Background

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived somewhere in the Midwest - Kansas, I think, although it could have been Missouri. I heard she had dark brown hair, but in the only photo I have, it's sandy blond. She was short, not even five feet tall, and she had a kind of sporty, healthy look to her, rather than beauty. She fit well in the 1970's, when that natural "healthy" look was in for a certain segment of the population.

I'm told she loved the TV show M*A*S*H.  I'm sure she liked music, because all young people like music. The parents of a man she had a child with claim she was a compulsive liar.  They also claim she had the best of intentions, and tried hard. She "wasn't a bad person." She just made some bad choices.

At some point, those choices led her, like so many others, to California. She drifted, never really tied down, never really fitting in. She was so small, and looked so young. Men liked her but they didn't stay with her, or she didn't stay with them. Soon she had two baby boys by two different fathers. The first was sent back to Kansas (or Missouri) to live with her parents. The second was adopted by his paternal grandparents.

There were no grandparents left to take the baby girl, father unknown, who came next.

Do you wonder what she was thinking or feeling, this small, young mother, twenty-two years old, with three babies she wouldn't keep? Did she want them? Did she care? If she had been given the option of gainful employment and a safe place to live, a chance to get her feet under her, would she have risen to the occasion - thrived, even, perhaps?

I don't know.  I never met her. I couldn't tell you whether she wanted to be a good mom, or any kind of mom at all. I don't know what she was looking for that her family couldn't give her, why she left the Midwest for the sunny, clean vision of California in the late 70's. I don't know what she wanted, but I know approximately what she found. Southern California, then and now, is a brown land. It's thin - the air, the scrub pines, the scraggles of low, prickly vegetation. It's dust and dirt and sand, the brilliant blue of San Diego Bay a saintly mirage that, up close, reveals polluted truth. The food is brown, the people are brown. Rattlesnakes haunt the outskirts of cities and up into the Eastern mountains, also brown. Santa Ana winds blow the smoke of wildfires down into the valley, dense and close, bittersweet sage and burning pine, every year.  Water is precious, something for the rich. Down in the barrio, away from the sea, green lawns give way to gravel and cactus, laundry hanging on tattered lines, metal-barred windows, small stucco houses with backs turned to the dry desert heat.

In her time, the little mother would have found English still the predominant language, with pockets of Italian and Japanese here and there, alongside native Spanish neighborhoods.  The hippies were starting to age, their hangouts closing, or taken over by surfers and drifters - drifters like her. It was the end of an era, the last time when lack of education didn't mean you couldn't earn a living, as her children would learn. But the little mother, for whatever reason, couldn't settle down. Maybe she wanted to be a housewife and make a nice home, but the right man never appeared.  Maybe she dreamed of a real career, but didn't think she could achieve it.  Maybe she struggled with mental illness, or the wounds of a bitter childhood. Maybe she didn't know what to do except drift because, as difficult as drifting is, it's the easiest thing she knew.  To go where the world pushed. Accept what it gave, and what it took away. Maybe she never questioned.  Maybe she never realized it was possible for her to push back.

Of course, it's always possible, too, that she didn't give a fuck.

For the little mother, this story doesn't have a happy ending. She died young, of a pulmonary embolism, at a commune in the southern Oregon wilderness.  By then she'd had eight kids with seven different men, and kept none of them. They went to family members, or to the state, or to neighbors who couldn't stand to see children living in neglect.  None of her children knew her, not even the eldest, who lived with her parents. What she thought or felt about all this, I don't know.

I can make some educated guesses. She's a drifter in southern California: from this, I can guess drugs played a part in her life, and possibly the law as well. Vagrancy is as much a crime there as anywhere else. After eight children, the department of social services had to know her fairly well - did she refuse assistance to get back on her feet? Or did she accept, and just couldn't manage it?  I find it difficult to believe, no matter how understaffed and underfunded the state government, a woman abandoning child after child wouldn't raise some red flags.

I'm the third of those abandoned children, the eldest girl, the one with no grandparents to speak for her because her half-brothers already took what spots there were. I was born at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego, at nine-something at night, and I weighed a little less than six pounds. The doctor didn't want to let us leave, but we did. Six months later, I was abandoned at a police station, weighing less than ten pounds. I was labeled Failure to Thrive and possibly mentally retarded, and placed in a foster home full of children unlikely to be adopted.

Me as a toddler

Here I am, somewhere around age two or three, in foster care.

When people hear that I spent time "in the system," I think they don't know how to react. They think I must have horror stories about cockroach-infested hovels, abusive foster parents and uncaring social workers.

I don't. I'm not saying I'm perfectly healthy and happy and I had a picture-postcard childhood, but I didn't have that stereotypical experience that everyone expects. Honestly, sometimes I think it would be easier if I did. Easier to explain. Easier for people to understand. Easier to find a nice little hole to hide in, safe and secure.  But, see, it doesn't work that way.  Not for me.  I'm not what people expect when they hear about foster care.  I'm not an ethnic minority, and I'm not white trash, either.  Or, rather, I come from a stereotypical white trash background, but I myself, the person that I am? I'm too educated for that. I've never been to jail or tried meth. I don't like redneck jokes, or any "sport" that requires an internal-combustion engine.  I never aspired to be Courtney Love.

I wasn't in foster care quite long enough to learn to forge signatures and lie to authority figures. But I was there long enough to learn other lessons, ones that go deep below the skin. I knew, long before I cared about non-animated television, that sitcom-family lessons weren't true. When the father on Full House sat down with his daughter and told her there was nothing she could do to make him stop loving her, I knew, before he even opened his mouth, that it was a lie. Not because it was a treacly sitcom, but because it's something all foster kids know: nothing is permanent. Everything - love, possessions, home - is up for grabs. And it's not us doing the negotiating.  We're not the ones who get to decide.

One of the other foster kids I remember particularly. Misty, a year older than me, blond and cute but returned more than once by prospective parents, like a dog to a shelter, because of her violent outbursts. Later I learned that she had been diagnosed with an attachment disorder as a toddler but prospective families were never told; they didn't want, the social worker explained, to prejudice adoptive parents unnecessarily. Misty was therefore bounced away and back again, like a hula hoop spun from the hand. There is a photo of us in what would become my family - just the two of us this time, little blond girls, back from a day trip to Disneyland. I am asleep in our foster mother’s arms, Misty wide-eyed beside us. I can remember the indentation in my cheek from the elastic band holding my Mickey ears in place. The black band ran through a little riveted hole in the blue felt hat, and was held on the inside by a crimped metal tab. I remember chewing on that tab, sucking the elastic band, the sharp metallic taste and the warm smell of rubber - and Misty almost vibrating next to us, unable to sit still. She was bounced away again not long after; I never learned where. It’s always the question in the back of our minds, us foster kids, even when we stop being foster kids: am I next, and when? Not why. I don’t remember ever asking why.