If you drive west long enough you will come to country where nothing ought to grow. The ground is caliche and the rain does not come when it should. And yet out there, every so often, you will see a mesquite tree, bent and thorny and green. Nobody planted it. Nobody waters it. It grows anyway. I have always loved that tree. It is the most Texan thing I know. I think of it whenever someone brings up foster care.
Texas’s foster-care system has been under federal court oversight for more than a decade. That is a fact, and I will not pretend otherwise. I will also admit something my critics will find hard to forgive. I have not followed the case. I have not read what the court has written. I could not tell you what the state was ordered to fix or whether it fixed it. And I have found that I am able to live with not knowing.
What I know instead is that children are resilient. Everybody says so. Doctors say it, teachers say it, grandparents say it. A child can be moved from one house to another and another and still find a way to smile on the first day of school. I have seen it at church. A girl comes in with a new family, sits in the back, does not sing. A few months later she is gone, and I assume she is somewhere else, singing.
A child who comes through that is strong in a way my own children never had to be. I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it to make anyone feel better about what those children have been through. I say it because it is true, and because I think we owe them the respect of believing in their strength rather than fussing over their troubles.
Some people want the state to spend more, hire more caseworkers, and answer to the court for every child in its care. I understand the impulse. But I worry that a child who is managed too closely will never learn to manage for himself. The mesquite did not become what it is because someone fretted over it. It became what it is because nobody did.
I am also wary of a federal court in Texas business for that long. Whatever was wrong, I suspect the state was already doing its best, and its best is something I am inclined to trust. When people tell me otherwise, I think of the children I have seen come through and turn out fine, and I let that be my answer. I expect to carry that same trust into the voting booth this fall, when I mark my ballot for the Republican for Senate. My impression is that the other side would want to read every page the court has written, and I have already told you that I have not.
I pray for those children every Sunday, by name when I know the name, and in general when I do not. I believe they will be all right. They are resilient.
I have decided that is all I need to know about them.
D. M.