience of the individual investigator, and the culture of the agency, and what's been on the news this month or year. Also, Oliver technically wasn't earmarked for investigation because of suspected abuse, but rather
neglect:
his mom hadn't been giving him his medication or giving him healthy milk. Again, more than 75 percent of all child maltreatment cases in this country are neglect cases (as opposed to roughly 15 percent physical abuse, and 10 percent sexual abuse).
Many child welfare reform advocates argue that
neglect
is just another word for poverty. Kids come into care because the food stamps ran out, or the parents were kicked off Medicaid, or somebody had to work and leave the baby with an older sibling.

If I read Oliver's story on paper, or saw his mother, Caitlin, in some courtroom, if Steve and Erin were generic and faceless foster parents and not my dear friends, I might agree with Dr. Rittner and be on Caitlin's side. Besides, I know the statistics: children do better with their (even marginal) birth parents than with foster parents.
Drugs alone aren't usually a reason to remand a child, and Caitlin had been showing all the signs of getting better; I believe the state should support such progress.

 

And still. In August 2008, I found myself flying out to Austin to support an old friend who was facing the loss of a child. We sat in the living room, on the wide-planked wood floor with the sun streaming in on walls painted pale green and cornflower blue, and talked about Oliver's permanency hearing coming up in two weeks. At this hearing, a judge would decide his home. Oliver marched around with a toy shovel in his hand, oblivious. Steve watched him, and I watched Steve simply slump his shoulders and cry.

Steve, Erin, Oliver, and Wilson live in East Austin, in a neighborhood of bungalow-style cottages from the forties painted in wild shades of turquoise and pink. There's a taqueria on the corner, and Wilson's daycare, named Habibi's (“beloved” in Arabic) Hutch, is a few blocks away. It's the kind of place that sends kids home covered in mud or paint from a day of playing, and where Wilson is indulged in acting the superhero or in pretending that the juice he's drinking is really pee, so he can scream in delight and gross everybody out.

When Erin picked me up from the airport on a Friday night, it was nearly midnight, but she had to drive back to the local Moose Lodge where she and some friends were stenciling lettering and a moose's head onto the side of the building. Erin is a graphic designer with her own firm, but even with two kids and a full-time business, she has time to indulge her great sense of camp.

Early the next morning, Erin trooped off with Wilson to actually paint the lodge (Wilson loves paint), and Steve settled in with me to talk.

“The mom signed away her rights on a
napkin
—that should have been our first red flag,” Steve said, handing me a cup of coffee. “Still, it was notarized, so we didn't worry about it too much.”

We drank our coffee and the sun made dappled patterns on the bright living room rug. Steve continued. “Right after we got him, they warned us that sometimes the investigators can get a little idealistic about taking the kids away. Our social worker started saying, ‘Hopefully this will work out, but sometimes it doesn't,'” Steve said, catching Oliver as he tumbled into his lap. He said that perhaps he and Erin were overconfident because of the way things had worked out with Wilson, which is to say, without a hitch. They had found out about Wilson through a friend—a teenage girl was pregnant and looking for smart, sensitive parents to raise her child. She didn't want to go through an agency, and when she met Steve and Erin, she was thrilled. Although Child Protective Services had never seen a case where the parents made the agreements outside their jurisdiction, they approved the arrangement and stamped the papers. After Wilson was official, Steve and Erin understood the system in one way: they saw it as a functional kind of bureaucracy, the kind they could work with. And they saw themselves as helpful to society: as people who raised the kids whom others couldn't.

Steve said to me, that day on the floor, miserable and self-effacing, that maybe he had “a bit of a savior complex,” but really he didn't want to add to the problem of overpopulation. He wanted to do the right thing; he had time and money and love to shower on a few kids abandoned to the system. He didn't bargain to stand between a mother and her child. That was never part of the plan.

On the day Steve was scheduled to drop Oliver off for a visit with Caitlin, he was promised one thing: he wouldn't have to meet her. Steve was to leave Oliver in a waiting room, where a social worker would be the intermediary. This is standard procedure in most places, as tension or arguments can break out between the various parents and in front of the children. Fighting is saved for the courtroom. But when Steve pulled into the child services parking lot, an old man in a tank top immediately marched up to the car.

“Did you ever read
Executioner's Song?
The guy reminded me of my mental image of Gary Gilmore. He was all grizzled and making faces at Oliver, saying, ‘I'm the grandpa!'” Steve later found out this was Caitlin's boyfriend's father, who had lived with Oliver in his first few months. “It was kind of scary. I wasn't ready for that kind of contact.”

As they walked into the building, Steve said, a pretty teenager with wide-set blue eyes and curly blond hair lunged at him and grabbed Oliver from his arms. This was Caitlin. An older woman was close behind, shouting, “Give the baby to me! He'd rather be with me!” and “Can you take a picture?”

Steve was overwhelmed and concerned by the chaos, and he didn't have a camera, which seemed to upset everybody. The social worker, who was supposed to coordinate the handoff, finally came out and told Steve to leave; she'd drive Oliver back in a few hours.

When Oliver got home, Steve said, he felt a tinge of worry: Caitlin and her in-laws had used up all four of the diapers he'd provided for the two-hour visit and not nearly enough of the baby formula. Aside from being tired, though, Oliver seemed fine.

The next week, after Steve made the two-hour drive to the welfare office, Caitlin didn't show. “I was so happy,” Steve said. “She was screwing up, just like people said she would.”

But then Caitlin made the next visit, and missed the next, and it was off and on like this for the next few months. There were excuses—it was raining, the family didn't have gas money, someone had a doctor's appointment, and so on. Usually they called, but sometimes they didn't, and Steve wasn't sure whether, to a judge, Caitlin's unreliability would look like unfit parenting or progress from her prior state.

At Oliver's next hearing, he found out. The judge upgraded Oliver's visits to overnight stays. When this happened, Steve said, both Caitlin and her boyfriend's mom, Jill, got nicer. They reintroduced themselves, Caitlin noticed the similarity in Steve's and Oliver's curly hair (claiming the two even looked a bit alike), and Jill started the hard sell on her maternal instincts.

“Jill talked to me for about an hour,” Steve said, gently imitating her Texan drawl. “She said, ‘I wanna tell you what I'm all about. I make my own baby food, I take my kids to Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald's 'cause you gotta treat 'em right.'”

Steve said, at the beginning, he tried to extend goodwill; he plainly had more education and money than Jill and Caitlin, but he also knew that wouldn't make him a better parent. Still, there was the complicated issue of love and letting go. Steve, Wilson, and Erin were already deeply attached to Oliver, and Oliver to them. And Steve didn't want to release Oliver into a family that would be dangerously irresponsible. His radar was up.

“Jill did say one thing that made me feel a little better,” Steve said, handing Oliver a bottle. “She said, ‘I know Caitlin's young—but if anything happens, if she tries to take that baby out of my house, I'm calling CPS and I'm calling you.'”

Just as Oliver was getting fussy and I was getting hungry and the morning sun was shining hotter through the window, Erin and Wilson bounded through the front door, Wilson covered in paint.

“I painted a moose!” Wilson said, and then, “Can we get tacos?”

Oliver threw his bottle to the floor at the sight of his brother and toddled toward him, arms outstretched and grinning madly. Wilson barely gave Oliver a glance and ran to the other room for some paper, suddenly struck with a new idea. “Mom! Will you draw me a truck? No dogs, no cars, and NO BUTTOCKS!”

Buttocks
was Wilson's new favorite word, something he picked up at Habibi's Hutch. Most of Steve's and Erin's days were spent in the swirl and tumult of the thousand immediate feeding, sleeping, playing, and drawing needs of two small children—for the past several months, Steve had tried not to think too deeply about what it would feel like, or mean, to his family if Oliver had to leave for good. He and Erin had spoken to lawyers who said that they couldn't fight for custody anyway until Oliver had been with them for a full year; at that point, and only then, could they argue that so much emotional bonding had taken hold that it would be in Oliver's best interests to stay. When I visited, Oliver was still a few months shy. So Steve simply reported what he saw when Oliver came home from Caitlin's, or when she missed appointments, and he hoped, somehow, that everything would work out, whatever that meant. In a way, he relinquished control, but he also became a bit of a spy.

“It's awkward because I'm friendly with these people, but I'm also tattling on them,” Steve said. Steve started meeting Caitlin and Jill at a restaurant parking lot midway between their two towns, and in the handoff learning more about their lives. He discovered Jill couldn't read, and that there was a pit bull in the house, for instance. He called a social worker to check on the dog, which was later kept on a leash. Caitlin told Steve she took Oliver to Golden Corral for his own chocolate cake, and Jill fed him tea and sugar water, which Steve didn't particularly love, but which wasn't particularly illegal either. Neither was the smell of cigarette smoke on Oliver's blankets, which Steve also reported. The car seat they were using, he felt, was too big for Oliver, but he wasn't really sure. Caitlin, he found out, was stabilizing a bit economically, as she had landed a job at McDonald's, and he took solace in the fact that under the “Goals for Child” section of Caitlin's file, she had written “college.” But Jill confessed to him that Caitlin's moods were unpredictable. It was hard to get a complete picture, and Oliver couldn't talk.

“That's the hardest part of letting go,” Steve said. “Because we have this vision of what we could give him—not to sound egotistical or whatever—but what kinds of schools he could go to, what kinds of opportunities he could have.”

Steve struggled to find words. “But who's to say our lifestyle is any better than theirs really? Maybe they'll have a different parenting approach, like they'll talk to him in a more shrill voice or they'll be watching a lot more TV and there won't be too many books, but maybe he'll thrive in that environment in a way. He could become one of those disadvantaged kids who gets motivated to improve himself, instead of us just handing him everything.” Steve paused. “Maybe he'll have a good, happy life.”

He sounded as if he was convincing himself, his voice lilting and unsteady. Steve tried to picture Oliver growing up in the town where he'd been dropping him off; he'd looked at the teenagers there and imagined. “He may be some kid who wears NASCAR shirts and it might be a big deal if he graduates from high school. It's hard—you have this one vision of what can happen, and then he's going to have a totally different life. But then, it's like he'll be living, and I think he'll be nurtured and stuff.”

One thing that did concern Steve was Caitlin's claim that Oliver was a “difficult baby.” According to Steve, he wasn't. He needed to be held more than some children, but he wasn't an excessive crier, and he was engaged and friendly. Couple this with Caitlin's reported mood swings, and a case report that she once hit Oliver for grabbing the television remote, and Steve worried that she still wasn't emotionally equipped to handle the curiosity and constant demands of a growing child.