L.A. Foster Parents Face an Agonizing Reality

Note: The wording in this article makes me want to smack people.  "Low risk for foster parents?"  Fuck them!  What about the risk for real parents? 

Late last year, husbands Ivano and Stephen were at a playground in a West Hollywood park. A double stroller sat next to them; in it, a little boy and a little girl, both less than a year old, slept. The infants were entrusted to them by the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services. The men told me their dream is to permanently adopt both kids one day. But Ivano and Stephen, who asked that their real names not be used while they have ongoing placements with DCFS, no longer get their hopes up too high. They’ve already had to say goodbye to two other children. Their first foster placement was a newborn girl they cared for from the time she was seven days old to just before her first birthday. “She was tiny and sweet,” says Stephen, who was there when she took her first steps. The second foster child was a girl who was with them for the first nine months of her life. “She had a heart problem and needed regular medication and to be driven to specialists,” says Ivano.

In each case there was a biological grandmother who initially told social workers she didn’t want the baby. This scenario is what social workers will sometimes characterize as “low-risk” for foster parents, meaning a reunion with a child’s biological family seems unlikely. Social workers, says Stephen, “always make it sound as low-risk as possible.” But shortly after the two men had bonded with the first infant in their care, the grandmother changed her mind, and a judge later decided in the grandmother’s favor when it came to custody. After the child left their home, Stephen describes feeling so sad that it was like “having a rock in your heart.” History repeated itself with the couple’s second placement. The pair’s story resonates with me not just as a writer but also as someone who chose to start a foster family with his partner. The process is known as fost-adopt, and it’s an emotionally fraught path that offers no certainties. Over and over again, my partner and I encountered people who told us they’d love to fost-adopt but couldn’t put themselves through the possibility of bonding with and then losing a child. One friend told me point-blank, “You can’t do this to yourself.”

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