“We don’t want to recruit under false pretenses, and we don’t want parents who think they’ll be the next Hallmark movie. Just tell the stories truthfully. That’s enough.”
I hope so, because Fall or Fly encompasses humans full of rage and a system plagued by crazy, alongside homes redolent with warmth and offering pathways to possibility. The takeaway most will find here has two parts:
1. Adopted and foster children, their parents, and their social workers include some of the most hopeful humans you will ever meet.
2. Despite official-speak, they have had few reasons and even less encouragement to be so hopeful.
Children in Coalton’s foster care system are doubly burdened. First, they’re kids. Who listens to kids, even when they’re trying to articulate their own needs in the face of harsh circumstances? Second, those from Appalachia’s Coalfields have grown accustomed to being helped rather than listened to. History has taught citizens here that helpers aren’t interested in what we people of Appalachia know, far less in who we know ourselves to be; they’re here to “fix” us so we can be all they know we can be, if only we knew better. That applies to kids too.
It is undignified to be a victim. The Coalfields population may or may not be one; answers vary with each person you might gather the courage to ask. But these young’uns shifting between houses with no say in the matter, learning contradictory rules with each move, bleeding dignity every time they stuff their personal belongings into a garbage bag and occupy the backseat of a car? They are victimized. Self-efficacy is the first casualty, followed by trust, confidence, hope, and a viable future. Yet these children are our future.
COLLECTING THE STORIES
The interviews resumed after Dale’s encouragement, this time more in-depth, taking little diamonds of individual telling and turning them into as holistic as possible a depiction of what’s going on in foster care and adoption in the Coalfields. Phone calls and “I can meet you at the Mountainside Dairy Queen tomorrow morning” notes flew via Facebook Messenger. The core group of a dozen people who’d been my informant base expanded, slowly, as trust built.
We—the social workers, the foster kids, and I—were careful in the telling and collection of stories. Nobody’s real name appears in any of the transcripts; I kept forgetting real names and called informants by their pseudonyms when asking for follow-up interviews, causing moments of confused merriment. When possible, interviewees read the drafts of their stories and made tweaks or comments. In the early stages, not many foster parents were willing to speak to me, so I worried about balance when social workers and foster kids discussed events involving foster families. Yet both groups also willingly told uncomplimentary stories about themselves.
The first in line to talk tended to be the social workers. Former and current foster children were a mixed bag of reluctance and eagerness; foster parents rarely returned phone calls; adoptive parents were mostly happy to chat; but it was the social workers who loosed pent-up torrents that turned mountain stoicism into volcanoes spitting boiling lava.
Social workers and foster parents have several things in common, and the first one you notice, when standing outside listening in, is that neither group can catch a break in public opinion. They are either saints or sinners—“no middle ground,” as one interviewee said months later, articulating the observation in a single phrase. Foster parents tend to be seen either as naïve victims for taking a cuckoo’s egg into their nest or as paragons like Mother Theresa. Either way, bless your heart but you’re not to be trusted, because you’re not like the rest of us humans.
As for the public’s opinion of social workers, who would do that job for that pay? Their very altruism made them suspect. Social workers rarely get to talk without repercussions, and they really wanted people to understand that Coalton culture sometimes eats social programs for lunch. Over and over again, the stories social workers told hit a common theme: parents who were part of the problem rather than the solution. It took a lot of listening to get past the anger and hear the reasons behind the stories the workers wanted to tell. Social workers in the Coalfields vary widely in type and temperament, but if I had to choose one phrase with which to summarize their perspective, it would be “benevolent frustration.”
One of my earliest lessons in listening with discernment during conversations between foster parents and social workers came from asking the latter about things they didn’t deal with directly. (I asked about group homes.) Caseworkers who had been talking nonstop at one hundred words per minute shut down faster than a flooded coal mine. And proved harder to open back up. Finally, it became clear: what dedicated social workers couldn’t change for the better, they wouldn’t talk about. That thing did not exist in their world. Cut off the part you can’t save; close the doors on the energy drain that won’t yield results. Eventually, I learned that this defense mechanism applied equally to government bureaucracy, bad foster parents, and kids who were their own worst enemies.
What’s interesting in light of this observation is that the workers talked practically nonstop about foster parents overly concerned with money or morals. If you think about it, maybe that’s a hopeful sign. Because social workers don’t waste their breath on things they can’t change, if the bulk of their venting centered on foster parents, then foster parenting is likely a place where awareness can bring about positive change. I’d like to think so, given that my original intent was to recruit foster parents.
Interviews with foster parents proved more difficult. Social workers thrust contact details on me with the parents’ permission, but the latter often exhibited passive resistance when I called. Too busy, so sorry. Actual refusals varied in wording but centered on the foster parents’ feeling that they had little good to say about the system, coupled with reluctance to discourage someone considering being a foster parent. Some felt their experiences were too stereotypical to be understood outside the region. Others thought them too unique to avoid identification; they didn’t want to be targeted, prosecuted, or recognized. Four interviewees or contacted individuals narrated similar tales of coping with an older foster’s inappropriate behavior to a younger child yet forbade publishing that story because people would recognize them.
Adoptive parents, on the other hand, were eager to talk. Most started as foster parents and fell in love with specific children. They were as happy to relate their history as any couple explaining how they met and fell in love. Adoptive parents were also more forthcoming about existing and prior struggles with their children. When I first mentioned the different trust levels observed between foster and adoptive parents during interviews, I was standing in the office parking lot after meeting with Cody about how to proceed in collecting stories. He said he wasn’t surprised and offered an early clue into the difference between adoption and foster care, as viewed by case managers (those who oversee the care of displaced children). He suggested that most people doing foster care for good reasons wind up adopting.
“Long-term foster homes are where you find the stuff going on that you don’t want to find. Not always, but our goal is always adoption.” Parents who foster, unless they do respite or emergency care, tend to wind up realizing that the best way to make a difference is to choose one child or sibling group and adopt. “So you’re trying to talk to those who are feeling too new to talk, or maybe they’re not wanting a lot of disclosure. Or they’re trying to adopt and getting yanked around by the bio parents and the system. Either way, they’re in limbo.”
At the time, barely two weeks into the interviews, his comment didn’t resonate. I watched Cody hop into his jeep, scribbled his words on the back of a napkin in my car (fieldworkers take note: never turn your recorder off, even in the parking lot after a good night’s collecting), and filed the comment under “see if this attaches to something later.” A month later, what he’d meant made sense. You’ll read in this book several narratives of people who made the journey through foster care to adoption.
Then there were the interviews with kids. We set ground rules: No one under the age of fifteen. Aged-out adults who used to be in foster families were preferred. I could make observations while attending family-fun events held by Department of Social Services (DSS)