FOSTERING CLASS PREJUDICES
Foster care is complicated and unpredictable — to say the least — and nothing bothers Mark Daley more than that. Daley’s new memoir, “Safe,” covers his and his husband’s entry into foster parenting, and both the book and a system are full of the maddeningly expected.
I should say upfront that I adopted my son from foster care and that I, too, have a complicated relationship with the child welfare system as well as with my fellow foster and adoptive parents.
Daley, a social activist and political communications specialist, and his husband Jason, an event planner, begin the process to become foster parents several months after they get married. Weeks after being certified, they take in 13-month-old Ethan and three-month-old Logan.
“Safe” is a compelling story of Daley’s crash course in parenting. His love for Jason and the boys is palpable as is his anxiety about “losing” the boys to reunification with their parents, Amber and Zach.
His propensity for research — he often shows himself in the act of Googling — assists readers who have little to no knowledge of foster care. We’re right alongside them all as they navigate a truly inept caseworker inside an under-resourced, unnecessarily burdensome system.
Undergirding Daley’s present-day story is one of haunting grief from the death of his beloved cousin when they were in their early 20s. We come to understand that he hasn’t fully addressed that loss until the boys reunify with their parents after 18 months in Daley’s and Jason’s care. He is crushed by this turn of events, and it’s hard not to feel for them all.
It’s also hard to know that he and Jason are correct that the boys will eventually return to the system.
For all of this very real pain, though, there’s an insincerity at the heart of Daley’s story. Though he writes toward the end of the book, “We didn’t become foster parents to take someone else’s babies,” his actions suggest otherwise.
He and Jason wanted “a slam-dunk case; happy, healthy babies, ready for adoption on day one.” So much so that Daley created an informal formula to indicate the likelihood of a baby being among the 55% of foster children in California who are reunified with their parents.
To talk about foster care is to talk about what makes a “good” parent, what the chances are that someone might not be, and how much we care as a society whether children are harmed as a result. This conversation is entirely rooted in race and class, the former of which Daley addresses explicitly in what amounts to a threepage research paper in the middle of the narrative — and the latter of which he repeatedly exemplifies.
For instance, he looks around at all his friends who are celebrating Ethan’s birthday and wonders how many friends Amber has and if they could be as supportive as his. He can — and does — directly contact People Who Are People or People Who Know People toward serving his own needs and wants.
Not the writer’s to share
The biggest instance of how class informs acceptability is by way of Jason, who has been sober for years when he and Daley meet. When they bring the boys to visit Amber in rehab, Daley looks on lovingly as Jason reminds Amber about doing one thing at a time, one day at a time.
Daley does not ever, though, interrogate his repeated assumption that he would never be able to trust Amber and Zach’s sobriety, though he appears to trust Jason’s explicitly.
“Safe” also calls into question the right we have to tell someone else’s story. Ethan and Logan are too young to consent to Daley’s memoir. Daley writes that he is no longer in touch with Amber and Zach, which suggests neither consented to the inclusion of details of their upbringings, health, and parenting.
What do you do with a book that, in some ways, offers an important insight into a broken system, but a good portion of which isn’t the writer’s to share and, thus, isn’t the reader’s to read?
I don’t know, either.