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Change of Heart
I couldn't let them go into a foster home, I just couldn't. I talked with Donna, a social service agency rep over the phone, just to get a better glimpse into the foster care system. After we exchanged details, the stories I had in my head about abusive foster parents changed. I felt more confident with the agency's protocols for screening and monitoring parents.
"The thing is," I said finally, "I don't want them separated. They need to stay together. Is that possible?"
"It's highly unlikely," she replied. "Most often we separate kids based on housing availability. It's rare to find a foster parent willing to take two kids in at the same time."
After we hung up, I walked outside into the backyard and sat on the white plastic lawn chair. I stared up at the gray clouds crossing the sky as Ruby sat at my feet, gazing up at me with her big brown sad eyes. I felt agitated, even angry, as if I wanted to scream out at someone or something. Timmy and Tessy had never been away from each other. Not ever. It didn't seem fair, the injustice the two of them had already experienced in their short little lives.
It was bad enough Joan had fallen for a man who was a loser in many respects. Wayne, Timmy and Tessy's dad, had had numerous run-ins with the law, had never been able to hold down a steady job, had had a long history of drug abuse, and add to that list, since he'd been a parent, he fully lived up to the reputation of a deadbeat dad. Joan had not one, but two children with that man who in no way, had ever been available to her or their children. She kept hoping and praying he'd change, but that never happened. It rarely does.
Knowing young boys tend to idealize their fathers, as Timmy did his, Joan had tried to overlook Wayne's deficiencies, focusing on the importance of her son maintaining contact with his father. Every year Joan invited Wayne to Timmy's birthday party. On Timmy's third birthday, he showed up. After a half hour, he pulled Timmy aside, crouched down in front of him, and said, "I'll be right back, I'm just gonna run to the store to get a pack of smokes. I'll come right back."
But he never returned. As the afternoon turned into dusk, Joan found Timmy standing on the sofa, his elbows resting on the windowsill, peering out onto the street waiting for his dad to return. The next day, Joan found him again, sitting on the sofa, staring out, and waiting. And the next day after that, and the next one after that.
I know we all have flaws, and some of us are walking around this great big earth with troubles that are too big and burdensome for any one soul to handle. I try my best not to berate anyone. But I'd never been able to hold back when it came to that man. Because the next time Timmy saw his dad, a year later on his fourth birthday, Wayne did the same thing to his son. Again, he told him he'd be back after he ran out to the store to buy cigarettes.
Overhearing the conversation, and sensing the trauma it could cause Timmy, Joan excused herself from the party, followed Wayne out to his truck, and told him not to come by, ever again. It tore her up inside seeing her son go through that anguish.
Not only were Timmy and Tessy without their dad, but soon, very soon, they'd be without their mom. It felt as if it would be an unnecessary hardship for them to be separated from one another.
So I decided to take them back to California for the year.
Dad was forever saying, "Check your motives." So I did. And the only true answers I could come up with were, first, it's my nature to be responsible and dependable. I tend to lean toward wanting to do the right thing. I couldn't picture myself back in my sunny California life with the possibility of the kids feeling abandoned, scared and unhappy in foster homes.
But the more compelling reason for taking them was that the ghosts of my childhood had come knocking on my door. There was the time when I was six, maybe seven, somewhere around Tessy's age, when my mother went into the hospital. I came home from school one spring afternoon, and she was gone. My mommy ceased to exist for a time that felt like forever, leaving an empty hole in my heart.
My nana, my mom's mum, was a beautiful, robust, good-hearted woman who, in keeping with her Irish legacy, believed all of life's problems could be settled over a cup of tea. The day my mother went into the hospital, I saw Nana's big blue Impala parked in front of our house from the school bus stop up the street. I ran all the way home so I would be the first one in her lap.
She was sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of Lipton tea. She sat my brothers and I down at the table, placed a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies in front of us, and then poured us each a tall glass of milk. With her long silky fingers, she pulled a blue lace handkerchief from under her dress sleeve. While rubbing it with both her hands, she looked up at us and said, "Your mum's in the hospital. She'll be okay. But you need to be brave and strong and help out by being good little children." She nodded her head while cracking a faint smile.
That's all I remember. She helped us each pack a suitcase, and off we went to live with relatives until our mother was well again.
My older brother Brad and I stayed with our Aunt Elaine and Uncle Dick. It was okay because we knew them well, they were nice people, and they had kids around our age we liked to play with. They lived in a huge white colonial house on a lake where hundreds of red and yellow tulips lined the walkway down to the shore.
Mostly I loved hanging out with my cousin Diane, who was a couple of years older than I. I felt so grown up in her presence. We sat for hours at the pink Formica kitchen table making love-bead necklaces together, and she taught me how to play Twister barefoot on her front yard. On Saturday mornings she took me to the park where I learned to sing Jeremiah was a Bullfrog from soulful teenagers who played guitars and wore patched faded blue jeans. So in many ways my stay with my relatives while my mother was in the hospital was somewhat of an adventure for me.
But in the secret chambers of my heart, pools of teardrops gathered as my mommy seemed alive only in my memory.
I couldn't let Timmy and Tessy go into foster homes. Maybe my intention to take them was to compensate for my own childhood loss. It's possible, I suppose, that I was reacting to the whispering voices of the abandonment and anguish I had felt so long before. When I finally stopped telling myself all the reasons I couldn't take them, I was flooded with the memories of the little girl who still lived in me. She was scared and saddened by the memory of the distance and separation from her own mommy those many years ago. Though I had longed for different memories, I became present with the emptiness and heartache of the past that still lived in me.
Eventually my resistance in taking them vanished.
Steve and I talked it over, well, sort of.
"I've decided to take them back to California with me. I don't know what else to do. I can't let them go into foster homes. It just doesn't feel like the right thing to do," I told him over the phone one evening.
"It sounds like you've already come to a decision," he said.
There was a long silence.
"What's the matter? You don't have anything else to say?" I asked.
"You've already made up your mind. What's left for me to say?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Don't you think you should've discussed this with me first? You're making choices about both our futures without consulting with me." He remained calm and rational, though I knew he was bothered.
"But, what am I supposed to do? I can't let them go into foster homes, I can't. You know I've been trying to find someone to take care of them, and I haven't been able to." I knew I was defending my reasons. He knew it too.
"You're making decisions that affect me without talking with me."
"What am I supposed to do? Please, tell me what I should do?" I said, almost insistent.
"It's a tough one, Laura, I know. But I don't think you should take on the responsibility. They're not your children. They're not your responsibility."
"I can't let them go into foster homes. I just can't," I said wearily.
"I need to be with this on my own for a while. We can talk more about it later, but I need you to know that I don't like it," he said again, before a long deafening silence.
