109 babies later, Mama Shirley is still fostering a most vital gift
After parting ways with 109 babies, you’d think Shirley Haney would be used to this. After holding 109 infants against her bosom and feeling the beat of their hearts next to hers, you’d think she’d be steeled to the whole process.
Handing over a child you’ve cared for, and loved, to another set of arms, forever, can’t be easy under any circumstances. After 15 years — which works out to seven foster babies per year — Shirley Haney has developed coping mechanisms. The law implies she must.
But that won’t make Monday any easier. Five of the 109 babies she and her husband, Andrew Haney, have fostered since 2007 have been classified as medically fragile. One of them — Ezekiel, who has been with the Haneys for most of his 18 months — graduates on Monday to the full-time care of his biological grandparents. It’s called reunification, and it’s always the goal. To that end, Haney has been giving the boy — born, essentially, with half a heart — small but gradually increasing doses of his grandparents’ care, and he is comfortable with them. On Monday, Haney will drop Ezekiel into their permanent care and very possibly never come back.
“This is bittersweet for us,” she said, speaking for herself and her husband, who is chair of Bakersfield College’s automotive department. “We’re very excited that he’s going with a family that’s amazing. But having him for over a year and fighting for his life, keeping him alive, I’ve become very attached.”
She is not exaggerating here. Haney spent her 50th birthday preparing to transfer Ezekiel from Valley
Children’s Hospital, where doctors were struggling with his care, to Stanford Children’s Hospital for his second open-heart surgery. Every day, every moment since, has been guided by one overriding consideration: What’s best for Ezekiel? What’s best now is reunification.
It is that kind of selfless giving from the heart, of the heart, that prompted the Bakersfield College Alumni Association, along with the Bakersfield College Foundation, to make Haney one of four new inductees into BC’s Alumni Hall of Fame on July 7. Her class includes businessman/philanthropist Louis Barbich, nonprofit director/diversity activist NaTesha “T” Johnson and Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
The Haneys, who have two adult biological sons, Devon and Austin, and a 13-year daughter, Haylee, whom they adopted from foster care, won’t be able to make the induction dinner at Seven Oaks Country Club.
But it’s for an excellent reason: They’ll be in New Jersey, probably watching the event via Zoom with a family similarly dedicated to the foster care mission.
Sparrow Swatzell, the adopted daughter of Jessica and Tim Swatzell, lived in the Haneys’ home as a foster daughter and gave Shirley Haney the nickname so many others have since come to know her as: Mama Shirley.
Shirley Haney and Jessica Swatzell met in 2018 at a Bakersfield dance studio, where they were watching their daughters practice. Haney heard Swatzell tell another woman she’d just acquired her county foster license and was awaiting her first placement. Haney nosed in and introduced herself, and within a month had helped facilitate the arrival of Swatzell’s first foster child, Sawyer.
The court was not able to reunite Sawyer with his birth family and the Swatzells adopted him. Later, the Swatzells adopted Sparrow and her biological brother, Sullivan. Mama Shirley is Sparrow’s godmother.
Haney, a 1989 North High School graduate, received her Associate of
Science degree in child development from BC in 1993. She started foster care when her boys, now in their mid- to late-20s, were 10 and 14 years old.
“I was too old to have kids again, but not old enough to be a grandma yet,” she said. Once she became a foster mother, she had to learn how to give them up, but Haney understood her role.
“A lot of people out there can’t have children and so they want to adopt. But it’s very hard for them to be foster parents because they don’t want to work on bringing about unification ... But I’m very, very — how do I say it? — I love to see families succeed. I’m there to help them get their child back. That’s my ultimate goal. And if they can’t reunify, I’m all about finding wonderful adoptive families that will take them in.”
She just wants to make sure she sends children away with one key developmental piece they’ll need to cope.
“What I’ve learned through foster care is if you do not get attached to a child they’ll have ... attachment disorders. They won’t attach to anybody. So let them learn what love is and what attachment is. As hard as it will be for Ezekiel to leave me, he does know what attachment is, so he will look for that in others. Teaching children about love and attachment to other humans is the most important thing I do.”
There should be an award for that kind of caring. The Bakersfield College Alumni Hall of Fame is at least a good place to start.