Another Mother: Co-Parenting with the Foster Care System

8. The End of the Beginning

187 8 The End of the Beginning t he court had terminated the rights of Ella’s birth parents . She was now a “legal orphan.” However, we couldn’t move on just yet. The final step would be adoption. Over the next months, I was still obligated to bring Ella to the agency for visits as I had been doing for the past two years. Ella was quiet during the visits and stuck to me like glue, spending most of the visits on my lap, which was unusual for her, since she was normally very active. She didn’t pay too much attention to Zuri— Zuri herself was more focused on her youngest child—but closely watched the other kids. Once when I was packing up a bag on a Wednesday afternoon, Ella said she didn’t want to go to “Dawn’s house,” meaning the agency. Dawn was sometimes aggressive toward Ella, I think because she was jealous of the attention I 188 another mother gave Ella. I reassured Ella that Dawn would not hurt her, and she went to the visit happily. While there was no requirement that Ella meet with Zuri, as her rights had been terminated, Ella had to have visits with the older half sisters who were not yet adopted and the younger half brother who was in foster care. However, since no one had any objection to Zuri’s attending the visits and because she was entitled to visits with her son, the visits were kept open to everyone. I resented that the visits were not scheduled at times convenient for me or Ella. I would think about how much more I (and, I think, Ella) would enjoy the experience if we could have met everyone in the park on a weekday morning. This was not practical though because of the older girls’ school schedules. I was now working part-time and I had to hire a babysitter to pick up Ella at day care, bring her to Manhattan, and meet me at the agency every other Wednesday. Then the babysitter had to head back to Brooklyn in time to pick up Peter and Martha from afterschool by 6:00 pm. As the weeks passed that spring, my reluctance must have become more obvious. One day in the middle of May, I got a call at work from Ella’s day care saying that she was ill. The teacher asked me to leave work to come and pick her up. After picking her up that afternoon, I called the agency and let them know that we wouldn’t be able to come to that evening’s visit. The next day at work, I received an e-mail from the social worker stating that she wanted me to fax her a copy of the doctor’s diagnosis confirming Cecilia’s illness, so that she could show it to ACS. I was furious, because I felt she was implying that I was lying—and this after I had to leave work early the day before. E-mailing with the social workers was a new thing for me. Either it had just become apparent to me that this was a possibility or it was only recently that they had this capability in their office. Anyway, it suited me to communicate in this fashion with this new and fourth social the end of the beginning 189 worker. I was tired of building personal relationships, and I was counting the days until the adoption. I e-mailed back without my usual first-name salutation: Ms. Hernandez, The message that I left was that Ella’s school called me to pick her up early on Wednesday because the teachers felt that she wasn’t well. They suspected that she had an ear infection because she said that her ear was hurting. I did not take her to the doctor because although she was very crabby on Wednesday afternoon, when she woke up on Thursday, she seemed much better. If you or ACS would like to call her day care to confirm this, feel free to do so. Sarah Gerstenzang In June our agency moved to the Bronx; New York City was shifting to a new system in which foster care services would be neighborhood based. Agencies had to be located in their allocated districts and provide foster homes to children in the neighborhoods that they came from. This...