First Night

She arrived while I was at a community meeting just a couple of minutes away. There had been no specific time designated for the social worker to drop her off so I figured I’d get it all in- community activism and new motherhood.
She was a big girl – tall and big-boned with a beautiful smile. She was 18. “Eighteen?” I’d asked. I thought they aged out of the system at 17. She’s a voluntary, they said. At 18 they can sign themselves in and the State will provide housing and health care as long as they’re in school.
“Whoa,” she said as she dragged a huge suitcase into the hall. Later she asked if I was a health freak because the first things she noticed when she came in the door was a big empty carton that had “organic” food in it.
The social worker was a smiley guy – not her regular worker because she was on vacation. He gave me the Child Placement Agreement and left.
I showed HT her room and asked her if she was hungry. I said I’d make her a burger, not telling her it was a turkey burger until I placed it in front of her.
“I’m gonna die here,” she said. But she ate it and enjoyed it. She preferred fried foods. This was when she asked the “health freak” question.
She was charming and chatty, telling me about herself and asking about me and my life. She was really open and honest about why she’d been booted from her previous foster home and her version had a lot in common with the story I heard from DSS.
The reasons for leaving that home, according to the CPA, were that she was disrespectful, that she let others into the home when the foster mom wasn’t there and that she had a knife in the house.
HT showed me the knife and explained that it wasn’t illegal because the blade was smaller than her hand – some sort of street poppycock, apparently. HT said she was seeing a guy and she didn’t bring him into the house – how could she when she didn’t have keys? They were talking on the front stoop when she saw the foster mom walking down the street and got nervous so she told the guy to hide – in the bushes. He did and the foster mom, who according to HT was new and nervous, freaked out. New and nervous or not, I explained that of course the FM freaked out – there was some strange guy hiding in her bushes. HT had made a tactical error.
She is preoccupied with race and made a point of telling me that her family was “mixed” and that she preferred mixed people. This was a good point of agreement because I have always believed that miscegenation will save us and her attitude gave me hope that we would have things in common. Her mother is married to a white guy and one of her sisters married a “Chinese” as HT calls anyone who is Asian. Turns out the brother-in-law is Philippino.
Whenever I mention someone in conversation, her first and immediate question about the person is “What is she?” meaning what is her racial/ethnic background. I suppose that curiosity doesn’t differ much from what tends to be the first query of professional people, “What does he do?” Either question is an attempt to categorize a person, have an idea what he is about.
I’ve always loathed the “what does he do question” because I think that truly interesting people can’t be defined exclusively by what they do to make money. In the first few minutes of a conversation, if someone asks what I do, I know I’m dealing with a really crappy conversationalist.
We made it through the first night and the first morning was about getting her up and finding the most expedient T route to Brockton, from whence she had come and to where she had to commute daily for school. Roxbury was the closest placement they could find.
I didn’t have internet access at home so I was at the mercy of the social worker who suggested going to Jackson Square. HT knew how to get to Brockton from Ashmont. She got there and back and that first night and we were off on our exciting Foster Mom/Daughter adventure.