All My Children

They gather in my yard. Neighborhood kids, cousins, school friends. With my three daughters, they skate up and down the sidewalk, they laugh in the pink-and-purple-painted wooden playhouse, they slide and swing on the ancient equipment in the side yard and they climb the mulberry tree.

Sometimes there are eight or nine of them out there. I sit on the porch steps with my mail or my students’ papers, trying to grade and watch and admonish at the same time. I have a cup of tea, since it’s late afternoon. They have everything loose in the kitchen. Fruit rolls, Popsicles, cookies, string cheese. Everything.

And they talk. While they’re asking me to open the plastic packages so hard for little fingers, while I’m cutting the tops off the Popsicles, they tell me about school, about fights on the playground. About their mom’s fights with their dad. About their dad leaving. About what they would do with a horse. I listen, trying to say the right thing. Maybe I could send some eggs or oranges home for Mom. Maybe my daughter and the girl could band together on the playground against the boys with the palm-frond weapons. Maybe the child can come over here and play and talk any time.

Before I start to sound like I think I’m doing the right thing, I should explain that what I do is only the easy stuff. I don’t do the really hard stuff. And for that, I feel guilty nearly every day.

Every Tuesday, I work in my 5-year-old’s kindergarten class. I cut out sailboats, help children write in their journals and sit in a tiny chair just behind the group of 33 kids in case someone is acting up and needs to “take a seat with Delphine’s mom.”

Lamont* was always taking a seat with me. Instead of sitting quietly on the rug, listening, he would hum, lie down, talk and touch people. When he sat next to me, another volunteer mom whispered to me, “He’s so dirty.”

He was. His braided hair was fuzzed and grown out, his shoes filthy and loose-soled, his fingernails dark crescents. I’ve seen dirty kids before. Lamont kept fidgeting and talking, and I pulled him onto my lap. “Hey,” I said. “We have to listen to the teacher now.” He noticed the silver anklet I wore around my boot, and then my other jewelry, and he played with the charms for a long time, quietly.

He sat on my lap all the time after that, and then I’d hover near him when he worked at his table, trying to help him with projects. He colored beautifully, with great artistic flair, but when we worked on the alphabet, he knew no letters. The teacher and I discovered he was a crack baby, one of seven children being raised by his grandfather in an apartment several blocks from my house. I talked to his grandfather a few times, helped him get forms for free lunches, and gave him two bags of groceries every Tuesday. My neighbor gave Lamont new shoes, Sharks sneakers, and I got him jackets, shirts.

Then, while I was supervising the playground one day, someone came running to tell me Lamont and some other boys were arguing over scooters. I walked near the fence, and Lamont lifted his shirt to scratch something on his stomach.

It was a festering magenta burn the size of my hand. He dropped the shirt quickly, his eyes darker-brown in fear, knowing that I’d seen the burn.

“How did that happen?” I whispered.

“I’m not apposed to tell,” he said, his fingers clutching the shirt.

“Did you go to the doctor? Did you get medicine?” I asked, and he shook his head. “Will you come see the school nurse with me?” I took him to the nurse’s office, whispering to the kindergarten teacher that we had a problem. The official school nurse travels among several campuses, so we talked to the health aide. I explained that Lamont had a bad ouchie and might need some medicine. When he reluctantly lifted the shirt, she gasped and winced.

The burn was at least a week old and had become infected and crusted. I couldn’t imagine how much it must have hurt him. He dropped the shirt again and began to recite, “My mama cooked some food and she gave me a hot plate. The food spilled on me.”

His mother was, I had heard, incarcerated. “Are you sure?” we asked, and he repeated the exact sentences, over and over. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” His fingers flew down to cover his crotch.

“Did the food fall down there, too?” we asked, and I’m thinking that the only way he could be burned like that was if he ate naked. Eventually, he pulled his pants partway down to show us circular burns, three of them.

I went into the outer office and cried in front of all the secretaries. They’d seen it before; I hadn’t. But Lamont would only stay in the room and talk if he was on my lap, so I went back in.

By that afternoon, the Department of Social Services had concluded that food accidents happen, and Lamont had gone home with his grandfather. I didn’t think his grandfather had hurt him. But his mother was out of jail now, living in the apartment with her boyfriend. I cried nearly all that night, even at work the next day, seeing Lamont’s eyes when I saw the burn, knowing that hot food hadn’t hurt him.

For the next three months, I visited Lamont’s apartment with groceries and clothes. I made sure his grandfather knew I could be called upon, and I stood face to face with his mother outside the school grounds. She was three years older than I, had grown up a few blocks from my husband and didn’t mind telling me about her lifelong addictions to alcohol and cocaine. When I said, “I’m worried about Lamont, and I hope nothing happens to hurt him,” she smiled gently and said, “I’m trying to get myself together, but I’ve got so many kids, you know. So many.”

I wanted to bring Lamont to our house, maybe just for a week, even for a few days. I have brought people home for 15 years. My husband had been patient. Cambodian and Vietnamese and Laotian orphans, teenage students of mine, would stay with us on weekends. My niece stayed with us now and then. And my brother, when he was rootless and fighting his own demons, lived with us for a long time, until I became pregnant with our first child and she needed that bedroom.

“You can’t bring everyone home,” my husband told me when I mentioned Lamont. We have three children. Two bedrooms, one bath. It’s crowded, to say the least, in our small farmhouse on our busy city block, And my husband was right: I couldn’t bring everyone home. I couldn’t risk the possibility of hurting our children with the behavior or problems of a damaged child.

I was reduced to bringing more food. Even if parents are addicts and criminals, children don’t deserve to be hungry. At Christmas I brought a ham, and Lamont’s little sister saw it in my arms and breathed to me, “Is that meat? Meat?” (I had lobbied for the smoked ham instead of frozen turkey when I’d gone around collecting boxes of food. Never give a frozen turkey to an already challenged mother. Even I don’t want to defrost and wash and stuff a turkey.) Lamont and his brothers and sisters ate some meat. I know that.

I took four boxes of food to Tina’s family, too. I’d known her since my 7-year-old’s kindergarten class, from those same Tuesdays. Tina was dirty, too, hair uncombed, and she could barely speak. She had never held a pencil. She knew no letters. When my kids and I feed homeless families at a local park on Sundays, Tina and her sister, brother and parents are in line. They have a run-down duplex not far from here, and when I delivered the food, Tina and her mom stood in the muddy yard, barefoot in the cold, their pale legs streaked with dirt, their sandy hair wild. I had bought rollerblades, Lego toys and remote-control cars for the kids. Tina’s mother and I joked about Santa, and then my kids and I went home.

The kindergarten teacher smiled at me when she heard. She said, “Charity is primarily for the giver.” I think she’s right. I do this for myself, for some need. I have to imagine people to be at least marginally happier or more satisfied. If I had the courage or space or time to really change anything, I would bring children into my house and be a true foster mother. I come from a long line of women who had more courage, more time and just as little space, but they raised other women’s children for years. My mother had foster children throughout my childhood, and we five ranged in age from 1 to 5. People at Kmart stared at her, asking if she’d ever heard of birth control, and she was unfazed. We had a brother and sister, Bridget and Patrick, for five years. Then their mother came to get them.

We had another brother and sister, Chris and Sandy, for five years. Their father was in jail, their mother institutionalized. When she eventually got out and came to claim them, my mother cried for days. Her heart was never the same. She wanted to believe she had changed their lives, she told me, with regular meals and baths and reading and love, but she didn’t believe she had. She said she could never invest her heart that fully again.

We had shelter kids now and then after that, like David, who came one night with a black eye and broken arm from his lawyer father. He was hyperactive, on medication, peed on the floor and called us creepy bastards. We liked him, though. He didn’t stay very long. When we were teenagers, my mother went back to work and she stopped taking in kids.

My mother-in-law had raised other people’s children for months at a time--teens who were in trouble at home or who needed a stable place. And her door was always open for anyone who wanted a meal. She cooked huge pots of food, available to hungry kids and adults alike. Her generosity amazed me, and I learned to cook in large amounts so I could give food away.

My husband’s godmother, who watched our kids when I went to work, raised foster and shelter children for 30 years--kids of all races, ages and temperaments on the rug in her back room at nap time, wrapped like burritos. I watched her patience, her firmness--her cooking, too. But I can’t do it. I have a full-time job, three girls in one small bedroom and so little time and space to do it properly.

I tell myself that these are only excuses, that if I really wanted to make a difference, I could try. Then my mother says, surprisingly, that my own children are my first concern--earning money to take care of them and making their lives happy. When I tell her about taking the toys to Tina’s house, her eyes fill with tears and she says, “I’ve been on that street. I did all that for years, and I don’t know if I accomplished anything.”

She did. She passed onto me this incurable need to touch kids, listen to them, give things to them. We feed them for only a day, maybe, but their bones might be a little straighter. They might learn their letters. They might have some fun.

Who knows what will really happen? One Tuesday this spring, I went to kindergarten with three bags of groceries, and Lamont was gone. His mother had moved the kids to another apartment, out of the district. The next day, I heard that Tina’s father had died of a drug overdose. I tried to take food and clothing to that tiny brown house, but no one was there. Social Services had taken all the kids away. I stare at Lamont’s photo, apart from the others on the wall, as if he’s a child who’s left the class. I see Tina’s green eyes, pale as glass.

What can we really do? When other women see me with the kids, the grocery bags and clothes and toys, when they see the children in my yard, some say, “I just can’t help people who won’t help themselves. It doesn’t work in the long run.”

But those children play with my children in school. They learn with my children. My daughters might fall in love with one of them, might be best friends with another, and I want them to have a chance, as minuscule as my offerings might be.

My yard and house are full of children most days. Girls spend the night, rolled in sleeping bags on my living room floor, telling me stories. I know they can’t stay here forever, but I listen to them until late into the night.

In the front yard, the bikes and skates and shovels and toys are scattered so far and wide that people stop and ask if I do day care. Do implies money, I think. But they come over, every day, all the kids. I am the mother who doesn’t mind lying belly down on the sidewalk to examine pill bugs. (I have no shame.) I am the mother who builds a tepee. (I pruned the mulberry tree, and cutting up all those branches for the trash seemed like too much work. More fun to stand them up and tie them together.)

They eat Otter Pops and cheese crackers in there, with stripes of light falling across their faces. I throw a box of cookies out in the yard and, like piranhas, they buffet it about and send it back to me stripped clean. They come and tell me secrets, their foreheads glistening with sweat. They sit up in the branches, and I toss crackers to the monkeys who can hoot the loudest and catch the orange squares. My baby girl, who’s 1 1/2, grabs the fallen crackers for herself and then sits on my lap on the porch steps to watch all the kids laugh. For now, this is the best I can do.

* This name and others have been changed.