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1. "Become a Foster Parent: Help a Child"
- Vanderbilt University Press
- Chapter
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1 “Become a Foster Parent: Help a Child” I t was mIdnIght, February 28, 2000, a Monday on the verge of a Tuesday. I lay in bed, shivering from anxiety. Although I had wondered if I should stay dressed for the visitors I was expecting, I had decided to change into my pajamas to help myself relax. My two children—Peter, nine, and Martha, six and a half—were fast asleep upstairs in their bedrooms. My husband, Michael, was away on business in Chicago, just for the night. I kept wishing he was home with me. The doorbell rang at 12:30 am. I walked through the hall and down the stairs, my footsteps silenced by the carpeting under my bare feet. As if in a dream, I opened the front door to the cold night air. Our street, lined with brownstones and alive in the daytime with traffic and people walking children and dogs, was perfectly quiet, the only light thrown by streetlamps. Two strangers, 1 2 another mother an African American man and woman, stood on the doorstep. The man was cradling a tiny bundle wrapped in a soft white blanket . Seeing this couple so neatly and professionally dressed for work at my front door in the middle of the night added to my sense that I had entered another realm—where it is someone’s job to take children from their own unsafe homes and place them with another family where they will be safe. Nothing about this situation was familiar to me. My sense of the surreal was displaced by my desire to see inside that soft white bundle. I invited my visitors to the living room, where we all sat down on my overstuffed green velvet sofa and armchairs. Trying to appear generous, I offered to take their coats, but they said they wouldn’t be staying. I wanted the bundle but the man did not offer it to me. Sensing his hesitation, I wondered if it was because I was white, because he felt sorry for the birth mother, or because he already felt attached to the baby himself. So I reached for the bundle, took my foster daughter into my arms, and felt the soft weight of her almost nine pounds. Inside the blanket, her head was covered with the hood of a matching white fleece snowsuit. I looked down at her face and she gazed straight back at me, her large brown eyes wide open. Experience told me that, at five weeks, she was too young to understand the precariousness of her situation. But searching for something, a clue to who she was, I thought I saw sadness in those eyes. I signed some paperwork without reading it. I was given a copy of the “Administration for Children’s Services Preplacement Services Fact Sheet Report” and the nurse triage form that confirmed the baby’s name was Cecilia and that as of ten o’clock that night she was medically cleared with the exception of a diaper rash. The man and woman said a courteous goodbye, gave a little good luck pat to the bundle, and walked off into the night. As I shut the door, I caught sight of the large white van parked by the fire hydrant . My thoughts raced: Temporary parking because they don’t [3.87.209.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:37 GMT) "become a foster parent: help a child" 3 intend to stay, this child is my responsibility now . . . Such a large van, how many children could they fit in that thing? . . . Looks like a commercial vehicle but it’s anonymous—no large block letters on its side announcing “Administration for Children’s Services : Rescuers of Abused and Neglected Children.” I carried the baby up to my bedroom, where I had hastily assembled a bassinet and some other necessities earlier that day. I laid Cecilia gently on my bed and, alone now, took my time examining her, feeling her downy-soft jet-black hair, getting to know her. I changed her from the Administration for Children’s Services thin but new clothing into a white cotton T-shirt and a cozy blue sleeper that had belonged to a friend’s daughter. Between outfits I paused, looking for clues, which I didn’t find, that might help me understand why a child would be taken from her mother in the middle of the night. She had the diaper rash—nothing oozing and nasty, although the...