Losing It

In writing for CASA, I often refer to the trauma children feel when they are separated from their family and sent to live in foster homes. My description is usually confined to a phrase or two because there are so many other things that need to be said. For this blog, I am stepping out of the more formal responsibilities of organizational writing and into the messy, highly-charged world of memories and perceptions. Mine.

My mother had lost her job and needed to apply for welfare. Having pulled me out of school months earlier, she took me with her to fill out some paperwork. We sat in the spacious waiting room as she glared challengingly at the other occupants, swinging her leg hard up and down in a perpetual scissor cut. Under the pretense of discussing her payment, they invited her into one room while I was ushered into another. I don’t know how long I waited, but finally someone told me that my mother was sick and would have to go to a hospital. They were going to find a place for me to stay until she got better.

Before I continue, a word about my mother: she was beautiful, smart, witty, and cultured. Her marriage to my scientist father was a mistake and dissolved within its first year. Trained as an artist, she worked as a stenographer to support us. I was probably in the fourth grade when illness began to overpower her. Everything I knew about her, all her cleverness, humor, gentility – all of it was shredded as she fell into the black hole of paranoid schizophrenia.

But you don’t stop loving your mom when she starts losing it. You go along for the ride.

As they took me down the hallway, a door opened and my mother walked out between two large men. It wasn’t until she saw me being taken away that she began to struggle. Handholds tightened and voices rose. She turned to me and wailed, an animal cry of recognition that the nightmares were coming true. I began to weep. More people came to drag her down the hallway while my escort clucked about the bad timing.

They piled me into a car and took me to an institutional building, where I was ushered into a low-lit room. My questions were met with sugary patience. They were dealing with the progeny of a lunatic and it was important for them to control the interactions until they got the lay of my mind. I had not been lucky enough to get my mother’s green eyes and blonde hair, but it was entirely possible that I had inherited her crazy. And even if it wasn’t my nature, nurture could do it. How many of my thirteen years had been under the influence of a madwoman? Tests were given. More smiles and sympathy were submitted. A few hours later, I was pronounced sane and eligible for the foster-home experience.

I was an emergency placement, the inconvenient disaster. I stayed overnight at the institution and the next day, they managed to scare up a foster family willing to take me in. We arrived in the ubiquitous government car. They walked me up the front stairs leading to the porch and introduced me to a smiling woman who put her arm around me. To someone standing across the street, it might have appeared to be a heartwarming experience. The homeless young girl arriving at a handsome house, met by an attractive blonde with open arms, a women with three tow-headed children of her own who has room in her heart for a complete stranger.

On one level it was clearly a blessing: the proverbial friend in need. But here’s what it feels like to be inside that girl. You are the residue of an atomic blast, a shadow on the wall, the shade of a dead child. You are emotionally eviscerated, a flatlander in an empty gray landscape of lines that go nowhere. You can see the real world on the other side, but the transmission is full of static. You can see the good intentions of the child-care system, but it is like the distant murmuration of a flock of birds that never land.

The foster parents were kind, but they had their own kids. I was a fake child. But let me reiterate. They took me in. In a metropolitan area of over a million people, they were one of a rare handful of families who would open their doors to this strange, flatlander child.

So there I was, the scared, naïve product of a cloistered asylum of two, recently kidnapped to live with a more acceptable family. An alien child, owlishly observant yet conversationally stupid. It was somehow appropriate that I shared a room with their youngest, a three-year-old daughter. For me, an only child, this small, insolent, sweet, petulant, demanding creature was perhaps the most alien species of all.

After a year, the home closed when the mother went to France for a rest, an old-fashioned way of saying she couldn’t take it anymore. Aside from her own kids, foster kids had rotated in and out of that house for the entire 12 months I was there, and for years before I arrived. She, too, was in danger of becoming a shadow on the wall, but she had the support system of her family and I like to think that it gave her a path back to happiness.

At the end of that painful year, I understood that my mother and I were broken cogs in some mysterious societal system of which I knew almost nothing. Life had become a bit like the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil, where the brief flashes of Monty Python humor only served to highlight the strangeness of it all.

Imagine the difference a CASA Advocate would have made. In the blur of changing social workers, schools, and homes – there would have been one person who was in focus. One who had full bandwidth available, who knew me well enough to know when something was terribly wrong.

My third foster mother was despotic to the point of cruelty. I can remember sobbing to my case worker as I described how she bullied and despised us, and how it was particularly awful for another foster child in the home, an eight-year-old, who was treated as an indentured servant.

Years later, when I obtained a copy of my files, I discovered that emotional plea had been reduced to a bureaucratic safety zone of the child being unhappy because she missed her mother. There was no mention at all of the foster mother’s bizarre behavior or the younger child’s predicament. Redact the names and I wouldn’t have realized that this report was even about me. It was a generic summary of every child in the system. No one had heard me.

It’s hard for foster kids to feel real, and even harder to feel connected. Caseworkers come and go. Schools change. Friends change until you reach a point that losing them is just too painful, so you do without. Even when foster homes are good, you always know you’re second-class. The relationship will end with a forced move.

Yes, a CASA Advocate would have made a life-changing difference. Because a CASA only works for one child or sibling group. They don’t disappear after a few months, they stay with you the entire time you are in care. A CASA would have known how unusual it was for me to voice such specific and emotional concerns about a placement. They would have listened – and that would have given me a voice in a system that is hard of hearing.

It’s wrenching to be separated from your family, even when your family is imperfect. It’s a breathtaking loss of identity, amplified by living with people you don’t know who have routines and habits of mind you have never experienced. There is nothing to hold on to when everything changes with such fluidity: people, peers, teachers. Kids need one person to be consistent, one person they can count on to come back.

And that is why I do what I do: fundraise so that kids in foster care can have that one person who comes back. I know how much it can mean to have someone who sees you, someone who hears you, someone who advocates for you. It’s why kids with CASAs have more hope. If there is a better job than helping to bring kids hope, I don’t know what it is.