THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 5, 1994 TAG: 9409050068
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 184 lines
The question should be easy.
How many foster homes have you lived in? But 18-year-old Chris Burke has to think about it. One, two, three. He goes down a mental list. Four, five. He rubs his eyes in thought, and finally lands on a number.
``Six or seven?'' he says, more as a question than an answer.
``I don't remember all the names. I can remember what they look like, but not their names.''
Until this summer, Burke was one of an estimated 460,000 children in foster care in the country, one of 6,200 Virginia children. The average length of stay in foster care in Virginia is three years, a term that children often carry memories of for a lifetime. Nationally, 15 percent of children who go into foster care have been there before.
For Burke, foster care was no stopgap measure; it was his childhood. It was not temporary, but decade-long. He changed families more than a lot of kids switch school friends. ``I've lived in every city in Tidewater,'' he says almost proudly.
To look at Burke is to see an average kid in jeans and a T-shirt. He surfs and plays baseball. Takes classes at a community college. Has plans to join the Marines in a few months.
All that belies an upbringing that most people would find harrowing. His hopscotch of foster homes began as a toddler and ended when Burke reached legal age this summer and moved out on his own for a long-awaited taste of freedom. He speaks of his tenure as a ``foster child'' dispassionately, in spare sentences.
His casual manner is a callous reminder to the constant packing and repacking of his life. It's as if he's filed away in mental drawers the events that would wound the soul of the averagekid. His nonchalant retelling of one move after another in a social worker's car is all the more poignant when you consider he's just one of thousands of children who grow up this way.
``Living with strange people. I don't know, it was an offbeat situation,'' he says. ``I guess when you're little, that's when you learn everything. If you're bounced from one to place to another, you get confused a lot.''
Instead of values you learn tricks of the trade. You learn to lie. To distance yourself from people. To make your own way. To do what you have to in order to fit in.
But the tricks backfired. By the time he was 12, he'd been in five homes getting into the kind of trouble that lands you in the newspaper. In a story in The Virginian-Pilot five years ago, foster parents complained that Norfolk Social Services sent them Burke without telling them he had a history of playing with matches, setting fires, lying and stealing.
One foster parent described him as ``a little monster.'' Another predicted he'd burn down a foster home some day. ``We went through hell with him,'' said one foster parent. ``Honest to God, it's a real nightmare.''
What Burke remembers best of those days are the rides in a social worker's car.
``Lot of times, the social worker would pick me up from school and that's when they would tell me. They wouldn't flat-out say, `They don't want you any more.' They'd beat around the bush. But I knew what they were trying to tell me.''
And on he'd go to the next home.
Burke has dark hair, dark brown eyes. He looks you in the eye once in a while but seems more comfortable looking around. He rubs his eyes periodically, yawns. He mumbles a little when he talks, but usually speaks clearly.
He's vague on the details of his early life. At first Burke says he was put in foster care ``soon as I was born.'' Then he backtracks and says his mother left him when he was young, and he lived off and on with his stepfather until he was 8.
``He used to take me to bars with him. That's where I learned to play pool. He taught me to play. I love the game of pool.''
But the pleasant memory has a dark side. ``I never wanted to leave the bar at the end of the night. When he'd leave, he'd drive all crazy and speed. I'd be scared. We got in two accidents where the car flipped over.''
When he was 8, he came home from school one day, and his stepfather's girlfriend told him to go to the baby sitter's. He didn't want to, so he went to a friend's house instead, and asked if he could stay. His friend's mother agreed. He remembers hearing her call Norfolk Social Services.
Two hours later a social worker picked up Burke.
``I wasn't scared,'' he says, trying to remember how he felt. ``I was confused. I didn't know what was going on. I thought I was going back home, but it never happened.''
The social worker took him to a shelter and said his stepfather would probably pick him up in a few days.
``He never came,'' Burke says.
Home, after that, was a string of foster homes, temporary shelters and group homes, with a constantly changing cast of people and house rules. He ran away more times than he can remember. The length of time he stayed and the people he knew at each stop are a blur.
He downplays the behavior that got him booted out of home after home. The most frightening habit to foster parents was his penchant for setting fires.
``I experimented with fire. I used to go in the woods and take matches and start fires and then put them out. It was neat to watch stuff burn. I didn't see a problem with it. I didn't hurt anyone. I'd light a paper and watch it burn, then stomp it out. Or I'd let it burn until there was nothing left to burn.''
He also became an excellent liar. He lied mostly to get out of trouble. Or to fit in better with a family. Or because he didn't know anything better to do. ``I lied a lot. It was a habit for me. I didn't want to get in trouble. I was always trying to get out of things. I kept doing it and doing it.''
Trish Brennan, a Lutheran Family Services worker who would later counsel Burke, felt he was ``acting out'' anger during those early incidents. But foster parents felt threatened, and legitimately so. Some even had to seek counseling after keeping him.
Burke says social workers tried to tell him why he was leaving.
``They would kind of like say, `They were tired of how you were acting.' They tried to tell it to me nice. Sometimes I got mad. Sometimes I didn't care. Sometimes I cried. After a week or so I was over it.''
The newspaper story, however, never left his mind, and always bothered him. ``My foster mother picked me up from school one day and showed it to me. I sat down and read it. Some of it was true. Some of it . . . it wasn't a lie, but it wasn't true.''
Shortly after the story was published he spent two years in a residential-type center. He refuses to talk about his experience there. ``I don't want to be mean or anything, I just don't want to talk about it.''
In October 1990, Chris met a family he would spend the longest time with - more than three years - and foster parents who worked with him to break bad habits.
The Wilsons of Virginia Beach had received eight weeks of training through Lutheran Family Services to become ``therapeutic foster parents,'' a higher-trained, and better-paid foster parent.
Unlike the other foster homes he had been in, Burke met the Wilsons and spent weekends with them before he moved into their home in January 1991. Instead of meeting with a social worker every three months, he met with a Lutheran Family Services counselor once a week. He also met with a therapist.
The Wilsons recall what Burke looked and acted like when he first moved in. He didn't talk much, and mumbled when he did. He wouldn't look them in the eye. He slumped his shoulders. ``It was like he had a sign on his back that said `Kick me,' '' Beverly Wilson says. ``It was like he was wounded.''
About six monthslater, Burke mentioned to Beverly Wilson that he had been in the newspaper before. She assumed it was for a baseball game, until he said it ran on the front page. Burke went to the library, made a copy of the story and brought it home for her to see. Although the story surprised her, she didn't let on as Burke watched for her reaction.
The story would resurface from time to time. ``It was usually when we complimented him on something,'' Beverly Wilson says. ``It was like he was saying, `You may think I'm OK, but look what they said.' We could tell him, `You're OK, you're not a bad kid,' but there were other things in his head.''
Burke seemed to be wrestling with who he was - a problem child, or an average kid trying to muddle his way through the system. He also struggled with intimacy. ``I got in the habit of doing certain things to keep myself distant,'' he says. Beverly Wilson said he asked once if he could call them Mom and Dad, and they said he could if it felt comfortable. ``I think he really wanted to,'' she says.
But he never did.
It was clear, though, that he was ready to settle into a family by the time he met them. ``Chris really wanted a stable life. He'd had enough stress in his life,'' Beverly Wilson says. ``Maybe he was to a point where he wanted to be normal.''
Gradually he became more comfortable being honest with the Wilsons. At first, he would write them letters if he did something wrong, and leave them on a dresser. Then he told them face to face. He started speaking more clearly and acting more confident.
``This was not something that happened overnight,'' Beverly Wilson says. ``It happened gradually.''
But the boy Wilson read about in the newspaper article was not the same person who graduated this spring from Princess Anne High School. ``He's going to make mistakes just like anyone, but he's capable of doing anything he puts his mind to,'' she says. ``I think he has a good chance at a normal life now, whereas before, that was questionable.''
One thing Burke always wanted was to prove wrong those predictions foster parents made five years ago. To show that foster kids who travel rocky roads don't have to turn out bad.
Still, he wonders what kind of impact his upbringing had on him.
``I think when I get older I might be lacking. Foster parents didn't always push me. That's why I'm going to boot camp. If I'm pushed, I know I will do it. I can do it but I need help.''
There are a lot of things you miss out on when you grow up in foster care, says Burke. The main thing is real parents. ``I was going to be adopted by some foster parents once,'' he muses. ``They asked me and I said, yeah, but then I started getting in trouble, and they decided not to. The last family I was in . . . I wanted them to adopt me. But I never said anything.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
JIMMY WALKER/Staff
How many times has Chris Burke been in foster homes? ``Six or
seven?'' he guesses. That's in part because of his troubles. Foster
parents said Norfolk Social Services sent him without revealing his
history of playing with matches, setting fires and lying.
KEYWORDS: FOSTER CHILD by CNB