To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) Read Online Free

sixteen months. A boy,” Allyson remembered, saying that at first they wanted to decline. “But when they told us he had been in three different foster homes already, it hit something in me. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, no. Bring him.’”
    The baby was Allen. Sekina loved him right away; he was a baby after all. But then the agency kept calling. Their real emergencies were teenagers; couldn’t the Greens take in a few more kids?
    Unfortunately for Sekina, the calls coincided with more of Allyson’s dreams. She dreamed of a woman saying, “This is my daughter; you have to take care of her.” That daughter was the Greens’ first teenager, Chanel, nearly two years older than Sekina. Then Allyson dreamed of a girl who looked like her niece, and a foster child named Fatimah showed up. And a white man, who was “spaced out” and followed Allyson everywhere. That was Russell,an autistic teenager. The dreams, and more kids, kept coming. Sekina never got her little sister; all the kids, save for Allen, were older than she was.
    But Allyson couldn’t resist her dreaming. “Because when I resisted it, that’s when I got sick,” she said. “And ultimately, it’s not what you want, it’s what you’re supposed to do. This is what life is supposed to be. We’re supposed to be of service.”
    So Sekina, in losing her place as the oldest child, became perhaps a little bit bossier, a little more specific about her position with her siblings. “I tell them all the time they’re not just adopting parents, they’re adopting a
family
, and if it weren’t for me, if I didn’t let them be here, they’d be out on the street,” Sekina told me one afternoon early into that next spring. She was straightening her hair, heating up the comb on the stove. The pink and purple streaks were gone, and she had decided, for the moment, to go for a natural brown. One of Sekina’s four foster sisters was sitting on the kitchen stool watching her, and she rolled her eyes. Sekina caught the look. “It’s true. But I like to help people. That’s why I want to be a pediatric nurse.”
    Sekina had a particularly proprietary hold over baby Allen, claiming to anyone who would listen that he was the only foster child she originally wanted. And Sekina, maybe even more than Bruce or Allyson, was terrified of losing him.
    â€œI’ll go crazy if Allen goes to his father’s—did you hear about Allen’s brother?” Sekina said, her eyes flashing as she ran the comb through her hair. “He’s HIV positive—and he was in the system before he was even born! They called us and asked if we wanted him and my mother said yeah, but the thing is, unless Fatimah gets adopted or something, we already have too many people here.”
    Sekina was right: Allen did have a new baby brother, born to the same drug-addicted mother and a different father, neither of whom wanted him. The logical placement choice for this baby would be with the Greens, so Allen and his brother could grow up together. But there was the issue of space: even with four thousand square feet, the Greens were already at the legal maximum capacity with all of their foster kids. And there therewas the issue of Tom, Allen’s biological father: if he got custody of Allen in a few months or years, he’d separate the boys, potentially adding more trauma to Allen’s young life.
    Sekina wasn’t the only one on DeKalb who adored Allen; in a house full of teenage tension—especially a house with such strict rules about staying indoors—a toddler was a welcome distraction. That spring and summer, Allen could bumble around the warm house clad in only his diaper, reaching for anyone who would pick him up or keep him from bumping into the big glass table in the center of the living room. On nearly every surface there’s a sculpture or painting or