There’s this case I’ve been working for about a year. It’s one that takes a lot of my time and energy, and I care about the family so much. Last September, I was in court for it, and the older kid in the family, a fourteen-year-old, attended court too. We were catching up outside the courtroom. I remember sitting cross-legged on the bench so I could face her directly. She’d just heard the judge order the department to continue paying for the hotel she and her mom were living in with their little dog. She’d been wearing her hair in this huge afro lately and it looked so cute. How are things going? I asked. And how about between you and your mom?
I’m mostly worried about my sister, she said. Her little sister, who is ten, and still in foster care. It’s just hard for me to understand why she can’t come home even though I’m home.
I tried to answer her questions truthfully and still appropriately. It can be hard, with teens and tweens, to strike the right balance. I remember being fourteen — my hunger for the entire world, and my righteous anger. I see that version of myself in this girl, who works herself up into these fervors and says I just don’t understand and makes it sound like a command (make it make sense). Or like a malediction (it doesn’t make sense and you know it). Part of my strategy is trying to show my hand, to make it obvious that I am considering how to communicate to her. Let me think about how to explain this, I said. Okay, one part of it is that I’m not the only decision-maker here — you know that, we’ve talked about that. Another part of it is that your sister is younger than you, and she has different needs than you do.
Something that weighs on me is knowing that kids get these skewed ideas of what’s normal, of what’s owed to them by adults and the world. I don’t actually always dwell on that. I think one way to love someone is to respect them, and one way to respect them is to understand what is real to them. Sometimes getting too tied up in my own ideas of what a child should have takes me away from really understanding what is real to them. But I also don’t want to let a young person be known by me and come away never having heard that they deserve good things. This is another place where I struggle to find the right balance.
It was on my mind while I tried to articulate to this teenage girl why she and her sister were being treated differently. She has different needs than you do, I said. I know you can see that, because you know her so well. And those needs mean it’s extra important that she has a reliable sober caregiver. I smiled dryly here, tried to catch her eye. Just so you know, I wish your mom was sober all the time for you. I bet you wish that too.
I think I did an okay job understanding what was real to her on that day (I love my mom, I wish my mom were different, I don’t want people to think I can’t live with my mom, I want you to see that this isn’t okay, I want you to think that I can handle this, don’t look at me, please notice me). And when I named our shared wish for her unsober mom to be sober, she just huffed out this wry little laugh and said, Yeah. I have never felt so in tune with this girl before or since, never felt so aligned. And it broke my fucking heart.
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There’s this other case, one I’ve worked even longer. It started when the kid, a twelve-year-old boy, ran away from his dad after his dad broke his hand. Dad’s in prison now, and his mom lives out of state. When I first took over the case, he hoped that he could move to Florida to live with his mom and her other kids. But she told me she just couldn’t handle it, and then she slowly stopped responding to my calls.
He lived with the family friend he had run away to for a year and a half, and they agreed to pursue permanent guardianship. But he went into this deep funk last summer. He started giving me one-word answers when I came to see him. His kin caregiver said he was being ornery and disrespectful and had stopped expressing interest in anything. I told her that depression can look a lot like a kid being an irritable pill all the time. She said, Huh.
Finally, he confessed to the kin that he wanted to live with his dad’s ex, who he saw as being like a mom to him. He said she had told him back in December that her dream was for him to come live with her and the little kids. The kinship caregiver told me that she told this boy, I want you to be where you want to be, I want you to feel comfortable where you are, of course I love you, but I always tell you to follow your dreams, and this is your dream. She said, It’s okay if you do this, and we will always care about you, and I also need you to understand that if you leave us you can’t just come back.
I wish she said, I want you here, because you are my child, and I have a place for you no matter what, and you belong here with us. I almost never get what I want at work.
But he moved in with his stepmom, and it was a sweet reunion of family, and it went well, and they adjusted around each other, and it was going fine, and then I guess it wasn’t going that well, and he kept bringing weed into the house, and she said I think we’re going to have to talk to Anna about this if you don’t even want to be here, do you even want to be here?, and so he ran away.
I saw him last week. I’d been calling around all month to different family members, going down little rabbit holes, circling back around and calling again. Have you heard from him? Have you seen him? I talked to his mom, who I hadn’t gotten through to in over a year. He will always be searching for what you won’t give him, I wanted to say, but only part of me wanted to say it, and of course I didn’t. The most I could get someone to tell me for weeks was that their cousin’s son had heard from him through Facebook messenger and they didn’t have a direct number for him. Finally, he turned up at his dad’s other ex’s sister and her husband’s place. I sat on the couch next to him and complimented his fresh haircut, the one the husband gave him because he’s a barber out of their front room. I wanted him to know that I was glad to see him and that I thought about him a lot while he was missing. I’m happy to see you, I said. I was worried about you. His smile was a little shy.
We talked about how his weekend had been in this house, and the older brother he had stayed with for a week before that, and what he wants. I wish you could see this kid the way I’m seeing him in my mind’s eye right now. He’ll be fourteen in April. He’s pretty small still, but his voice is a lot deeper than when I first met him. He wears a little chain around his neck.
I said, When you think about the future, what would you want to happen?
He said, Well, I’d like to live with my mom. He ducked his head. But I know she doesn’t want me, my brother told me.
What do you even say to that? Hm, I said. I know the situation with your mom really sucks.
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There are all these visceral details, funny things, and sad things, things in the physical world that make up my workdays. I try to be present to those things. The pale, sweaty skin of the nineteen-year-old who smoked meth right before our meeting, or the persistent smell of urine every time I visit this one house, or the string of uncertain text messages from the mentor who wasn’t sure if she should alert the team that this girl’s mom sent her on their outing with a full package of hot dogs and nothing else as a snack. I laughed at the hot dog thing for a long time, which, by the way, is not child abuse or neglect, it’s just funny. I’m laughing right now, is what I’m saying.
But as much as the actual specific parts do stick with me, there’s this other thing that’s gotten into me way deeper, this undercurrent of sadness. It’s this lingering sense of loneliness in my chest. Despair is too strong — despair sounds like I don’t think the world is good, and I do think the world is good. But I guess it’s despair.
It’s just that we’re all starting from behind. These kids I know, their parents, my parents, my friends, me. There is only ever starting from behind.
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I used to go to this meditation group in college. The teacher was this wonderful, gentle woman. When someone spoke, she would look at them really softly and directly. She taught us a kind of meditation called tong-lin. I’m not confident that I’m remembering it accurately, but in my memory, it’s practiced like this: on the inhale, you inhale the suffering of the world. And on the exhale, you exhale peace, and good things.
When I’m freaking out about guzzling from a firehose of human struggle for a living, I like to do this practice. It suggests to me that the painful things of the world actually are unending and ceaseless, constantly renewing themselves, borne forward through generations of living and dying. It suggests that if I am looking for a rest from the world offering up difficult circumstances, I won’t find it. And, okay. Fine! But it equally suggests that I can witness anything at all without ever depleting my inner stores of goodwill, which are also unending and ceaseless. That’s its own kind of rest, because I don’t have to wish the world were different in order to find a little levity, a little humor, a little holy reverent sweetness.
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The whole starting-from-behind thing, it’s liberating in its own way, isn’t it? It helps me understand why we all struggle so much in the same painful, repeated ways, and why we haven’t managed to solve all the painful, repeated problems. Politically, personally, all of it.
Better than that, it helps me marvel at the miraculous things people do. Like write novels even though they have full-time jobs, or encourage their children to study hard even though their own parents had been so distracted and mean, or quit smoking even though they’ve already been smoking for two decades, or start new housing programs even though city council keeps starting things and then reallocating funds after a few years. All this grinding, all this persisting. It’s so audacious and thrilling. Everyone an underdog.
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Before I opened this document and started typing, I was sitting at the gate at the Fort Lauderdale airport. I knew I would be getting home late and starting my workweek on the back foot after seeing friends this weekend. So I pulled up my work inbox on a Sunday night, which I almost never do, to schedule-send a bunch of emails.
There were all the flagged ones I’d left behind on Friday afternoon, plus a crisp new one up at the top from someone on after hours. It had this chipper opening: Hey!
Just a heads up — foster father calling re: and the kid’s name, and his date of birth. Foster father reported that they no longer wish to be a placement. Foster father understands that they must give notice and youth will remain in this home until another placement is found.
It felt like someone had reached into my chest and just squeezed. One more runaway kid getting churned through the system. An emergency weekend placement, then long-term — you’re part of our family forever! — just kidding, he needs to go the hospital right away and he can’t come back afterwards, and now he’s in a new placement, we’d totally stick this out until he’s eighteen, but we found pot in his room, a not-insignificant amount of pot. He’s gotta go. A tale as old as time, I guess. It’s just that the main character of this tale is so special to me.
I sat there in the molded plastic airport chair with my duffel tucked snugly between my feet. And I closed my browser and shut my laptop and put it on the little table next to me and took a cool drink of water. Anyway, there’s always tomorrow, another day to try again, doomed before I begin, but lucky, really, to be doomed to anything at all.
