Chronicles of Liminality

A BABY SCREAMS as he tries to break from the makeshift restraints that his mother has jerry-rigged from a belt and chair. She is in the next room, trying to get a better high. Over the next dozen years, this turbulence only intensifies as he is thrust into California’s broken foster care system.

Such is the journey described in Rob Henderson’s harrowing Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (2024), a book that turns out to be more than a chronicle of pain, and one that comes to some surprising—and for some policy advocates, unwelcome—conclusions. First, I should state an unavoidable personal point of reference: I grew up with abusive parents. After my mom died when I was 15, I was placed into California’s foster care system with no direction or consistent family. In a group home, I saw how astonishingly indifferent school officials and bureaucrats were toward kids forced into a system that often left them worse off. I was a few years older than the rest and had positive (though fictional) role models who kept me away from the tar pit of drugs and led me to a path toward college. But the odds were against this outcome.

Henderson went in younger than I did and had a slightly different experience in multiple foster homes—households run by “parents” who accept state subsidies in exchange for looking after children who have often been through unimaginable horrors, with all the attendant psychological blowback. He admits he can’t remember much about at least four artificial families he was thrown into. Whether this lapse resulted from trauma or lack of awareness, he never precisely states. His mother was long out of the picture, having been arrested for neglect and then deported to South Korea.

Henderson drank, smoked, and played dangerous games involving choking to feel alive. But his primary emotional outlet during this period—perhaps unsurprisingly—came through fighting. In one of these episodes, a bigger classmate named Edgar baits Henderson. The boys throw punches, put each other into headlocks, and attack below the belt. After this scrap, Edgar helps Henderson get back up. “[F]riendships formed and endured after fighting,” he writes.

Then something like a miracle descends: a family in Red Bluff, California, legally adopts Henderson, and he takes their last name. But the period of stability lasts only as long as it takes for his adoptive mother to seek divorce and for the adoptive father to disappear. Thus emerges the perennial problem that haunts Henderson’s life: abandonment.

Throughout the memoir, we meet various adult figures: his mother, the Martínezes, Gerri the social worker, the Hendersons, and other parental characters. Each abandons him when he needs them most. This sends Henderson down a dark path of emotional instability and recurring substance abuse until he barely passes high school. The stability he craves only comes when he is old enough to enlist in the Air Force. After his discharge and a stint in rehab, he earns acceptance to Yale University.

There, however, he is confused by the attitudes of his fellow students, who seem unaware of their shallow beliefs. Particularly troubling to him is their approval of nontraditional families and drug legalization. He calls these attitudes “luxury beliefs”—the cognitive ability to advocate for policies that sound fair, equitable, and liberating but create unintended trouble for the most vulnerable.

Not everyone will appreciate what can be read as an essentially conservative message. But this book is compelling. Henderson offers a clear view of the foster care system and the problems that it fails to solve. His narrative credibility lends an unassailable critique of liberal solutions, which he contends lead only to a permanent underclass. “Thus, it seems the affluent secure their positions by ensuring that only those who attend the right colleges, listen to the right podcasts, and read the right books and articles can join their inner circle,” he writes.

The book’s central argument is that society should attend more to family stability than academic benchmarks. The latter lies downstream from the former. When he was in environments that offered him safety and security—like his first years with the Hendersons—he was able to improve his grades and was placed in an accelerated course schedule. But when the family broke apart, his grades plummeted, and he grew prone to violent outbursts.

While I agree with Henderson’s message that most discourse surrounding foster care is superficial, I wish he had used his own experience to offer solutions for people in similar situations. I believe one of the more robust approaches is to promote individual and family therapy even before trauma is inflicted. Therapy is often stigmatized, which can lead people to hide their emotional needs, as I did growing up. Left unaddressed, such needs can grow and transform into harmful behaviors. While there is slightly more access to treatment now, Henderson didn’t seem to have that option. If Henderson had had better access to intensive treatment sooner, he might have been able to break down the mental barriers blocking him from his journey toward self-discovery. Further, if his parents had been able to access therapy, there is a strong possibility that Henderson could have avoided much of his trauma. Bootstrapping only goes so far.

To his credit, Henderson is more forthcoming about his background than most foster kids. I often avoid the details of my own experience for fear that people will look at me differently. The public lacks a general awareness about the foster care system, and while social workers are supposed to guard against poor treatment, Henderson shows that they aren’t doing their jobs.

Regardless of whether readers agree with his political messages, Henderson’s story of self-discovery, growth, and resilience is a valuable contribution to the conversation about how our society must contend with the forever problem of kids who get separated from their parents—a subject shrouded in darkness.