Life at the foster’s

Life at the Foster’s
 
Humility, I thought, as I watched from the deck, mug in hand, as the children frolicked in the backyard.
These foster gaffers have lots to teach me.
I sipped my coffee, dry-eyed but not, and examined each of them. The agency referred to them as clients or cases, not in any indifference, but those were the words. We saw them as children, our children for the time they blessed us, and our challenges.
My life, my childhood, seemed now to be blessed compared to the sadness and sometimes horror that lingered beneath each of these excited faces, flushed with their game.
I watched the three siblings, only with us for this respite weekend. Ash stood at the threshold of teenage. She was the calm one, full of fun, but even now showing hints of motherhood. At 12 years, she should not, really, but circumstance and the failings of the adults in her life thrust maturity onto her. The others, her brother a few years younger and still with the innocence of youth, damaged but hopeful, and the wee sister whose pained heart lay deep beneath the exuberance of the young. Ash had become the parent, the guardian of her brother and sister. They were her brood and to be shielded as she could.
I pondered. My wife and I hoped, for a few brief days, that we might relieve Ash’s burden and let her be a child. These children, all who came here, carried the shadowed reflections of our long gone from home offspring.
Love grows, I thought, love grows.
Jer flashed across my sight. He was ours, in agency speech. He lived with us full time for now, and his bright smile as he chased about the yard brought hope. Jer was as feral as any of the kids we had seen. The system had its ways and biases, mostly dictated by bureaucrats and politicians who thought in dollars and intellectual theory. Both were important, but they obscured the needy humans they wished to help. Jer should not even be here. Income support, perhaps a support worker too, for a struggling mother who had to leave him feral at home while she struggled to earn a living would have kept him home. It would have allowed her to be a mother.
“Tag, you’re it,” cried from the yard. It raised a smile.
Last night came to my mind, and I eyed Jer and the brother Tim. The boys had recovered from last night’s trauma. Being feral, Jer had been used to living alone in the apartment, doing whatever he felt like, and slipping out to the store if he could. In the middle of the night, by happy chance, I had to do an old man’s duty. As I passed the room that the boys shared, I heard the whispers.
“It’s okay,” said Jer in conspiracy. “we’ll sneak, go to the Mac’s and be back before they know it. They’ll never find out.”
Jer seemed enthusiastic and Tim doubtful, if not scared. This old guy smiled, did my duty and eased downstairs to the front porch. I only needed five minutes sitting in the street light spilling through the windows.
“Going somewhere, boys?”
The little heads that had confidently emerged from the doorway suddenly held anguish. They froze. The jail break had not gone according to plan.
It was a short, if one-sided, conversation as I delivered my lecture quietly and calmly, not wanting to wake the cats. I explained the folly of their ways, and the dangers that might lurk in the nighttime streets, although our little town was safe. I explained that facing me was a lot more comfortable than if they had met a constable who might have bothered to be on Main Street at 3 AM. Chastened, the little felons fled back to bed.
I hoped they had learned three lessons: that sneaking was wrong; that making mistakes need not be fatal and that I cared for them. I slept well.
The system is flawed; I thought, sitting and watching the play. None of these kids had ever been in real danger, but circumstance and flawed parents and a flawed culture put them here.
Then I remembered Isaiah, who was somewhere else this weekend. He was the only one of our kids who had likely ever been in danger of death in his biological family. I called him “the ghost”. Isaiah would move through the house, ghost-like, as quietly as possible, and then materialize. Before they apprehended him, as the quaint jargon of the agency puts it, he lived in fear from his parents. We never knew or asked about the details, but we received that bit of back-story. Isaiah often visited for respite for his full time foster family. He was a great kid, but I suspect partly because survival had meant not aggravating the dangerous adults. And he listened. He heard everything, and we guessed that again, his safety at home depended on his knowing what was going on, what horror might be in his future. We tried to never talk about him unless he was with us. He deserved that morsel of power and respect.
My coffee had gone cold. I rose to refill and nuke it. I looked back at the happy youngsters, and somehow felt satisfied that we had given some of that to them, no matter how briefly.
I blinked.
We received an enormous gift of happiness from these children, to care, to love.