Word: fostered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...That child is getting fat as a butterball," Bonnie had declared happily ; that very morning at a meeting of other families whose foster children carry HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. Tina's doctors have lately totted up her symptoms and moved her into the category called AIDS-related complex, or ARC. Bonnie takes this as a hopeful sign: the child has a whole stage to go before full-blown AIDS. Tina's birth mother, a drug addict with AIDS, is less optimistic. She phoned not long ago and remarked, "Tina's going...
...With these children, you have to push a little harder," a woman named Helen is saying in a fervent voice at that morning's session of foster families. Connecticut has a policy against letting HIV-positive children languish in hospitals or boarding institutions. What it has instead are these 18 foster families, a kind of loose-knit secret society dedicated to giving the children normal lives. Some of them got started as foster parents because they knew the birth mother, or because they came to know the children in their jobs as nurses or social workers. They got together...
...other foster parents look to Denise, who is the sickest child, and Tina, who is the oldest, and see possible futures for their children. A troubling prospect, either way, and this is the remarkable thing: they risk loving other people's children in the foreknowledge that they may see them...
...know what I'm asking them to go through," says Rossow, who is mother to 16 adopted children, many of them severely handicapped, plus three of her own. Apart from her more formal duties as a consultant, she serves the foster families as a sort of group mother and their public stand-in. "And yet I also know that the only reason it's going to hurt so much when the child dies is because they loved him so much when he was alive." For this privilege, the state pays the foster families a monthly stipend...
They seem like normal families, with the sweet chaos of child rearing merely complicated by secrecy and the endless visits to doctors, social workers and birth mothers. Some foster families end up taking in the birth mothers too, when they become too weak to care for themselves; some remain ambivalent. "I always felt sympathy for her, until the night they put him in intensive care," says the foster mother of an 18-month-old boy with ARC. % "They told me that if his breathing got any worse they'd put him on a respirator, and at that moment I hated...