Independence Day (page 2 of 4)

Free to Go

He lets his guard down only on these rare days of happiness. He frolics like a preschooler, pushes the younger kids on the swings, hangs upside down like a monkey, lets the kids tackle him and pile on. He throws a football with his brothers, laughs until his side hurts. The onset of dusk will break his heart.

The return of the cars of the adoptive and foster parents means it's all over. Triston will leave the younger children more abruptly than he intends to, hugging each one roughly, then turning and striding away, his dark eyebrows knitted in pain.

More than once, as the years go by, the Urbans offer to adopt Triston. Paradoxically, it is the longing for family, the loyalty he feels toward his birth siblings, that compels him to decline. "No," he says without commentary, but he is thinking: I'm afraid to let go. I'm afraid I'll forget them. I'm the oldest. So Triston remains the foster son, the foster brother.

Adolescence is rough going for Triston Day and the Urbans. He is their first teenager, and the sudden flares of his temper alarm them. He shouts and slams doors, disputes their right to tell him anything. "You're not my real parents!" he barks through tears. He flouts curfew. Darla sits stunned in the dark of the living room at 2 a.m., asking herself what she and John have done to make Triston so angry. What have they not given him? How have they failed him?

Then Triston turns 18, which means soon nobody will be legally responsible for him, not even the state of Ohio. Darla loves Triston, but he's become insufferable. "We're just alike, hard-headed," she says. "I have the feeling I might be a better mother to Triston if he's not living under our roof anymore."

So Triston is free to go. He places an unzipped duffel bag on the floor of his room. Shirts on hangers lie across his bed. But where is he supposed to go anyway? His birth father has disappeared, his birth mother is unstable and his siblings are part of other families. Triston attends school, works, plays sports; his grades are good enough that he can expect to go to college, unlike some 70 percent of emancipated foster kids who don't pursue higher education; he wants to be a forensic chemist like John Urban. Can he maintain that schedule, those friendships, his ambitions, if he lives on the streets, becoming part of the young urban vagabond underclass? The Urbans argue that there has got to be an alternative. Triston's caseworkers agree. And in Hamilton County, Ohio, there is a better way.

In many American cities today, an emancipated teenager is given a firm handshake, a squeeze on the shoulder and a black garbage bag to collect his possessions. The financial support provided by the state can now go to a younger foster child. "All we had to offer was to ask a kid, 'Do you remember so-and-so? You think you could stay with her?' " says Lee Butler, a Hamilton County JFS supervisor. "You'd be afraid to pick up the newspaper. Every time you heard of a crime, you'd think, Don't let it be one of my kids. The average age of financial independence in America is 26. Yet our kids, abused and neglected, most of whom have not finished high school, maybe a third of whom have some degree of developmental disability, are supposed to take care of themselves at 18."

"It was tearing us all up," says Bob Mecum, executive director of Lighthouse Youth Services (LYS), a nationally recognized private child welfare agency in Cincinnati. "These were kids we loved. They aged out of the system. Then they called us. 'Can you come get me?' 'I ran out of money.' 'I think I need to go to the hospital and I don't have health insurance.' 'My boyfriend kicked me out and the baby's due.' "

Heartbroken that the foster care system was failing these children, Mecum, in 1980, came up with a different plan. What if LYS began preparing foster care kids for safe and competent independence at 18 or 19? Forget dropping the kids at bus stations and calling it "emancipation." What if, instead, each young person was set up in his or her own apartment, with the supervision and support of Lighthouse and JFS? Little by little, a young man or woman would take over all payments of rent, utilities and transportation; little by little, prior to emancipation, the young person would gain a home of his own and the skills to keep himself in it.

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