Mark Daley and his husband Jason thought they knew what to expect when they decided to start a family via foster care in Los Angeles. 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.
In this memoir that is both a personal story and a critical look at the foster care system, Daley tells of fostering brothers Ethan and Logan, a one-year-old and an infant, starting in 2016. 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, Daley reminds us, “is not meant to be a permanent arrangement.”
The birth mother and the birth father had addiction and mental health problems. Jason was able to relate, though; he himself had been sober for 15 years. And while Daley knew that “for us to foster and eventually adopt a child meant that other parents would have to lose their children,” he asserts, “I really didn’t want their parents to fail, both for the boys’ sake and for theirs.” Nevertheless, it was difficult for the two men when the children would come back from mandated visits with the birth parents with renewed behavioral and physical problems (like diaper rash) that the men had worked hard to ameliorate, or when the birth parents did not show up for most of their mandated meetings. After all this, unexpectedly, the birth parents then decided to try and get the children back.
The whole situation was made even more difficult by a convoluted foster care bureaucracy. While some of the case workers they interacted with were skilled, others were not, and all were overworked, cogs in a broken machinery. This led to scheduling snafus, a lack of attention to the details of the boys’ lives, and actions by courts that seemed contrary to what was in the boys’ best interests. The uncertainty for them—and more importantly, for the boys—dragged on.
Daley explains that it is rightly not easy to remove children from birth parents, but there is also no consensus about when they should be removed. “The system meant to protect children from harm ironically required them to be harmed in order to intervene,” he says. He and Jason found themselves in the bind of not wanting to push too hard when they saw the birth parents shirking their agreed-upon responsibilities or doing things that endangered the boys, for fear that the child welfare system would feel they were saying those things only out of self-interest. Confused, frustrated, and worried about the boys, they felt the strain in themselves and in their own relationship.
Daley blends the harrowing personal story with facts and details about the overall foster care system in the U.S., weaving an eye-opening 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. (Daley himself had founded One Iowa, which helped garner grassroots support for marriage equality.)
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, another recent memoir about two dads fostering in Los Angeles. Both of these books, however, offer scathing criticisms of a child welfare system that often loses sight of what it means to ensure a child’s welfare.
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.
The two dads, the boys, and the birth parents are White.
