Hugging A Stranger on the Plane

by:  Julie Beem

No, this isn’t a blog about indiscriminate affection.  And no, this is not a mom you will read about in a sensationalized report on “underground adoptive/foster families”.  But it happens much more often than most people know.

Coming home from the ATTACh conference days ago, I plopped my exhausted self in the aisle seat next to a married couple and pulled out one of the adoption books I had acquired at the conference.  The cover had the words “adoptive and foster parents” on it.

“Are you training to be a foster parent?” the woman asked. 

“Oh, no,” I responded and explained to her what ATN was, what I do and that I had been to an attachment conference.  “Are you a foster parent?”

“I was,” she sighed, “for about 12 years until they gave me a kid who harmed my family.”

So much for my quiet ride home, as I sensed this mom wanted to share her story.  “What happened?” I plunged in.

For the next hour or so, in spurts and starts, this stranger told me about the 12-year-old who was placed in her home when her own bio son was four.  And how one day she had caught him re-enacting the sexual abuse he had endured, and now her son was victimized.  I could only respond with “I’m sorry” and “you’re not the only one.”

CPS removed the boy from her home immediately, even though that wasn’t necessarily what she wanted.  “If they had told me ahead of time, I could have kept my son safe AND got the boy the counseling and help he needed.  But I just didn’t know.”

She proceeded to tell me that her son has struggled for years with the impact of abuse, and that despite counseling he was currently, as a young adult, living on her sofa, not holding a job and not thinking about college.  Then she told me about the foster son and that he had been homeless, previously a drug addict, but doing much better this year.  How did she know that about a child who was removed from her home nearly 17 years ago?  She saw the question cross my face.

“Oh, he still calls me at least on Christmas and sometimes on Mother’s Day,” she offered.  “And he calls me ‘Mom’.”  I teared up.  Then she added, “that’s why, even though we moved from the Midwest to Texas, I’ve kept the same cell phone number for the last 20 years—so he can call me when he wants.”

And that’s when I hugged the stranger on the plane.