I was 10 years old when my parents decided to become foster parents. I was 28, married, and with a child of my own when they took their last placement.
Throughout those years, my parents adopted five of our foster siblings through the foster-to-adopt program.
But not every foster sibling stayed.
As a family, we mourned every placement’s end, whether a child was placed with a different foster family or with biological relatives. Saying goodbye was one thing. Not knowing whether their next home would be safe and loving made it much harder, especially since we had no control over the court’s decision.
Nathaniel was part of our first foster placement
One of my foster brothers, Nathaniel, lived with my family for only two years, from ages 7 to 9, or from second grade to fourth grade. He and his two sisters were our first placement, bumping us from a family of five to eight.
My parents bought an old blue minivan that was always breaking down. From the backseat, my brothers Mike and Nathaniel would belt out songs from the Backstreet Boys’ cassette that played on repeat, earning them the title “The Backseat Boys.”
I remember squatting on the floor in their room, trading baseball cards, and going to their soccer games. Nathaniel was one of those bright kids who somehow managed to get good grades and make friends right away in school, despite everything he’d been dealt in life.
I’ll never forget how he and his best friend rounded up all the American flags from the neighbors’ yards on one side of the street after 9/11 and went door-to-door on the opposite side, reselling them. The neighbors didn’t even realize they were buying their own neighbors’ flags. The boys each took home about $72, which my parents promptly made Nathaniel give to charity since it was exactly an honest business venture. Still, you had to hand it to him. It was pretty ingenious — and gutsy — for an 8-year-old.
That was Nathaniel. He wasn’t dishonest, just a smart, scrappy kid who knew how to survive.
Courtesy of Kris Ann Valdez
He left our home, but never our family
Nathaniel kept surviving long after he left our home.
We never lost touch with him or his sisters. When they went to another foster home, we took them for long weekends. After they moved to Watts, Los Angeles, to live with their aunt, we made the six-hour drive from Phoenix to them as often as we could.
When Nathaniel was a teenager, he and his close friend came to stay with my parents one weekend. They confided in my dad about how hard they were working to stay out of gangs in their neighborhood.
He kept his head down. Eventually, he found a mentor who took him under her wing like a son. She helped him apply for college during his senior year of high school.
And then he graduated from college, too.
Decades later, I gave my middle-grade book’s main character his name
When I sat down decades later to write a middle-grade novel about a young boy, I knew exactly what I would name the main character: Nathaniel.
The Nathaniel in my book isn’t my foster brother. The story is entirely fictional. But I made him a fourth-grade boy, the same age my brother was when he left our home.
Nathaniel and the Worst Project in the History of the Fourth Grade was published with a small traditional press this summer.
This week, my own family of five drove down to California from Arizona to attend Nathaniel’s baby shower, as he’s about to have his own first baby this October.
I brought a copy of my book with me.
Giving my character his name was my way of making sure my brother knew how important he is to me. Foster care meant a court decided where he would live after he left our home. But it didn’t get to decide who we considered family.
At the party, I signed the book to Nathaniel and his daughter, just above the printed dedication I’d already written to him. Then we took a photo together.
All these years later, he still calls me his sister
The next day, Nathaniel called me to thank us for coming.
He told me everyone at the shower had been impressed that his sister was a published author and had named a book after him.
I was just glad to hear him call me his sister.
