S4: The Intended Outcome

After fertility treatments fail, Deya and Sandra decide to adopt a child through the foster system. They have a lot of love to give. They also know the intended outcome of foster care is for the child to reunite with their birth family.When Deya and Sandra begin fostering a baby girl, they try to not get too attached … but it’s SO hard. And as the baby’s birth mother works toward reunification, the women are torn. They want the young mother to succeed. They believe in reunification! They also fear losing the baby girl they’ve come to deeply love.

Originally published 2/26/2019

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible. Thanks for asking.

And this story is about Deya and her wife, Sandra, and their baby girl.

We picked her up August 22nd, 2016, at 10 a.m. at the agency. She was meant to be our daughter that day.

I remember hearing the footsteps when she was being brought into the room where we picked her up, and I was signing paperwork, and Sandra was sitting because she had just minor surgery. And so she picked her up when they brought her in.

She took her in her arms, and I’ll never forget that moment, seeing my wife holding our daughter for the first time. And you just know, I had never experienced that burst of love at first sight. And that was it, like I was hooked.

I think we both were, we were smitten.

There are so many roads to motherhood. Some of us get here on purpose, and some accidentally, some of us both ways. Some of us never wanted to be here, and some of us are painstakingly, desperately hoping to reach it.

All of us who get it are sure we’re doing it wrong. But not as wrong as those other moms, because, look, mom judging, it’s real, and I’d love to say stop it, but I do it too. It’s a sport.

A lot of motherhood stories start with a longing, an instinctual desire to raise a family. For some of us, it starts when we’re too young to even be mothers. It starts with baby dolls and playing house and making lists of baby names.

Because I, in fifth grade, thought that one day I would name a child Porcelain. Porcelain, I thought, was a cool name for a human child.

For some of us, this desire to be a mother starts later, when it makes more sense biologically, and we wouldn’t think about naming our child after a kind of ceramic.

For some, that desire is interrupted by circumstances beyond our control, and that brings pain and shame and something bigger than desire, a sort of frantic need for motherhood.

However you get here or don’t, the story is pretty much always complicated at some point. Something goes wrong. The plan isn’t working, or the plan is working, and it’s still complicated.

Deya really wanted kids, and Sandra wanted Deya to be happy.

They tried fertility treatments, but that is so expensive, and when it didn’t work after a year, they’d spent all the money they’d budgeted for that. Deya still wanted kids, but how?

A friend of theirs had adopted through the foster system, and the city they live in has a massive need for foster parents. That gripped Deya immediately, the idea that there were kids out there needing love, and she had love to spare? Boom, done.

Perfect match. You’re never a better parent than you are before you have kids. And Deya had a specific idea of the kind of parent she wanted to be.

So my intention of the kind of parent I wanted to be was, is still to be able to create a happy little human, you know, that they know their only function in this world is to be happy.

You know, no one told me that when I was little, and we all have a story to recover from. So kind of make the story better for somebody else, you know?

Sandra, not so much with the parenting, but she loves Deya. And when Deya wanted to go to an information night at a foster care agency, Sandra agreed to go.

The two of them sat at a table with parents whose families had been formed through foster care, talking about how many children there were in need.

There is a table where they invite several parents who have previously been or are foster parents. When I heard about their experiences, it was very emotional for me.

And it can also be said that it caused me the same shame that I didn’t want to commit myself to it, because I had so many children with needs.

And if one has the time or some time, if one has affection, if one has a house, everything, a car to move around, why can’t it be? I had my family, my parents, I had education, I had everything. And I decided not to have children.

And I said, well, why not dedicate my time and my love to someone who needs it? And since I also come from the Latin culture, we are a lot of raising nephews, children. So, I said yes.

Sandra was in right away.

She said yes as they walked out of the event that night. If someone has the time and love and resources, why not dedicate all that to someone who needs it?

And it helped that Deya had spent years as a preschool teacher and, you know, knew how to take care of babies.

And, apart from that, I have to admit that also because Deya has a lot of experience as a preschool teacher, that also gave me confidence. I said, well, she can guide me because I don’t know, there was nothing I could do to spoil my nephews.

So, the journey began. Paperwork, more paperwork, evaluations, meetings, stocking up on kid stuff, and baby-proofing the house.

Your home goes through a sort of safety inspection, initial and final training. There’s a training requirement. And, again, an infinite amount of paperwork.

You’re certified CPR and first aid. You get a physical. You pass a TB test.

Wait, TB, like tuberculosis?

Yes.

And there’s, they call it a home study, which is like a sort of psychosocial family assessment. We’re both interviewed individually and as a couple. Sort of, they touch everything from, how was your childhood?

And because we are a same-sex couple, how was your coming out process? How supportive is your family? They know you’re doing this.

Sort of as making sure you’re good people, sort of, to raise these kids.

The organization talked with Deya and Sandra a lot about the realities of foster care. The organization was very clear that the intended outcome is for the child to reunite with their birth family.

Deya and Sandra heard that over and over, their role as a foster family was to love and care for this child, but also not get too attached. To soak this child in love and affection while also knowing that this is intended to be temporary.

The children they may end up fostering have been through a lot.

Everything from neglect to all sorts of abuse, to drugs and domestic violence and physical violence and all of that.

And their intention upon removal is to put the children in a safe foster home at that point and give the biological family the opportunity to sort of get their life back on track, which the court orders a case plan, which consists of parenting

classes and domestic violence, whatever applies to the case of the biological family. And there’s a certain time frame to complete that, legally.

But what happens in court sometimes is extensive, and that’s why children are kept in the system for so long.

And so the intent of fostering is to be able to provide stability and a home and a family environment to those children during the time that their parents are given to kind of reconstruct themselves and their lives, to be able to provide again for

their children. And we were told the intention, the only intention is to reunify the child with their biological family.

That’s the sole purpose.

Whatever happens afterwards is where you, the foster family, comes in. And if your interest is to adopt, that’s where you come in after a certain time.

Deya and Sandra know this. They get it.

I understood the intent is to reunify the child with their biological family because that’s what is best.

They are approved. And then they wait. Luckily you won’t have to wait very long because we are going to be right back.

Some careers offer stability. Others offer meaning. With social work, you don’t have to choose.

And we’re back.

Foster care is unpredictable. You don’t know when you’ll get the call telling you that a child needs a family. And when the call comes, you need to make a decision based on the very small amount of information available at the time.

Five months after they were approved, Deya’s phone rang. Well, okay, she got an email first, but a phone call is like more evocative. It’s not like, I got an email.

So, Deya gets an email, and the email says that there’s a preemie, and the baby needs a family, and the baby is a girl. And could Deya and Sandra take her? Hmm.

Well, yes, yes, they could. Yes, they would.

We picked her up August 22nd, 2016, at 10 a.m.

at the agency.

So, here we are again in that waiting room, seeing baby for the very first time.

I had never experienced that burst of love at first sight. And that was it. Like, I was hooked.

I think we both were. We were smitten.

That was it. This was the baby who needed them. And the baby they needed.

Love is like this sometimes. An instant bolt of lightning. A switch turning on.

A floodgate opening. That act of falling in love is so involuntary. You have these expectations of your life, of the people around you, of yourself.

You’ve said to yourself a million times, the million reasons that love is complicated. How getting attached is a risk. You understand it.

And then someone hands you a new human. And you try to hold those opposites in your head. At the same time, you know the logic of what you’re being asked to do.

And you know something else that you are in love. Think about it. If you were so ready to be a parent, and someone handed you a helpless baby, how clinical could you be to just meet their needs?

Hope that one day she’ll be taken away from you. So what do you do when you’re holding your heart and your head and those two opposites in your hands for the first time?

We went to Target.

All of the deeply emotional roads in our life, they lead to Target.

And I remember wearing her at Target, because we had to go get diapers. And I was just, I felt like, like a queen, you know, just walking with her.

And Sandra had had surgery and she was, you know, walking slowly and she’s like, so it looks like I just gave birth and you’re carrying our baby.

That night, baby slept between Sandra and Deya. And they stayed up just marveling at her. Tiny toes, little bitty fingernails, teensy weensy eyelashes.

This little person that they’d been waiting for was here. In the clothes they picked out at Target, in the diapers they’d stocked up on before they even knew she existed.

It was lovely. I was smitten that, you know, here’s this tiny human who I’m now responsible for. I’m not like a, you know, dreams come true kind of person, but I felt like, like my dream had come true with her there.

When you have a little baby, especially your first little baby, you have so many illusions about how it should go.

But they quickly fell into the routine they never knew they needed. A steady rhythm built around this little person and what she needed. Clothes, the best, of course.

Pacifiers, the best ones. Milk, the best. You see how this goes.

Well, on weekends we would go out and buy clothes.

Everything that was in the jokes of the first kids, we would buy the best for her. There were three brands, the best, the one that was the best, in terms of sips, clothes, milk, everything was the best for her, and she was our princess.

And they also made time for everything they needed as a family. Baths, stories, snuggles. They sang baby songs and tried to teach her things.

Everything was for her.

All of our moments and our time was for her. We enjoyed her a lot. We used to play her special cuna songs that talked about the love we had for her.

Educational television programs so that she could watch things from a young age.

Their only goal in life was to make sure that baby understood that she was loved. Sandra, who is still recovering from a medical thing, stayed home with baby while Deya went to work, and she was very nervous to be on her own with a baby.

I said, you know, she’s a newborn. She’s going to sleep and cry and poop, and that’s it. You just got to do that.

So when I went back to work, I think a week later, she stayed home with her, and she would send me pictures, and she’s like, she doesn’t fall asleep for me, and if I put her down, she wakes up, and so I have to find a way to make sure that I put her

down, and she doesn’t wake back up because then she just wanted to hold her. So I remember this picture, we have a recliner, one of those lazy boy recliners, and there’s this tiny little baby on a cushion, and she’s, her feet and legs are propped up

Baby was perfect, beyond perfect.

She was magical, and Deya and Sandra and their friends and family were all falling in love with her. That was life in their family. And Baby had another family.

Baby had birth parents with visitation rights who also loved her.

She has two very young parents, teenagers, and she was removed for both mental health issues for both parents, very young. Some drugs, but not hard street drugs, just more of a mental health situation.

And it looks like it could be a possible adoption case.

Deya and Sandra knew that the intended outcome for Baby was that she was reunited with her parents.

They knew this, but your heart can know something and still feel something else because hearts are dumb and because it’s hard to nurture a small, helpless person and not love them, not hope that maybe she could be yours forever.

As she grew and as she developed, she was fearless. She was fearless, like she just knew she was sure of herself.

She had quite a personality and I felt proud of us too because here was this little person who knew her place in the world, like, you know, and she captured people wherever she.

While Deya and Sandra are building their family routine, while Baby is learning to talk and walk, while they’re changing diapers and wiping noses and comforting her when she’s hurt or scared, while they’re reading Dr.

Seuss books, Baby’s birth mother was slowly starting to show up. That’s no small thing either.

She’s a teenager with no transportation of her own and mental health issues, and at first she did struggle to make it to visitations on time, and her time with her baby was very limited.

But months passed, and she continued to make progress in the plan the court ordered for her, and her visitation increased. And so did Deya and Sandra’s anxieties.

You have these things. You would never not put in the car seat facing rear, or you would not feed her grapes without cutting them or, you know, something like it. Just details that are important for a child.

It was just her, her attention to detail was different. You know, one of the hardest things was when overnight visits starting to happen. So we had to let her go.

And the first time she had overnight visits, we didn’t sleep. We didn’t sleep the whole night and it was just thinking like, what if she cries and she’s gonna cry and they’re not gonna know what to do?

And they’re not, you know, and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s frustrating, it’s anxiety to worry because there’s nothing you can do. And it’s a bit of an ego check also that we’re not, we’re not any better parents, but you think you are.

At some point, you think you’re a better mom or you think you’re a better parent.

It’s not that they want the birth mother to fail, to give up. It’s just that they also don’t want to lose baby because they’re her mother’s too. They didn’t give birth to her.

They don’t share her DNA. But motherhood is fierce and territorial and ready to protect your child from anyone and anything, even the person who made them and also loves them.

That pull between the intended outcome and the unintended outcome, the one where Deya and Sandra love this child and are loved by this child, the one where Deya and Sandra love this child and are loved by this child, and know the goal is

reunification with the birth family, and feel so much that this child is theirs. This is really hard and really ambiguous, and the birth mother feels this. She knows that Deya and Sandra love the baby, and that doesn’t feel great to her.

I remember the social worker’s words one time was, you know, she thinks you’re trying to take her daughter, and she says, and you’re too attached to her. And I said, yes, and you can tell her, yes, she’s right.

And we’re not trying to take her, but it’s inevitable to love her while she’s in our care. And yes, we are too attached, you’re right, but that’s what’s supposed to happen.

You know, she’s a baby, and because she’s not with her mom, she’s supposed to attach to someone, so she’s a healthy human being. And that’s right.

Just like those five months before baby, when Deya and Sandra didn’t know when their child would arrive, they didn’t exactly know how long they’d have with baby either.

So they were rushing towards a moment because there’s a window in which the birth mother could show the court that she could care for this child.

And the birth mother kept ticking off the boxes on her reunification plan, which meant that it was very probable that she was going to get there.

And every step that she accomplished was good for the baby and good for the birth mom and hard for Deya and Sandra. In March, when baby was about 20 months old, a court date was set for the Tuesday after birth mom’s overnight visit.

She requested an extension of her overnight visit through Tuesday, expecting the judge to grant her custody of baby again. That extension meant she wouldn’t have to see Sandra and Deya again. And neither would baby.

So social worker granted her that request.

And we knew when we took her that Saturday, that was it. And March 22nd is Sandra’s birthday and we had gone out to dinner. And we knew that would be the last dinner with her.

And we got her all dressed up and, you know, we went to dinner and celebrated.

Sandra’s birthday, my mom gave her her last bottle that night before she went to bed.

And Saturday morning, we got her up and took her and we just kind of wait. It’s right off the metro line, the grocery store.

So she rides the metro there and we said our goodbyes to her in the car and she would just pick her up from us and put her in the grocery store cart and they walked off to the metro together and that was it.

Sandra and Deya watch their baby walk away with her other mother, and then they wait. They go home to the house they shared with baby. They won’t know anything about the court’s decision until 8:30 a.m.

on Tuesday at the earliest, which is when they can call their social worker.

Our agency worker sent us an email and said that reunification had been granted, so it was kind of a somber moment.

Where were you when you opened that email?

At work.

After all that, you find out the fate of your family via email. An email tells you that the baby you love is no longer yours and never really was. Sandra was also at work, but she told Deya not to say anything until her lunch break.

She didn’t want to cry at work.

So I had to wait until it was time for my lunch break, and I talked to her and she said yes. And I was in the car crying. And well, I went back to work.

It was very sad every day they followed.

So she cried in the car. The intended outcome had arrived. But what happens with all that love when you have no legal right to see this child ever again, when the two people who loved her and cared for her now just disappear from her life?

What happens then? A deep depression made of ambiguous grief for a baby they weren’t supposed to be attached to, and a family that was always tenuous.

I was reading once a song that talks about the loss of a baby when he dies, and I was reading the comments, and I began to think about what category we were in, because we were left without a baby, but she’s still alive, and we can’t see her.

It’s the same pain as losing a baby by death. It’s the same. We will never see it again.

It’s not the same as having a baby die.

Sandra knows that, but she was reading one time about a song about the death of a baby, and she started thinking, well, which category do we belong in? We’re without a child, but it still lives, and we can’t see her, and isn’t that the same pain?

It’s the same. They’ll never see her again. The two of them spend months in that place, in that pain.

And it was hard because do they have a right to be sad? They did their jobs, they loved baby while her birth mother got her life together. And now it was over.

Her mother put in the work necessary to get her daughter back, and she will know that, and that will be important to her.

So, as much as it hurts us, it’s not fair to not recognize that on her mother’s part. It’s a very different loss.

It’s very lonely, and we would be home, and Sandra would be in the living room, or I’d be in the room, and it’s kind of, you watch out for each other, but the grief is very individual. It was hard to process, or not think, or not feel.

It’s very lonely, because no one knows what to say to you. The typical words, which are real, but you don’t want to hear that, you know, oh, you did such a good thing for her, and she might not remember, but she’ll know, and you know.

My intention, it wasn’t a job. I wasn’t set out to do something good for her. It was just, this is what you do for a child.

It was natural.

We’re gonna take another little break. We will BRB. We are B, with Sandra and Deya.

We’re mourning the loss of a child who is still alive, but who they’ll never see again. How long did it take the two of you to talk about fostering again?

32:58
A New Foster Baby

Yeah, I thought that I’d want a baby at home right away.

I didn’t want to feel, obviously, the loss or the absence.

So there’s a type of foster care called respite, where you provide sort of a babysitting service to other foster parents who need a break sort of thing, or have stuff to do if they’re traveling.

So, in mid-April came a little boy for a weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and it was the most difficult thing, and I was like, oh my god, I’m not, no.

Their house was a respite for that baby boy and his foster family, but that baby boy was not a respite for their grief.

So we made it through the weekend, and it was, you know, so fun to have him there, but I just, I couldn’t throw myself to the same routine with this little guy.

Came up a lot of feelings for me, you know, I couldn’t wait till Monday morning that I could return him back to his home because it was, I felt like I wasn’t in a good place to take care of him.

They try a few more times, they take a toddler and another baby just for short respites. Meanwhile, Deya has started working for the nonprofit that helped them navigate the foster care system when they started their journey towards motherhood.

All day, she sees stories like the one she’s living, and other stories too. Stories that end with the foster parents adopting their foster child. In every situation, there’s joy, and there’s pain.

However it’s calculated, someone in that equation, the baby, the birth parents, the foster parents, someone hurts. The purpose of fostering isn’t to minimize your own pain, but to minimize the pain and trauma that the children are experiencing.

Deya does that now every day in her work with the advocacy group she works with. And then the phone rang again.

I got the call for her on September 21st, and she came home that day.

What did you know about her?

That there was a baby at a police station because her mom had been arrested, and she needed a home. That’s all we knew.

And how old was she?

Nine and a half months.

So here it was, the emotion train pulling into the station, big commitment, a big risk. At what point are you ready for tragedy or ready for victory?

When you want something but you’ve been hurt by that thing, there are reasons to say no and to say yes. But suddenly, it’s right in front of you again, and you don’t have any more time to discover how you feel.

How do you reconcile all the parts of your heart into a decision about the future of another person?

And I don’t know why I said yes.

But yes is what they said. They were ready for another baby. Remember when Deya and Sandra met baby?

How it was love at first sight?

Friday evening, September 21st. She arrived with little thin pajamas and she was dirty. I remember dirty.

The social worker is like, I don’t know when she’s had a bath. And she was crying and she looked like she hadn’t slept in five days.

Remember how Deya and Sandra stayed up that first night, just marveling over their first baby? That first night with the new baby.

It wasn’t joyful. It just wasn’t joyful. It was hard to find the joy.

She was anxious and scared and nervous and she couldn’t fall asleep. I had to swaddle her and swaddling a nine-month-old and she was tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny for a nine-month-old.

And I swaddled her and I just, I held her tight until she was able to go to sleep and I couldn’t put her down because she just would flail. I was afraid of what the night would look like. She woke, she was like a newborn the first night.

She slept well. I tell Sandra that she knew she could rest and I think she rested. But she would wake up starving.

I could hear her stomach grumbling when she was taking her bottle.

Remember how Deya and Sandra and their first baby just fell easily into the rhythms of family life? How that magical little girl just captured everyone around her and made them fall in love?

Well, that baby came straight from being born into Deya and Sandra’s arms. And this new baby had spent nine months.

We don’t know what trauma she went through, but she went through a lot in her short months before she came to us. So she latched on to me instantly. To both of us, but more me.

And I couldn’t move out of her sight. She would scream. She would scream.

She would be rigid. All her emotions were processed through scream.

So, and the screams were all the same and monotone, you know, and where she had just had a bottle, I don’t know, maybe an hour and a half ago, and she was screaming, and the only thing that would soothe her was a bottle, and she would drink it, and

her stomach would growl because she was hungry. There was no mass to her. She was, like, weightless almost. All that is said in training about trauma-exposed babies is real.

It’s very real. We couldn’t cuddle her. We couldn’t soothe her by skin-to-skin contact.

We couldn’t, by carrying her. She would ask you to hold her because she would extend her arms, but once she was in your arms, she would push you away and swat at you, and she would fight. So it was like, for me, it was very hard to love her.

When we talked, it had been four months since baby number two arrived in her thin pajamas, tense and anxious and screaming.

That’s four months of stress and wondering why they were doing this in the first place.

And I questioned my integrity, my sanity, my wanting to do this, you know, because it was so hard. And I, but I was so invested and determined to do it. I was like, I’m not sending her back.

I’m not contributing to her already traumatic life. I can’t, I will not let myself do this.

So what’s going to happen? Things are looking like adoption is likely, but we’re not going to say that. We’re not even going to pretend to say that because, I mean, the situation looks probable.

We’re not even going to say that because who knows? They love her, even though she didn’t come from either of them, even though she came to them kicking and screaming and shaking.

It’s hard, just parenting alone, I’m sure, is difficult. But this choice, because it’s a choice. And I take that very much to heart, you know, because it’s a choice.

No one puts a gun at your head to do this.

It’s a choice.

And you only find out how hard it is until you’re in it.

Foster parenting is a choice. And sometimes love is a choice too. Sometimes it is like that bolt of lightning that Deya and Sandra felt with the first baby.

And sometimes it’s a choice. It’s a choice to keep doing all the work. And that’s kind of the point, right, of foster parenting and parenting in general, that it’s hard, if it were easy, it would never…

Honestly, there’s no world in which it’s easy, even if your child is your dream come true. The whole point is that the dazzling, tender moments are really just there to punctuate the tedium and labor of what love really is, which is hard work.

Love is hard, hard work. Deya and Sandra signed up for something hard. They signed up to care for kids who have suffered and who can’t always verbalize or process it.

They signed up for a family with the potential to dismantle and rebuild itself on a never-ending loop. Now, she and Sandra have loved and mothered two little girls.

They’ve given each of them that safe, loving place, the security of knowing that you’re loved, no matter the outcome, just as they intended. This has been Terrible. Thanks for asking.

I’m Nora McInerny. Our senior producer is Hans Butow. Our assistant producer is Marcel Malekebu.

Our project manager is Hannah Meacock-Ross. We got some help from Anna Wegel. Thanks, Bud.

Our theme music is by Joffrey Wilson, and we are a production of American Public Media.