You Get Past the Tears A Memoir of Love and Survival

ONE The first time I saw her, she didn't even have a real name. Just six weeks old, she had been taken from the hospital nursery, where her mother had abandoned her, to Child Haven, a county-run temporary facility. Now, here at my doorstep, was Baby Girl Kelloggs. As it turned out, Kelloggs was not her father's name or her mother's, either. Perhaps her mother picked it up off a cereal box. This fact, like so many I learned about the children I had fostered or adopted over the years, would have shocked me if I hadn't heard a dozen stories like it before, and worse. A veteran social worker, an activist for minority adoptions, and a foster parent, I knew how this story began and how it would probably end. A baby born to a drug-addicted mother and temporarily cared for by the state now needed a loving home until she could be adopted. A friend who worked for the state had called and told me about this baby. Was I interested in taking care of her until she could be adopted? As a foster parent, my role in this little one's life would be brief but, I hoped, important. Having taken in several foster children before, I had learned the art of loving and caring for children who would not be mine forever. I knew when to hold tight and when to let go, how to draw the lines around my heart and theirs so that they regarded me as Auntie Pat and not Mommy. (Besides, I already had four of my own children to call me Mom.) This little one, like so many, was born with drugs in her system. That, along with the fact that her mother had left the hospital within hours of giving birth, told me that she probably had not received good prenatal care. I expected a baby who was smaller than average, more likely to fuss, less likely to interact spontaneously. I wouldn't have been surprised if she had problems with eating and sleeping or didn't like to be held as much as other babies. That was okay. To hear the mediathen in the grip of hysteria over crack babiestell it, "drug babies" were close to hopeless. But I knew better. With a few months' care, love, and attention, this baby girl would blossom. Even before she arrived, I was looking forward to the day when she would leave in the arms of adoptive parents who would love her forever. If this sounds a little idealistic, then maybe I was, even though I have always been a very pragmatic person. Some people see taking in a foster child as a noble sacrifice. For me it wasn't about that. I had always enjoyed kids and had spent most of my adult life working with them in both the public and private sectors. I imagine that there were people who looked at the lifestyle my husband, Loren, and I had made and wondered why we did it. Three children from my previous marriage and one from ours had been adopted. I had always felt that parenting had more to do with how you raised a child once you got him than with how you got him. By the time this little baby girl came along, two of my children, Paige, or Pepe, as we called him, and Kimmie, were teenagers. My oldest son, Kendall, was an adult, married and stationed in Germany with the military. We had decided that our family was complete. There would be no more adoptions, but that didn't stop me from wanting to help a child however I could. Most of the children we fostered were thrown into the system because their parentsusually their mothers, since fathers were rarely involvedcould not care for them, for various reasons. Sometimes, as in the case of this little one, the parent made it clear enough through her actions that there would be no going "home." For many others, however, there was hope. There were mothers and fathers who worked very hard to overcome the obstacles that kept them from being the parents their kid deserved. It felt good to provideBroadbent, Patricia is the author of 'You Get Past the Tears A Memoir of Love and Survival', published 2002 under ISBN 9780679463146 and ISBN 0679463143.