2 New Memoirs By Gay Dads Share Eye-Opening Stories of Foster Care

Let’s continue highlighting LGBTQ parenting memoirs this week with two recent titles by gay foster dads—two different stories of love, family, and a broken foster care system.

Click links or images for full reviews.

Both Safe: A Memoir Of Fatherhood, Foster Care, And The Risks We Take For Family, by Mark Daley (Atria), and A Family, Maybe: Two Dads, Two Babies, and the Court Cases that Brought Us Together, by Lane Igoudin (Ooligan Press), are by gay dads in Los Angeles, who experienced first-hand what happens when a child welfare system loses sight of what it means to ensure a child’s welfare. Each book chronicles a different journey, however, with different outcomes for the families involved.

Daley and his husband Jason thought they knew what to expect when they decided to start a family via foster care. Daley had three cousins who had come into his family via foster care, and had consulted for several child welfare nonprofits as a communications professional. (He had been communications director and spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, among other positions.) The journey that they found themselves on was far from what they imagined, however, as Daley writes in Safe.

In 2016, the men began fostering two brothers, a one-year-old and an infant. As is usual in many foster care cases, they were simultaneously preparing for possible adoption of the boys while also planning for their possible reunification with their birth parents. Foster care, he reminds us, “is not meant to be a permanent arrangement.”

Nevertheless, although the birth mother and birth father had made little effort to address the addiction and mental health problems that were preventing reunification, they unexpectedly decided to try and get the children back. The whole situation was made more difficult by a convoluted and inefficient foster care bureaucracy. The uncertainty dragged on. Confused, frustrated, and worried about the boys, Daley and Jonathan felt the strain in themselves and in their own relationship.

Daley blends his personal story with facts and details about the overall foster care system in the U.S., weaving a story about how poor policies and complicated bureaucracies have a very tangible negative effect on the youngest and most vulnerable children. Amidst the challenges, however, he also shows us the everyday struggles, triumphs, and delights of being a parent—and a queer parent at that, part of a generation for whom marriage and family was now an option.

The ending of the book is heart wrenching and bittersweet; I won’t spoil it except to say that it is different from that of A Family, Maybe, and is a definite reason to read both books if you have any interest in foster care. Safe is a compelling and highly recommended read about the personal and the systemic, about the families caught up in a flawed system, and about the desperate need for change.

In A Family, Maybe, English professor Lane Igoudin charts the lengthy three-year journey that he and his partner Jonathan took to adopt the two girls they had been fostering from the Los Angeles County child welfare system. Like Daley and his husband, they, too, were caught up in a convoluted and at times seemingly arbitrary legal process and under the tension of simultaneously planning for reunification with the birth parents and for adoption. Each of the girls’ timeframes for reunification was different, and the whole situation was made more complex because the girls’ birth mother herself was a teen who had been placed in a group home at age 11 or 12, and remained in state custody.

Igoudin’s story began earlier than Daley’s, though, in the early 2000s, and unfolded against the background of the fight for marriage equality, including the setback in 2008 with the passage of California’s Prop 8 and the victory in 2015 that made marriage equality a federal right. Woven into the book is the story of gay parenting in the U.S. from the mid-1990s onward, and of the vibrant community of gay dads in Los Angeles.

Igoudin shares the detailed ins and outs of his family journey and explores the thinking behind many of the decisions, big and small, that he and Jonathan had to make before and during the fostering process. He also tells of the small moments of childhood achievements and family celebration and the decision to raise the girls in his own Jewish faith. As part of a multiracial family, too (Igoudin is White; Jonathan is Black, Jenna is White; and the girls are multiracial), Igoudin shares some of the ways race and racism has affected their lives. (In contrast, Daley, Jason, and the boys they fostered are all White.) And like Daley and Jason, he and Jonathan, too, debated how hard to push through the delays in deciding the children’s permanent status.

The need for reform of the foster care system remains urgent. Stories like Safe and A Family, Maybe show us why—but may also offer hope and help to others who are considering foster care or in the midst of similar experiences. While both authors show the pitfalls of the current foster care system and why change is critical, they also show that the children within the system are still in need of foster homes, and that parents who are up for the challenge (and the joys) can make a difference in children’s lives.

Looking for more information on foster care? Check out my Resources for LGBTQ Prospective Foster Parents.