become foster parents, the checks and references finally complete, we get our first call.
I am standing at the kitchen island, gazing out at the backyard, which is full of burgeoning autumn color—russets and scarlets and gold. It is a beautiful, crisp fall day in mid-October, the kind of day where the air looks crystalline and feels drinkable. I spent the morning working from home, and then I had lunch with a friend, and in twenty minutes I am due to pick Josh up from cross-country practice. I’m feeling benevolent and contented, even though I am missing Emma, who started college in Boston just six weeks ago. Her absence continues to give me a certain, melancholy restlessness.
This is a similar feeling—in fact, I was standing in the exact same place—to when I first broached the idea of becoming foster parents to Nick, back in April. He was on the sofa, kicking back with a glass of wine, and Josh and Emma were upstairs in their rooms, working or socializing via their phones, probably both. They had the uncanny ability to simultaneously write an essay and take a Snapchat selfie approximately every three seconds. It boggled my mind, but I couldn’t complain, because they were both straight-A students and Emma had just been accepted to Harvard, something that Nick and I were absolutely thrilled about but felt we had to downplay. You can’t go running around to your neighbors boasting about your kid being accepted to the best college in the country, at least not in West Hartford, where everyone is politely cutthroat about college admissions. We’d been saying she was going to Boston for college instead, but weighing the word Boston with a mysteriously significant emphasis. Sometimes people asked, sometimes they just looked a bit miffed, because they already knew.
Perhaps it was because I knew Emma would be leaving soon, and at sixteen Josh didn’t seem to need us at all, except to drive him places, that I thought of fostering in the first place. I’d seen a documentary on my laptop, a few minutes of a clip on Facebook about the foster care crisis in America, and I listened to how there are almost half a million children in care in the United States, many of them waiting for placements or adoption.
It was the kind of thing that was meant to tug at your heartstrings, with traumatized, teary-eyed children looking straight at the camera, and it worked. I looked around our house, with the gleaming granite kitchen we’d renovated and expanded a couple of years ago, a pottery jug of tulips unfurling their blossoms in the middle of the island, the photos on the walls of our happy family hiking in the Berkshires, taking the inevitable trip to Orlando, in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, and of course the ubiquitous portrait of us all in white T-shirts and jeans, goofing around self-consciously for the camera.
We were so lucky. Hashtag blessed, and I didn’t even mean it ironically. I knew it, and I thanked something—God, maybe, or perhaps a more comfortably nebulous idea of fate—for how much we had. Wasn’t it time to pay it forward? Wouldn’t that be a good use of my extra time, now that Emma was leaving home, and I was only working twenty hours a week?
I was only forty-six, young for an almost empty-nester, at least in this part of Connecticut. Most of my friends with children Emma’s age were well into their fifties. I felt young, and Emma’s leaving felt like a new chapter not just for her, but for all of us. I wanted to do something different and meaningful with my life.
So I broached the idea to Nick, who looked startled and a bit nonplussed, which was understandable since I’d never once mentioned it before in our twenty-two years of marriage.
“Foster? But we’re finally getting our lives back.” He spoke jokingly, but I knew he was serious, at least somewhat.
“We’ve had our lives back for years,” I returned lightly. “It’s not as if Josh and Emma are toddlers.” They’d not been needing us since they were thirteen, more or less, except as a taxi service and a listening ear for the occasional emotional outburst from Emma.
“Yeah, but… with Emma gone, and Josh sixteen… we could go away on our own.” He waggled his eyebrows enticingly. “A romantic weekend in New York…”
“I can’t really see us leaving Josh at home.” I trusted him, but not quite that much. “And the placements