Could you foster a child without judging their family?

My foster son was late to his own high school graduation party. While we waited for him to arrive, his mother and I sat together on a worn picnic table in a community park, watching the family gather.

And as excited as I was to host the party, I was also nervous; arranging the food on the picnic table earlier (Texas barbeque on one side, vegetarian on the other) I worried the guests, when they arrived, would stand around uncomfortably, as segregated as the food.

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But if others in the family shared my fears, they set out purposefully to calm them: Tre’von’s African-American maternal grandmother stood by the ice chest with her sisters, talking and laughing with my Mexican step-mother and Jewish mother-in law, their plates piled high with ribs, fried chicken, and green bean salad with red onions and goat cheese.

Farther away from where we sat, the children played without effort on a large grassy field. A nine-year old corn-rowed cousin of Tre’von’s I’d never met ran around in circles holding a puppy; our two green-eyed toddlers chased her, pulling her beads and the puppy’s tail whenever she slowed enough to let them close.

When Tre’von finally arrived there were sixty of us in all, and we were mingling in the way I’d hoped, for his sake, we would: honestly, loudly, emotionally, if awkwardly. He pulled up, stepped out of the car, smiled shyly, and we applauded. He had made it.

Halfway through the party, as I was clearing the picnic tables and waving the little ones away from the cake, Tre’von’s great aunt approached me. She was smaller than me, and decades older, but the hands that grasped my own were strong and sure. Her skin was a shade darker than Tre’von’s, the bright blue of her shirt lit up in contrast. She was crying outright, not trying to hide her tears. I braced myself for what she had to say.

“I want to apologise to you,” she said when she could speak. With her shoulder she wiped a tear from her chin, not letting go of my hands. “I want to apologise to you personally, for this family; for the fact that no one in this family could take care of this boy. And I want to thank you, for everything you have done for him.”

Instantaneously I felt my body flood with emotion; not pride or gratitude, but shame; the hot, inescapable kind. I wanted to cry with her, wanted to sit down, wanted to leave. More than anything, I wanted to apologise. No, I wanted to say. I’m sorry.

Tre’von came into our family his freshman year in high school. My husband was working as principal of an urban transformation high school - the kind of public charter school determined to do whatever it takes to give the mostly minority, low-income student body the education they need and deserve to be successful in life. So when Tre’von ran away from home - barefoot on a cold January night - and ended up in a receiving home, desperate for a ride to school, my husband did not hesitate. He left every morning at five am, drove the forty-five minute loop from our house to the receiving home to school, and did the whole trip again in the evening.

‘What adoption did to my friendships – and I didn’t see it coming.’

After two weeks of this, my husband and I began to talk seriously about inviting Tre’von to live with us.

We were not new to foster care. We had been inducted by fire in our early twenties, when a family of young girls we were mentoring entered the system. For over a year we’d watched them move from home to home, placed in cities far away and separated from one another. The experience changed us.

By the time Tre’von ran away from home, foster care had become central to our lives. We’d continued mentoring; I’d spent five years running non-profit programs for homeless and foster youth; my husband, while focused on education, always knew which of his high school students were in foster care and made sure those students knew that they could come to him for anything, any time. More than once a student had knocked on our door unannounced or called after dark, needing a ride somewhere or a bed to sleep in for the night.

After carefully considering the logistics (we had an extra room in our house; I’d stopped working and was home full-time with our first child) we decided to ask Tre’von if he would like to come live with us. He said yes.

My first glimpse of Tre’von is one of the clearest memories I have. He stood at our front door in a black leather Nascar jacket, a gift from the firemen that had taken him in the night he ran away from home. The heavy jacket looked like it weighed almost as much as he did. I was expecting a young man - he was fourteen years old - but Tre’von was still very much a boy. Just over five feet, his chin pointed to the ground, and when he looked up, his bright eyes and quick smile took over his young face, made everything else in the world fade into the background. I was in love.

He sat down at our kitchen table, bowed his head to pray, and thanked me for dinner. I’d made chicken and mashed potatoes and baked a frozen pizza just in case, because I was a bad cook and because I didn’t know what he liked. He ate everything.

Afterward we showed him the house. The chalkboard wall in our playroom was filled floor to ceiling with title ideas for a novel I’d been working on, and he sat down and studied them, linking words and suggesting ideas with confidence. My husband and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised. Smart kid, we thought.

Tre’von lived with us under a temporary court order while we waited to see if any of his family members could take him. He had a large family. On his mother’s side he had a grandmother, two aunties and enough cousins that in four years I never memorised all their names. His mother had raised Tre’von alone for the first eleven years of his life. Though they lived in cramped public housing, surrounded by poverty and crime, Tre’von talked about those years fondly, remembering his mother’s famous shrimp salad, walking hand and hand with her to the park, and the many long days he spent playing fooseball at the local Boys & Girls Club.

‘Why you can’t change poverty one adoption at a time.’

But his life with his mother ended abruptly in fifth grade. His mother had struggled on and off with alchohol abuse, and Tre’von had started running with a tough crowd. Not liking the direction his son’s life was heading, his father took his mother to family court to get custody of their son. On a spring morning Tre’von would never forget, he was pulled from school, told the results of the court decision by his sobbing mother, and driven to his father’s home. In the next four years, he saw his mother only a handful of times.

The years at his father’s house were difficult ones. Tre’von missed his mother so much it hurt. And while he believed then (and still does now) that his father wanted what was best for him, his method of discipline left bruises and scars. He was hungry a lot. He sprinted every day from home to school and back again, barely pausing for red lights, always afraid of what the consequences of the slightest tardiness might be.

Then, one night after being woken up in the middle of the night and disciplined for something he didn’t do, he fled.

Both his mother and his father appeared in court the day we asked the judge for custody of Tre’von. His mother, though her love was fierce and outspoken, had neither a job nor stable housing. She wanted what was best for him, and, as long as she would be able to see him often, encouraged his placement with us as she worked to better her life. His father fought hard to have him returned to his custody, but in the end there was too much evidence against him. Tre’von was placed with us.

New mothers often ask me about these early weeks with Tre’von in our home, curious whether I found it difficult to bond with a teenager, whether all our differences (race, socio-economics, life experience) made our relationship awkward or distant. But the experience was surprisingly similar to the experience of bonding with my daughter, six months old when Tre’von came to live with us, or my son, born eight months later.

I checked on him at night. I watched his breath carefully under the overhead light he kept on for the first year. I worried when his skin broke out in a rash from sunscreen. I knew exactly how much he grew (29cm in four years), and how much weight he gained (24 kilos). I waited by his side in the ER when he needed stitches and cringed when the needle pierced his skin.

There were differences, of course. We met with social workers. We needed permission to take him on holiday out of state, and we spent weekends driving him to visit his mother, sister, aunties, and cousins. We talked about God, and love, and sex; had all the hard conversations we wouldn’t have with our biological children for more than a decade. And every few months, we went to court.

“The boy I should have adopted.”

It was at a court appearance, when Tre’von had been with us six months, when I had fallen head-over heels in love with him in the way that only a mother can love a child, that I was reminded, without minced words, that he was not mine.

Tre’von sat at a desk in front of the judge with his attorney and his social worker. To the right of him, his father sat with his attorney, to the left his mother sat with her attorney. The social worker had suggested another six months at our house; his father stood up to disagree.

When his father sat down, the judged turned to where I sat in a folding seat at the back of the courtroom, my daughter fussing quietly in my lap.

“I just want to make one thing very clear,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes. “And I want to make sure that everyone in this room hears it. We are not looking for a better family for this boy. Our goal is to return this boy to his family.”

I was stunned. His words, his tone, his direct and unwavering gaze; I felt absolutely, completely accused. Here I was, a mother of a one year-old, six months pregnant with my second child, offering to raise an African-American teenage boy that, statistically, would end up in a group home if my husband and I had not stepped forward. And the judge wanted to accuse me? He wanted to act like I was attempting to steal a child away from his family?

I wasn’t, of course, trying to steal a child. But did I, deep down, think I was offering up a better family? The words hurt me, on some level, because I feared they were true. We were educated; we were financially secure. We lived in a big house in a nice neighborhood, and Tre’von’s closet was full of new clothes and new shoes. Did I think we were better for him than his own family could be?

When my anger subsided, I felt ashamed. In the lobby after the hearing, as if to validate my emotions, Tre’von collapsed into his mother’s body, became a part of her, briefly, completely, wholly, safe. And this was the one thing, despite my love for Tre’von, and his growing love for me, I could never give him. I was not his mother, and there was an unspoken physical line in I could not cross. In that moment I new, in a way I’d never fully understood before, that my husband and I, alone, would never be enough.

So the evening of Tre’von’s graduation party, as Tre’von’s great aunt held on to my hands, it was that moment I flashed on: the judge’s cold, stern voice, followed by his biological mother’s warm embrace.

I’m sorry, I wanted to say to his great aunt, that I took your beautiful boy. I’m sorry I’ve been given every advantage in life so that it is me, not you, with the resources to clothe and house him, sorry that your family has lived in poverty for generations in the wealthiest nation in the world, sorry that our education system is so broken that Tre’von is only the third in his maternal line to graduate from high school.

But I didn’t say any of these things, because when I looked up at her, I saw that her eyes, unlike the judges, were not accusing. They were full of love, and gratitude, and forgiveness. The moment was not about my guilt or uncertainty; it was about her appreciation.

So instead of spilling my apology I simply thanked her, and when she let go of my hands I fell into her arms as if we were long lost family members finding one another after years and years apart. And in that moment, we were. We were a family, his aunt and I, just as Tre’von had become a part of our family, through love, commitment and mutual respect.

Looking at our huge, diverse, proud, mingling family - biological and foster together - I knew that he needed all of us. He needed my husband’s strict attention to education, his grandmother’s focus on family, his foster-grandfather’s deep spirituality, his cousins’ friendship, and his mother’s unconditional love. He needed his father’s belief that he could accomplish anything he set his mind to, his older sister’s career guidance, and our toddler’s sloppy kisses. And he needed me.

As I squeezed his auntie one final time, it hit me that we were, in that moment, exactly what the judge had feared; we were, all together for the first time, a better family.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh is a writer and co-founder of Camellia Network, a non-profit working to provide material and emotional support to youth emancipating from the foster care system (www.camellianetworkorg). Her debut novel, The Language of Flowers, has sold in over thirty translations. Her second novel, We Never Asked for Wings, Pan Macmillan, is available now.