At Home With My New Mama

Foster Mama was a straight-up hustler, but she was also a down-home, big-hearted person.

Life with her meant trips to the mall, home-made BBQ dinners, fast food, roadside carnivals, after-hours clubs, summer picnics, camaraderie and cat fights with my new foster sisters, rowdy dancing, drive-in movies, raunchy girl talk, loud laughter and an endless supply of mother wit.

She was the kind of person who had seen it all and done half of it.

She was the one who explained to me that my dad's bow-wow babes were really hookers. I naively protested my dad's innocence. "Hummph!" Foster Mama sniffed. "I saw him last week at a Coney Island with a woman I know is a ho."

Daddy would drive across town to visit me, and talk to Foster Mama at length about how I moved out because I was hard-headed and stubborn and didn't want to do chores.

Not true.

I did more chores at Foster Mama's in a week than I'd done at my dad's house in a year.

Despite her free-wheeling nature, when it came to running her house, Foster Mama had rules. There were dishes to be washed, floors to be mopped, tables to be dusted, beds to be made, dinners to be cooked.

Some of her rules related to hygiene. You were to take a bath or wash up at the sink every single morning without fail.

I honestly didn't know that's what normal people did. I washed my face and brushed my teeth twice a day, but the rest of my body got attention once a week. If that.

"Lord, that girl will take care of that face," I'd hear her remark to the other girls as I performed my nightly Noxzema ritual. Then she'd add that maybe I should wash my ass, too.

Thank God she took me in.

I was starved for order and for maternal affection.

From ages 12 to 16, I hadn't seen my own mother at all. Just before I entered 7th grade, Mommy tried one last time to win custody of us. During our annual summer visit, she took us to see a lawyer. When Daddy arrived, she presented him with court papers that said he couldn't take us back to Detroit.

He responded by bellowing, "Kids, get in the damned car!"

He got arrested for kidnapping ... but the charges were dropped when he proved that Michigan had jurisdiction over our custody case, and that everything my mom had tried to do through her local Pennsylvanian courts was null and void.

I had no more face-to-face contact with my mother until my junior year of high school.

With Foster Mama, suddenly, I had a mom again.

Someone to do my hair. Someone to buy me clothes. Someone to talk to about boys and sex and relationships, not that I had anything to talk about. I was the only virgin in the house, aside from the precocious three-year-old. So I mostly listened to the other girls' tales of love lost and sex had.

Foster Mama had been married once. Now her attitude was, "F*ck a damn husband! Unless he's somebody else's."

She'd never had children of her own, save for one miscarriage.

And she'd been in the foster-care business for over 10 years.

We were part business decision, part labor of love. For each child in her care, the state paid her $200-$300 per month.

So year in and year out, she took in the girls that nobody wanted and dealt with their emotional damage. She taught them how to cook and clean and care for their kids. And she helped set some of her "chirren" up with apartments, cars and furniture after they turned 18.

I loved Foster Mama, and I literally followed her from room to room like a baby chick.

She never once ridiculed me or tried to make me stop.