New York Times (Op-Ed)
By Jeanine Cummins
June 19, 2018
The kids showed up in our driveway on a Tuesday afternoon. The boy wore a backpack full of diapers for his sister; she wore neon-pink tennis shoes and wouldn’t let go of his hand. Their case worker gave me some paperwork and was gone before I had time to process the thought: Now I’m a foster mom. Their panic was palpable. Mine probably was, too.
The little one didn’t sleep so much as lose consciousness in moments when her small body demanded a break from her otherwise ceaseless crying. This happened with no discernible pattern. My two biological daughters, then 7 and 3, watched with concern as her cries turned to whimpers and then sloped into the ragged breath of sleep. She could nod off anywhere except in her crib: at swimming lessons, at the dinner table, sprawled on the kitchen floor.
Sometimes her cries went the other direction, too, spiking into screams, her body rigid with terror. Attempting to remove her sneakers provoked such hysteria that for the first three nights, my husband and I let her wear them to bed.
We may have been experienced parents, but we were inexperienced at parenting a traumatized child. I didn’t know how to change the diaper of a baby who was afraid of me. I didn’t know how to comfort a child who became frantic when I tried to touch her.
During the months that followed, the crying diminished and the children began to trust us. We tried to provide a safe, stable home for them. We gave them clothes, toys, grandparents. We laughed at their jokes and cried with them when visiting their parents was difficult. We loved them.
And yet we were, inherently, part of their trauma. Their parents were, for the moment, unable to provide a safe home for them. But even when it’s necessary, removing children from their parents causes acute distress. I witnessed that suffering. It lived in my home.
My older daughter began having nightmares that “the people” would take her away from us and give her to another family. She was inconsolable. “If it could happen to them,” she asked with the cleareyed logic of a 7-year-old, “why can’t it happen to us?”
I tried telling her that it happens only to parents who don’t, or can’t, take care of their children. It happens only when parents aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do.
I’ve tried not to read the headlines about migrant children being separated from their parents. The stories of frantic parents and sobbing children are painfully familiar. It is too easy to imagine a little girl shrieking in her new foster mother’s kitchen, writhing and kicking at the unfamiliar hands attempting to soothe her. I can see her falling into a fitful sleep in her hot-pink sneakers.
I told my kids this kind of separation happens only to children whose parents don’t do the right thing. But now it’s happening to people who are behaving exactly as good parents should. To parents who endure inconceivable hardship to get their children to this country, precisely in order to protect them. They come from places of violence and poverty and they travel, in some cases, thousands of miles carrying their children on their backs, all in the hopes of providing those children with a chance at safety. Their perseverance is the very model of parental sacrifice.
My husband, an immigrant, tried to soften the emotional spasm of my response to this news. “Surely a temporary separation would be worth it,” he said, considering how we would feel if we were asylum-seekers, “if that’s what it took to get our children out of a dangerous situation.”
But, I countered, “It’s like forcing someone to choose between diabetes and cancer.” It’s not a deterrent; it’s forcing migrants to make an absurd, unnecessary, detestable choice: Would you prefer to keep your children in a dangerous place or risk losing them in a place you can only hope will be safer?
Republicans are ostensibly the party of Christian family values. Their leader is making a mockery of those values at our borders, separating even asylum-seekers from their children, and then using those children to force migrants into voluntary departure. In immigration court, migrants are being told that the best way to see their kids again is to plead guilty, to return to whatever they’re running from. And yet even if they do just that, some parents still don’t get their children back. Where is our righteous Christian outrage?
After six months, our foster kids went home to their parents, and what remained with me was a new perspective on the fragility of family. We love our children so much, it’s easy to mistake the strength of that feeling for invincibility. Now I understand that it’s not always merit-based, who gets to keep their kids and who doesn’t. It can be arbitrary — a matter of unlucky geography — even in 2018, even in the United States of America.
My daughter was right to be afraid.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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