I recently wrote about our two daughters and said that the story of our foster daughter was not included because we got her only after she was twelve years old. She is, however, a cherished member of our family and deserves her own record, including our experiences with child welfare and hers with foster parents, as well as what brought her to our home.
Our foster daughter was a victim of a father whom I recognized was a narcissist and had a mother who was deeply afraid of him. I recognized that at the start of our association with our foster, and that his narcissism had totally overwhelmed her mother. I had known her father for years and had never known he had a wife and child because he was always talking about himself so much he never got around to acknowledge their existence. I had actually met him when I became, through an odd set of circumstances not pertinent to this essay, a member of the Las Cruces Astronomical Society Board of Directors. He was also a director and I wrote him down at the time as an eccentric amateur (He was actually an engineer at White Sands Missile Range.) About that time I got an offer of another postdoctoral appointment at the University of Florida and left New Mexico for what I thought was the end of my associations there.
When I returned to Las Cruces (I felt like a boomerang!) I rejoined the Society and met him again. My close friend, Clyde Tombaugh and I built a 10-inch telescope together and I spent some time observing planets, star clusters, nebulae and galaxies with that wonderful instrument. At that time my wife and I were considering where to take our girls to get them exposed to a religious, but sane, congregation, and after some discussion we agreed to try the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) since one branch of my father’s family was deeply involved in the western New Jersey meetings and had been since the 1660s. When we met the Browns, who had been part of the original meeting, we were convinced. They were the most saintly people that we had ever met and we were soon at home in the small, but vibrant community. To make a long story shorter, our eventual foster’s father showed up alone at meeting one Sunday and he had a very strange story to tell, which was immediately doubted by all but a few of us. It seemed, according to him, that his wife had run off with a Voodoo practitioner and took his daughter with her. As we found out later was that his wife had read advice somewhere that the best thing to do if you have an abusive husband is to grab your kids and run off to another state. She had befriended a practitioner of Candomblé, an African-Brazilian religion and that had absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. The friend had agreed to help her and so provided transportation. However, by crossing state lines with their daughter without her husband’s permission, our foster’s mother had put herself in a bad position. The father found out where she had gone- to a location in Colorado and he got the Colorado State Police to lure their daughter away from her mother so they could return her to the “responsible” parent. He then brought her to meeting and most of us became really suspicious that he was using the meeting to pass himself off as an involved father. Still the court had some reservations about him and put her into foster care, where she had the usual uneven and even abusive treatment. One foster couple tried to “Save her soul,” with the usual result. The court then returned her to her father’s care, but required him to obtain a nanny to live in and make sure she was safe. We invited her over to our house for sleepovers with our younger daughter when we had the opportunity.
However, her father in a fit of rage over something, fired the nanny. Then he found himself in a fix because he could not have his daughter there alone with him by court order and his daughter had called the police on him. The police officers who responded asked where they could take her for a “cooling off period” and he suggested my wife and I might take her in. My wife, who suspected him of not having good motives, immediately agreed and consulted me afterward. Of course I also agreed, as she knew I would, and we both knew that we would do everything we could to keep her with us. She was 12 years old and the pickings she had for foster care were slim. Plus she had already gone that route. The “cooling off period” lasted 16 months, or until the money ran out and the various people involved lost interest.
It was 1998, and we now had a 12-year old in our family, who was soon to become a 13-year old. We had room because our older daughter had moved to North Carolina, to follow her boyfriend and eventually to go to the University of North Carolina, and our younger daughter, after a short adjustment, welcomed her new younger sister and they became fast friends. In a few days we also picked up her dog, Esperanza (Hope) and kept her even after our foster daughter left. Unfortunately, her father had a few tricks up his sleeve to interfere with her and although he told me he had given me permission to take her from her middle school to her court-ordered therapy sessions, he had not. Both our foster daughter and I had long conversations with the principle and she gave me permission to pick up the girl, since the therapy was ordered by the court and he was interfering with that order. At that point I asked him for a real power of attorney, but instead got a paper that I discovered had not been written by his attorney, as he had said, and which gave me no power at all and required us to let him be present for any medical examinations. This was totally unacceptable, especially since he had made noises that his daughter should be medicated for psychiatric problems. My wife and I agreed that we would never allow such treatment, even if we lost her in the process. She was not the one who was mentally disturbed! So, I went to see the Ad Litem appointed by the court and appraised her of what the man had really done. She said that she would get a more reasonable POA and she did. The document gave us full powers and stated that we had the right to partition for adoption! This was signed by our foster’s father and witnessed by the judge! Obviously the court did not trust him very much at all! Unfortunately, they trusted her mother even less and for her part she had gotten it into her head that he would know if, where and when she came back to Las Cruces.
To cut this already long story short, when the money ran out the various parties- lawyers, therapists, and child welfare people lost interest, and as she wanted to go back with her mother, she was allowed to do so. We did not interfere as, while we loved her very much, she was by that time 14 and had a right to decide the issue. The result was that she considered me to be her father and my wife to be her second mother. Both our daughters considered her to be their sister.
She had been homeschooled until she had to go to middle school, and I seriously worried about her opportunities in education, but this kid had dealt with lawyers, judges, therapists, foster parents, and social worker types way too much and knew her way around the adult world. The foster system is a mess, and while there are good people there, there are far too many potential opportunities for child abuse, especially for a pre-teen girl. Also I was not at all impressed with the court-appointed social worker, as the person assigned to the case wanted the girl to treat her dad’s girlfriend as her mother and complained to me that she was the lowest paid person involved in the case.
However, our “foster” (we were never really in the foster care system, but had become court-sanctioned de facto foster parents) surprised us all. I got her a job at my department working for a virologist and she was assigned to the DNA lab. She went on to United World College in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and after graduation was accepted at Smith College. In between years at Smith she got an internship at Kew Gardens in London, in part because of her work with the DNA lab. She then spent time at a cancer research lab at Harvard and a VA hospital. She was accepted at Johns-Hopkins, got a masters in public health and eventually was hired by the CDC, followed with periods at Medicare, FDA, OSHA and finally NIH. She now works for NIH in Washington, DC. All in all not exactly a likely trajectory considering her background.
We are, of course, immensely proud of our very bright and strong foster daughter. She gives us way too much credit for her success, but truth be told I’m sure she would have succeeded without us. She had that ability. We may just have greased the wheels a little to help her on her way.
I should add that our foster daughter read this and helped me get the timeline straighter.