Tea
“It was really easy to break into,” he says. “It only took me, like, three seconds.”
Welcome to “Sketches of Found Family,” a collection of vignettes from my life as a single foster dad, living among a community of given and chosen family. I hope these stories resonate with you and your own found family. Enjoy!
My second night as a foster dad I wake in the middle of the night to the sound of footsteps. I throw on a t-shirt and find him pacing the living room, a teenager in basketball shorts and a baggy t-shirt.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask.
“No.” He looks miserable, his body jittery, his eyes glitchy. I don’t know him well enough to tell if he’s tweaking or tired.
“Would you like some tea?” I ask.
I go to the kitchen and start the teapot, feeling concerned and exhausted and fatherly. I only met this kid two days ago; now he’s pacing my living room at three in the morning. We sit beside each other on the couch and blow across the tops of our mugs. After a few minutes he breaks the silence.
“I broke into your closet,” he says.
“Oh yeah?” I say.
In the TV room I have a closet where I keep anything I don’t want kids getting into: documents, medication, some booze, a few knives. It only opens with a key—or so I thought. This kid opened it by jamming a Safeway card between the door and the jam.
“I looked at all your stuff,” he says. “I thought about drinking your whiskey, but then I thought, ‘Nah. Josh has been good to me.’ So I just closed the door.”
I’m not sure what to say. I eventually land on: “That’s good. I’m glad you didn’t take anything.”
“It was really easy to break into,” he says. “It only took me, like, three seconds.”
“Wow. That’s fast.”
“I’m really good at breaking into places.”
•
Before returning to bed I go to the closet to move some things to my room for the night. On my desk, a sheet of paper is loaded into the typewriter.
during the night i did not get any good sleep and i am typing at 2:00 A.M. so not the very bestin my words so i am going to type a bit more and then go to my room that is all i am doing alright i am at a bypass ? OMG! I cannot sleep it is driving me nuts so iam upset please let me sleep ahhhhhh!!!! SLEEP!!!! OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG AHHHHH OOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGG I AM GOING CRAZY
I read his note and then read it again, my internal breaker thrown by a surge of feeling. I’ve had restless nights before; I know what it’s like to feel you’ll go crazy if you can’t fall asleep.
What I don’t know is what it’s like to be a boy in a stranger’s home. I’ve never been removed from my parents, shuffled through hotels and respite placements, riding shotgun in cars that aren’t going anywhere, chaperoned by government workers who don’t have any answers. When I was a teenager I never woke up in the fearful dark of an unfamiliar room and wandered around battling a temptation to do a bad thing—I am going to type a bit more and then go to my room that is all I am doing alright—wandering and wandering in the dark until I felt I had no recourse but to do the bad thing, if only to get the thoughts to stop. I don’t know what that’s like.
I only know what it’s like to be the adult in the room. To try to convey some kind of safety through whatever word or gesture I can come up with this late at night. To try to show a scared child: nothing bad will happen to you here. To try to put his mind at ease. To realize how little I can do.
•
The next morning we go on a field trip to Ace Hardware, where he helps me pick out a better doorknob. The wall behind the register is covered in stills from a security camera, shoplifters caught in grainy black-and-white. Above the photos, in giant letters: “WALL OF SHAME.” My kid starts naming people in the photos, one after another, until he is laughing so hard he can barely speak.
The cashier’s eyes widen. “Wait—you know these people?”
He just laughs harder. He hasn’t seen some of his friends in awhile—it’s hilarious to discover them on a wall of shame.
We go back home and spend the morning installing the new doorknob together. Once the installation is complete I ask him to try to break into the closet again. The lock holds, despite his best efforts. He seems frustrated: he wanted to show off his skills.
A week later he will move out, and I will file his typewritten note with the other documents in my locked closet. A few days after that I will get a call from one of the helpful hardware folk at Ace—a manager who happens to be the grandmother of the cashier who rang us up for the doorknob. She will ask if my son can come in and identify some of the shoplifters from their photos.
“Sorry,” I will say, and then hesitate as I try to figure out the best way to explain. “He’s not with me anymore.”
Families are always tricky to write about, all the more so when your family is involved with the foster system. Many details cannot be shared, and it’s all too easy to fixate on the sentimental or the tragic. These sketches, which are nonlinear and intentionally vague in places, are my best attempt. Taken individually, they say very little about our shared lives together. Taken as a collection, unfolding week by week, I hope they communicate something of the joy, pain, and humor of our little household.
That is indeed a different world to the one that I'm used to.
"I only know what it’s like to be the adult in the room. To try to convey some kind of safety [...] To realize how little I [actually know]."
...But I suppose that acknowledging our inadequacies will at least indicate some honesty and integrity, and, hopefully, help them to consider trusting us a little bit.