Fresh Air - Best Of: The Life Of A Nun / A Foster Parent On Loving & Letting Go

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

Catherine Coldstream spoke with Terry Gross about her years as nun in a Carmelite monastery. She talks about what drew her to the vocation, what it was like to live a silent and obedient life, and why she ran away. Her memoir is called Cloistered.Maureen Corrigan reviews Percival Everett's new novel, James. It's a reimagining of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When Mark Daley and his husband became foster parents to two brothers, they fell in love with the children right away. But they also knew that their family could change at any moment. Eventually, the boys were reunified with their biological parents. Daley's memoir is Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, poverty, chastity, obedience, and rebellion. We talk with Katherine Coldstream about her years as a nun in a cloistered Carmelite monastery, the beauty of the silence in prayer, and the loneliness when her idealism and intellectualism were frowned on. After ten years, she ran away. She's written a memoir. Also, we hear from Mark Daly. He and his husband wanted children. Their choices were surrogacy, private adoption, which can take years, or becoming foster parents. They decided to foster. He's written a memoir about fostering two young children who suffered trauma. And Maureen Corrigan reviews Percival Everett's new novel, James.

It's a reimagining of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure, was adapted into the recent film, American Fiction. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life my guest Catherine Coldstream had lived before that. She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris

where she studied composition, worked in experimental music, and performed on viola. At the age of 24, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God. Entering the monastery meant starting a new life cut off from the outside world. Monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work, and obedience. This new life seemed transcendent, but eventually she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism, and her questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality, were rejected. She ran away, returned, and two years later, went through official channels and left for good. After leaving the monastery, she studied theology at Oxford University. She's written a new memoir called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun.

Catherine Coldstream, welcome to Fresh Air. Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken words for 10 years. I know you had a half hour each day where you're allowed to But if you look at it another way, words are absolutely woven through the texture of your life, because you are either chanting or reading or meditating on the Psalms, for example, for hours every day, and other sort of theological books. So there are a lot of words that go through your head. And in fact, you know, a lot of words that go through your head. And in fact, you know, a lot of prayer bounces off words or has resource or recourse to words. So although we were outwardly physically silent for a great deal of our lives, there was an awful lot going on inside. And it often was referred back to or inspired by the liturgy or the reading we were

doing. So yes, we were very silent, but in another way internally, words were very important. But it's like a dialogue with God and a dialogue within yourself. It's not direct interaction with people. Why is talking considered taboo except for small amounts during the day? Oh, gosh, that's a very good question. It wasn't speech itself that was taboo. I think I mentioned that certain subjects were taboo when we did talk.

So speech itself wasn't taboo, but there were loads of things that you weren't supposed to talk about. But there was a very strong culture of silence, which could feel like it was sort of anti-speech because the Carmelite order originated in the hermit ideal. So this goes right back to St. Anthony of Egypt. In the Alexandrian desert, people went out and lived in caves. And then a few centuries later,

you find people living in caves on Mount Carmel. And these were people who wanted to dedicate themselves to seeking God in solitude. It's called the desert monasticism or desert spirituality, which is like a sort of a subgroup within Catholic spirituality that's very much dedicated to seeking God through silence. What drew you to that? I mean, just to fill in your background, you're from an artist background. Your father was a painter, an art professor.

Your mother, an actor, an opera singer who was often on the road. And there was a 28-year difference between them. Your father was considerably older. It was a second marriage. You've called it a midlife crisis when you got married. The marriage didn't work out well. But you grew up in the arts. And you're a viola player.

You were then, you are now. You've done it professionally as well as just for the pleasure of it. So why did you feel called to live this life of isolation and silence? Wow, that's the million dollar question. I mean, I did grow up in what, you know, we call it a sort of arty household. It's quite bohemian. And yeah, there was a big age gap between my parents. So I'd grown up in a very sort of expressive kind of family. I loved ballet, I loved art, I love poetry, I loved music. I was very emotional.

Yeah, I mean, people couldn't understand it when I suddenly went really kind of pious and, you know, kind of quite penitential after my father's death. I think what it was was that when my dad died, I was 24, and he had been going downhill in a really kind of very, a very, very painful decline that lasted four years. So from the age of about 20, I'd been going through an awful lot of sort of angst. And, you know, I, the word trauma is overused. But, you know, I'd been going through a very unhappy time, my family more or less disintegrated. And I think I needed something radical, I was looking for something radical. And, you know, I was looking for it through music at first, I was really into the whole kind of experimental music stuff,

Stockhausen, John Cage, Boulez, and all this sort of stuff. So I probably always had slightly extreme tendencies. When the kind of hammer blow of bereavement came, I was utterly thrown and completely bereft, obviously, and devastated. And I think I just started another kind of radical search, which took me to different kind of churches. I looked at, you know, I spent time sitting in Greek Orthodox churches, I spent time going to Catholic churches, charismatic churches, all sorts of churches. I think I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died. And that led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought, you know, religion maybe had the key.

I think that transcendent experience you're referring to, after your father died, was seeing his body. Can you describe why that was a transcendent experience? I think it's the sort of combination of familiarity and completely alien things at the same time. So you go into the room, and it's the dead body of your beloved parent. It was the first time I'd seen a dead body. And I think obviously there were familiar things about this body. The irony was his hair was moving in the breeze. It might have been a ventilator system or it might have been a window open, but his hair was moving as though he was still alive.

But everything else, of course, was utterly static. And it's just the shock of seeing the complete vacancy of a body that you're used to seeing in life. And I think I just felt immediately that he couldn't possibly have died. He was somehow present in the room and there was some sort of huge sense of presence, I suppose divine presence that just surged through the room and that hit me at that point. The fundamentals of the Carmelite life revolve around total devotion to God, pretty constant prayer and reflection, and total self-denial.

Would you describe how that translated into daily life? Yes. Well, I suppose one of the big aids, as we would have called it, to self-denial and discipline and virtue and all these other things was the structure of the rule and the constitutions. So there was this ancient document called the Rule from the 13th century, but it was supplemented in the 16th century by the constitutions of St. Teresa of Avila. So there were these kind of written texts that, you texts that were meant to govern all aspects of your life. How did it translate into actual everyday life? Well, we had a very disciplined horarium, we called it, like a sort of timetable,

which started at 5.15 with a matrack, which was this kind of really loud rattle that shook the whole house almost and you jumped out of your bed. You weren't allowed to lie there. You just had to get straight up on your knees. You washed in a bucket of cold water. You went straight down to what we call the choir,

which was our monastic chapel. And you were praying 25 minutes later. And this went on throughout the day. There were bells. There were times of prayer that alternated with times of work. But it was all very strictly regulated. You knew exactly where you had to go when, and you were silent most of

the time and very focused on what you were doing. So there were all these kind of external structures like the texts and the timetable and the bell that meant you could sort of focus on your inner life and not be always needing to talk or sort of make decisions. So can you describe the first time you put on a habit and what it meant to you? And if you felt transformed by it in any way? It was a rite of passage and taking a new name, taking new clothes, these are all sort of quite, I guess, probably universal accoutrements of major life changes or rites of passage. I mean, if you think of it, getting married is like that. So, yeah, it did trigger a sense that you were somehow changed at quite a deep level.

I mean, putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you, but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way it also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down because there were layers and layers of stuff the main habit was made of this brown serge which is like a rough thick wool and we had sort of basically two layers of that the main habit and then what we call the scapula, which is like an extra sort of apron a bit on the front. And then we had under that we had a tunic, which was a thick cotton thing. And then we had four layers of linen on our heads. So you did feel kind of really you felt encumbered by a lot of cloth at first and all these pins which you could easily stab yourself with and people did, you're always by mistake sort of scratching

and sticking the pin in the wrong bit but you felt weighed down but quite quickly like with all these things we are a very adaptable species you quite quickly get used to it and find new ways of sort of if you've got to work in the garden you tuck up the habit and pin it up the back. The actual right of being clothed, of course, was a great sort of transition from being

somebody who was hoping to become a nun to somebody who really felt she was and belonged to the community. And you often got given a new name. Mine wasn't very different. I went from being Catherine to being Sister Catherine Mary. In the book, I just say Sister Catherine as a sort of simplification. But my name didn't really radically change. But some people did want to have a new name. In the olden days, you had to have a new name and you were just given a name, often a man's name. So yeah, you were taking on a new identity. You were putting yourself aside in a way and putting on this new identity with these new clothes. Yeah, because I was wondering, what's the point of a habit if you're cloistered? Because in the outside world, the habit, when nuns wore habits in the outside world, the habit signaled certain things. It signaled a modesty. It signaled that you were a nun and were worthy of being related to that way. And it was a symbol of a certain amount of respect that you should just automatically give to that person. But inside, when you're all nuns, you don't have to communicate that to each other.

So what's the point? Yeah, that's a really intelligent point. And I've never thought of it like that. But I think you're absolutely right. It's a symbol of having been set aside, consecrated was the word we use. So you had somehow left the main body of humanity and you're specially set aside. Why signal that when you're all doing the same thing? I think part of it is that there were strangers or visitors to the

chapel who would see you, glimpse you in the distance through the grill and they'd see you floating around sometimes, you know, you catch the odd glimpse of them. So you wanted to signal that to outsiders, just as the grill signaled to outsiders that you were people living a set apart kind of life. But within our own world, I think it was really a powerful thing that we all wore exactly the same clothes. When I say exactly, one or two people had slightly different shades of brown. And, you know, you really notice the tiny differences. Like some people had special shoes, you know, whatever. But basically, we were wearing the same habit.

And I think that was a very powerful symbol that we were, well, the idea was we were equal. We were meant to be, differences between us were meant to be eliminated. And that extended to other areas of the life. before you'd been a nun, that would be in any way likely to sort of set up, set yourself up as different or special or to trigger any sort of envies or rivalries. So you were subsumed into this new identity. And I think the fact that you all wear the same clothes was just a way of making everyone, trying to make everyone as equal as possible, which was a great idea. Of course, in reality, groups of people are never equal. Well, we need to take a short break here.

So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Catherine Coldstream, and her new book is called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. I want to ask you about something very extreme and shocking and horrifying that happened to you, which is that the sister who had become, you know, basically the mother superior of the monastery, although the word is prioress. Yeah, prioress.

She beat you, she kind of like dragged you out of bed across the floor and beat you. What happened? Yeah, well, this was not the perennial prioress. It was quite strange. We had a sort of prioress who was the sort of natural leader who everybody was, everybody loved, basically, but had quite big problems with as well, I think some people did. This was another prior, this is a relatively new prior, that in my later years when there had been some changes in the structure of the community, and I think she was having a breakdown.

I think she was, I mean, I've often wondered why she took it out on me so physically. But what was happening was this was an expression of a much wider kind of thing that was going on in the whole community. There were breakdowns happening. There were tempers flying. There were people, you know, being carted off to the infirmary, having had physical breakdowns. I mean, the community went through a time of sort of sickness, if you like, when there was this massive, stressful eruption of disagreement about who should be prioress and how the authority of the prioress should be mediated.

And basically there were two points of view, there were two groups, and there was a sort of breakaway clique who resisted the rest of the community. So it felt like the community was split in two. And I think people were just struggling so much this particular moment when I was beaten. I think that the the prioress who did that to me was basically somebody who was experiencing such extreme frustration. She just didn't know how, you know, she was just taking it out on me. I don't know. But when you said it was an extremely shocking thing, I know it reads as shocking when I describe it in the book. And people notice that, of course, it's a dramatic moment in the book. In reality, I think that there were other things that were far more shocking.

I think that the fact that somebody cracked up and beat me, yeah, of course, it's horrible. But I mean, basically, I felt that the psychological sort of psychological cruelty was much more difficult to cope with. Because this was something that lasted 10 minutes when I was dragged out of bed and beaten. And nobody knew that we were alone, again, you know, behind closed doors in an infirmary cell. And, you know, I wasn't I wasn't disabled by it. I mean, I wasn't I wasn't sort of, you know, I could still function

afterwards. I was just a bit bruised and a bit sore and a bit shocked. But basically, psychological sort of cruelty, I suppose, for want of a better word, is something much harder to deal with when you're very isolated, and you've got nobody to talk to about it. So when you talk about the psychological aspects being worse, can you give us an example of what you mean? affection. And there was also lots of deliberate little humiliations that certain people might, in authority, administer to younger sisters in order to, quote, unquote, keep them humble, or break their spirit. This was a very traditional thing in monasticism that you would be made to feel small, that you'd be made to feel unloved or rejected. And it was all part of sort of character formation it sounds stark just saying

it in the cold light of day but it was like that and you felt terribly lonely and terribly crushed by some of these sort of things at some point you decided to literally run away um so briefly look was there a breaking point for you where you decided I can't handle it anymore? Well, I think the night I ran away, I'd obviously reached breaking point. But I didn't break. Actually, I think I ran away to forceful breaking point. I'd seen others breaking, and I thought, why are so many people in my age group? We were the younger ones. Why are so many people having breakdowns?

And a few people had to go to hospital and had had to leave because they were having, you know, mental breakdowns and things. And I, I thought, I thought, gosh, you know, the pressure is so great. Maybe, maybe I'm going to have a breakdown. So I kind of ran away to maybe avoid reaching breaking point, actually. Yeah, I, but I did go back after that for two years. So I hadn't reached breaking point. I don't think I did reach breaking point in the sense that, you know, I was ever made, you know, I think I always retained a sense of buoyancy and hope somehow on some level. And maybe that's why I had to leave. I was worried that I'd be broken if I stayed. You explained why you ran away from the monastery. And then you returned for two more years, but decided after those two years, to leave for good and to do it, you know, the legit way.

Why did you leave the second time around? I think going back to monasticism after having done something as dramatic as running away, meant it was never going to be the same again. And although there was a large part of me that was very at home in the Carmelite life, in that later stage, I think I eventually realised that part of me had moved on, part of me had developed beyond what could really be held within the cloistered life um i'd done too much questioning by then and i felt um i think i just felt ultimately that it was the right thing to do um yeah but it was uh it was very difficult when you first entered the world and you knew it was very difficult. When you first entered the world and you knew it was for real and it was permanent, what were some of the hardest things to adjust to and some of the most joyful things to welcome? Again, beautifully put question because it was dual.

It was two edged. The hardest thing was the noise. I was very used to a completely silent world. So I found noise very difficult. And I found talking to people very difficult, actually. I mean, now I don't. You were out of practice. Yeah.

I disliked any sort of intrusive human contact. I liked being left alone, and I was used to it. I found everything very messy and dirty and just too much going on so that was really difficult and I didn't like the sense of well obviously I got used to a very ordered and structured world that had a kind of peaceful vibe although of course you know as I described things were simmering and seething under the surface because we were human beings but outwardly it was a very quiet and peaceful way of life um but there were things of course I hugely enjoyed I mean I loved the feeling of just being to physic the physical freedom of just being able to just go go wherever you wanted to um I remember the first time I went to the sea and

you know just sort of running along the beach uh hair flapping in the wind, jumping into the waves. You know, I mean, the physical freedom was wonderful. You know, I enjoyed going for a drink as well. I mean, you know, this is I remember I spent a bit of time in a sort of halfway house outside the monastery where I was having a bit of counselling. And there was another nun there. It was some sort of more secular type of religious order. And there was another nun from a much more outgoing sort of apostolic order. And I remember we went to the pub together. And that was brilliant. I mean, I really enjoyed having a pint. And I really enjoyed going

for an Indian meal. That was amazing. So there were things I enjoyed, like just nice food and just freedom and, and being able to lie in in the mornings and have baths, you know, just creature comforts that I'd been denied. My body was aching for relief and rest. And, you know, I hadn't had any form of, you know, pleasure was all really paired, you know, drained out of our lives. So those pleasures were great and I really enjoyed it. But I did feel slightly overwhelmed by, yeah, a noisy, busy, messy world with so much going on.

Thank you so much for talking with us. And I have to say I admire your courage entering a monastery because you give up so much to do it. It's such a stark life. No matter how rich it is, you give up so much to do it. It's such a stark life. No matter how rich it is, you give up so much. So I imagine I admire your courage in doing that. I also admire your courage in leaving. And at some point knowing it wasn't the life you wanted to live any longer. And I thank you for talking about all of that with us.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, Terry adapted into the acclaimed film American Fiction, and his latest novel, James, has just come out. It's a reimagining of Mark Twain's 1885 classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has a review. Ernest Hemingway was not known for his generosity to other writers, but even he felt the need to humble himself before Mark Twain. In 1935, Hemingway famously declared that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It's the best book

we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. Hemingway was talking about the slangy, cussing voice of the novel's narrator, Huck Finn, who spoke a blunt, funny American dialect that leapt off the page. But just imagine if the other passenger on that immortal raft ride down the Mississippi had taken over the narration. American literature, and perhaps America's sense of itself, really would have been upended had Twain allowed the runaway slave Jim to have his say. That's the premise of Percival Everett's magnificent new novel called James. Admittedly, the strategy of thrusting a so-called supporting character

into the spotlight of a reimagined classic has been done so often it can feel a little tired. We've heard from among a multitude of others, Ahab's wife, Daisy Buchanan's daughter, Father March, the patriarch of those little women, and Bertha Mason, that poor madwoman in the attic who terrorizes Jane Eyre. So when is a literary gimmick not a gimmick? When the reimagining is so inspired, it becomes an essential companion piece to the original novel, so much so that you can't imagine ever again reading one without the other. Such is the power of James. Everett, like Twain, is a first-rate humorist. He begins his novel by merrily exposing the absurdities of racism through language lessons that James conducts with his little daughter and some other children. It's crucial that these kids learn to put on a slave filter when they talk because, as James says, white folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them. James then tries

out what he calls situational translations with the children. You're walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday's kitchen is on fire. How do you tell her? Fire, fire, January said. That's almost correct, James said. The youngest of the children, five-year-old Rachel, said, Laudemissum, looky there. Perfect, James said. Why is that correct? Lizzie raised her hand. Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble. Another child adds, because they need to name everything. This sly comic tone predominates throughout the first third or so of the novel, which also sticks pretty close to the root of Twain's original plot. Huck, running away from his abusive father, teams up with James, who's learned he's about to be sold away from his

family. Together, the two hide out on Jackson Island and then embark on the Mississippi, braving violent storms and towering riverboats that suddenly bear down on them, as well as the pursuit of slave catchers and conmen. But gradually, the familiar rafting voyage veers off into newer, more ominous tributaries of the mighty Mississippi. James realizes that he's envious of Huck's naivete, his ability to be highly excited by the adventure of it all, to feel that in a world without fear of being hanged to death or worse. Of course, the stakes of their shared journey were always different for Twain's Huck and Jim and Everett's Huck and James, but Twain chose not to dramatize the racist barbarity of antebellum America. Everett does. Alternating mordant humor with horror, he makes readers really understand that for James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven, but given the

realistic odds of him reuniting with his family and making it to freedom, the river is most likely a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Though Jim achieves the victory here of naming himself James, there'll be little chance of him simply lighting out for the territory. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed James by Percival Everett. Coming up, a memoir of fatherhood, foster care, and the risks we take for family. Mark Daly talks about the experiences he and his husband had when they decided to foster two young boys who had experienced trauma.

Daly also had to deal with dysfunction within the foster care system. This is Fresh Air Weekend. No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't get pregnant, jokes my guest Mark Daly in the opening sentence of his new memoir. It wasn't a fertility problem. It was that Daly's spouse was his husband. They both wanted to have children, which meant their choices were surrogacy, which they were ambivalent about, private adoption, which could take years, or foster children. In 2016, they chose fostering. They soon became the foster parents of two brothers, three months and 13 months old. Daly and his spouse, Jason, fell in love with the

children, and the boys thrived. But when the boys' birth parents decided to fight in court to get the boys back, Daly was alarmed at the possibility of losing the children he loved. He worried about them being returned to their birth parents, who were dealing with mental health and addiction issues, and seemed to be indifferent to their children and even worse, neglectful. Through the ups and downs of his family's story, Daly writes about the larger foster care system and the ways in which it's a dysfunctional bureaucracy.

Daly started consulting for child welfare nonprofits before fostering. Although he thinks the system failed him, he recognizes the importance of foster care and founded the organization TheFosterParent.com, a national platform to connect interested families with foster organizations. He also founded One Iowa, the state's largest LGBTQ organization. He was a communications director for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. His new book is called Safe, a memoir of fatherhood, foster care, and the risks we take for family. He and his husband Jason are now the parents of three adopted siblings. Mark Daly, welcome to Fresh Air.

I found this book very moving and also very informative about foster care. When you got the call that there are two brothers aged three months and 13 months old who you could foster, what were you told about them? I had a list of questions. I knew that it would be a very emotional moment. And so I pulled out these questions and I started asking, you know, things like, are they, do they have any other siblings who are in the system that have been adopted been terminated, and he'd been adopted by an aunt or uncle. And that relative was not either able or willing to take in the younger boys as well. I asked things about what was the deal with the parents? Did we know anything? And truthfully, what happens is when a child enters the system, the social workers are just trying to find, you know, a home that can take them. It's more about finding a home than it is about finding the right home. And that's really due to the lack of available homes that we have. So what were you told and what were you not allowed to be told about the parents and the boys? So when we first got the call, we didn't know very much. In fact, the very first time my husband spoke to them, he was told that they were Latino twins. And then when they called back a little bit later, when he was able to reach me, we were told that, no, in fact, they were not twins.

They were actually white boys, and they were three months and 13 months old. And so it's very much the game of telephone, you know. In fact, they were not twins. They were actually, you know, white boys, and they were three months and 13 months old. And so it's very much the game of telephone, you know. And then when we first met with the social worker who came to our house, you know, I wanted to ask a million questions. But, you know, you're in this really difficult situation because just because you're caring for someone's children doesn't really give you, you know, courtside seats to their life either. I mean, these people are obviously experiencing the most difficult time of their life. And you have to be respectful and mindful of that. But there was also a curiosity factor to it, of course. But even more than that, really, was this idea that if the children had been exposed to anything, I wanted to make sure that I could get them any specialized help or care that they needed.

And were you allowed to be told what kind of trauma they had experienced, if any? I think we would have been told if that was known from the front end. I think that there was very limited knowledge of what had really happened. We got the greatest sense of this later, you know, as we were talking to the parents themselves actually told us more than anybody. What did they tell you? You know, they just talked about their own childhood and the stuff they'd gone through where they were living, you know, once the boys were removed, and this is, you know, what happens, you know, what happens, they were living with the grandmother. And once the boys were gone, they had been sharing a mattress on the floor in the family room. But when the boys were detained, the parents then moved to the car that they had leased, which then took away his job because he was driving for Uber. And then ultimately that lost her income. So eventually the car would be repossessed. And, you know, it's just this one domino that fell that just sort of

triggered this whole series. And it's just far too common, not just in our story, but in America now with poverty and things that people are dealing with. And you learned that the mother, Amber, had bipolar disorder and wasn't taking her medication. And both she and her husband had addiction problems. And they were in and out of rehab. So that's, you know, a lot of problems to have. It is a lot. I remember we were at a, really early on, we were at a sort of a meeting between the social workers and the biological parents and us and the children. And there was a therapist there who was doing some work with the kids. And the mother was going on about how, you know, to the social worker about how she never should

have lost her children. And the social worker was just remaining very, very calm. And then eventually she just turned and said, hey, Amber, look, I don't even have a clean drug test from you yet. And which sort of, you know, changed the tone of the room, you know, immediately. And I would learn out a few weeks later that the mother was pregnant again with their third child. All I could think to myself is, here's this child that's now, you know, probably being exposed. Yeah. But, you know, you fell in love with these two boys, and you wanted them in your life forever, but you weren't sure if the parents would want or get them back. So you didn't know whether to prepare for handing them back to their parents or save money for their college education. It's a very emotionally

perplexing and anxiety-producing way to live. Absolutely. I'm not a person who does well with the gray. You know, I like to have a certainty, you know, whether it's yes, it's no, it's here's the plan. And, you know, when you're sort of living at the mercy of whether or not the system decides they're staying or going, you know, there were certain things the parents did where they were having real successes. And, you know, you would have to be a heartless individual to not root them on when they're having those, you know, and we certainly were supportive in those sense. But there are other things that you would experience when you're with them that you were like, Oh, gosh, I just don't know that if they go home, they're going to be safe. And it was a really difficult challenge. Plus, you know, as you said, the moment you see these babies, you fall in love. That's just what happens.

You were surprised and baffled when the parents started trying to get their two children back. Why were you so surprised? I think, you know, the surprise came in because there was so many opportunities where they just hadn't stepped up so that when they finally did, it was like, wait a minute, what's going on here? You know, like, I just, I think I had kind of told myself that, you know, they're not, there were so many things that the court had ordered them to do, whether it was go to rehab, take parenting classes. And they weren't doing any of it, you know, get drug tested, these different things. None of it were steps they had done. So when they did, it was just sort of like, oh, wait a minute. And I think at that point I had sort of told myself, well, they're not, these babies aren't going to stay.

They're never going to go home if they don't do these certain things. And then when they started, I was like, oh, wait a minute. The game just changed here on that sense. They were allowed supervised, what, three-hour visits with the children? And you were there for some of the visits, but there were also visits at their biological parents' home, which you weren't always there for. So when you had visits together with the parents and the children, what were your impressions of the parents and how they reacted to their own children? You know, there were often times where the older child would walk in and the mother would just

run to him and hug him and kiss him and so on. And the baby, you know, she just seemed very indifferent towards. And I really struggled with it because, you know, obviously I was crazy about both these children and I just hated for him to have to experience that, not even knowing whether or not he was even processing, you know, who she was at that point, you know. But it was really hard to see that. And also, yeah, you thought that the parents were kind of indifferent to the kids a lot of the time. They ended the visits early. They didn't show up for some of them. They showed up late for other visits.

And when the kids went to the parents' home, they'd return with problems. What kind of problems? Yeah. You know, when the children would go to their house, you know, they would come back and there was regression issues. So there was, you know, biting or pinching or, you know, or having tantrums and meltdowns. You know, it was very clear that they hadn't had naps or, you know, the food was sort of, you know, just thrown at them whenever, like in the sense of, you know, they were eating, you know, junk food and, you know, which I don't judge anyone for feeding junk food in that sense either. But it was, you know,

it was very clear that just these kids were exhausted. There was no schedule, you know, and I can't, I don't say that with a judgment towards them. I think it's more about the behaviors that the kids were having when they came back, where I just, they were so well adjusted and it was hard for them. And there was also like the diaper rash and the diarrhea that they'd return with. Absolutely. And your heart just breaks. You've got these children with these terrible diaper rash and you'd work all week to try

to get it to go away. And then they'd go spend the weekend with their biological parents and come back with a new one the next week. You're just thinking, how long are they sitting in the soiled diaper? Yeah. Your husband, Jason, had dealt with addiction. He'd been sober for 15 years, but he had problems with alcohol in the past. Was he especially understanding of the problems the parents were facing with addiction? Jason was really understanding. In fact, there were times where, you know, the mom in particular would call and they would be on speakerphone having a conversation and I would be like the third wheel in the room just listening to them because he really understands what it's like and, you know,

the one day at a time mentality and the fact that, you know, what addiction means and what it can do and how hard it is. And so it really, I mean, it was a moment where I even fell more in love with him. So were you torn between wanting the family to be reunited, you know, the children to return to their parents and wanting to keep the children yourself because you love them,

because you worried about the kind of care they'd get if they were reunited with their parents. Yeah, it was an absolutely, I mean, it was really such a hard situation to be in because you really, the last thing I'd ever want to do is make my family on the back of another family. You know, that realization that for my family to stay together meant that another family had to break apart, that is a really difficult pill to swallow. What was it like for you to find out you had to give back the children?

How long had it been, by the way, since you had been parenting them? It had been about 15 or 16 months that they had been with us. You know, we fully expected at some point we might have to. And, but I mean, it certainly didn't make it any easier. And what really gave us the big fear was that we just didn't know what it was going to be like. We just felt like they weren't ready yet. It wasn't that they could never be ready. It was just that it was too early.

You know, we had just started doing more visits with them. You know, things weren't looking great when they were coming back, but with continued support, they could start to look better. And so it was really, it was really upsetting. What was your goodbye like with the children? Because they were too young to understand what was happening. They were too young to understand what a foster parent is or why they weren't with their parents. I'm not sure if they even understood which parents were which. Yeah, the day they left, we had, you know, packed up a bunch of their stuff. And one of the social

workers from the nonprofit that we were fostered through, licensed through, had come over to pick them up so that we really didn't have to drive over there and drop them off because she just knew it was going to be really emotional for us. And so, you know, we helped get them in her car. And, you know, I remember putting the baby in the car seat and his brother was asking for him. And I just, you know, it broke my heart. But all I could think was, you know, thank God they have each other. You know, they were so close and so tight. So what happened to the children? So ultimately, we waited, we knew that they were going to come back in. It was just in my heart. I just I knew it wasn't right yet. But you know, they were in a position because they were so young. And even though they had a younger sister too, they weren't really exposed to any reporters. There were no teachers or doctors or nurses or anything that they were coming in contact with

regularly who would lodge any sort of complaint. And, you know, we obviously hoped that they would be okay. But a little over a year later, I woke up to a text message from a friend of mine that said, you know, there are, she said, I'm not sure you're ready for this, but my adoption worker was at the house today. And she has three kids that have just been assigned to her that their parents are no longer in the reunification service, you know, getting reunification services, and they're available for adoption if you're interested. And so, I ran it by Jason, you know, I wasn't really sure what to think. And he said, let's find out their story. And so, we did. We got into a potential match situation. And a few

months later, the kids moved in with us. And those are, of course, the kids that I've adopted. But if you fast forward, you know, 10 months after our children moved in with us, we got a call from the county that the boys and the younger sister were now back in care. And would we consider taking them in. That must have been such a hard decision. You love those boys, but they were babies when you got them. They were like three months and 13 months old, and this was two years later. So they were more developed, and they did that development in the home of their birth parents, who you thought probably weren't quite ready yet to parent the children. So what kind of math did you do in your own head to decide what was best for all your children, the three adopted children and the two boys who you'd fostered, and what was best for you and your husband? It was absolutely a horrific position for us to be in. You know, we obviously love all six children in that situation. But at the end of the day...

Wait, there's five children, right? Who did I miss? Well, no, the boys had a younger sister now. So they were offering, right, so the have gone from three to six kids. And, you know, our house is only so big, but the county said they would have worked with us. And I think our initial reaction was, yes, okay, let's do this. And then we started to talk and the agency that we had gone through, thankfully said, let's get on the phone and talk this they said, you know, look, we talked to the social worker and the kids have been through a lot since they left your care. And the boys are much more aggressive than they were. And all I could think about is the children that we have adopted now. And, you know, they're very petite and any sort of, you know, roughhousing would really hurt them. And I had to protect them. But also, would I be doing what was right for the other three kids,

bringing them in, knowing that my attention would be divided amongst six children, that all of them have their own needs and things that we need to take care of, and the help that we need to get them, the therapy appointments, the doctor's appointments, the school, the extracurricular, the fun stuff, you know, and not to mention, they're in a situation now where they could still go back to their biological parents. And we'd have to go through this again, but only this time, you know, what if we bonded as a large family in the sense we now have children to worry about, you know, meaning the kids that we're adopting. So, oftentimes I think about it and I remember the decision that the boy's grandmother

ultimately made at the beginning when she said, I can't do this even though I love them. And that was, to find myself in her position was just really, it was terrible. It's been a pleasure to talk with you and congratulations on the family that you have. Thank you so much for having me, Terry. This is amazing. Mark Daly's new memoir is called Safe. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly

to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.