Foster Home at Five
Let's workshop this story that captures the vulnerability and strength of those navigating the uncertain terrain of familial disruption and institutional care
Foster Home at Five
I was only five, but I knew my mom and dad were in court that day fighting over custody rights. The rainy gray outside—plus, no doubt, the turmoil of yelling and crying, of nighttime stirrings and morning wakings to different rooms or houses or cars, of not understanding what was going on or where exactly was home—had me nodding off at my grandma’s kitchen table that day.
At first I fought to keep my eyes open, jerking my head back up each time it dropped. I do remember that. And I do remember eventually letting go to sleep, but aware enough to feel myself gradually slipping under the table. I was in non-time for it seemed no time. The front door opened and my eyes opened for good, sounds were somehow muffled and yet too loud. It was strange to see him in a suit. After such abrupt waking, the suit added to reality’s antimatter air. My dad squatted down. I came in response to his silent gesture: an open hand reaching out. It was strange to see his eyes brimming. He carried me to Grandma’s couch, forever plastic-covered.
“You’re gonna have to go away for a while,” he said. “But daddy will get you back soon. I promise.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“The judge ordered it, Mikey. Just a couple weeks or so.” The tears were now flowing. “Quick. Don’t worry.”
The cab, already waiting at the curb, brought us to a police station. It was probably in Poughkeepsie. Googling just the other day, I think I found the very place matching the imprint in my mind.
A lady was waiting outside with an umbrella against the drizzle. “Hello, Mikey,” she said. She only looked at me. It was as if she was refusing to look at my dad. She put an arm around my shoulder, leading me to a white car while insisting on keeping her body, it was clear, between me and my dad. She got me to the passenger seat with no time for my dad to say more than “I love you,” officers at his side. She seat-belted me in and off we went.
I have seen enough movies to imagine myself at the window, a hand open on the glass for my dad. But I know myself. I go within. I had to be that kid whose focus folded back on himself, shutting off the outside like the body shuts off blood to the limbs in cold. I probably never looked back.
The lady told me she was a social worker. I do not remember her name. I would be going, she told me, to a nice home with many kids to play with. Was this one of her first cases? Perhaps even her first? Or was she a veteran at this? I wonder. The way she put her body between my father and me could indicate either, someone still green enough to stick tight to the book or someone brown enough to know what could happen.
It turned dark as we drove and she asked me if I wanted McDonalds. My stomach, I remember, was in knots. I said, “No.”
“Don’t you want a happy meal?”
I shook my head no, unable to open. I can imagine myself crying as well. I can better imagine myself silent in guardedness. A family violence counselor recently told me I was guarded. I was merely criticizing the assessment questions, spotting ambiguities in wording that—with so much at stake—I would need clarified before I answered. I am a Doctor of Philosophy, after all. But despite having the washed-up look—Keith Richards comes to mind—of the recovering drunk she admitted she was, which had me scoff at the idea that she could be assessing me, perhaps that counselor did sniff out some truth. And perhaps her order that I undergo anger management, although unbacked enough by cold fact that the judge ultimately overruled it, was an appropriate intuition of the gestalt.
We turned down an unpaved driveway. The big lone house lit up by lights grew and then we were there. The social worker brought me up the stairs to the porch. The door was already open and the house was lively with kids and lights. A lady—and I picture her now with an idyllic apron—said, “Why don’t you go in the living room and play with all the other kids.” Both of them guided me there.
The living room was swarming with children of all ages. Children were climbing on the jungle gym at the back of the room. Children were jumping on the furniture. I scanned the room. There was even a toddler in a playpen. I was in no mood to play. I rested on the couch, perhaps prayer hands between my legs as I sleep now.
A little black boy, face painted white, came up to me. He stared for a while, perhaps studying my pain. He offered me a bite of his corndog. Several of the kids, I noticed, were walking about the jungle-gym living room holding corndogs. I refused, even though I sensed he was trying to make me feel at ease. He was younger than me, I think. It seemed on some level he understood what I was feeling.
Aside from that opening into foster care, only random memories come back. These are less and less, and with diminished vivacity, now that I am in my thirties.
I remember being in the backyard on a sunny day. One kid, between perhaps eight and ten, was pulling up grass and inspecting the blades. Noticing me watching him, he said, “Onions!” He showed me the roots and there were little bulbs. I helped him pull more up. Following him in wiping off as much dirt as possible, I followed him in eating the bulbs. The sharp and pungent taste, the crispy and crunchy texture, the burning-biting burst—I recall all these sensations, but do not know if I had them at the time. And yet I must have. Only a few years ago, when I was still married, I found such grass in my lawn and revisited those sensations.
Finding and nibbling these little bulbs might have been, for all I know, one of the first times I surrendered to fun while in foster care. The saddest thing is not when I picture myself there in shut-down shock over what was happening. Nor is it picturing myself moping because I wanted to go home, or hysterical in fear that I would never see my parents again, or—more so out of TV than out of me—yelling at the foster mother “You’re not mommy!” The saddest thing, rather, is when I picture myself, backward as it seems to say, losing myself in play, as I did that day picking grass onions.
For whatever reason, I also remember—through smell, mainly—my foster mother cooking asparagus in a big pot one night. “I’m not eating that,” an older black girl said. I had seen her only a few times before that, but I had a deep need to know her. She talked back and would go around repeating that she was leaving soon because she was about to be eighteen. I followed in her steps and refused to eat the asparagus too. It has taken me years, in fact, to work asparagus into my diet. And for the longest I was not open to corndogs. I do find myself, however, drawn to black girls around that age.
Once or twice during my stay I got picked up by a social worker—same white car but different lady. We would go to what I assume to be city hall in Poughkeepsie. I say “what I assume to be” mainly because in my late teens that is where me and my dad went to visit my sister, who was herself in foster care at the time. The last time we visited, before passing through the metal detectors of city hall with a coloring book and disposable camera while Grandma and Grandpa waited in their junkyard Mazda (hand-brushed red), my dad—nervous—had guzzled what he could of a forty in a nearby park—even asking me, absurdly, to carry it inside in the leg of my sweatpants (“You got baggy pants, boy) only to bury it in the snow next to a bench (“Gotta keep it cold”) when I refused to entertain the sloshing-clinking fantasy.
Having seen supervised visitation from that side of things has no doubt colored my memory of how things went in my case. Perhaps there was the stock coloring book, yes. No pictures were taken—none I ever came to see at least. My mom, I think I remember, brought along my teddy bear, the one that I had since I was a baby whose eyes and nose I had bitten off. The visits were quick, though. I remember that. I felt that. I imagine they cried, but I do not know if I cried. Did they worry that I was forgetting them, getting accustomed to a new family? Selfish, controlling, afraid of abandonment—that is what I would worry in their shoes.
After a while, I guess I did get accustomed to living there. I remember sleeping one afternoon and being jarred awake as the family van drove past the window. I jumped to the window and watched it rock down the dirt driveway. I felt forgotten, left. The house was quiet as I ran to the door. No swarm of children in the living room, I was alone. I ran outside, into the same gray drizzle of the police station. Like a nightmare, my socks sunk deep into the mud. I screamed out for the van, “Wait—you forgot me!” Red of brake lights burst forth in the gray, I remember—far away. But it was only in preparation to turn onto the street.
The foster father, a bearded man, ultimately found me kneeling in the mud. They were just going to the supermarket, he told me.
Then the day came when I was to go home. Not much longer than a month or so had passed. A social worker, again in that white car, again buckled me in the passenger seat. I was happy to say “Bye” to everyone from the window. Given the security I must have felt knowing I was going, it is easy to imagine that part of me wished I could stay some to play first—to play, perhaps finally, with all my heart. I know, though, that if by some magic a few extra hours were offered to me, I would not have taken it (in fear, all things considered, that the offer to go home be withdrawn).
Chemical hits of happiness flooded me. I felt chest-open good. As we drove, I remember closing one eye and with the other I would blink each time the tip of the car’s antennae, which was in front of me on the right side of the car, cut across background power cables or telephone wires or whatever. I imagined that my blinking would cause the tip to cut the cables.
The car stopped along the curb in front of a white house. Amusing myself with the powerline game, I did not register right away that this was a planned destination. I did not know the house. A feeling of being betrayed flooded me, as the social worker unbuckled me. But she merely put me in the back seat and told me, “Don’t worry. We have to make a stop.”
The wave of betrayal receded as she walked to the house. I know the ebb and flow of that betrayal wave. I feel it at least once a month, and more like once a week, with my romantic partners. So perhaps I am projecting too much into the past. And yet it had to have started from somewhere.
She came back with her arm around the shoulder of a black girl, probably between twelve and fourteen. The girl was crying. I do remember that. I assumed she was headed off to a foster home. I felt sorry for the girl. Empowered by the euphoria of going home, I had an urge to console her. I had an urge to reach for her shoulder and tell her, “It’ll be okay. Look, I’m going home right now. And it wasn’t long at all.” I imagine, now at least, that I also wanted to say, “Take the McDonald’s if it’s offered.” Words were right on the cusp of coming out, but they never did. Perhaps it was some sense that I was making a hasty generalization, some sense that just because I was going back did not mean she would be, that prevented me from opening. There was that girl in my own foster home, after all, who was just about to turn eighteen.
Instead of the police station, I was dropped off in front of my old house. My mom and dad were waiting on the street. We went to lunch together and I was glad there was no fighting. They promised they would be better at getting along. They told me they were sorry this happened. From what my dad still tells me at least, rage bouts in the custody courtroom resulted in the judge ordering me to foster care. People I tell my story to insist that something else was going on, that there must be more to the story.
*This piece originally appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood (2021)
Photo: picture of me as a kid