Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care.

Weeks turned into months and a year passed, but I didn’t miss my parents. I missed the memory of them. I assumed that part of my life was over. I didn’t understand that I was required to have an attachment to them, to these people I barely knew. Rather, it was my understanding that I was supposed to switch my attachment to my foster parents. So I acted on that notion and no one corrected me, so I assumed that what I was doing was good and healthy.

The one piece of advice I always give is this: become a foster parent because you want to help the child. Not because you expect the child to think of you as their mother or father. Or to love you for the rest of their lives. They might never love you. But you have to do the very best you can for them at all times, no matter what. Fostering is one of the few jobs where your ultimate goal is not to be needed anymore.

The love of a foster mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational.

We've both changed. We're tired of having the world push us into places we don't want to be. We're both scared of losing love that maybe we never had to being with. We can have whatever we want in our lives. It's only a matter of deciding. But we don't have to do it alone. We have each other.

Just as it was in Kempe’s time, the rate of removals today has less to do with the literal rate of physical abuse or neglect and more to do with a fickle public intermittently enraged by what they hear on the news. When kids die at the hands of their parents, headlines put child protection agencies under intense and sudden scrutiny. Investigators increase their removals, hoping to avoid another high-profile fatality.

...it takes a special person to be a great foster parent, someone who realizes that the child he or she is receiving isn't perfect and probably is carrying a lot of heavy emotional baggage and bad habits. But that understanding and acceptance are essential if foster parents truly hope to bring any sense of normalcy to the child living with them in their home. The rest is all uphill from there.

Then I remember social workers don't care.

We're just different, that's all. That's all a freak is. someone who's different."The Very Worst Thing

One afternoon Walter brought Izzy to the house for lunch and, pointing to me, he said to Izzy, “He’s one of your tribe.” Dobkins lifted his head to look at me and after a few seconds said, “I don’t see it.” “The mother’s a Jew,” Walter answered, as if he were describing the breeding of a mongrel dog. “Then you are a Jew,” Izzy said, and sort of blessed me with his salami sandwich.