The Small Sacrifices of Foster Parenthood

Tanya’s 16th birthday was no ordinary affair. Sure it had the usual cake, decorations and wrapped presents. But this was the first birthday party she had ever had. It was the first celebration of Tanya, the individual.

We invited many of her new friends and some old ones, including counselors from the group homes in which she has lived for the last six years.

Tanya was gracious and glowing all day and exhausted with pure elation at the end of it. As first-time foster parents, my wife Kathy and I also felt overwhelmed at day’s end--not from the work of hosting a party, but from the delight of watching Tanya’s delight.

We still shudder when we think that this 85-pound, 5-foot child had been living on the streets of the tough Tenderloin district.

As a young child, Tanya had been abused, physically and sexually, by her mother, stepfather and a parade of her mother’s boyfriends. She was placed in a San Francisco group home when she was 10 and told she would be transferred to a foster home within months.

Kathy, a social worker, was supervising a group home for children when she met 10-year-old Tanya, and the two developed a special relationship. Since then, we had acted as an informal big brother and sister to Tanya, visiting her, buying her Christmas presents and taking her to ballgames.

The dream of a foster family was just the first of many unfulfilled promises for Tanya. As she grew older, she was shuffled from group home to group home, 10 in all.

Finally, a few months ago, Tanya got fed up and ran away. But she couldn’t go to school on her own, receive medical treatment or get a job. She was born in El Salvador, and although she had been in this country nearly all her life, none of her social workers had tried to gain legal status for her. She was a legal resident only as long as she was a minor under the care of the Department of Social Services.

Tanya had nowhere else to go, so she landed in the Tenderloin. She was arrested for selling drugs and spent 30 days in a juvenile facility. Upon release, she was sent to another group home; again she ran away.

Each time Tanya moved to a new group home, she called us to let us know where she was. While she was on the run, she also kept in contact, although she wouldn’t let us know where she was staying for fear of being apprehended. But she knew we worried, so she kept calling.

And we did worry. We knew Tanya as a bright, beautiful girl. She got A’s and Bs in every school she had attended, although she rarely was in the same school for more than six months. All she had ever wanted was a home and a family, and now she was perilously close to a life on the other side.

So Kathy and I sat down and studied the pros and cons of becoming Tanya’s foster parents.

Our house is small and we have two young sons. The boys already shared a bedroom, and the only extra room served as Kathy’s home office, guest room and music room. We would have to give that up. We would also have to give up our privacy and some of the time we squeezed out of our busy days to spend with our little boys.

But the alternative was to watch Tanya melt away into the creepy night of drugs and despair. There was no choice. We made the offer to Tanya.

Tanya was moving around, bunking in friends’ apartments. It took her two weeks to make a decision. Then one teary night she called and said yes, she wanted to come, even though she knew it meant turning herself in, re-entering the system, with no guarantee a judge would grant our request.

Since Kathy is a social worker, we had little trouble getting certified by Alternative Family Services, a private foster-care agency that places physically abused and emotionally disturbed children in Bay Area foster homes.

Within a few weeks, we got temporary custody of Tanya pending a formal court decision. A week later, a judge made us Tanya’s permanent foster parents.

Soon, we were invited to the agency’s “Foster Parent Appreciation Night.” Even though we had been foster parents for only a short time, we were honored along with families that had raised many foster children and families with long years of service.

I looked around the banquet room, and I saw blacks and whites and rich and poor. There was a Baptist minister and his wife. There was a lesbian couple.

Everyone swapped stories of the joys and traumas of foster parenting.

There was one couple who had watched helplessly as their 3-year-old foster daughter repeatedly returned to them bruised from court-ordered visits with her mother. It took the couple months of persistence to persuade the courts to end visitation rights.

Another family suffered verbal and physical threats from their teen-age foster daughter’s boyfriend. The family was given the option of ending the relationship with the girl, but they stood by her and she finally left her boyfriend for good.

Nobody talked about politics. Nobody blamed the social welfare programs of the ‘60s or the culture of greed of the ‘80s for the abundance of abused and neglected children in our country. These foster parents were too busy solving the problems of one child at a time.

As I was initiated into this circle, I too refrained from discussing politics or ideology. We had more important things to do. We had to learn from veteran foster parents how to deal with a new and permanent teen-age guest.

And as soon as the evening was over, I had to get home to sleep because the next morning I was scheduled to meet with Tanya’s school counselor.

Tanya and I bumped into each other in the bathroom the next morning, both of us bleary-eyed. I apologized and stepped out while she fixed her hair and applied her makeup. She is, after all, a teen-ager.

And as I had to wait to take a shower in my own home, desperately in need of a cup of coffee, it dawned on me that I would be as transformed by the experience of foster care as I hoped Tanya would be.

I knew then that the sacrifices I had anticipated in undertaking foster care would not be that great after all. A wait for the shower seemed a small price to pay for the chance to change a life--or five when you count us all.