You sit up straight in the hard plastic chairs in the cold conference room waiting to meet your potential new foster daughter, absently rubbing your knuckles raw with your thumb.…
-
-
On a bright Wednesday morning in March, we leave for daycare and work because that is what we do, even when we’ve spent the evening in Trauma One of Children’s…
-
Image Credit: Irina Iriser For J I. when we leave you for the last time right away, we forget the look on your face, for fear of burning…
-
Image Credit: Daiga Ellaby Before we met in person, we talked on the telephone, matching alto timbres warm in our ears. This was decades before you could spit in a…
-
Image Credit: Emma Margraf I sat in a small and dirty conference room with a young mother and her lawyer for hours before she decided to sign away her…
-
Creative Nonfiction / EssayFeaturedFoster Care: Everybody Likes a Comeback (But Not for These Kids)
Jane and I stood on the stage with the Governor at the annual ceremony for graduating foster youth going to college. There were maybe sixty of us in an auditorium…
-
My friend Michele’s mother said I could stay with them for four days tops. “That’s it,” she said. Four days. She was moved by my plight, but scared of Mama.…
-
It began with a photo album. Simple looking, but full of memories of a time buried in the back of my mind—an old wound picked open as I stared at…