Open Arms

You know how kids start a ruckus the moment you’re on the phone? Same goes for the Paula Poundstone household. No sooner did the comedian get on the phone to talk about motherhood than her children started a ruckus.

“Excuse me,” Poundstone offered while she patiently quelled the squabbles.

She has had practice for the last six years--as a foster parent since 1993 through the Westside Children’s Center, and as the mother of two daughters adopted in 1997.

“My girls are having a little fussy blitz. Usually it goes away as quickly as it comes,” she said of Toshia, 8, and Allison, 5.

Toshia was 4 1/2 and Allison was 3 weeks old when Poundstone, 39, took them in as foster children. Currently she also has an 11-month-old foster son.

In real life, Poundstone’s Westside household includes three rabbits and nine cats. In her reel life, she stars in “Home Movies” (UPN), a new animated series. She does the voice of Paula Small, a divorced mom with two children.

Question: What were they fussing about?

Answer: Alley colored something on the picture that Toshia was coloring and there was a big explosion over it. I told her it was OK. We get a thousand coloring books. Don’t worry about it.

Q: What books do you guys read at home?

A: We have an enormous collection because it’s my reward system. Since I have to read the books, it’s really important to me for there to be a big variety, although they often choose the same one over and over just to be cruel.

Q: What’s a favorite?

A: One of my favorites is “Carrot Seed.” We’re big on that. Unfortunately, my children like “Cinderella” so we have a hundred versions. I personally hate “Cinderella” and every now and then put a ban on reading it. They can read it, but I can’t. The other night I read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” It was a different version of it. They had him out working in the [fields]. He was a shepherd in charge of guarding the sheep.

Q: Paula, that’s the original story.

A: Oh, I always had it that he was bored in his house.

Q: What got you started with foster care? Was there a defining moment?

A: I don’t know that there was a defining moment. There were a couple of conversations with friends. For example, I met someone who was on the board of Westside Children’s Center who had fostered and subsequently adopted their son. And I don’t need anybody to look like me. I don’t have any desire to go through the birth experience. Sorry, you know, I don’t feel that I’m unwhole if I don’t do any of that.

I just felt like I had--I think everybody has--this reserve somewhere of stuff to give and there’s a variety of ways of doing that. And then I started thinking, you know, I have nine cats now. I didn’t want to end up puttin’ hats on my cats’ heads, you know.

Q: How many children did you foster before the three kids there now?

A: I had three others that went back to their birth families. The most kids I’ve had in my house at one time have been three, although I’m actually hoping to get a fourth. My goal is to shove myself over the edge.

Q: Does that bother you, taking care of children and then never seeing them again?

A: Well, it’s very hard. I mean, that’s the hard part.

Q: The not knowing.

A: Yeah. I mean, that’s the challenge. And my kids, my daughters are great because they really gather--on the level that they can anyways--what it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Given that it is a very imperfect world, you have to just tell yourself that you know that that period of time meant something and hopefully stays with them in a way. Attachment is a big part of being a baby--and being slightly older than a baby--and, hopefully, they learn to attach in a healthy way that’s going to stay with them.

You know what happens when someone is tossed around a lot is that it becomes a damaged cycle of attachment, but if you, hopefully, start out with a healthy situation, then they can “reattach” successfully. My oldest daughter was raised until she was 4 1/2 in a group home, and it’s devastating. Just devastating. And I don’t know whether she’ll ever really get over it, exactly.

Q: What’s your own experience with a group home?

A: A tremendous amount of coming and going. And I used to volunteer there not knowing any better. I mean, now I would never do that again because I think that those homes are really, really, really destructive.

What happens is everybody, in order to feel good about themselves and feel that they’re helping and doing something, comes and interacts in a particular personal way with these children. Then there’s shift changes. They go off and do something else.

Q: That must be horrible for kids.

A: It is horrible. . . . It’s a kind of care that’s offered, but it’s not a healthy kind of care. What I think is really great about foster parenting, the situations that I’ve had, my children have had me as the mom and I have had the same nannies for years and, you know, I live a very stable kind of life with some routine. We’ve transitioned them, I think, fairly well back to their birth parents, and hopefully that’s the last of that that they’ll ever have to go through.

Q: When you said Toshia may not ever get over her experience in a group home, what did you mean, if that’s not too personal for either one of you?

A: I have obsessive compulsive disorder so I can’t stop talking anyway, so I’d probably tell you these things even if you didn’t ask. The problems that are created were certainly not things that I knew about until experiencing having her here. For one thing, she really didn’t know the difference between someone she knew and someone she didn’t know.

One time we went to a party there [at the group home] after she had been sprung. It was a Halloween party, and all these people were coming up to her saying, “Oh, you’ve grown.” This one lady comes up and says, “Do you remember me? Do you remember me?” I made sure I stuck right by her side. You can never remember everybody’s name. These people who were jumpin’ in and out of her life. I think at a certain point she didn’t even register their names, because why? I said to the lady, “You know what? How about if you tell us your name, and I’ll bet you she might remember you.” And that lady just blew me off. She said, “Oh, no. I took care of her on Tuesdays.”

Q: What about people who really are unknown to Tosh?

A: We were camping one summer and borrowed the hammer of a guy near us so that we could drive the stakes for the tent. She looked up and said, “I would like to go sit in that guy’s lap.” Now, we had never met the guy.

Q: Too damned many rotating laps.

A: I said to her one night a long time ago, “Tosh, how do you get to know somebody?” And she goes, “Kiss.”

Q: Oh, Lord.

A: All right now, let’s start over. There are things about that that just aren’t good. So I would really like more people to realize their eligibility for foster parenting. I think so many people think that they can’t do it. If you consider it more than a few minutes, you’re probably perfectly appropriate and there’s going to be mistakes all along the way just like when you brought [home] your own children. It’s the job most fraught with mistakes of any in the entire world. I like to think that my mistakes are more creative than others, but they’re widespread.

Q: It sounds as though things are going well at home, coloring book fights and all.

A: It actually is going pretty good. We’re getting there. One thing I’m really proud of: Alley was a year and a half when I fostered my older daughter, who was 4 1/2, so they both had their little personalities fairly established by that time and they really became sisters, which was a cool thing to see.

Q: Now, that’s neat.

A: It is neat. When I got called by the agency saying there was a baby for me, we’d been waiting and talking about it every day at home. So I was real excited. I called home and got Alley on the phone. She said, “We will take very good care of him.” And I just thought it was so neat. She really gathered what we were doing, and so far we have taken really good care of him.

Q: Alley’s been good to her word.

A: Yeah. She just yelled at him a little while ago, but I’m sure that was a fluke.

Q: Was that part of the tizzy going on earlier?

A: He’s a big hair puller. I mean a major hair puller. He can pull himself up on my hair.

Q: Everybody’ll have to wear bathing caps at his upcoming birthday party.

A: That’s a good idea. We’ll have some available as people walk through the door if they’re going to hold the baby.

Q: It sounds like you guys are having a good time.

A: I would love for more people to realize that they’re eligible to be foster parents. I think a lot of people think about it, and then they think, “Oh, I couldn’t do that. I don’t make enough money or I’m not married.”

Q: We disqualify ourselves.

A: Right. The only reason I speak publicly about doing this at all--and I’m not really a good recruiter [because] I think I always say the wrong things--is to help recruit in an area that really needs more people.

* Westside Children’s Center: (310) 390-0551. May is Foster Parent Recognition Month.

* Candace A. Wedlan can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.