FALL OR FLY
FALL OR FLY
The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia
WENDY WELCH
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2017 by Wendy Welch
All rights reserved
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Printed in the United States of America
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-2301-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-2302-8
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4623-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
This book is dedicated to the many brave souls who took time from their lives to tell their stories—and then went back and reentered them, day in, day out.
God Bless.
Rock-a-bye baby
In the treetop,
When the wind blows,
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks,
The cradle will fall,
And down will come baby,
Cradle and all.
Contents
Introduction. Welcome to Coalton
1. Looking for Love—and Babies
2. A Different Kind of Love Than I Wanted
3. Through the Eyes of a Child
7. What’s Love Got to Do with It?
8. Love, Understanding, and Fecal Matter
10. Cursed Be the Ties That Bind
11. The Day Barbie Became a Social Worker
12. The Day Beth Stopped Being a Social Worker
13. Why People Don’t Foster, and Why They Do
14. Look for the Sunshine, not the Rain Clouds
Acknowledgments
It is impossible to thank the many people who told me their stories here, but please know you’re in my thoughts and prayers and some of you are my heroes. Thanks to the early draft readers, particularly Kathy Still and Beth O’Connor, for their insightful comments. Much love to my husband, Jack Beck, for taking on most of the bookstore’s needs so I could concentrate on the interviews and writing. And undying gratitude to the anonymous supervisor at a senior level who, when told of this book, said, “It would be wonderful if more people knew about our work. I never want to hear about the project again.”
Introduction
Welcome to Coalton
True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.
—Sol Luckman
A baby is born with a need to be loved—and never outgrows it.
—Frank A. Clark
THERE ARE two ways to achieve parenthood in this life: sex and paperwork. Most people prefer the first method, but it’s good to know there’s something else to fall back on.
The world of foster care is an amazing place, a maze of a place, a blazing mess of a place, and one of the most strangely hopeful places you can enter. Accent on “strange.” If you say the words “foster care,” people’s minds fly to the inner city: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and their skyscraping poverty. Add “adoption in Appalachia,” and here come the consanguinity jokes. “Aren’t you all one big happy family anyway? Why make it official?”
Investigating foster care and adoption in the Appalachian Coalfields provides little opportunity for laughter, however. The truth is that more than 90 percent of the children up for adoption in this region have living parents.1 In the majority of cases, the kids are “available” because of their parents’ substance abuse, and since dealing drugs tends to be a family business (and using drugs a genetic scourge), these children have no suitable blood relations to look after them.
Perhaps it is best to start with a description rather than with statistics. In the same way that the Ozarks or the West Coast can be both stretched to a one-size-fits-all covering and narrowed to specific zip codes, Appalachia has at least two definitions. The US government says it is a vast stretch of economic, geographic, and population diversity encompassing portions of twelve states from Alabama to New York, plus the whole of West Virginia. In casual usage, “Appalachia” tends to mean the central belt of this governmental stretch, rife with mountains and coal seams. If Appalachia is a beautiful, resilient, misunderstood place, Central Appalachia is its poster child.
Then