The Bookworm Brings Us This Month “Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family” by Mark Daley
Terri Schlichenmeyer/TRT Book Reviewer
The closet is full of miniature hangers.
The mattress bumpers match the drapes and the rug beneath the tiny bed. There’s a rocker for late-night fusses, a tall giraffe in the corner, and wind-up elephants marching in a circle over the crib. Now you just need someone to occupy that space and in the new book, “Safe” by Mark Daley, there’s more than one way to accomplish that dream.
Jason was a natural-born father.
Mark Daley knew that when they were dating, when he watched Jason with his nephew, with infants, and the look on Jason’s face when he had one in his arms. As a gay man, Daley never thought much about having a family but he knew Jason did – and so, shortly after their wedding, they began exploring surrogacy and foster-to-adopt.
Daley knew how important it was to get the latter right: his mother had a less-than-optimal childhood, and she protected her own children fiercely for it. When Daley came out to her, and to his father, he was instantly supported and that’s what he wanted to give: support and loving comfort to a child in a hard situation.
Or children, as it happened. Just weeks after competing foster parenting classes and after telling the social worker they’d take siblings if there was a need, the prospective dads were offered two small brothers to foster.
It was love at first sight but euphoria was somewhat tempered by courts, laws, and rules. Their social worker warned several times that reunification of the boys with their parents was “Plan A,” but Daley couldn’t imagine it. The parents seemed unreliable; they rarely kept appointments, and they didn’t seem to want to learn better parenting skills. The mother all but ignored the baby, and the child noticed.
So did Daley, but the courts held all the power, and predicting an outcome was impossible.
“All we had was the present,” he said. “If I didn’t stay in it, I was going to lose everything I had.”
So was there a Happily-Ever-After?
Ah, you won’t find an answer to that question here. You’ll need to read “Safe” and wear your heart outside your chest for an hour or so, to find out. Bring tissues.
Bring a sense of humor, too, because author and founder of One Iowa Mark Daley takes readers along on his journey to being someone’s Daddy, and he does it with the sweetest open-minded open-heartedness. He’s also Mama Bear here, too, which is just what you want to see, although there can sometimes be a lot of tiresome overdrama and over-fretting in that.
And yet, this isn’t just a sweet, but angst-riddled, tale of family. If you’re looking to foster, here’s one man’s truth about the frustrations, the stratospheric highs, and the deep lows. Will your foster experiences be similar? Maybe, but reading this book about it is its own reward.
“Safe” soars and it dives. It plays with your emotions and it wallows in anxiety. If you’re a parent, though, you’ll hang on to every word.
“Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family” by Mark Daley
c.2024, Atria Books $28.99 304 pages
*The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a prairie in Wisconsin with two dogs, one patient man, and 17,000 books.
