Foster mom says system doesn’t meet the needs of children
Gilroy – Before the call came, Lorinda Mosca and her husband had sworn: No more foster babies. Not for a year, at least. They’d cuddled and fed and adored two babies since August, and though they loved them dearly, they were frustrated and drained.
Both were meth babies, born to addicted mothers, and both were plucked from the Moscas only months after they arrived, bawling, from the hospital.
“The system says the [biological] family’s best,” said Mosca, sighing. “But it’s not always. They use these kids as bait, to get their moms off drugs … Addiction is such a beast, and the babies are the victims.”
Then the call came: a baby boy, less than a year old, in need of a family. His mother was a meth addict, and he’d been shuttled to three different homes already, said the agency, bouncing between his biological family and foster care.
The story was too familiar. She could have said no; could have spared herself the anxiety, backed away from a system she says she’s fed up with, and gone back to caring for her four biological children: a handful already.
But something pulled her back.
“Every child deserves to go to sleep safe and loved,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand me: We need foster parents. But the system is so poor, and so broken.”
The boy peers up from his crib, dough-cheeked and round-eyed. When he came to the Moscas, the back of his skull was flattened, from lying too long on his back without being moved. When he urinated, the toxins in his system burned his skin, giving him diaper rash.
“They’re already in pain when they’re born,” said Mosca.
He’s distant, wary to attach himself to another adult. Drug-addicted babies take longer to bond with a parent, and no baby can be traded from home to home. Each child learns Mosca’s voice, her smell. She is, if only for a few months, Mom. But when the babies are taken away, she’s cut off from the baby’s life, unsure where he’ll go.
The pain racks her, and it happens every time, with every baby she’s taken in.
Neighbor Amy Myers has cared for seven babies in two years, relinquishing some in as few as five days, others after seven months. She complains that foster parents don’t have enough of a say in a system plagued by overworked, underpaid social workers.
“Listen to us – we’re with the child much more than the judges and social workers!” said Myers. “But they always prioritize the biological family – even at the child’s expense.
“It costs money to keep kids in foster care,” Myers added. Mosca receives $600 a month to care for the baby; other families receive more, depending on a child’s needs. “It all comes down to the mighty dollar.”
Like Mosca, she worries about the homes kids are sent back to. One foster baby, returned to her family, was left in a bathtub for days, she said.
“It’s horrible,” Myers said, “but we used to joke that the one thing we should have taught the child was how to dial 911. How to say, ‘I need help!’ ”
There are some happy endings, said Mosca: one foster baby, taken out of her care, is now with a loving aunt. But as she cradles the tiny boy now in her care, gently stroking his raucous curls, she fears the day she’ll give him up.
“You see these babies thrive. You see their potential,” Mosca said, “and you worry about the world they’re going to.”
