Stranger care, p.14
Stranger Care, page 14
“I can’t do it,” I said to Eric. “I need you to answer.”
“It’s okay to say no,” Eric said.
We said no a lot. To sibling set after sibling set. To older child after older child. To child in need after child in need after child in need.
“These phone calls really mess with you,” Juliana said. “You need to tell Rolayne you only want to be called when there is a baby.”
I called Rolayne. “Would it be possible to ask people to call us only when there is a baby who needs a foster home?” I asked.
“It doesn’t really work like that,” she said. “I’ll make a note in your file, but when social workers are trying to place children in foster homes, they just go down a list of possible foster parents. It’s usually an emergency.”
When our landline rang again, I answered.
“We have a baby in care,” the social worker said. “Are you available to house her?” The biological mother and her sister had recently moved to Idaho from California. They’d been in and out of jail, in and out of rehab. The baby had come into care with broken bones. She was living with foster parents now, but she needed to be moved to a different home.
“The baby won’t stop crying,” the social worker said. “Screams all night long. The foster parents can’t take it. Maybe it’s the broken bones, maybe it’s an ear infection.”
“How can they not know what’s wrong with the baby?” I asked. “Why don’t they take her to the doctor?”
“The baby has an appointment next Wednesday,” the social worker said.
“That’s a week away,” I said.
There was a grandfather who wanted the baby. “He’s taking PRIDE classes now, but who knows if he’ll follow through,” the social worker said.
I wanted to adopt, and if there was a relative expressing interest in taking care of the baby, adoption would be unlikely.
“No,” I said. “We can’t take her.”
shelter
Eric and I spent all morning cleaning our house. We swept. We cleared the kitchen counters. We folded laundry. That afternoon, we had an appointment with Jen, a social worker, who would recertify us as foster parents. It had been a year since we’d first been certified in Idaho. We had to meet with her to keep our license up to date.
Eric and I had assembled an outdoor couch for our patio the day before, and it had rained during the night, soaking the cushions. We laid the cushions in the sun to dry. Before Jen arrived, Eric went outside to put the couch back together.
“Sarah, come see this,” he said through the screen door.
An ant colony had taken up residence under the cushions in the few hours they’d been drying on the pavers, and the ants had laid hundreds and hundreds of eggs. Without the cover of the pillows, the eggs were exposed to the sun. It was early August and hot. “I don’t want their babies to burn,” Eric said. He rested two of the couch pillows together to create a triangular shelter for the eggs, protecting them from the heat. He checked on them every hour, made sure the eggs were still shaded, watched the ants disappear the eggs between the pavers. “There must be an underground network beneath our patio,” he said.
To be recertified as foster parents, each of us had to complete ten hours of continuing education. Before Jen arrived, we typed up the list of articles and books we’d read and a description of the two workshops we’d attended on whiteness and racism.
“I wish everyone would give me lists that looked like this,” Jen said when we gave her the document. She didn’t mean the content of our list; she meant that it was typed, legible, organized. She didn’t read what we’d written. She didn’t ask us any questions about what we’d learned, what fears we had, why we kept saying no to placement after placement after placement.
She did ask to see the smoke detectors and the carbon monoxide monitors, and Eric used a broomstick to press the button on each alarm to make it beep. She took pictures of our driver’s licenses, our car registration, our car insurance.
“Do you still have life insurance?” she asked.
“Yes,” we said.
“Are you open to an older child?” she asked. “Or do you still only want to be called for an infant.”
“Infant,” I said.
Jen arrived at our house at two o’clock, and she left by 2:11. “I’ve been telling everyone we have a great family waiting for an infant,” she said on her way out. “When they get a baby, they will call me, and I will call you.”
IX
BIG LOST
big lost
At the end of the summer, Eric’s friend Derek visited, and we drove over Trail Creek Pass and into the Big Lost Wilderness to hike into the Pioneer Mountains and up to Betty Lake. We made camp a hundred feet from the water’s edge and lived in that gorgeous basin, without cell service, without other people, for three days. Every night, I sat on an enormous rock and watched the sun set, watched the sky go pink then blue then black, watched the moon relight the landscape and sparkle the lake, no headlamp needed. We saw moose and elk, chipmunks and a peregrine falcon. When it was time to go, we hiked out through fields of cows. “We’re vegetarian,” I shouted at them when they blocked the trail, as if their knowing we would never eat them might allow us easier passage through their fields of shit, their howling.
We followed the Big Lost River home, driving through a valley then back over the pass. We went straight to Grumpy’s, where we drank beer and ate baskets of French fries. My parents met us there, and then my sister and her husband and my two nephews joined us, all of us on the patio in the sun.
The next morning we planned to take paddleboards to Silver Creek, a nature preserve less than an hour from our house. Before we left for the preserve, I had a phone call with a writer to discuss a chapter of her manuscript she’d asked me to read. While we talked about her pages, my cellphone rang. I ignored it. Another call clicked through on my landline. I ignored that, too. Eric came to my office door, which is mostly glass, and knocked on one of the clear panes. I hate it when he tries to talk to me when I’m on the phone, so I glared and pointed to my headset. He walked away, but he had a strange look on his face. His aunt was very sick. I worried he’d received news she’d died. I texted him: You OK?
Baby, he texted back.
When?
Now.
due date
In the second and third centuries, people argued about what happened to Mary’s body in childbirth. Some insisted she felt no pain, that her body did not split open, that her hymen remained intact. Mary gave birth so quickly and with such ease, others insisted, that the appearance of the child startled her.
Think of the paintings we see of Mary kneeling by the manger, the New Testament scholar Jennifer Glancy writes. She’s not lying in bed or on the floor. She’s not squatting or sitting on the lap of a midwife. She’s not tired or pale from loss of blood. She shows no pain, no weakness. Her body bears no sign that she has just given birth. Maybe she never even looked pregnant.
Though I thought a lot about my unchanging body, about the invisibility of our preparation, I didn’t think about the changing body of the woman who would have given birth to the child we would bring home. But then, after the phone call, I thought of nothing else. Did people stand to give her their seat on the bus? Did they congratulate her when they saw her swelling belly? Did they nod and smile? What does it feel like to give birth and then have your baby taken away, either by choice or by force?
Some feminists try to reclaim Mary’s birthing body as holy—the bloody mess of it, the stretch marks, the scars—and in rendering Mary’s body holy again, they hope to sanctify the bodies of all birthing women. Pain teaches you how to become a mother, Glancy argues.
But what about people who give birth but do not become mothers?
And what about people who become mothers without giving birth?
The Mary story I like best, because it reads to me now like an adoption story, is found in Ascension of Isaiah. In this telling, Mary is pregnant for just two months. One day, out of the blue, an infant appears in the room with her. Mary is surprised. One minute she is alone, and the next minute, there he is. Mary’s womb is unchanged, the story says, and her child doesn’t need milk to live, but Mary breastfeeds him anyway, so no one will know he is special, so she can keep him safe.
how soon
I ended my call with the writer. Eric and I listened to the messages a social worker named Grace had left on my cellphone and our landline and his cellphone. The same voice said the same thing: There was a three-day-old baby girl at the hospital in Twin Falls.
I called Grace. We asked her our list of questions. Eric and I talked. Then we called again and asked a few more questions, heard her use words like imminent danger and premature and declared.
“Does the baby have a name?”
“Coco,” Grace said.
“What about the bio mom?” I asked.
“Evelyn,” she said. “And she’s a poor prognosis.”
“Any relatives who want to take care of the baby?”
“No,” she said. “Not that we’ve found.”
“One minute,” I said. I covered the phone, told Eric what Grace had told me about the baby, about the mother, about the likelihood of adoption. He nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll come get the baby.”
“How soon can you be here?” Grace asked.
It takes almost two hours to drive from our town to Twin Falls. It was already eleven. “Two o’clock?” I said.
“See you at two,” she said. Grace told me the name of the hospital’s social worker, told me where to park, told me to go to the front desk when we arrived and ask them to page her. It was Friday, the start of Labor Day weekend. They wanted to get things squared away before the department’s office closed for the holiday, she explained. “Bring a car seat,” she added.
Eric and I changed out of what we were wearing to paddle Silver Creek and into regular clothes. We found the car seat in the basement and packed a bag of things we imagined we’d need. Water bottles. Potato chips. Clif Bars. Baby blankets. Diapers. Wipes.
We didn’t know how long we’d be gone. I showed Derek a map of Silver Creek, explained how to inflate my paddleboard, where to leave the car, where to hide a bike in the bushes.
“Take our picture,” I said before we left, and Eric and I put our arms around each other and stood by the kitchen table.
“Last image with total freedom,” Derek said.
stranger in my arms
Driving to Twin Falls, we passed the now familiar lava fields, signs directing visitors to ice caves, sunlit hills, migrating cranes. In the rearview mirror, we could see the Pioneer Mountains, where we’d camped the day before. Later, people will fixate on this. “What if they’d called you one day earlier?” they will ask.
“We would have been out of cell range,” we will say.
“What if you hadn’t answered the phone?” they will ask.
“They would have called someone else.”
The drive between our town and Twin Falls is beautiful but dangerous, single lanes on either side of the highway with no barrier between, people driving too fast, too tired. Crosses mark the landscape, wreaths of flowers, names of the dead.
“We’re going to get a baby,” I said over and over again. I didn’t know how else to talk about what was about to happen, what we were on our way to do.
When we reached the bridge across the gorge, one side of the road was shut down, lined with ambulances and police cars. Someone had either jumped or fallen. I saw two BASE jumpers folding their parachutes on a patch of grass. Everything felt like a sign, but of what?
We found the hospital and wandered through parking lot after parking lot, looking for the nonemergency entrance Grace had told us to use. We parked, lifted the car seat out of the trunk, and carried our bag of random stuff inside.
I said the name of the social worker, and the woman behind the front desk paged her. I needed to use the restroom, which I should have done before they paged the social worker.
“Hurry,” Eric said.
I ran, and when I returned to the lobby, Eric was in the middle of a circle of women—Grace, an intern who was shadowing her, the hospital social worker, and some other people whose names and roles I don’t remember. They explained there was a mountain of paperwork for us to do. “But would you like to see her first?” the hospital social worker asked.
We took the elevator to the NICU. We must have walked through doors we had to be buzzed through, down long hallways lined with patients’ rooms, then down other hallways, but when we left, hours later, I didn’t recognize anything, not the elevator or the hallways or the security desks.
A nurse was feeding the baby when we arrived, sitting in a rocking chair, holding her tiny body on her lap, supporting her head. “Want to hold her?” she asked and handed her to me.
Love.
This stranger in my arms already familiar.
I’d never held a baby so small. Coco weighed less than five pounds, her legs and arms like sticks, her body thin. The nurse explained how to feed her, that we’d need to give her a bottle every two hours, encourage her to eat by unwrapping the blanket around her, even unsnapping the top of her onesie because she might eat more if she was a little bit cold. She was dressed in a pink onesie with the words Best Little Sister stitched across its front.
Every nurse who came into our room to teach us something—infant CPR, what to expect with low birth weight and early birth, signs to look for that would indicate withdrawal—clearly loved the baby. “She’s beautiful,” one of them said. “Not all babies are so beautiful,” said another. In other NICU rooms were infants with oxygen tents, with feeding tubes, but ours was just small, a month early and strong.
Grace and the other social workers talked with Eric while I fed Coco. Then I heard Grace say, “I have to go, but don’t take this as a sign of anything. Just take this as a sign of how many other cases I have.”
“You’re leaving us?” I asked, my voice too loud for that small room. I barely knew Grace. We’d been together for maybe ten minutes, but her departure scared me, as if the fact that she was on the other end of the phone when we received the call meant she’d shepherd us through this process in some way, as if her leaving meant we were now on our own.
On her way out, Grace said, “There won’t be any visits with the bio mom over the holiday weekend.”
A few weeks before, I’d received another call about a different baby, a three-week-old boy. He’d been found in a home where drugs were being manufactured. Police went into the home because of the drugs and found the baby. I’d asked the social worker the questions on our list—how exposed to drugs the baby had been, what other substances he’d been exposed to, how long he’d been in care.
“I literally do not know any of that,” the social worker had said. “I just know the police declared the baby in imminent danger. They’re about to give him a drug test. There are six potential family members who want to keep him. We’re working with three of them.”
During that phone call the social worker talked only about visits with the bio mom—how important they were, how they made bonding between mother and baby possible, how I’d need to drive the baby to Twin Falls twice a week to see the bio mom.
“Are you willing to do that?” she’d asked. “Because there are other people who are.”
“Of course,” I’d told her. “I’ll drive to Twin twice a week.” I hung up and waited for her to call back to tell me what would happen. Fifteen minutes, an hour, two hours. I called her. “We found someone else to take the baby,” she said. “Someone who lives much closer.”
But this time there was no talk about visits with the bio mother. No talk of bonding. No talk about driving to Twin.
Eric doesn’t like babies. Any time we’ve been in a room with one I’ve tried to hand him the baby to hold, and he’s kept his arms at his sides, shaken his head, but when the social workers asked me to complete some paperwork, he took Coco like he’d always known what to do, and for the next two hours, he held her, fed her, changed her diaper, rocked her.
I left the room once to use the restroom, and to get back into the NICU, I pressed the buzzer on the side of the big locked door.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked, and I said the baby’s full name.
“Who are you?” she asked. “The mother?”
“The foster mother,” I said, and she opened the door.
what a mother’s body does
We stayed in that small room at the hospital for hours, long enough to watch a video on infant CPR, long enough for a second feeding so we could learn to do it ourselves, long enough to talk with the doctor who had delivered Coco. “If you wait, he’ll be able to tell you more about the birth,” Grace had said before she left.
I liked the doctor in his blue jeans and plaid shirt, with his kind face. He answered my questions about what the birth was like, about whether the baby had had any breast milk, about the state of the mother.
Later we’ll learn that Coco’s biological mother drove hours and hours from the state where she used to live to Twin Falls the day before she gave birth. We’ll learn that the time from her check-in at the hospital to delivery was six minutes. We’ll learn that a friend drove her from that other state to Idaho, and when we meet that friend, she will tell us that Coco’s mother came to make a new start, but the social workers will tell us she came to avoid Child Protective Services in her hometown because she already had a child in foster care there and she didn’t want them to take this baby too.
