New arrangement with foster family brings many changes

By Elizabeth Simpson

The Virginian-Pilot

The last time Max Karam saw his father was in a homeless shelter in Florida.

It was September 2007, and his father had brought 13-year-old Max and his four younger siblings there to stay for a while.

He told them he was going to the store and he'd be right back. By 11 that night, he still hadn't returned, so Max and the other children went to bed.

"At 2 a.m., social workers woke us up and said to grab anything we wanted or needed, that we were going into foster care."

The moment stands out in Max's mind, even though it was not the first time they'd been picked up by social workers, not the first time they'd lived in a shelter or a foster home.

What he remembers about that middle-of-the-night scene is the look on the faces of his two brothers and two sisters, who ranged in age from 5 to 12.

"I'm the oldest, and they all looked to me like, 'What are we going to do?' It was hard for me to say I didn't know."

Max figured they were on their own.

He is 14 now, tall and lanky. He cracks his knuckles throughout his story, which he tells matter-of-factly.

Their mother had died three years before that September night, shortly after leaving their father with four of the children and moving away with Max's youngest brother, Wesley.

"When she left, she said she was going to call, but my dad didn't want her to. So we didn't get to say goodbye."

He did his best to look out for the others: his sister, Cheyenne, who was 12 at the time; Jealousy, 10, named after a Natalie Merchant song her parents used to listen to; Malcolm, then 9; and Wesley, who was 5.

After Max and his siblings left the shelter, they were divided into different foster homes. During the next several months, the living arrangements changed, depending on the availability of foster families. Two siblings here, two there, one somewhere else.

"It was kind of hard because I was by myself," Max says. "My brothers and sisters were in a different county."

Within a few days, the children's aunt, Jennifer Grugan, caught up with them. Her brother had called to tell her he had abandoned them. She had known the children since they were babies, even going to get Wesley after his mother died and bringing him back to the rest of the family.

As soon as social services would allow it, she picked them up from their foster-care homes and took them out to lunch once a week.

At a court hearing to terminate her brother's parental rights, the judge looked Jennifer in the eye and said, "It's up to you now."

Either she found someone who would agree to take them, or the children would likely remain separated or linger in foster care. Jennifer had no parenting experience, so she didn't feel she could do it.

But she went home and started contacting everyone she could think of, including her sister, Lorraine Finkbeiner, who lives in Virginia Beach.

Lorraine, the oldest in their family of seven, didn't know her youngest brother well because she had married and left home when he was 8.

She mainly kept up with him through Jennifer, who was closer in age to him and lived in the same state.

Lorraine felt a world away in her well-ordered life. She was 53, and she and her husband, Gary, had two grown daughters and five grandchildren.

The couple had built the home of their dreams in Lagomar in 2001. It's a sprawling brick place with a dock and a boat. Around the time their nephews and nieces were pushed into foster care, Lorraine and Gary were traveling to Italy on a vacation. They figured it was the type of trip they'd be able to take more often as they moved closer to retirement.

Lorraine had never met her brother's children, but as she listened to her sister's stories, she knew what might be ahead for them. She's a pediatric nurse practitioner and was working for Tidewater Child Development Services Clinic, a state agency that assesses children, some of whom had been in foster care.

She often saw boys and girls surface again and again with the same problems. Even with counseling and other services, it was hard to change the fabric of their chaotic home lives.

Lorraine knew placing five children in a single adoptive home would be near impossible. She worried the older ones wouldn't be adopted at all and would stay in foster care the rest of their childhoods.

"I immediately felt compelled to take them."

The children, meanwhile, were wondering what would become of them.

They had been through a lot since the day in 2004 when their dad pulled the car over to the side of the road on the way to the beach to tell them their mother had died a few weeks earlier.

"We were crying and stuff and he said to get over it, she was gone," Cheyenne says. "That hurt us."

They moved around a lot after that. Their father was a roofer, and he sometimes kept Max out of school to help.

"He didn't always have a job," Max said. "He broke his leg, and that didn't help."

Cheyenne remembers coming home from school and finding her dad packing up his things. That was their cue to pack their own stuff and move on to the next apartment or shelter, the next new school, the next set of strangers.

"It'd be the middle of the year and we'd have to learn all these new things and make new friends," Cheyenne says. "We were moving from place to place to place. We were embarrassed when the bus dropped us off at a shelter. The other kids said, 'You live in a shelter?' "

Sometimes it fell to Cheyenne to cook for the family.

"I kind of learned on my own. I read the directions on the box. I cooked simple things."

Cheyenne would wake her younger siblings in the morning to make sure they got on the bus; she also told them when to go to bed. "Sometimes they wouldn't listen, and I'd say, 'Whatever.' "

Cheyenne and Jealousy played mother to their two younger brothers, picking out clothes for them, when they could find clean ones.

Max, too, shouldered a lot of responsibility when their father wasn't around, telling the others to brush their teeth, pick up after themselves, quiet down, don't touch this, don't bother that.

That was all hard - winging it on their own - but living in separate homes was worse.

"We were afraid we'd lose each other, like we might never see each other again," Cheyenne says.

"At first, Wesley was by himself," Malcolm remembers. "Then me and Wesley were together. And then me, Cheyenne, Wesley and Jealousy were together, and Max was by himself."

For weeks, Lorraine thought and prayed. She sought counsel from her pastor. She called the state of Florida to find out about foster- care policies and adoption law.

She flew to Florida to meet the children but didn't reveal her idea to them. She asked people to pray for her, talked to her colleagues.

"I wanted to be settled in my mind before I talked to my husband."

Then she asked her friends to pray for Gary to make the right decision.

Gary, married to Lorraine for 36 years, wondered what she wanted to tell him that night last October when she took him out to dinner.

He's an estimator with an architectural sign company, and retirement was not too far in the future. He had built their Lagomar home over 18 months. He enjoyed being a grandparent, working around his garage and taking the boat out for spins.

At dinner, Lorraine told him she wanted them to adopt the five children.

He didn't hesitate over the thought of 12 more years of parenting.

"Sounds like they need a home," he said.

He agreed to the plan; Lorraine cried in relief.

The couple took foster-care classes, a requirement in Florida's adoption process. They had background checks done for a home study. Lorraine traveled to Florida to appear in court and tell a judge her intentions.

They bought a van that could hold seven, enough mattresses and bunk beds to hold the children and the grandchildren at one time, not wanting anyone to be left out.

She and Gary flew down last December to tell the children.

It was Jealousy's birthday, so they all went to lunch at an Applebee's.

While they were standing outside waiting for their table, Max told Gary he and Cheyenne had been talking, and they didn't want to be broken up into different homes.

"Are you here because we can stay with you a while?" Max asked.

Gary told him they could stay with them forever.

"I was in shock," Max remembers. "I couldn't say anything."

And his brothers and sisters?

"There was a lot of screaming and stuff. They were happy, they couldn't stop smiling."

Lorraine thought it would take a few weeks for the paperwork to be complete, so she quit her job in January. She wanted to prepare for the children's arrival and then keep up with their schoolwork, figure out their needs, fill in the gaps that years of living out of suit-cases and boxes had created.

Since it was an adoption that involved two states, it ended up taking six months for the children to be released into the Finkbeiners' custody. The children took their first plane ride in June to get here, accompanied by Lorraine and Jennifer.

"I wanted to see the looks on their faces when they saw the house," Jennifer says. Their eyes widened as they turned onto the street and saw the two-story home rising up at the end of the court. Whooping and hollering followed.

They tumbled out of the van and ran from room to room, checking out their bedrooms, with the bunk beds made up in new sheets and covers. The living room with the 10-foot ceiling was bigger than entire apartments they'd lived in before. There were new clothes for them, and shoes and bicycles.

Soon it was time for Jennifer to say goodbye and return to Florida. It was hard for her to let them go, but she felt relieved seeing the family whole again.

Seven-year-old Wesley, tousled brown hair, shy smile, sits on a stool at the kitchen counter on a Thursday night in early December as Lorraine quizzes him on spelling words.

"Read the words for me."

"Ten, shed, pet, bet, fret."

He looks quizzically at her on the last one.

"Fret," she says. "It means to worry."

The children have been trickling home on school buses since late afternoon.

Malcolm, now 10, and 13-year-old Cheyenne have their homework spread out on a dining room table, warm yellow light spilling down from an overhead light.

Cheyenne is tall and lithe, her dark eyes lively. She tells her aunt about a science program at school she'd like to enroll in, a step toward her new dream of being a doctor some day.

Jealousy, 12, is a bouncy girl with big brown eyes, and long, dark hair she puts in a ponytail. She springs from the living room to the kitchen to the dining room, finally flinging herself into a ball on the sofa.

Malcolm - a boy with brown hair and brown eyes - talks a little about the differences between their Florida and Virginia lives.

"It's better here because in Florida there were gangs and bad stuff happening. Here there's not so much crime."

"At least the part we know about," Cheyenne says.

Gary comes home around 6, and Max demonstrates some moves he learned that day in a football conditioning session. Malcolm sidles up to him with homework in hand.

"Aunt Lorraine says you're good at math. Can you help me?"

For the children, going from a life in shelters and apartments and foster homes to a waterfront house in an elegant neighborhood might seem like a "happily ever after" dream, but it's also been work.

Max and Cheyenne have had to learn not to parent their younger siblings. "It was hard letting go of that," Max says.

They're glad not to move from school to school, but it's also meant buckling down to close the learning gaps that moving around caused.

They're having to live by household rules - TV limits, table manners, bedtimes, telling the truth - a change from their anything-goes past.

"We have given them more than they have ever had, but they also have more responsibility," Gary says. "It's new having a bike, but it's new taking care of it. It's new having a bedroom with dressers instead of cardboard boxes, but it's new folding your clothes and putting them away."

There have been visits with therapists and tutors and dentists and doctors to catch up on years of living on the fly.

It's been a change for the Finkbeiners, too. No more watching TV whenever they want. No more picking up on the spur of the moment to visit grandchildren or go on vacation.

Now there's algebra to contend with, schedules to keep.

The work Lorraine used to coordinate for other children she now does for her own family. Gary, meanwhile, plans to work longer before retirement to make up for her lost income and the cost of another round of parenting.

Their children and grandchildren have had to adjust to sharing them.

They are all gradually settling into this new life. Doubt creeps in sometimes.

"Uncle Gary," one of the children will ask out of the blue, "you're still going to adopt us, right?"

After homework, Cheyenne and Jealousy help Lorraine cook supper, cutting up carrots, putting biscuits on trays for baking as Christmas music plays in the background.

Cheyenne thinks back to past Christmases.

"One year, we didn't have a Christmas tree, so Aunt Jennifer got us one. Another Christmas, our dad couldn't buy any gifts, so our school did. Another year, a church we didn't even go to got us some. That was really nice."

Their home now, they say, is far beyond anything they've ever had, but it's the family they appreciate more than anything.

They like all the relatives who come for holidays, the cousins and the aunts and uncles, the laughing and talking and joking.

"It's awesome," Jealousy says, pulling her knees up to her chin.

Now that the children have lived here six months, Lorraine and Gary can begin the adoption process, which could take a year. Gary remembers people used to ask him why he built such a big house for two people. If he didn't know then, he does now.

It's hard for Max to believe, sometimes, the difference a year makes.

He still remembers the looks on the faces of his brothers and sisters when they were all asking him what would come next.

He feels like he knows the answer now.

"You just keep going. You have to believe there's someone out there," he says. "You have to believe that something good is going to happen."

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com