Conversations on Healing

Introduction Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole healed and connected.

Shay Beider Hello and welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m the host Shay Beider. In this episode today, we are joined by social activist, entrepreneur, and foster turned adoptive father Mark Daley. Mark is the founder of one Iowa, the state’s largest LGBTQ plus equality organization, and also the foster parent.com, a national platform to connect interested families with foster organizations. Mark is also the author of a new book called Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family. He’s worked with more than 30 members of Congress, numerous governors and other elected officials, and served as the communications director and spokesperson for then Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. In today’s episode, Mark and I discuss his new book, Safe. Hillary Clinton is actually quoted as saying about this book that Mark Daley points out the ways in which structural and systemic forces cause profound inequities, traumas and heartbreak in the foster care system. But most importantly, he shows how we can move towards a better future by examining what it means to be a family and what it means to love a truly revealing work. It’s a thoughtful and personal conversation focused on foster care and adoption with Mark who has had his own experiences with the intersectionalities that exist within these spaces. So I’m just so grateful that you can join us for this meaningful episode, learn a tremendous amount more about the foster care and adoptive systems that exist, and I’m excited to hear what you think.

Mark, welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I am so delighted to have you on the show. Thank you for joining me.

Mark Daley Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Shay Yeah, so I am really delighted to get to talk about your new book called Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family. In the book, you share your experience of being a foster parent, and I thought it might just be a very nice way to start the conversation to just tell us a little bit about your story, and obviously you go into a lot more detail in the book, but just to give our listeners a little bit of an introduction and understanding to what you’ve been through and what you share in your memoir.

Mark Sure. So you know back in 2015, my husband and I had just gotten married and we grew up in a time where for two gay men, being a parent really wasn’t normal or common or even something you really aspired to. And so we had to kind of look around and see what our options were since biology was clearly not on our side. So we looked at private adoption briefly. We looked at surrogacy for a long time. We were really considering that, but ultimately foster care felt right to us. I have three cousins who entered our family through foster care, so it was something I’ve known about since I was seven years old. But again, I’d never thought that I’d probably be apparent growing up gay. And so we ultimately decided to foster, we thought maybe we would do surrogacy afterwards, but when the agency came to our house for the inspection, they said, oh, you have a big house. Would you consider siblings? And what I thought that meant was could we call you in a few years if the mom has another baby? That was not what she meant at all. It turns out that there is a great need for sibling sets for homes, for brothers and sisters that come into the system together, and obviously they don’t want to break them apart, but unfortunately that happens way too often. And so we said yes to siblings, and you know our story begins that we get two little boys who are three months old and 13 months old, they’re brothers. And that starts our journey into foster care.

Shay And I really love, you shared with me that your expectations of what a foster parent is, really transformed once you actually became a foster parent. And so I’d love for you to share with our listeners like the difference between your expectations and the reality as you came to know it.

Mark Yeah, there’s so many differences, hahaha.

Shay That’s a long list.

Mark We don’t have time to cover them all, but luckily I read a book on it for anyone that did.

Shay Luckily you did.

Mark Yes! I’ll say some of the biggest things is that we thought we would go in with this idea that foster to adopt was a thing. This idea that we would foster a child, it would be the right fit and we would ultimately adopt. But the big thing that we forget is that when it comes to any form of adoption, adoption begins with loss. And so before the child can join your family and you can have that beautiful moment in the courtroom with the balloons and the judge and all your family and loved ones, that child has to lose their birth parents and their biological family. And so it starts with loss and then ultimately it can start. And so the goal of foster care is always reunification. It’s this idea that a child is in a bad place, and so they enter foster care to be kept safe while the parents do whatever it is they need to do to try to heal or remedy the situation at home. And so I think in our head, what we were expecting was we’d heard these stories even from friends where mom had had a baby, mom had stepped outside of the hospital to get some fresh air and never came back in. And that’s what we thought we would get. And that wasn’t what we got at all. And so we had parents who had experienced very difficult childhoods, were dealing with mental health issues, addiction, and were extremely loving of their children and were trying to get their children back. And that obviously wasn’t what we expected. And certainly we would have to be heartless to not want them to be able to reunify with their children. But of course that fear remains of if they go back, are they going to be safe? And that was my biggest concern because anytime you take anyone into your heart like that, you just worry about their safety.

Shay Absolutely. And I’m glad you mentioned grief because grief is something you definitely talk about in the book and actually want to read an excerpt. This is something that you had sent to me. So it’s from page 232 in the book. And you say, even though my family had suffered huge losses, I had no tried and true rituals to get through the grieving process. Grief took me by surprise every single time, like an attacker jumping out in the dark, grief shouldn’t have been a stranger, but no matter how many times we’d met, I was still wary of its power and the endless depths of its void. And you specifically talk about how hard it is to grieve someone who’s not dead, that that’s a different form of grief. And I thought it might be useful to just hear in your own words a little more about that process from your perspective.

Mark When you take in these children that you love and they reunify, which is what we’re referencing there, they went back to their birth parents. There was a sadness to it for us. And obviously you’re rooting for the family to succeed, but you’re also grieving a loss. And in our case and spoiler alert on the book, but the boys go back and they went back not because the parents had finished doing all the work they were supposed to do by the courts and the social workers, but because they won a legal loophole early on. And so really it was our fear and just having spent so much time around them that these kids weren’t going to be safe. And that was the hardest part. It was, you can’t really say goodbye to children that are that young and really don’t understand what’s happening and knowing they’re just across town and you so desperately want to just go over and hug them, but you’re no longer in that role. They’re not yours to care for. They’re not yours to keep safe. And it’s hard. It’s really hard. You know, and we ultimately had a situation that happened where we had done our best to stay in contact with them and let them know we’re here if you need anything, the parents I’m talking about, let them know if you need anything, please call us. Reach out. And there was a situation where we took them one night to the emergency room because one of the boys was really sick and needed, they needed a ride. So we took them to the emergency room and I went over to the grocery store with one of the other boys and got them some food. It was clear when we had picked them up that there was nothing in the house. And so we went back to the house, dropped ’em all off, and then one of their family members who was their grandmother, who was lovely and very supportive, had gone down there the next day and spent the night.

And then that following, it was a Sunday night. She had gone to the laundromat or something to run some errands for them. And when she got home, the mom was outside, the dad wasn’t home, the mom was outside smoking a cigarette. And the 20 month old son, which was the younger of the two now, and they had had a younger sister as well who was now 10 months old, were in the bathtub alone. And it was just this perfect moment of we’ve all looked the other way. And when your child’s in the bathtub, maybe you blow your nose or something, but you don’t leave the room, don’t. It’s just such a dangerous moment. And in this case, I didn’t know what our role was. It was when she got home, when the grandmother got there, she called us and said, I told the mother that was unsafe.

And she yelled at me and told me to leave and said, it’s none of my business and leave me alone. And so she called us hysterically and we didn’t know what to do by law where mandated reporters, but we also didn’t see it. And so if we reported it, it’s hearsay, right? It’s like it’s someone else’s word. We’re just relaying the story. But also, if we reported it and the mom found out it was us who reported it, she’d probably cut us off. I mean, we just undermined all the trust we’d established with her. But if we didn’t report it, of course, then we run the risk of something happening to them. And I didn’t know which was worse. And obviously I never would’ve slept another night if something had happened to them and I hadn’t reported it. So we made the really difficult decision that we would report it and hope that they would get the right interventions they needed. Maybe she get some parenting classes or something, but it was hard. And she did, she cut us off, and then we went into another stage of grieving. It was like you can’t even see them.

Shay Yeah and I think that’s one of the things you deal with in the book. And it’s interesting, the title safe, how do you keep someone safe? And there’s this thing that you’re constantly navigating around protection. And I think what’s so fascinating about it is it’s not simple. This is a very complicated idea of what it means to actually protect another human being because like you said, there were micro decisions there. If we make that choice, then we risk being cut off. If we’re cut off, then we don’t have access to even hearing these kinds of stories and helping. So it puts you in really a terrible place of trying to figure out how to protect without having full access. I mean, a lot of it’s not a simple answer to know how to do this.

Mark It’s not. And I see a parent’s job is to keep their children safe. I mean, I think that’s me as a parent, that’s how I see it. And the truth is, our ability to keep our children is limited. To keep them safe is limited. I mean, it’s when they’re in your house, you can make sure you have electric outlet covers and you can do whatever, make sure they’re not doing cartwheels off the couch or whatever it is. But at the end of the day, there is a limit to what you can and can’t do. I mean, if a kid goes to school, you trust that they’re going to be safe, and there’s a school shooting that wasn’t your fault. You were doing the right thing. And I think that’s, and on the flip side too, it’s also about, as a foster parent, how do you protect yourself and keep your heart safe knowing that the second you open your home to this child, you’re going to fall in love with them? I mean, of course. And the truth is that kid needs to be loved. And that’s where a lot of people have said to me, you try to, because in my current work, I help recruit foster parents, and this book might turn some people off from doing it. And I’m actually okay with that because I’m being honest. And I think that there’s a crisis level need for foster parents across the country, but we don’t need everyone to do it. And I want those who are doing it to know what they’re walking into probably a little better than I did in that sense. But the thing is, at the end of the day, when a child comes in to care, they need to know that they are loved and that they’re worthy of love. And you need to be able to be as vulnerable with your heart as you possibly can because ultimately at the end of the day, we’re the grownups and we’re the ones that can heal. They’re the ones that are going through the trauma.

Shay And another issue, Mark that you talk about is that in some states, they don’t allow kids to be fostered by parents who are LGBTQ+. And that can create a lot of additional difficulties for kids in those states. So I’d be interested to hear what your vision is on how we take into account not only sexuality, but race, ethnicity, gender, when it comes to being a foster parent. What’s your approach to how we deal with those issues?

Mark Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think it’s about a dozen states that do not have laws in the books that prevent discrimination against LGBT families or individuals when it comes to being foster parents. And obviously I think that’s wrong for so many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons in particular is that there are agencies out there that recruit families that are not affirming of LGBT folks. And now there’ve been a couple studies out there of kids in foster care over the age of 12, 30% of them identify as LGBTQ. So what happens to those kids who get assigned to homes that are not affirming? I mean, they’re already going through one of the biggest traumas any child could go through and that’s being removed from their family, and now they’re going to a place where they don’t feel safe from a place where they probably weren’t safe.

And so, I mean, how do we do that to kids? It’s just compounding trauma. The other thing is too, I mean the issue of race, there’s a huge disproportionality among the BIPOC community in foster care. And so I think it is so important that we do our very best to try to maintain cultural connections we work with if they’re not necessarily moving into families that might be the same race or have the same religion or whatever it might be that they’re moving into families that have a cultural competence or do the best they can to try to make sure that that child has a sense of cultural context or pride in whatever that looks like in their situation.

Shay Yeah, I would imagine there’s still a lot more for us to learn about that and all these different haha, again, parts of the puzzle in already a very complicated dynamic. That’s not easy just inherently, but it’s very nature. But I do want to talk about a little, because I know you grew up in a working class neighborhood where homosexuality was not really particularly visible and at a time when a lot of the messages you heard is if you were gay as a man, you got AIDS and you could die. So it was scary also because you did identify as a gay man. And so then from what I understand, you developed some shame around that. And so on your own, there’s also your own personal healing journey of coming to terms with your sexuality and how you navigate that in a world that is often very harmful and hateful still to this day towards people that are gay. And so I want to hear also what you’ve learned about healing and claiming your own sexuality.

Mark Yeah, it’s so interesting. I mean, I grew up as one of the late seventies. I grew up in the eighties and Brockton, Massachusetts, which is a working class city south of Boston. It was a strong knit community, but it was a lot of moms and dads or divorced parents. We were the latchkey kid, the Gen Xers, the latchkey kid generation there. And when we were turning on the TV at night, I mean the news as it started talking about gay cancer and then aids and if you grow up and you’re gay, you’re going to have aids and die. And it was a very horrific thing to go through as a child in that sense. I didn’t come out until I was in my early twenties, large part because of that. There was a scene actually that got cut from the book just because my editor didn’t think it moved it forward, but it was a powerful moment for me.

I was about 15 years old and every year we would go into South Boston, stand beside my grandmother’s house and watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade. And when I was about 15 years old, there was a group of LGBT folks that marched, and as they marched in the prey, they were protected by state police and Boston Police, and people were yelling at them and throwing stuff and spitting and turning their backs. And I just remember thinking like, God, this is so hard. Why would they even want to be a part of this? And at the time, and of course, fast forwarding now and looking back at it, I realized they wanted to be a part of it for me so that I knew I wasn’t alone. And it was such a powerful realization, and I’m so grateful to those brave men and women and transgender folks that marched in that parade and continue to fight. And of course, whose shoulders I now stand on as a gay man, father, husband.

Shay Yeah. I’m also thinking there’s another aspect to this that’s really interesting to me, which is part of what you had to come to know through your life experience of being gay in a world that wasn’t openly accepting of that at all and was rejecting in many cases was sort of an understanding of an outsider status. And this interests me for multiple reasons. One, I would imagine a lot of foster kids feel an identity of an outsider, kind of a status that they’re experiencing differentiates them in such a way. I see that a lot in the work that we do through integrative touch with families that have children who are seriously ill. If you have a child who has cancer, you can also really identify with an outsider status of people don’t understand this experience is different. It’s not the mainstream. And so there’s a way in which you can feel like people don’t know what this is like, but even when the circumstances are different under understanding what an outsider status feels like can help you to understand it from even a different experience, like a different type of outsider experience, but it’s still a level of understanding that could be very beneficial. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

Mark Yeah, there’s so many things you just brought up in that even there for me, I think when it comes to foster kids in general and the LBGT family, LGBT communities, the same sex households are more likely to be fostering than heterosexual couples. And obviously there’s one part of that is that biology and anatomy doesn’t really work that way, or same-sex couples. That being said, the other side to it is that we don’t often think about is that there is a real powerful meaning behind chosen family when it comes to the LGBT community because all of us have friends who have been pushed away from family members, their backs turned on them because they’re gay. And I think that is, it’s so for us, I think we just have a really, it means something. I know it means something to everybody, but I think it’s a little something unique to the gay community in particular.

And so when it comes to fostering an adoption, I think there is a natural connection there that’s just a little bit different. The other thing that I was thinking about when you were talking is that I wrote this book and I was joking, I always say this, whenever you meet a foster parent meets another foster parent within five minutes, they’re telling them stuff they haven’t told their siblings because it’s a shared experience, even though so unique to everyone’s specific journey is so unique. It’s a shared experience that they can relate to. And I have had, since this book has come out, I can’t tell you the number of emails and instant messages, direct messages on Instagram or whatever that I’ve gotten from strangers around the country who have said to me, I didn’t have the words, and thank you for giving me the vocabulary for what I was feeling.

It’s a difficult thing. There’s another thing you brought up for me was there’s a story. The reason we ultimately decided to foster in advance of doing surrogacy, we had gone and we met with the surrogacy office and we were there, we were ready to go, and it was right before Christmas and they said to us, well, why don’t you take the holiday and call us in the new year and we’ll get you started. And we said, oh, great. We’ll do that. Well, we had a wedding that we were traveling to over New Year’s, and we had gone to meet with a young woman who I had become friends with through some of my nonprofit work that I was doing who had aged out of foster care. And she was just one of those kids that’s like schooling life. She was working on her master’s degree.

She’s just awesome. And we’re sitting at breakfast and she said to us, I grew up without a mom, without my mother. She said, well, I had maternal and they all loved me. There’s no question about it. And they were wonderful. She said, I always felt like I came second because they always had biological children before they had me. And so we left the breakfast and we got in our little rental car, and Jason, my husband, turned to me and said, maybe we should foster before we do surrogacy. And I was thinking the exact same thing because it was this idea that at least we wouldn’t want a child to feel like they ever came second to another one. And so if we started that way, maybe we could just prevent something from unintentionally happening. I don’t think any foster parent ever tries to do that, but that was the way that she had perceived it. So we were like, maybe we could foster first. And then of course they give us siblings, and that was it. At a certain point, you reach capacity.

Shay Right? Absolutely.

Mark No need for surrogacy.

Shay There’s another point that you raised that I think is such a beautiful one just to reflect on for our listeners, which is a lot of foster parents at some point ask themselves a very difficult question or can choose to, which is, how do you give your heart to someone when the outcome is unknown? Because at any time you don’t know that reunification could happen. There’s just all these variables that are out of your control, and how do you give your heart to someone when the outcome is unknown? I think I want to pose that to you because such a deep question to ask.

Mark I think that as it is in the foster care experience, it’s one thing in life, it’s another. I think all of us who’ve ever fallen in love have gone with through that, right? I mean, it’s that idea of it may not love me back or how do I go with this? How do I protect my heart and keep my heart safe so that I’m not hurt when the other shoe drops or should the other shoe drop or whatever it might be. And in foster care, I think oftentimes foster parents and myself included, we sort of start in that way where we’re like, well, we’re going to go in so this kid knows they’re loved, but I’m going to protect myself. And it becomes impossible. And the reason is that the kid needs it. That child needs to know that they’re loved and they’re worthy of love. And if you can’t do that for them, you’re not helping them. And I think that’s the biggest thing that you can do as a foster parent, is to be as vulnerable and as raw and as real with your love and your heart.

Shay That reminds me a lot of Brene Brown’s work on wholeheartedness where she did a ton of research and she thought she would find out that the people that were the happiest, maybe they’d learned how to protect their hearts better or they had good strategy on how to love, but also take care of themselves, like this strategic balance or something. And as it turns out, it was the opposite. It was the people that were the happiest and had the best lives lived wholeheartedly. They gave their hearts fully, they made a choice and were willing to deal with the consequences if it went poorly. And that, yeah, of course then they suffered pain, but they were willing to take the risk essentially is what she discovered. And I feel like the stories that you share, it’s about an opportunity to take a risk and each foster parent, each parent too, just in life in general, you get to choose in a relationship how much of a risk you’re going to take. But obviously, like you said, it’s very hard to actually give the child what they need without taking that risk.

Mark You nailed it. And Brene Brown is a god amongst us all.

Shay I hear you. I echo that.

Mark Her work has helped me through so many difficult times, and really it’s the truth. I mean, just as far as even just the idea of shame, in particular for me, her work on shame and vulnerability as a gay man, and then of course someone who has opened his heart and been raw with vulnerability to children in foster care system. I mean, I am directly aligned with her teachings. It’s helped me through everything.

Shay The other piece of the puzzle that I want to be sure we address in our conversation is trauma, because there are so many layers of trauma that can stack one upon the other in a foster care situation. And this obviously can include abuse, neglect, poverty, systemic racism, a number of things. But because most foster parents don’t necessarily have a degree in trauma-informed care…

Mark Right.

Shay How do you think as a society we can best support kids who are in foster care given that?

Mark That’s a great question. I think part of it, first of all, is recognizing that these things exist to begin with. Recognizing that there is intergenerational trauma, recognizing that, and actually really studying that and the impact of that. And I think from there, and obviously recognizing the harm that has been caused by systemic racism and structural racism and all of these things, and then working to remedy, but also building more upstream interventions, I think are some of the biggest things. Today we have an increase in the number of women who are incarcerated in jail in the United States, 80% of the women in jail have minor children. Those children, foster care last year was a record number and not in a good way of overdose deaths in the United States. I mean, fentanyl has, in the last five years, we’ve seen a double of the number of overdose deaths. Fentanyl is pushing more kids into the foster care system. It is really, we have all of these challenges that are tributaries feeding into this giant river of foster care. And that’s really, that’s the problem. I mean, we need to serve kids better while they’re in care, and we need to do our best on the front end to make sure that we’re getting less kids coming in. And so having better programs in place, having rehab facilities that allow parents to bring their kids with them. Some people don’t go get help because they don’t want to leave their kids, and that’s understandable. They’re also afraid they’ll never get ’em back. And I think that’s some of it. And then also, I really think one of the biggest things that stood out for me was that was the sense of community that we had and how it was so absent in the lives of the boys’ parents. We had so many people at our house bringing over gifts or if we needed a babysitter, if we needed whatever, and even if we didn’t need a babysitter, we had one. We had so many people just lining up to help and be supportive. All of our friends and these folks don’t have any of that.

And I think people could look at families that they know in their communities or maybe struggling parents that maybe need a night off or something and just help out. Those are the simple things we can do that don’t require big policy changes.

Shay Right, right. Well, and that’s an interesting thing too, because in terms of policy changes and other things, earlier in your career, you had a political chapter, right? Sure. Did. You worked with Hillary Clinton, who has been a champion for children. That’s one part of her story. In college, she worked with individuals with disabilities as part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. And I would imagine that that work in your life also influenced the way that you looked at all of this, right? Because like you said, there are so many systemic elements that are tributaries, that was the word that you used that feed into this, essentially. So I’m curious about how that work that you had done kind of politically also influenced your understanding of understanding the system of foster care.

Mark Yeah, it’s interesting. I think I have always been the kind of person that says, maybe I don’t want to go volunteer at the organization, but I’d rather host a fundraiser for it or do some sort of a, help them come up with a strategic plan. I mean, I think that’s just sort of my mindset is that I might not be the day in, day out. I’m going to go work in the soup kitchen. I’d rather write their strategic plan of how are they going to double in size or something.

I’m totally riffing here, but I think that’s the way that I approach things. And probably a lot of that comes from working with visionaries and leaders in that sense, and I’m grateful to them for that. When I first thought about writing this book after our experience, I thought, Hey, I want to write the policy book on what needs to be done.

And I very quickly learned two things. First of which was the obvious that no one’s going to read it because that’s not that interesting. And the second was, I don’t know. Oh, there are so many different factors that lead into this. In our training, I just share this story in the book. We had this really wonderful trainer, Cindy, and she would say, oftentimes we’d ask a question about a hypothetical, Hey, what would happen in the case of this or that? She would say, look, if someone wrote a book on foster care, it would be called, it depends because every case is different. Every child is different, every parent is different. Every social worker, every judge, every nonprofit that’s working with them. And we’re like, you’re right. That’s exactly what it comes down to. Everyone has a unique story that is involved in this process, and I think it’s hard to write some policy that’s going to benefit everyone when the truth is sometimes they need a little bit of flexibility to make things work for each different case.

Shay And as I understand it, you are doing some nonprofit work currently. Do you want to share a little bit of that with our listeners where you are choosing to dedicate your time and energy?

Mark Sure. While I was fostering, I actually sold an agency that I owned at the time. We did marketing work, and I started doing some work with a nonprofit to recruit foster families using online advertisement. And turns out it works. And so I was contracted with Los Angeles County where I live to do some work for teenagers on probation in particular, and it was successful. And now I work with states including California and other states to recruit foster parents. I have a website called the foster parent.com where anyone in the US can go and find more information about becoming a foster parent or to get connected with a local agency in their community.

Shay Yeah, I think that’s a great resource for our listeners to know about, just to learn more and get some more understanding about this. In addition, obviously, to reading your book, which is great. Thank you. When you think about a call to action, because so many people listening may not have personal experience with the foster care system, but obviously this is something you’re passionate about because these are some of the most vulnerable children in our society. What do you feel is a good sort of call to action for people that may not themselves become foster parents, but what else can people do that are listening right now?

Mark I love this question. So there’s so much we can all do, and a lot of people don’t have the capacity to be a foster parent.

That is totally okay. Obviously we need foster parents, but we don’t need everyone to do it. There are other ways you can volunteer if you have time. Becoming a casa, a court appointed special advocate where you go in and become the voice of a young person in court is one amazing opportunity. Some people don’t have the time for that, right? I get that. There’s mentorship programs all around the country, big Brothers Big Sisters has some great ones. There’s also the one thing that we can all do is this is an election year and everywhere you live, someone’s going to be asking for your vote. I want you to ask them, what are they doing about foster care? Don’t even know what, you don’t even have to know what you want them to say back.

They just need to know that people who are considering voting for them care about foster care because when they hear about it from voters, they’re going to do something about it when they get elected. And that to me is the most important thing that we can have. These are kids. Kids don’t have a voice, they can’t vote. Some of them can’t even speak, and they don’t even know what they need yet. I mean, some of them don’t even understand what’s going on in their life. And so we need to collectively be their voices. So my call to action for anyone would be, donate your advocacy, email these candidates, reach out to them, or when you see them on the subway platform or knocking on your door, ask ’em what they’re doing.

Shay Yeah. That’s great. I also want to touch on, because this is a conversation on healing, I like to ask our guests about their own processes of healing. And obviously you’ve had a number in your life, you’ve had some significant losses, including a cousin that you were very close to. We’ve talked about the grief of being a foster parent and knowing the children could be taken back. That process of reunification, what accompanies that from some of the big losses in your life? What have you learned about healing and what it means to heal and how we do that in the face of difficult relationship challenges?

Mark Yeah, I mean, I think for me, healing is not something that came natural. I was a person that would just had to table the emotions and not try to just sit on them until they eventually exploded inside of me. And that was losing my cousin Jamie, as you spoke about. That was really hard. I didn’t really fully process the grief there, but when I had done a lot of work on it with therapists a few years before I met my husband, I started doing that work. And she had been dead over a decade at that point. And part of that work was really just allowing myself to feel the emotions when they came up, feel them, sit with them, be present, and let them pass. And that’s what I allowed myself to do. When the boys were unified, it’s like you’re supposed to be happy because they’re going back to their biological family.

And in our case, they didn’t go back because the parents had done what they were supposed to do. They went back because they had won a case. And I like to give away the ending here too, that we had waited over a year with the expectation that they would come back in. We just knew that it wasn’t going to be a good situation. But we did hear from a friend of mine who was finalizing her adoption, that there were three other kids who were siblings who had come into care and that they weren’t going to reunify, and they were looking for a home for them. And so we decided to find out more information about them, and we did. And then ultimately, they moved in with us. And about 10 months after they moved in with us, we got a call from the county that the boys, original boys and their younger sister had reentered care. And they asked if we would take them, which would’ve given us six children, the three that we were well on the way to adopting, and the three others who may or may not end up going back home and now have been in an abusive situation and experienced some trauma and some severe trauma. And we ultimately made the really, really difficult decision to say no, because we felt that we needed to protect the three that were in our care to the best of our ability. And also that we just had to hope that there was another family out there willing and able to take in the other three that could give them the sort of attention they need. We just knew that six kids, all who had their own trauma would be really hard for just the two of us to do. But I think that to your question of healing, I think being a dad, especially to kids who we’ve adopted who have experienced the loss of a biological parents, of course, the addition of new family, I’ve done a lot of work with them and their therapists, and I’ve learned quite a bit about dealing with emotions and feeling them and also trauma and the way that we act as a result of trauma and things like that that come up.

And it’s been the most eye-opening experience of my life.

Shay And what’s so interesting about what you just said is one of the things we know about trauma, because I spent a lot of my life studying trauma and helping people to move through traumas on a number of different levels, is that part of how we heal from and through traumas is by being well-resourced. And that is in a number of ways, but your wisdom there, it’s an interesting thing of choosing. If we overextend, then we are maybe not helping any of these children to the degree we need to be helped. And that right there, obviously, I can only imagine you share it in the book, but how painful of a choice that is to make to determine such a big decision, but at the same time, a recognition that there are limitations, and that in some ways in honoring and respecting some of our limitations, we can better create a healing experience for the ones that are in our lives immediately. So there’s again, so many parts to that I respect to the position that you and your husband have put yourselves in to be in a place where you’re having to make hard choices.

Mark Yeah. No, thank you. And first thank you for your work on trauma, by the way. I mean, I dunno that people thank you the way they should, but you mentioned something that stood out to me too. It’s about not taking on too much. And I think that’s another thing to really remember in these situations is that the parents who lose their children to foster care often are coming into this with severe trauma of their own, whether that’s from addiction, mental health abuse. I mean, who knows what they have been through in their childhoods, so on and so forth. And my husband and I, we, by comparison, we paled in comparison. We were two white men full of privilege, and we had the ability and the resources to get help and to get the therapists. We live in Los Angeles. You can’t walk down the street without passing a therapist’s office. I mean, it’s very easy for us, but I think for the single parents out there working two jobs with multiple children, it’s so hard and so difficult. And I give you so much credit and I hope that services are available to you for free, that are made convenient. It’s so hard. I get it. And not just the single parents. It’s hard for those of us who married too.

Shay Yeah. Yeah. We’re actually doing a collaboration at the moment with a group. It’s a trauma informed network in Arizona that has a huge number of foster parents that are part of this network. And I’m really excited because we’re going to do a whole series on trauma for a lot of those parents. And it is something that can be at little or no cost based on need, so we can scholarship families that need it. And so that kind of thing excites me because like you said, you make this choice. You want to become a foster parent, and yet, oh my gosh, you may have no prior knowledge about trauma-informed care or how that affects behavior. And really what you’re getting into from that side of things could be very unknown. And so it’s great to give some resource.

Mark Really, I’m so grateful to you for doing that. I will tell you. And there was so much I’ve learned about just really that’s the thing of when a child is having this action is doing something and you see it naturally, our instinct is to see it as a reaction to something you did or in response to directed at you when the reality is it’s so much more than that. And for me, that wasn’t something I knew. So I had to learn that. And thankfully my husband does have a much better background in this sort of stuff. And so he was very helpful to me in going through this. And obviously we’ve done a significant amount of work ourselves just to try to be the best parents we can be. But I think that is the biggest thing. It’s approaching all these situations with empathy and not taking it personal and realizing this isn’t about you, this is about something other than that, it might be more than just hanger right now, or it might not just be overtired. There’s something else deeper at its core here, and you just have to be there and be present and help them through it.

Shay Yeah. I thought you raised a really interesting point too. Earlier in our conversation around you noticed the difference in resources that you had friends that would offer to babysit, that would come, that would help, that would bring you things. And yet the kids, like their family of origin didn’t have that level of support. And community resource community is a resource. And I was thinking about how often in the world trauma is born out of people not having that level of community resource being in a way cut off from community support. And that’s often where we get kind of in a dynamic where it makes it much more inevitable for trauma to arise. And so that community-based solutions also can be really compelling and beneficial to, as you’ve invited in the conversation, the opportunity for people to provide support, to have more outlets that even the work that you’re doing with the website you’ve created that help to educate and inform people more. These are all layers of community resource and support. And so just as we’re talking, I’m thinking all of that through how trauma often evolves when that access is cut off. I’m curious your thoughts on that.

Mark Well, I think even social isolation is such a big issue, whether that’s parents trying to raise kids by themselves or whether that’s the kid that goes home and sits after school by themselves in a room doing nothing or something. It’s kids that go home to public housing that are outside playing soccer in the field, that’s not isolating. But kids that go home and sit by themselves with an Xbox or something that is social isolation and there’s things we have to check on those kids too, even though they may be kids who come from a place of privilege in that sense, there’s a deficit there that needs to be met too. And I think that’s often lost and it runs the gamut. I think that it really is about checking on one another as much as we possibly can. I think we’re all in this together. And I think that’s when it comes down to when you asked about the call to action. I mean, that’s really it. We need to be the voice of the kids who don’t have a voice yet.

Shay Yeah, and I think also something beautiful about healing. I just worked with someone recently who’s in their late seventies, and we were working on a childhood trauma that was from many, many years ago, and they had a profound healing experience. This is 60 years later plus. And so there’s also kind of just some delight in my own heart around it’s never too late. Yes, you can have horrible things happen. Yes, maybe in the moment you can’t resolve it because of a whole variety of reasons, but it’s never too late. We have a capacity to heal, even from terrible, horrible, traumatic things that many different stages in our life. And so I think that’s hopeful.

Mark I agree. Even when I was writing the book, I talked, it was funny. My mom is a very, very private person, and very rarely does she ever share anything about her own childhood, which was not really ideal. She lost her mom at a very young age and of things. And so when I was writing the book, I had said to her, are you okay with me sharing part of your story? And she was like, I don’t even know how much of it. And I had sort of pieced together things she had said, or I had heard from aunts and uncles and stuff, and I incorporated into it. But this book was such a healing process for me just being able to sit with all these emotions and write it. But as I would send stuff to her to look at just saying like, Hey, mom, is this accurate? Are you okay with me including this? We’ve had multiple conversations about how healing it was for her to be able to go through this with me. But I will say for me, the greatest sense of healing came in the writing and sitting there. My routine was I get up very early and I would sit downstairs and write until I had to get the kids up for school. I would get up at 4:30 in the morning and wait until about seven to get them up. And there’d be moments where I’m like, okay, I need to stop writing here so I can wipe these tears and pat my eyes dry before I go upstairs to wake them up. But that was part of the journey, the healing for me.

Shay And your mom sounded like a very resilient woman in the way that you portrayed her.

Mark Very much. No. She had endured quite a bit and she’s definitely, she’s is remarkable.

Shay Well, I want to give you an opportunity, Mark, if there’s anything we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about that feels important to you to be able to share with our listeners. So I’ll open that up.

Mark Well, Shay, I always have this issue wherever, whenever I do a podcast, especially one that’s as thoughtful as this, where we talk about the heavy issues on foster care, I feel like sometimes I don’t do the book a bit of justice in the sense of the book is actually told with a lot of humor. I mean, I think it has to be, because otherwise it would be really hard to read. So I do hope that people will consider checking it out and say, if you read the prologue in the first page, then make your decision. But I hope you consider it. It’s fun.

Shay That’s great. Well, I really appreciate your time. It was lovely to have this conversation with you. I certainly hope that the information that you have both in the book and that you’ve shared in the podcast today will be valuable to a number of people listening. So thank you so much.

Mark Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for everything you do. It’s so important.

Conclusion We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Conversations on Healing Podcast. If you haven’t yet, please go to Apple Podcast, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast, it helps so you won’t miss an episode. See you next time.