In the early 2000s, Lane Igoudin and his partner Jonathan began fostering two girls from the Los Angeles County child welfare system. In this heartfelt memoir, Igoudin shares their three-year-long journey to adopt the girls, caught up in a convoluted and at times seemingly arbitrary legal process.
The two men fostered the children via a two-pronged “concurrent planning” approach, where a plan for reunifying a child with the birth parent(s) proceeds at the same time as a plan for fostering that could become adoption. Each of the girls’ timeframes for reunification was different, however, 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. The contradiction of her being assessed for parental competency while remaining a dependent under the care of others “was at the heart of the situation we were all in,” Igoudin writes.
Delays, absences, appeals, and the presence of one girl’s birth father strung out the process and threw into question whether the two sisters would be able to stay together. The situation led to increasingly strained mandated visits between the girls and Jenna.
All of this 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. Igoudin weaves in 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 explores the thinking behind many of the decisions, big and small, that he and Jonathan had to make, from choosing the foster-adopt path in the first place to indicating what gender and racial identities of children they would be willing to foster, to debating how hard to push through the delays in deciding the girls’ permanent status. He tells of the family celebrations they had even when they didn’t know if the girls would remain with them; the small moments of childhood achievements; and the decision to raise them in his own Jewish faith (though they also celebrate Christmas because of Jonathan’s faith). “I wanted to share my roots with them, graft them onto the branches of my ancient tree,” he writes, noting that a sense of roots is especially important “for the kids whose roots have been cut.” As part of a multiracial family, too (Igoudin is White; Jonathan Black, Jenna White; and the girls multiracial), Igoudin shares some of the ways race and racism has affected their lives.
Igoudin describes the ins and outs of his family journey almost to a fault; he quotes some letters, documents, and dialogs at length when shorter excerpts might have better served the focus of the narrative. Having said that, other foster parents (and prospective ones) may appreciate the sheer amount of detail he provides, which may offer insights on a practical or emotional level.
While rights for same-sex couples have advanced since the time of his daughters’ fostering (helped in part by the family stories that he and Jonathan, along with many others, submitted to various courts), there is still need for further change. Similarly, the need for reform of the foster care system remains urgent. Stories like this one (and like the recent Safe, a similar but somewhat different story of two dads fostering in Los Angeles) show us why—but may also offer hope and help to others who are in the midst of similar experiences.
