Stay at Home (essay)

When my husband and I got married, we had had no significant talks about having children.  There would be life things left as surprises and I was okay with this.  Together, we figured out what we wanted for ourselves and each other, collectively and individually.  We figured out what we could do together, how we could live and grow together.  I put my faith into us, religiously.

After five years of traveling, learning, and experiencing the small joys of being together, we decided to start a family.  Though, this is not a story about the beginnings of a family, which grew to include two little girls, four years apart.  This is a story about the end of making one:  about how a newborn came to complete our family during the first autumn of the pandemic.  Life as we all knew it had changed, there was upheaval in the world, and I needed to make sense of something, to help our community, to have a purpose.  In the summer of 2020, as I stitched hundreds of cotton face masks, as I watched our city put up plywood over businesses and windows, and as I listened to George Floyd cry out in desperation for his mama, we decided to become foster parents.  

As I waited in line outside of a grocery store, on a dot six feet apart from the next person, I alternated looking up foster care details on my phone and reading The Yes Brain in the sun.  We would attend an online informational session and then start ten weeks of classes, three times a week, three hours a class.  Amid so many unknowns, I saw fostering as an immediate way to help our community and engage ourselves and our daughters with something that would be positive for everyone involved.  Maybe we would welcome someone – or siblings – until the uncertainties in their lives were sorted.  Maybe it would be something else entirely.  We checked the boxes for boy or girl, any race, any religion, newborn to age seven, the age of our oldest daughter at the time.  We finished our classes.  We read children’s books on foster care to our daughters. We discussed room arrangements and imagined possibilities. My head hosted various trajectories of what might come.  I read any books I could find on parental experiences I was unfamiliar with:  the death of a child, raising children of a different race, transgender children, fostering and adoption.  I did my homework, wanting to understand how the temporary and bureaucratic nature of the foster care system coincided with the permanency of wholehearted acceptance and love of another human being.  We would have to live it.  

During classes, we learned scenarios, possibilities, outcomes.  Reunification!  Reunification is the goal.  We would be a bridge.  Or would we be something else?  Does reunification really work?  We would help a family.  Would a family help us?  “Remember that time…” we would say one day, maybe.  We were going to become a foster family.  The unknown was deeply thrilling, as it was when I was first married.  Daily life became not only the traumatic tragedies on the news, the red covid numbers on the side of the tv screen:  we were living in wonder.  Change was here.  

Children needed (and need) homes and the phone calls came immediately.  The first one came while we were out of state, camping.  The next call came a few days later, asking if we could pick up a two-week old baby girl from the hospital the next morning.  She was ready to be discharged and had nowhere to go and were we ready?  Were we ready?  Grandma came to watch the girls, while my husband and I ventured downtown to the big children’s hospital to pick up our baby girl.  Well, we were ready.

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In her book, Real Self-Care, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin talks about eudaimonic well-being.  To paraphrase, eudaimonic well-being focuses on distilling meaning from our daily lives.  It teaches us that our experiences guide us through learning and growth.  Values and actions are in alignment and we have intention.  Rather than hedonic well-being, which focuses on pleasure and happiness, eudaimonic well-being focuses on how our lives can be imbued with purpose.  I will joyfully take the hedonism in doses – sometimes big gooey ones!  But, the long-term physical and mental health benefits of intentional eudaimonism is where I’d like to rest my head.  

I have an overwhelming feeling to live life deeply, with value and intention, with humility and imperfection.  As an antidote to frittering away time, I invest attention toward emotions and let that guide experiences.  I talk to a therapist, I look for the helpers, I love my family and friends.  It is not smooth, there are frustrations, and it can feel subversive at times.  I see infinite reasons to cry about this world, about the unsupportive systems filled with people who are trying their hardest, who are here to make things easier for others.  I also see reasons to weep with gratitude:  helpers, family, hope.  The summer of 2020 brought all of it to our doorstep; misery and miracles swirled around each other, looking for places to go, and we allowed them into the rooms of our hearts and home.

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These are the actions, the motions, movements of our lives during the Summer of 2020.  I have left out the specifics, which were beautifully complicated, only sometimes made simpler through the eyes of our daughters.  All things are possible to children, anything can be.  I considered this pull, this desire in me to know the foster care system and to see what would happen to us if we allowed it in, if we remained open to it.  The world felt chaotic and I wanted more out of it than daily news updates and – although crucial – coping strategies.  I wanted this for my girls, I wanted them to see how we can make our family the way we felt compelled to, how there are children who might need us, families who could use our help.  And how would we grow from this new purpose?  We had the openness to accept another child as our own for as long as needed.  This timeline would be decided by a foster care system pulled and stretched like dough; a system desperately needed by a society that continually fails to support vulnerable populations.  We would soon come to know a baby, a toddler, a child.  They may look different from us, they may have needs different from ours, and we were preparing. 

Our baby girl was tiny.  She was born on an autumn day and we welcomed her home from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) seventeen days later.  We went through multiple DCFS case workers, learned the ins and outs of Zoom court dates, and experienced a host of emotions that would forever change our family.  This baby was a gift and I felt so selfish.  I wanted her forever.  I wanted 2020 to go on forever.  Joy and peace had found our lives in the midst of chaos.  In the end, this resilient, precious baby girl would never once leave our home.  And, almost to the day, two years later, her adoption would become official on paper and we would be each other’s forever. 

Our daughter was born and a team of experts nursed her, took care of her, and held her for weeks.  They were the bridge between her birth mother and her home, and I am eternally grateful for each person she came into contact with who helped her survive and thrive.  She came home in autumn of 2020 and because of her specific situation, it quickly became clear there would be no home visits with biological family members, no supervised visits at the library or the park.  It was quiet there, uncomplicated, and I wondered how I would eventually talk to her about all of this.  But, I was getting ahead of myself.  That would be for another day.  I carried what I knew of her mother close in my heart, quietly grateful for her to this day:  I will do right by you, Stranger.  Our baby girl had two sisters who were smitten and we adjusted to life with a newborn, to life as a family of five.  I dealt with the issues of permanency and the unknown with gentleness and literature; I was fully aware that we chose this path of mystery and it was part of the experience I had to go through.  Now, she is three, healthy and blooming, with her giggles, her bananas, her scooter.  She is a part of our family and always will be.  She will be able to choose her path in life, irrespective of how she came into the world:  I will do right by you, dear Stranger, I promise. 

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These books helped me prepare for becoming a foster mother and continue to help me with mothering today:

Austin, Nefertiti - Motherhood So White

Boss, Pauline - The Myth of Closure

Cain, Susan - Bittersweet

Cameron, Julia - The Artist’s Way for Parents:  Raising Creative Children

Didion, Joan - The Year of Magical Thinking

Dungy, Camille T. - Guidebook to Relative Strangers

Garbes, Angela - Essential Labor:  Motherhood as Social Change

Hudson, Cheryl Willis and Wayde - The Talk:  Conversations on Race, Love, and Truth

Lakshmin, Pooja - Real Self-Care

Patterson, Jodi - The Bold World

Rapp, Emily - The Still Point of the Turning World

Sentilles, Sarah - Stranger Care

Stedman, M.L. - The Light Between Oceans