Year Anniversary

Today is the day one year ago when we did our first weekend visit with T. Starting on that July day, we went on to do 17 consecutive weekend visits with him; we endured one moment of crisis when he got mixed up in some serious trouble we weren't sure we could handle; we overcame our doubts and visited him through a brief and frustrating stay in a group home; we made ourselves a thorn in the side of county child services, and finally it worked and they let us become his parents, exactly 34 weeks ago, on the day he moved in. Seventeen weekend visits + 34 weeks of living together as a family = one helluva year.

To me, family is in the lived experience, not the shared genes. Potential parents and older kids "picking" each other strikes me as a near miracle and one I'd really like to convince other people to consider. There are thousands of older kids waiting in long term foster care (seven thousand in Los Angeles alone) who can't return to their original family or relatives and many of them long for a home and for parents and to be somebody's precious person. T. used to be one of them. Today, he proudly introduces us as his "adoptive parents." He obsesses over the latest Nikes, brags about his prowess playing x-box live, pushes the boundaries we set for him, tickles and hugs us and wakes me up early on Sunday morning to tell me the latest teen gossip from the night before. It's not "done" and it's not easy, but it has momentum. We'll be family to each other for always.

It reminds me of science. Once, for a job, I interviewed a research chemist. He described disease as a keyhole, and likened his work to investigating tens of thousands of chemical "keys", seeking the one that would fit the disease target exactly. He said it always seemed incredibly unlikely and at the same time inevitable that he'd find a match, and that science depends on the confidence that eventually one will emerge.

Our relationship with T. feels like that to me. He'd been searching for adoptive parents for two years when we met him. We had only just signed up to become potential foster/adoptive parents. We met him at the first "meet the kids" event we ever attended. I looked around the room and thought, well, I feel like I could parent any one of these kids (all boys, all between about 10 and 15). I had long planned to be a foster/adoptive parent to an older child and I was ready so it wasn't too hard to envision. Then I saw T. and something inside went "Fascinating!" He smelled good to me. His eyes showed a busy brain, and his facial expression showed tremendous (probably excessive) self-discipline. The slight tremor in his hands gave away his fear and the tremendous importance he attached to being adopted. I couldn't stop thinking about him.

The first three months after he moved in were hard. He wasn't used to feeling attached to authoritative adults. He understood rules, but he hadn't experienced the coercive emotional pressure of love. It was confusing to him. It made him feel trapped, to find that he cared what we thought. We worked through it. We continue to work through it. We aim for a mix of flexibility and consistency, but really it's mostly sheer innate compatibility that works most of the time.

I'm a broken record on this point, but I feel tremendous awe about parenting him. A good friend of mine said recently "it's his ego that saved him" and that struck me as being very true. He was born tiny and sick and addicted, passed through various homes while he survived those early years, then endured a very turbulent middle childhood being passed from one home to another and mistreated in ways that we've only begun to discover. At some point, when he might have broken, he decided "This is shit. I'm going to find something better." And he did. He doesn't feel grateful to us - he feels satisfied. He was right.

I do love the frank honesty of parenting a kid like that. It's as if we met in the middle of a vast, busy, often indifferent world and looked at each other and said "Okay, what have you got?" We all acted polite for awhile, and then we had to put our emotional cards on the table. We might have expected to be overwhelmed by his problems. He might have expected to be cruelly disappointed or rejected - that's what adults had taught him to expect. Instead, it turned out that we had the potential to create a soulful, life-altering connection to each other. We get how to crack each other up. When we fight, we understand how to make up. We know each other in a deep way, as if we have known each other for much longer than we actually have.

I do think people are spooked sometimes by the "knowing" child. Our cultural cliches of family suggest sometimes that parents are all powerful, while children are naive and unformed, and the process of parenting is one of transmission, of values and knowledge, from parent to child. Kids like T. are not like that. It's a much more democratic process of negotiation. He knows a whole lot of things I will never have the misfortune to understand. I know things he could care less about. We have to sort out tremendously complicated issues together, like how he feels about his birth mom, and why he should follow our rules, and how to balance love and loyalty to more than one kind of family.

I LOVE being that kind of parent. It makes me a better person. Nobody told us this was a good idea, and a lot of people told us it was impossible. But it totally works for the three of us. It makes me think that the world is a much more nuanced, multi-dimensional profound place than I would otherwise have realized.

Brothers

One thing we learned pretty quickly is that sibling relationships can be really complicated for kids who've been in the system for a long time. According to the official record we received when we began weekend visits with T. a year ago, he is the eldest of two siblings. But according to T., he is the middle child of five, four of whom have been raised in foster care since birth.

And of course, T.'s version is the true version. (Technically, they are all half-siblings, since they have different fathers, but that hardly matters as they consider themselves brothers.) When social services took T. from his extended family when he was small, they took him along with his closest sibling who was living in the same home at the time. So in the official record, he became one of two, rather than the third of five. Social services didn't bother recording the fact that his birth mom had three other children - she was nowhere in the picture at the time and the social worker probably didn't even have a way of knowing about her other children. But of course, the birth relatives with whom he is in contact have told him of his other siblings and, despite having met them only once in his life, he considers them all something of a set.

Bringing people together is in his nature. When we recognized this and complimented him on it and made explicit that we would help facilitate his unifying instinct, he responded with great warmth and gratitude. It's a huge part of his identity. Given his history (sixteen foster placements in fifteen years), keeping in touch with his people (friends, family, extended family) is a very big deal. Anything that frustrates that instinct is a source of anxiety for him; anything that facilitates that instinct settles and soothes him.

His younger brother is coming for an overnight visit in two weeks. He lives in a group home. He's on juvenile probation for taking a kitchen knife to school because he was being bullied. He has serious behavioral and developmental challenges. T. invited him for an overnight to celebrate his fourteenth birthday without asking me first. I knew at the time the only possible response was "Fantastic. I'm going to call his social worker and his group home and make sure we have all the permissions we need in order to make that happen. I'd hate for him to be disappointed in any way on his birthday. Let's discuss the particulars together before we get any further." They want to go see a cousin in a nearby town. It's not clear whether she welcomes the visit. Everything about it is epically complicated.

We don't have both boys because T. didn't want to be placed or adopted along with his brother. He asked to be placed for adoption separately. His reasons are hard to explain and easy to understand. He tried to raise this brother for many years, from the time he was around four until the time he was around ten. In that time, they were both molested, physically abused, cycled through numerous foster homes, and finally the younger sibling was taken to a separate placement. When we talk about T.'s history, he often speaks in terms of "we" - what happened to him happened to his brother. To summarize what I intuit to be his feelings on the matter, I'd say he has tremendous survivor guilt, he torments himself about his brother's well-being, and yet he knows that, at least for a time, in order to develop himself he needs to be separate from his brother, so that he can finally be a child rather than a child-parent.

T. tells me that his next tattoo will read "My Brother's Keeper." If you've ever watched a child parent another child, you know how tragic it is to listen to him talk to his brother on the phone. He puts on a stern authoritarian air and counsels his brother with what he must imagine is fatherly wisdom, and it makes him sound so, so young.

So yes, this visit is a very big deal. I expect his brother to feel heartbroken seeing T. at home with us, in circumstances so different than the harsh environment of his group home. I half expect that in the mid-term, T. will propose that his younger brother come to live with us. I am hardly prepared for that, and yet there is only one possible way to respond: yes, of course, let's do some visits and see what we can work out. If T. feels that our home is a suitable safe place for his younger brother, there is really no deeper indication of trust. There is no way to say no. He is our child, and in some sense, his brother is his child and we will just have to stretch that far, if he asks. In an ideal world, I'd love for the county to find a foster family placement for his brother nearby, so that we could bring the boys together with the benefit of two sets of parents, one each. They deserve that intensive, exclusive parenting after what they've been through. But the realities of foster care are about as far away as one can get from an ideal world.

It's Mah Birthday

It's my birthday and I'm feeling reflective.

I always wanted to be a foster/adoptive mom to a teenager. Then I turned 35, and right around the time other people's biological clocks start to chime, the impetus acquired a momentum of its own.

I think it's just part of who I have always been. I went to a strict Catholic grammar school and in fourth grade, we had to do a presentation in the parish hall. About 80% of the class went with anti-abortion presentations. My best friend and I went a different route. We had a three-part posterboard with cartoon illustrations that we obtained from a local social worker - the "dos" and "don'ts" of child-rearing. The right panel advertised in large type the various hotline phone numbers for abused kids. My dad still jokes about the sideways looks he got from the other parents, but he proudly saved that posterboard for a long time.

So I guess it's not too surprising that I grew up and wanted to do this kind of parenting. Still, actually becoming T.'s parent has been a long, hard slog. Before him, I loved people and I was loved, but I didn't really believe in profound, life-altering commitment the way I do now. Our connection with him was like a bolt of lightening. Just under a year ago, we were volunteering at some stupid dog rescue event in Torrance, and I looked up and there was this boy, so tall and solemn and utterly withdrawn and the three of us fell into an uncanny synchronicity. It was like he had a beacon inside him sending out an unspoken message: "It's me!" On the basis of nothing other than this irrational hunch, we pursued our foster license, did five months of weekend visits while he bounced through two other foster homes, and finally wrangled DCFS into placing him with us. Keeping up the connection to him while navigating that process was like trying to keep your eye on a feather in the midst of a hurricane. But T. kept transmitting his signal, and we kept believing in him for whatever mysterious reason.

Tomorrow, the children's court hears his six-month placement review. The report going to the court contains one simple statement from an interview DCFS did with T.: "I like it here and I want to stay." The report recommends adoption (which has always been our goal, but you have to do six months of foster care before the court will consider moving forward with adoption in a case like T.'s), and we're likely to get a date now in adoption court a few months from now.

I'm not a perfect parent - in fact I'm very bad at it sometimes. And T. is not an easy kid - he has oddities and challenges that come from having been through 15 different homes before ours. I might fail him. I might be broken-hearted when he leaves home. I might foster/adopt several more kids. Or he might be the only one, and we might be close for the rest of our lives. I don't know. But if I died tomorrow, I'd be satisfied that I did this one small thing, however imperfectly

I really do feel that way.

Adoption Isolation

Sometimes I have the sense that adopting a teenager is so unusual, it makes us a social oddity and a subject of speculation. I had a breakfast meeting this morning, and a client asked the inevitable "do you have kids?". I said yes; he said, how old?; I said 16; he said he was suprised; I said, we just adopted him, and then....well, you know how it goes. The conversation kind of dies while the other person tries to figure out how to make sense of what you just said. Awkward.

Life in a fishbowl makes me acutely aware of what I call adoption isolation: the feeling that you're in uncharted territory and while everyone seems to have an opinion, very few actually have any idea what older child foster-adoption is really about.

We're a biracial family now, and the difference in our physical appearance is probably one factor that gives people pause, but the predominant reaction is to T.'s age and, secondarily, to the fact that ours is an open adoption, meaning we know and spend time with his relatives.

People ask us outright all the time why we would ever want to adopt a teenager. I tell them teenagers still need parents. There are 12,000 kids in long-term foster care in Los Angeles, and 7,000 of them are over the age of 12. Of all the kids adopted out of foster care in LA over a ten-year period, only 3% were T.'s age or older. One in three kids in long-term foster care who "age out" end up homeless. One in five end up in prison within two years of leaving foster care. T. knew all that and he spent two years searching for adoptive parents against the odds, going to adoption fairs and trying his painful best to make a good impression on strangers in the hope they'd rescue him from the odds.

Kids in long-term foster care who can't return to their birth families need parents. Is that really so hard to understand? Even though they aren't "little" anymore, they are still children - they can't work, they don't have the full cognitive capability necessary to make adult decisions, they are vulnerable and malleable. They want, need and deserve protection and guidance. They aren't gross; they aren't damaged beyond repair. They have special needs, and satifsying those needs can be really profound and...fun!

Those who don't balk at the idea of adopting a teenager balk at our choice to be in contact with his birth relatives. I believe in the merits of open adoption, particularly for older kids. It's very difficult - there are enormously complex issues of divided loyalty, unresolved trauma and loss, cultural differences and more. T's birth mom probably hates me, but we talk. We do our best, so he can integrate his past and present. I want the stability we provide him to be a home base from which he can explore his feelings about his birth family and understand where he came from and make sense of his history. But the idea of a family that combines blood and adoptive ties confounds people more than I expected.

Here are a few other juicy questions we commonly field:

Why would you want to adopt a teenager?
Read: Teenagers are gross.

What happened to his family?
Read: There must be a sordid story here and I want to hear it.

What do you call yourselves? Foster parents? Adoptive parents? (This from his school counsellor, prompting me to reply "We call ourselves parents" in my best don't-fuck-with-me tone of voice that made T. laugh with delight.)
Read: You're not his real family.

On some level, I probably like to be different, to make unusual life choices - and I know I have to accept that doing so implies some degree of self-isolation. But if I were advising someone else who wanted to foster/adopt an older kid, I'd tell them to get ready for a lot of intrusive questions and grow a thick skin. And I'd tell them to seek out other adoptive parents of older kids, because some days it feels like there are three other people on the planet who understand that this is just another way to be a family, and that parenting is parenting, no matter where the kid comes from.

It's a Boy

It's done! On Friday at 3:00, the adoption caseworker called me at work and left a message "A meeting finally happened and you've been approved. You can pick him up today and he can live with you in a permanent placement."

....!!!!!!

We begged out of work, hopped in the car, and two hours later (traffic!) he met us at the door of his group home with the few possessions that weren't already at our house packed in plastic garbage bags and a huge grin on his face. We hopped around impatiently while they got his birth certificate and immunization records together - and then we drove home, ordered in Chinese, and (at his suggestion) carefully ironed all his t-shirts and jeans and hung them in his closet before heading to bed.

I thought it might go that way - that we'd tussle with this tangled bureaucracy until we thought our heads would explode, and then one day it would be over with a whisper. And it was. I mean, we still have to go through the process of finalizing the adoption, but that part seems minor compared to the task of getting foster licensed, finishing our home study and our mandated parenting classes, filing countless papers with the state and the county, and doing four-and-a-half months of consecutive weekend visits with T. while he got bounced from one temporary foster placement to another and we argued, begged and wheedled in order to get him permanently placed with us.

I really don't know how people stand to get licensed to foster/adopt if they aren't already attached to a particular child (we met T. and then learned we'd have to do all this in order to adopt him). I am ashamed to say I probably would have given up. If anyone ever says of adoption that it's "having kids the easy way" in my vicinity, I'll kill them.

I'm sort of without words to describe what it's like. I didn't know it was possible to love another person this much, in this way. I suppose any parent could have told me.

Last night, driving in the car, T. asked me for a sip from my water bottle. He rarely does that, because he's a neat-freak germaphobe. I gave him a sip and he turned sideways in his seat in the dark, the way he does when he has something important he wants to say and he wants to see my reaction. Then he said, "Thank you." Confused, I said, "For the water?" He said, "I mean, thank you for EVERYTHING." I smiled and said, "Oh, um, no problem!" He said, "Thanks for the water, too." And that was it. Five minutes later we were back to discussing curfews and his bike route to school.

He needn't have thanked me. There's nothing altruistic about adopting him - it's deeply satisfying and we enjoy life with him more than we enjoyed life without him. It's not about us doing something for him - it's about the three of us doing something together that seems kind of impossible, but we actually did it, and we're all kind of looking at each other now like, whoah, we did it! What now?

A side note: some friends asked if we had any preferences regarding adoption "etiquette". For anyone who finds themselves in similar situation, this post said it better than I ever could.

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for a few things. I don't usually take any note of that at Thanksgiving - frankly, I usually find it kind of boring as holidays go. But after spending months trying to adopt an older kid out of foster care, I'm struck by an unlikely sense of gratitude.

More than anything, I'm thankful that we bonded with T. these past few months. I'm thankful we met him in the nick of time. I'm thankful that we humans are so odd that occasionally we match up with each other like puzzle pieces and form unlikely families.

I'm thankful that T. hasn't been arrested.

I'm thankful that our days of intrusive visits from multiple social workers who scrutinize our parenting skills and browbeat T. about his misbehaviors are about to end. I'm thankful we won't have to drive 100 miles every weekend to pick him up anymore. I'm grateful T. won't have 7 different adults sharing the role of "parent" in his life.

I'm thankful that T. is the neatest, cleanest teenage boy on the planet.

I'm thankful that the relationship between Tim and I survived and grew through this very messy, frustrating, drawn-out process.

I'm thankful for whatever miracle of biology and psychology produced a stubborn habit of gentle, optimistic thinking in T. It is so humbling to behold.

I'm thankful that next Tuesday DCFS is meeting to make the final call on placing T. with us full-time and all signs are go.

I'm thankful for my hot Irish temper because it keeps me going and keeps me from getting depressed.

I'm thankful to anyone who adopts one of the many foster kids waiting for a permanent chosen family in the United States. In way too many cases, we have really failed as a society to provide for them. But T. proves to us every day that kids in foster care, even kids on the cusp of adulthood, are still receptive and responsive to love and logic and commitment and guidance and, most of all, a sense of being precious to someone.

A 180 Turns Into A 360

I've been offline lately and here's why:

- T. got into some serious trouble in his foster placement (he's been living in a foster placement and spending weekends with us while our adoptive placement is pending).

- During that time, T took a ride with another kid in his foster mom's car (he wasn't driving, but I'm pretty sure it was his idea). They crashed, left the scene of the accident in a panic, and eventually got picked up by police. (They are 15 years old and their foster mom left them at home alone that day, forbid them to go out, and left the keys on the kitchen table...as he put it "It was wrong, but it was just so tempting!")

-In response, his foster mom called in a 7-day notice, meaning that DCFS has 7 days to get him out of her house. Of course, he had no idea she's given notice, and continued to go about his life until his social worker showed up and told him to pack his things. She drove him to a town 100 miles away, dropped him at a group home and then left us a phone message telling us how to contact him.

- That made us absolutely furious - nobody called us to ask if we would take him before they moved him. And we've been pursuing an adoptive placement since August and we're licensed foster parents. In another post someday, I'll explain the hideous DCFS politics that have caused this situation to drag on and on.

- This whole experience made T. frantic and re-traumatized him - he has PTSD-type symptoms stemming from early mistreatment and abandonment on a rather grand scale. He immediately started running away from the group home, staying out all night and otherwise demonstrating his suffering.

And here's the good news:

1. We all got through it. This weekend, we were back to "normal" - he spent the weekend with us and we had a lot of fun. As he got in our car, he sighed, slumped back in the seat and said, "This feels like a family reunion." Tomorrow we're picking him up for a five-day Thanksgiving holiday.

2. It showed us the strength of T's bond with us. Finding himself in a group home in a strange city and knowing we didn't know where he was, he took matters into his own 15-year old hands. He went to the park, challenged a group of men to a game of dominoes for dollars, won $20, took the money to WalMart and bought himself a cheap text-only cell phone that he now uses to text message us from morning to night. If you don't think that's funny, you probably wouldn't enjoy parenting an older foster kid, but I think it's hilarious and ingenious. He calls and writes to me in the middle of the day, with questions like "I'm thinking of getting a tattoo. What do you think about that?" and "I met a girl at my new school today. I think I've got game! Can I go hang out with her this afternoon?" As I've said before, open invitation to parent, albeit from afar.

3. We experienced a serious moment of doubt in the midst of all this, which I'm pretty sure is an unavoidable component of older child foster adoption. I fully admit that for a period there, we weren't sure we could continue to pursue this adoption - we felt inadequate in the face of his behaviors and totally unsupported by DCFS. I'm not proud that my commitment to him flagged for a moment. But it's done and it taught us that we need to find support wherever we can so we're prepared for the next crisis. Even as I tried to convince myself that it would be okay to admit defeat, it made me feel utterly sick and heartbroken to think about letting him down. We just couldn't do it. It was interesting to realize that even if we thought this was the worst decision we ever made, we wouldn't give up for anything. My mom tells me that's how ALL parents feel sometimes.

4. Because he got in trouble and got moved without notice, he was separated from some dangerous peer influences in his previous placement. He knew he wanted to leave those friends behind, but had he not been yanked out, it would have been hard for him to separate.

5. Our relationship as a couple stayed intact. We stayed friends through all this drama. We weren't always in the same emotional place at the same time but we did a good job of letting each other be honest. We made decisions together quickly when we needed to, and laughed at the situation whenever we could.

Now we're picking him up tomorrow for a 5 day trip to Northern California. He's never been outside of Los Angeles and he's never spent Thanksgiving anywhere other than in a group home. We're trying to keep things low-key because the holidays can be overwhelming under the best of circumstances. Thankfully, he's met some of my family before, so he won't be entirely among strangers -and everyone has been briefed: don't throw your arms around him, don't say "welcome to the family", don't ask him questions about why he's in foster care, and recognize that this is a stressful situation for him. If all else fails, we'll take him out to practice his driving, which never fails to make him feel good. Fingers crossed.

Eleventh straight weekend with T - we've had him from early Saturday morning until late Sunday evening every week since late July now as we work on his adoption. This weekend, we went to a football game, visited his friends, and had breakfast with his social worker to talk about the transition plan for full-time permanent placement next month. We also had a visit with my brother's family who were visiting from out of town - the first extended family of ours to be introduced to T.

It was a weekend of firsts. Including the first time we've had to ground him. On Saturday, he missed the mark during some time we allowed him to spend with one of his friends. He didn't keep in touch as he is supposed to, snuck off to the car, and ran the car battery down to zero listening to the radio. I dropped his friend home before discussing it with him. Then I said, "I think you didn't do a great job today of keeping in touch and telling the truth. What do you think?" He covered his eyes with his hands and wailed "I think I got a D-minus!" He's 6'2", but he was slumped down in the seat with a look of terrror and shame like a young child's. I said, "Okay, so there has to be a consequence, so tomorrow we're not going to visit your friends as we had planned. Is that fair?" He nodded yes, and then he was very very quiet.

After about half an hour, he still wasn't talking and he seemed quite crushed. I said, "Tim and I realize that you've been living in situations where you're not given much freedom and as a result, maybe you've had to sneak and lie in order to get any free time with your friends. And we do things differently. So it's going to take awhile to get in the habit of using your freedom wisely. When you start to lie to me, I want you to stop for a second and think about whether you can tell me the truth instead." He said "okay" very softly. Then I said "You have a lot of adults poking around in your life right now. It's going to be nice when it's just us, working things out together like this. We've talked a lot about you. Do you have things you'd like to know about us?" He looked shocked and amused and made a face that meant "A million but I can't put them in words." I offered, "Maybe you wonder why we want to adopt, or why we chose you?" He said, "Well yeah!" with a big exhalation. So I told him that, although some people adopt because they aren't able to have a biological baby, that wasn't true for us. I explained that my best friend in college had been a foster child, and I didn't like how she was treated. So when I grew up, Tim and I decided maybe we'd adopt a foster child - that we liked the idea of making a family with someone like him, where we all choose to be together of our own free will. And I told him that we weren't totally sure we wanted to adopt until we met him - and that as soon as we did, something about him set the wheels in motion and we just knew he was the person we wanted to be in our family. He just LOVES this story. He just beamed quietly with this amazing soulful expression on his face. I said, "And nothing that has happened since then, in all this time we've spent together, has ever made us feel differently about you. We like you much much more than I even thought possible, and I couldn't possibly be more proud about having someone in my family than I am of you." He didn't even pause before he said "Thank you!" in a firm, proud, satisfied way.

I asked him then if he still felt like the adoption was something he wanted, and he said yes.

We're In!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!! Had a GREAT conversation in the car with T. Thanks to my boss who raised two boys and said, if you want them to talk to you, go on a long drive. I picked him up this morning and we had a drive of just over an hour. Instead of playing music, I left it quiet and started with a couple questions about school.

Once he got warmed up, he volunteered, "I talked to April this week." April is the social worker who visited to talk to him about how he's feeling about us so far. I played cool for awhile, and said, "April called us too. She likes to check in and make sure we're doing a good job and not freaking you out." I knew he was trying to open up a conversation, so a few minutes later, I said, "April asked us how we feel about adoption, because some of the people in the Kidsave program want to adopt, and others are more into weekend hosting. So I told her we definitely want to adopt. But if you decide you would rather just do weekends with us, that's totally cool too. We're in it to help you, whatever you decide you want to do."

Bingo! "I want to get adopted," he said softly. I asked him how he imagines adoption will be different than foster care. He had a complete analysis ready to go! Foster parents give you back if you get into trouble or do something bad, he explained, but adoptive parents work on it with you and they are there forever. They "treat you like you're their own," and make you part of their family. I said, yeah, I think adoption is an awesome way to make a family. We always wanted to adopt, and I like the idea that when you adopt you become a family because you all really like each other. I got a little smile for that one so I kept going.

"Well, we'd be psyched to adopt you whenever you're ready, and you can come live with us while we do the adoption if you want," I said (the Kidsave program is set up so that a kid can be placed with you as a substitute foster family as you're pursuing adoption). "And we think you're the best kid in the Kidsave program and we liked you right away. We knew we wanted to do the program, but we didn't imagine we'd meet someone we like as much as we like you!" He was beaming. Hooray!

I also said, "But you know, if we adopt you, you're stuck with us. I mean, you'll be, like, 35 and you'll have your own kids and we'll be calling you up all the time, asking if you're coming over for Thanksgiving." He seemed surprised about that and amused. So I said, "I think that's one of the things that's really different about adoption - it isn't just til you're 18. And I know I needed my parents for a long time - to help me with stuff like college and getting a first apartment, and just giving me advice when I needed it." He was quiet about that part - I think it might be a new consideration. I also snuck in a word about how we would help him keep in touch with his brother. And I asked him who his favorite foster moms have been - which included the one he's with now - and said, being adopted doesn't mean you don't see those people anymore. You can totally keep in touch with all the people who are important to you. He was quiet, but I wanted to make sure he didn't feel like he had to give up what he has.

And OH MY GOD I felt relieved to have gotten all that out. I was really having trouble figuring out how to broach this subject - there aren't a lot of precedents for telling a 15 year old that you'd like him to be your first and only child! I realized last week that I was clamming up because I was uncomfortable with the emotional intensity of the conversation - it took me some effort to get down to emotional brass tacks and set aside my own fear of rejection.

We chatted all the way home! T. totally cracks me up. A little while later, he said "What do you think about tattoos?" I said, "Why? Are you thinking of getting one?" He nodded and smiled slyly. I said, well, for our anniversary, Tim got a tattoo of a big anchor with my name on it, so I think tattoos are pretty cool. What will yours say? "On my arm, it will say Live Life to the Fullest," he said. "And on my back, Liberty." I said, "I like tattoos to mark big life transitions, because a tattoo is forever. Wouldn't it be cool to get a tattoo like Liberty on the day you get free of the foster system?" "Yeah!" he sighed.

Then I realized he's only 15! "Hey wait, can you even GET a tattoo?" I asked. He cracked up and said a friend is going to do it. I said, okay, not with a ballpoint pen, and it's really important to make sure to use clean fresh needles. He nodded solemnly.

I also brought up the school issue - I said something like "I wish we lived closer so that if you decide you'd like to live with us, you wouldn't have to move and change schools." As usual, he thought about that for a quiet minute, then said, "I don't mind moving schools. That's how you meet new people!" I said, well that's an awesome attitude to have! He chatted a bit more - about his mom, and how he was going to live with her, but decided he didn't want to, and how he has a sister that he doesn't really know who has autism. He told me his mom is tall - 5'11" - and that she says his dad was tall, too.

When we got home, I called out to Tim "We're home! And we're adopting T.! But he's getting tattoos, so you better talk to him." T. loved that and totally cracked up in his quiet way - I was checking to see how comfortable he felt with the outcome of our conversation, and that was my answer.

So now we're home and T. is in the den playing X-box live, after we all shared sandwiches. He played with the cat, and we quizzed him about what he does and doesn't eat. It turns out he eats pretty much everything except what we served him last weekend. And he loves sushi! He's still beaming, and quite easy going and talkative today. And he went in his room and took off his shoes and left them there! So I think he's claiming it for himself.

I suppose the next hurdle is convincing DCFS that we all three know what we want, and they don't have to keep worrying about whether he's comfortable with us. But first, we have a weekend to enjoy. And we're planning a camping trip for two weeks from now.

Best Day EVER

Today I think I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my whole life. Whatever complexities come afterwards, this day is perfect. We heard back from T.’s social worker, who had an opportunity to tell him about our interest in him. She said this: “He really liked you guys. He remembered you both and is very interested in having you host him. He got a huge smile on his face when I told him that you were interested in spending more time with him. He tends to be more on the serious side, seeing his mega-watt grin was a real treat!”

So huge. And so so easy – so natural in its own weird way. We have so many decisions to navigate now – and so many awkward getting-to-know-you moments! But OH MY GOD I’m so happy.

I can't say anymore - I have no urge to analyze or stories to weave. Just waiting for the next step down this road.

Pins and Needles

Yesterday we went to a party in Malibu on a private beach. We drove one of the kids from South LA, which took about two hours in traffic. The kid – he’s twelve – spent the last twenty minutes of the drive yelling at the top of his lungs “I’m bored! Bored! I'm bored! Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored!” That was after telling us fanciful tales of the gun he carries, and the ski mask he wears when he’s doing robberies and the hit CD he recorded at his father’s recording studio. (His assessment form described in my previous post does say he tells tall tales.) He interrupted his manic chant briefly to bark like a dog at a passing car so loudly that our car shook and we attracted notice from a nearby motorcycle cop.

Arriving somewhat shattered, we immediately spotted the kid we’re really interested in – I’ll call him T. He was meticulously and fashionably dressed, with bright white socks pulled up over his ankles, old-school black sneakers, long black shorts, and a very clean t-shirt. I learned later that his current foster mom is out of town, so he’s temporarily staying in a “substitute foster home.” Any credit for keeping his clothes so neat is his own.

He’s 15 and very shy with adults. He attends these events with his younger brother, with whom he has never lived. I wanted to be careful not to put any pressure on him. I know from reading what his social worker has written about him that he’s been frustrated that nobody has expressed interest in him yet. He “presents” (as the social workers say) as very standoffish and disinterested. If I were he, I would do the same. I think his behavior suggests that he’s intelligent enough to understand what the event is about, how high the stakes are, and to protect himself from disappointment.

We all headed down to the beach where a volleyball game was getting started. I went up to T and his brother, introduced myself and reminded them that we had washed dogs together at a previous event. He looked alarmed, but he also shook the hand I offered immediately. I asked if they wanted to play volleyball and he shook his head no. I said, “Are you sure?” and smiled. He shook his head no, but he stood rooted in place, and he smiled quickly. I said, “I could keep asking until you say yes.” He shook his head and smiled again and looked down at his feet and I let him go.

Later he went upstairs for a moment and re-emerged in a second outfit, one he brought with him for swimming. Long orange board shorts and a tank top, no socks. He has the stretched appearance of a young teenager whose bulk hasn’t caught up with his height yet, and he holds his head on his long neck sort of like a turtle. He stood quietly at the edge of the water with just his toes in the waves, near the group playing volleyball but out of reach. After several minutes, I saw him notice a seal swimming offshore. He cocked his head to the side and watched it with a far-away expression.

Later, we were playing flag tag with the kids and he came and stood on the periphery. I had a hunch that sending an emissary might work better this time, so I grabbed one of the young college-age coaches who had come to organize the games for the kids. “There are two young athletes standing over there and I know they’d like to play but they need to be encouraged,” I told him. That worked great –the boys responded to the coach immediately. They lined up for the game behind us, and I heard T. speaking to his brother, softly, telling him just to stay put in the back of the line up until the scrimmage was over, so he could hold on to his position – a defensive strategy, calculated invisibility.

Later we played a little volleyball with a big group. He’s a natural athlete, easy and confident. Eventually he drifted away from the game and went to sit by himself, very still, watching and listening. He reminds me of a cat. His younger brother hung in – asking me how the game is played, why the sun made spots in his eyes, and offering his sandy ear for me to clean for him. He wasn’t particularly interested in me – he’s just a bit hapless and in the habit of being taken care of and told what to do.

Our agency told us both boys want to be adopted together, but we had a hunch that isn’t true. We sought out the boys’ social worker and told her the truth. “We’ve met T. twice and we think he’s great,” we said. “We’d like to offer to host him on weekends, and we’re interested in adoption." We also explained that we didn't want to put T. on the spot. We suggested that she talk to him about us, and pass along any questions he has.

She had to chaffeur the boys, which added up, return trip included, to about six hours in the car for her. Her enthusiasm about our offer was limited, for no reason other than she seemed tired. But she did tell us that T. had no interest in being adopted with his younger brother – in fact, he finds his younger brother quite annoying. A brief attempt was made to unite them with their birth mom, with whom they’ve never lived, sometime last year, and when that fell through, T. committed himself to the idea of adoption and he’s been frustrated by the slow progress toward that end ever since. In fact, he recently told the social worker that he expects he may not be adopted, and he wants help preparing for "emancipation" - that's what they call the time when the kids turn 18 and are booted out of the foster care system without any further support. He's planning ahead.

The social worker told us that the next step would be to organize some sort of social outing with T and his current foster mom (he’s only lived in his current foster home for a few months), because she has to “get to know us” and agree to the plan for weekend hosting. And she’s out of town, so that could take a couple weeks. Our instincts tell us to move on this right away, because if it turns out that he likes us and we get through some weekends together intact, we might like to offer to have him live with us full time before the new school year starts. But this process moves at the pace of the bureaucracy and doesn’t respond much to instinct.

We didn’t try to talk to him again after that. We figured the social worker would likely pass along the message, and he might feel overwhelmed. Later in the evening, we were down on the beach watching the volleyball game as the sun set, and he came down and circled the group, then climbed up on a distant rock, and sat quietly watching us from afar. After about 15 minutes he went back up to the house and when we went upstairs, he was gone.

We still had to drive the little maniac we brought with us back to south LA, so it was a late night. Fortunately he was tired on the return trip. All I can think about is T. I share his frustration with the process – and it’s not clear that there’s anything we can do to speed it up. So now we wait – for exhausted social workers and chaotic agency people to facilitate the next step. This process is incredibly awkward, in every way. I fear disappointment most of all – that he won’t like us, or he’ll change his mind about wanting to be adopted, or some other circumstance will interfere. There is something about him that I can't easily summarize that makes me feel like he's the only one for us. But it’s hard to indulge my own fear of disappointment when I consider his. He is reserved and dignified and diligent in the way he approaches these events, and I’m going to try to respond in kind even though I don’t feel nearly so cool. Most of all, I want to give him space to make a decision about whether we are right for him. I mistrust my own sense of urgency and I'm wary of pushing him.

More to come.

Musical Chairs

I’m settling into the emotional rollercoaster that is bound to be the next few months - we're finally fully involved in our program to meet and "host" a Los Angeles foster kid on weekends. But we haven't found the right kid yet. It might take a week, it might take six months - it’s hard to say, and our agency and our social worker seem to counsel that it’s impossible to rush or predict the process. I’m slowly getting used to that idea and it’s uncomfortable at times, because it goes against the grain of my natural modus operandi, which is to follow through decisions more or less right away (read: right now).

Our social worker, who is a stiletto-wearing Lakers-loving native Angeleno and two-time graduate of UCLA, recently asked me a question last week that drove the point home. “You realize, don’t you, that these kids come with two social workers – a primary social worker, and an adoption social worker? And then there’s the head of their group home, who also has a say. And all these people have to coordinate, and that doesn't always happen right away. So you might be calling the kid’s social worker trying to get an answer, and they might not return your phone calls for a week, and that might get really frustrating. You know what I mean?”

Yes, I do. I think experience has probably just taught her that fancy-pants white folks like me live in a world that insulates us from bureaucratic inefficiency most of the time. I get it. This isn’t a service business. The agency and the social worker aren’t there to fulfill my desires and preferences. They exist to protect, as best they can, tens of thousands of abandoned kids in a system that’s been robbed of resources, and they do so amid a nearly impenetrable tangle of laws and regulations. And that saps their energy and exhausts their idealism, and if they fail to be impressed by my noble desire to provide a permanent home for one of these kids, I'll just have to forgive them, because they've got a lot of thankless dirty work to do.

So we wait and we participate in loosely organized events sponsored by our agency every weekend. We are feeling good, as we’re done for now with the official process of qualifying as "weekend hosts". The Lakers-loving social worker interviewed us for hours the other night and gave us (and our home) the thumbs-up. That means the Los Angeles DCFS says we’re officially approved to have a foster kid in our home on weeekends.

I also finally got the answer to a question I've been trying to puzzle out for months. We know that if we find a good match, and if the kid is interested in being adopted (eventually), we'd like to make that commitment. But the state doesn't terminate birth parent rights unless/until there is an adoptive prospect in the works. And that means the kid lives with a licensed foster parent during the (sometimes lengthy) process of terminating birth parent rights, leading to adoption. So my fear throughout this process has been: what if we connect with a kid, we do a series of weekends visits, and we all decide we'd like to have a more permanent arrangement? Do we then have to go through all the training and licensing to become foster parents before the kid can move in full-time? And the answer is no. The agency we're working with has a special arrangement with DCFS that allows a weekend arrangement to go full-time under an obscure provision regarding what they term "Non-relative Extended Family Caregiving."

And we did just meet a kid we felt comfortable with, who seemed to feel comfortable with us – unfortunately, our agency had orchestrated a match for him with another couple last week, just at the same time we expressed interest. At times the process feels like musical chairs – if there are more adults than kids in the program on any given weekend, then it’s easy to get the feeling that when the music stops, you need to grab a kid quick, or they’ll all be taken. I'll continue to try to resist that feeling. We’ve got weekend events scheduled every weekend between now and Labor Day, so there's plenty of time left to let the music play and see what happens.

Meeting the Kids for the Fist Time

Wow, today was a big day. We did our first weekend event with the kids – washing dogs at a rescue pet event in Torrance. (By coincidence, the dog washing event took place just a few blocks from where I was born, off Torrance Avenue.) I didn’t catch all the logistics, but it seemed to be some sort of benefit, hosted by a do-it-yourself dog washing facility. The idea was that pet owners could bring their dogs by and pay to have us wash the dog for them, and the money would go to a pet rescue organization. I’m not sure the people running the benefit even clearly understood that we were volunteers from a kid rescue organization, and that the kids with us were from foster homes. The customers clearly didn’t – they just thought we were professional dog washers! Which was somewhat hilarious – because these kids don’t have dogs at home and don’t know the first thing about washing one – and somewhat tragic – because it clearly illustrated how much more attention goes to rescuing pets than rescuing people.

But that aside, here are some fresh first impressions:

I’m excited to say: the kids were exactly as I imagined they would be! That’s a huge relief, because I was afraid my imagination and reality might collide in an uncomfortable way – that somehow the kids would turn out to be different than I expected and I would feel cold feet as a result. Well, that didn’t happen! There were only a handful of kids there, and for the most part they were painfully shy and generally lacking social skills. But they were sweet and familiar. They were what I’ve had in mind all through this process. We gravitated to the boys, rather than the girls, as I expected we would.

The adults kind of tended to hang back, unsure how to engage the kids. Not knowing what else to do, we got a few kids organized in some dog-washing activity. In our little group, we had two boys both about 15 years old. One was very skinny and tall – at least 6’2" already. The other was about half a foot shorter and somewhat disabled with a speech impediment. The first boy stood for almost an hour in an empty dog-washing stall waiting for someone to bring him a dog to wash. He seemed accustomed to waiting. The other boy hung around the driveway until some unknowing customer pulled up and handed him a leash with a medium-sized matted dog on the end of it. He was letting the dog drag him all over the facility when I caught up with him and suggested we head for the stall his friend had commandeered. He nodded yes and looked really excited and terrified. Next thing we knew, we were in a little dog-washing cubicle with a sink, a blow drier, two tongue-tied teenage boys and a frightened tangled mutt.

The kids, who barely acknowledged my presence otherwise, responded to every suggestion and instruction. I was struck by the realization that they were hyper-attuned to every word I was saying even though they never looked at me. I imagine they were somewhat mortified by the social pressures of the event, and so relieved to have a job to do and someone to help break it down into manageable tasks and a clear division of labor. I also had the sense that they are accustomed to having women tell them what to do all the time – perhaps because they live in group homes, which tend to be staffed by women.

With us, the two boys were shy and withdrawn. With the dogs, they were incredibly gentle and even a bit timid. They held the dogs so gently, and brushed their fur so carefully. The taller boy took his task very seriously and performed it well with a gentle-but-firm touch and a quiet manner that seemed to calm the dog. He set the temperature on the water, running the water over his wrist while he adjusted the knobs to be sure it wasn’t too hot or too cold so carefully that I wondered if he had some experience warming a bottle or bathing a younger sibling - his manner was like that of a practiced parent. The other boy seemed panicked by the leash and the difficulty of holding the squirming dog in the sink, and reassured when we showed him how to lather the dog up and use the scrubber to get him clean.

We washed three dogs together. Each one went back to its owner still a bit damp and rumpled. The dogs seemed aware they had just received something therapeutic but not quite cleansing, but the owners were oblivious that anything had been other than professional. They just zoomed off with their beloved pets, in their comfortable cars.

When it was over, the boys sank back into themselves, milling around uncomfortably, declining attempts at conversation, and looking generally unsettled. The agency had a pizza lunch for everyone. When the boys only picked reluctantly at their pizza, I wondered whether they weren’t terribly nervous. After all, what 15 year-old doesn’t lunge at a pizza under normal circumstances? But I suppose nothing is normal about a situation like this one and despite everyone’s best attempts to keep the atmosphere light, they must have felt scrutinized.

None of this is getting me any closer to explaining how excited I feel. We vowed to proceed with measured deliberation, attending a few more events before further discussions with the agency about hosting one of the kids. But I know we’re going to do it and I can hardly wait.

These kids are obviously not going to have easy lives and nothing we do for them will reverse their early misfortune. They are hungry for attention, highly reserved and perhaps mistrustful, and plagued by all sorts of difficulties. But they are so obviously deserving of some comfort and so brave to do what they did today. And doing whatever is required to give them a home seems so natural and so logical.

We’re having dinner with some good friends tonight, and I know they’ll ask about the event, and our plans to adopt. I know they think of it as an “alternative” to having a “real” kid of our own. One is a teacher, and she has sound advice about choosing a younger kid, to give us more time to influence. She’s kind and insightful, but I know I’ll feel like we’re missing each other. I won’t be able to explain why these kids are the ones for us, and I won’t know how to talk about the alternative parenting that we have in mind. We’ll make a joke like we always do about how we just really like the tricky teenagers, and then we’ll change the subject. And that will be it, until someday, we introduce our friends to a shy, agonized teenager who has come to live with us for awhile, and we all figure out how to break being a “family” down into a series of manageable tasks like we did today at the dog wash.

Cold Feet and the Morning After

So here's what this rollercoaster has been like of late:

Last night, I started reading some blogs about adopting an older child on the website adoptivefamilies.com (and whatever I have to say below aside, it's a FANTASTIC resource). I actually googled "older child adoption success" looking for some happy stories to tide us over. Somehow I ended up reading the ones that said things like "After many, many years of HARD, EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL PAIN, things finally improved..." and "Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do this again."

I went to bed feeling scared and discouraged. Actually, I felt terrified and frozen. I felt relieved that we hadn't yet committed to a particular child, and embarrassed about what I was going to have to tell my few friends and family who know we're in the process of trying to foster/adopt an older kid. Why were we doing this? We have a great life, and we're pretty happy with our routines. Why throw that all away? Was I being COMPLETELY idealistic and naive? Worse yet, was I destined to fail?

This morning I got up and read a story in the paper about four Mission High students in San Francisco who are graduating this spring and going to college (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=40827). All of them have faced significant challenges. One girl ran away to Los Angeles in her junior year, stopped going to school altogether, and was living in a foster family that barely cared for her. The attendance liason from her old school in San Francisco called to see where she was and learned she was in LA, not going to school. They got talking, and the girl asked the woman to be her foster mom. After thinking about it long and hard, the woman said yes. So the girl returned to San Francisco and moved in with her new foster mom, who set just three ground rules: no tv on weekdays, we go to church on Sundays, and I'm doing this so that you go to college and have a career. And the girl had a stellar academic year - she designed a class about the Pan-African Diaspora; she served as president of the school's Black Student Union, and this fall she's starting at Spelman College, an all-Black women's college.

I felt so happy reading these stories, I got tearful. I looked up all the profiles of all the kids in our program and started looking for those who resembled the kids in the story. I felt like I could hardly wait to get started.

And so it goes! I don't know, I bet maybe parenthood feels this way, full of highs and lows. I'm trying to manage my feelings so that the rollercoaster evens out a little bit. My partner is better at is than I am - better suited by disposition to maintaining an even keel and following through on a commitment. He doesn't worry much about the daily fluctuation of emotions. Clearly I have some work to do. I intend to follow through, and I KNOW there will be some rough times and some huge hurdles. Sometimes I wish I could find more examples of people who have done this before, successfully, rather than all the gloomy warnings one finds by googling things like "older child adoption." Maybe I'll just stop googling. There's an event coming up, sponsored by our agency - show up and wash dogs with kids who are looking for adoptive parents. I'm sure I'll learn more by washing dogs alongside teenagers living in group homes than I will be late-night googling.

Mandatory training: check!

We wrapped up our mandatory Department of Child and Family Services Training! It felt uncannily like traffic school. For most of the training, a DCFS social worker sat at the front of the room and read to us from a binder. We got through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the Seven Stages of Grief, and a host of grim and off-putting statistics about foster care/adopting older children and the behavioral challenges of post-institutional kids.

The oddest thing about this training is that we are sitting in the ground floor conference room of an institutional foster home in east Los Angeles, effectively doing time so we can get the rubber stamp of approval from the child welfare bureaucracy, while above us there are seven floors of abandoned kids living in an architectural cross between a maximum security prison and a public grammar school in a bad part of town, with barred windows, locked gates, oddly deserted recreation rooms and lots and lots of security desks. I have a gnawing feeling that spending an hour or two talking to a small panel of these kids would probably yield a lifetime’s worth of insight.

Thankfully, the final two hours were spent with a guy who has been mentoring a child through the agency we work with, and who helped this boy look for a permanent adoptive placement. He was enthusiastic, emotionally engaged, and specific about what drew him to the boy he set out to help, and how their relationship built over time.

Which leads me to what I like about the agency we’re working with, Kidsave. They aren't an adoption agency - instead, they facilitate a program that introduces prospective adoptive parents to older children in foster care who are ready for adoption. The idea is that you "host" a child in your home on weekends, or (if you're interested in their summer program for kids coming from Columbia or Russia), for several weeks in the summer. You may also choose to advocate for and mentor an older kid who is looking for adoption, introducing the kid to people in your community without signing up for adoption yourself. That sounds a little odd, until you realize that a lot of these older kids really want to be adopted, and they are hidden away in group homes and foster facilities with little opportunity to meet and form relationships with adults outside the system.

You attend events where you plant trees or visit a museum alongside a group of kids. If and when a natural connection emerges, you check in with a kids’ social worker and find out what her needs are and what kind of life she’s looking for – adoption, a place to hang out on the weekends, a long-term mentor, etc. The social worker sees how the kid feels about you. And if you are getting on together, the kid spends weekends at your house. Over time, that might lead to the kid living permanently in your house through adoption. Or it might lead to a life-long friendship that defies bureaucratic definition. Whatever. The agency does a good job of staying focused on the bottom line, which is that kids need connections to adults who care about them, in whatever form they come.

The process is socially awkward, and I wince sometimes when I imagine the potential for the kids to feel like puppies in a pet store or worse while we jockey to impress them with what cool prospective parents we all are. Am I wearing the right kind of jeans? How do I start a conversation with a stand-offish teenage boy who has sequestered himself under his iPod headphones? Do I seem to "white"? Too old? Am I acting too interested? Not interested enough? At times it sounds like speed-dating. But the agency holds us at bay and gives the kids the right to choose. These kids have been shuttled between temporary living situations for most of their childhoods. It's only fair that these events be designed to make them as comfortable as possible, and that we feel like the ones on display.

We'll see how it goes. Next up, the DCFS home visit to get us approved for hosting a child overnight. Before the social worker shows up, we have to clean, get any household chemicals stored out of reach (even though these are older kids we have to comply with DCFS guidelines about child-proofing), and make an evacuation plan in case of fire in our home. Then we get to the fun part - getting to know the kids.

Beginning at the beginning

I’m starting this blog as a chronicle of my foray into foster parenting in Los Angeles. It's a journal of sorts, and hopefully, a candid account that tells the truth about being a newbie foster parent.

Recently, I told my mother that we’re starting our foster parent orientation and training program. She told me that someone in her community became a foster parent and the girl had to eventually be removed from the foster parent’s home. She suffered a history of abuse and by the age of 12 she was sneaking out, having sex with much older men, and rejecting any attempts at discipline.

When we tell people we want to be foster parents, most often they respond with concern and consternation. I think they assume I can't get pregnant. Why else would someone want to foster or adopt an older kid? Stories of impending natural parenthood are usually greeted with congratulations and optimism, but it seems that helping to raise someone else’s child (the ones who are treated like nobody's child) attracts grave pessimism.

I can think of plenty of biological parenting parallels for the stories I’ve heard about foster care. My grandmother struggled to raise four boys whose young adult lives were marked by addiction. My colleague’s young daughter resents her father’s absence and takes it out on her mother in violent outbursts. I’ve had friends who grew up with pretty stable parents and yet came to tragic ends - their suicides were crushing.

Biological parenthood hardly seems to be a recipe for uncompromised success. I’m not a parent yet, but I can see that no matter how it comes about, parental "success" is always relative and fleeting. The straight-A student might develop anorexia. The high school athlete might marry young and wind up divorced and confused at 30. Human beings have messy lives. Event the most fortunate of us suffer, fail and inflict petty injustice on each other from time to time.

I haven't had much opportunity to explain why I'm doing this, but when I'm talking to myself about it, I say that I feel ready to start with someone who already has a history. I hate the thought that we fear and reject children whose lives have been hard, in favor of kids who are shiny and new. It feels consumerist, and more to the point, it feels like a lie. If a baby is a blank slate for projecting our aspirations to innocence and perfection, an older foster child seems to serve the opposite function; the pessimism I hear echoes our fear of human darkness, anger, weakness and pain.

I don’t know that what we are doing is “right”. I don't want to prove my moral mettle, or impress my friends or my god. But when I think about taking in and taking on a child who is already half grown-up and fully complicated, I feel a rush of maternal feelings that have always eluded me when I try to imagine having a baby. We haven’t struggled with infertility, and I’ve never been pregnant. My partner and I feel meant to do this, and it just descended on us over time with a heavy, stubborn certainty. Some days I feel excited about it, and some days I feel terrified. But like all such things, the decision seems not to rest on any momentary emotional state.

In some way, it doesn't seem like a decision at all. It just feels like it has to be done, by someone, and it might as well be us. There are more than 30,000 kids in temporary foster care in Los Angeles, most with little chance of being reunited with their birth parents. More than half drop out of high school, only 5% go to college, and 25% end up homeless. Thousands age out of foster care without anyone to help them make the transition - to loan them a deposit on a first apartment, or buy them their first car, or advise them about an important job interview.

I feel strangely touched when I think about the possibility that someone else’s child might someday sit with ease at our dinner table. I feel a fierce protective instinct when I think about advocating for a kid whose education has been interrupted by personal chaos beyond their control. I go to the institutional "foster care facility" where we're doing our training courses, and I look at the deformed bureaucracy that professes a desire to do the right thing and dehumanizes these kids every day, and I feel my mind and my heart and all of my personal resources click into overdrive like a machine or an athlete getting ready for competition. I feel beyond myself. I feel that there is a very good possiblity I will "fail" in the ways that one measures such things, and I don't care. The system is building the conditions for failure every day, and maybe I can interrupt it just long enough for someone to catch a break.

We’ll see what happens. The foster care system is already sending us clear messages to beware, be realistic, and be ready. But for me all that matters is to try.