This is part of a Wednesday series on Goddess spirituality and political activism.
I’ve worked with foster kids here in California for most of my career. Occasionally I take a step back and try to make sense out of what I’m doing. For some reason, mythology is filled with foster children, including Pali Kongju .
Pali Kongju, "Princess Thrown-Away," is a Korean healing Goddess. Her story has some similarities with Kuan Yin . Pali Kongju was the seventh daughter of a king who desperately wanted sons. When the seventh child turned out to be yet another girl, the king had soldiers seize the baby from her mother’s arms, place her in a box and throw her into the ocean. (A jeweled box – she was a princess, after all.)
As always happens in these stories, the baby survived; she was rescued by a family of golden turtles (or in some versions, a dragon) who carried her to shore, where she was found by a very surprised peasant couple. They became her foster parents and raised her to be a fine young woman. Still, she always wondered about the parents she had never known.
Years later, the king and queen developed a wasting illness, which could only be cured by the water of life from the Western Sky. Not surprisingly, their six remaining daughters refused to undertake the arduous journey. The king had deemed their sister expendable; why shouldn’t they feel the same way about him? I don’t imagine they were too pleased with the queen either: she had failed to protect their sister, and she had stayed with the king for all these years.
The God of the Mountains appeared to Pali Kongju and told her of her birth parents’ illness. She traveled to the palace and revealed herself to the shocked rulers. She then shocked them further with the announcement that she would travel to the Western Sky to find their cure.
It was a long journey through the spirit world to the Western Sky. Disguised as a boy, Pali Kongju passed between the North Pole Star and the South Pole Star. She met the Old Farming Woman of Heaven, who made her plow and sow a field by herself. Then she had to get past the Laundress of Heaven, who forced her to wash all her laundry from black to white, causing a monsoon.
Finally, she reached cliffs that led to the Western Sky. Once again, golden turtles came to her rescue, forming a bridge to get her there safely. She found the well with the water of life, protected by the Guardian, a rather disagreeable old man. Still dressed as a boy, she asked him for some of the water, but when he learned she had no money to pay for it, he refused. (Surprisingly, the royal family’s health insurance did not cover prescriptions for magical water.)
Pali Kongju offered to become his servant. The Guardian said he’d think about it. Pali Kongju spent three years gathering firewood and tending his house for him. Still he refused to give her the water.
Her disguise was exposed after the Guardian challenged her to – how often does this come up in a sacred story? – a pissing match. Realizing that she was a woman, the Guardian asked her to marry him. She agreed. But it was years later, after she had borne seven sons, when the Guardian finally gave her a bottle of the magical water so that she could return to earth.
Her parents’ wasting illness must have been very slow – or perhaps time passes differently in the Western Sky – because Pali Kongju got home just in time for her parents’ funeral. But when she sprinkled them with the water of life, they revived. The parents were filled with gratitude and remorse, and offered to give the princess her rightful place in the royal household. Instead, Pali Kongju returned to the spirit world, where she could help others who needed her.
Why did Pali Kongju agree to save the parents who’d abandoned her? She certainly had a better motive than her sisters to refuse. But for the first time, her parents truly needed and wanted her. For a child who’s felt rejected, that can be hard to resist.
Maybe I’ve met too many kids who wanted to save their parents, no matter what the parents had done.
No one sets out to be a bad parent. One of the first things I learned, working in child protection, is that the overwhelming majority of the parents do love and want their children. For most of my clients, the problem is that they need their drugs more. For others, the issue is mental illness. It’s almost a relief to work with straight-up physical abuse; most of the time, those parents are trying to discipline and just don’t know how far is too far, or what’s normal childhood behavior. (I’ve had young parents tell me that their 2-year-old soiled himself because "he was just trying to make me mad.")
The thinking about what’s good for foster children has changed several times. Decades ago, back before my time, it was customary to move foster children every couple of years – so that they didn’t grow "too attached" to their foster parents. It’s hard to imagine a more damaging thing to do to a child, shuffling them from one place to the next, leaving them with no one they can trust or depend upon.
Most of the foster parents I've known have been wonderful. A few have been awful. But even the wonderful ones are left trying to undo the harm of a child be separated from their home, parents, friends, and perhaps siblings as well.
Twenty years ago, when I started working in child welfare, the watchword was "family preservation." We did everything possible to keep the children home with their parents. If children were removed, parents got a minimum of 12 to 18 months to get them back – and if the children were removed and returned again, the clock started over. Family preservation is still the best answer, when it works. Or as one of my co-workers says, "If we’re going to screw children up, it might as well be with their parents." The damage at home has to be pretty bad before it’s worse than the trauma of being torn away and moved to an unfamiliar place, and possibly moved again and again.
When family preservation doesn’t work, the harm done to children is considerable. The longer they’re in an abusive or negligent home, the more long-term emotional damage they suffer, and the less likely it is that they’ll find a stable home after removal. So now the watchword is "permanence." Parents get six months to reunify (for a baby or toddler) or twelve months (for an older child), with more time possible if the parents are showing tangible progress. After that, the law favors adoption, or guardianship by a relative. But if the parent has lost other children before, and didn’t get them back, the social services system may immediately begin looking for an adoption or guardianship.
There’s no one-size-fits-all, of course. There are parents who screw up on their first or second or third attempt at sobriety, then finally get it right. There are others who never do. The problem is, children can’t be kept in limbo, wondering who’s going to take care of them for the rest of their lives. I’ve diaried before about children who age out of the foster care system without an adoptive parent or guardian to rely on. Those young adults are far more likely than their peers to wind up homeless or on drugs. I’ve been doing this job long enough to see some of those children come back into the system as parents.
These aren’t just professional issues for me. Packrat and I raised our niece (known online as Kali) from the time she was 14 years old. In our case, it was an informal arrangement within the family, made without CPS intervention. We couldn’t fix the problems in her mother’s home. We couldn’t spare Kali the normal teenage angst multiplied by the pain of being so far away from her mother. One thing we could give her was permanence. She loves her mother, her mother loves her, they will always belong in each other’s lives. But Kali came to us knowing that this would be her home until she was grown. That was hard in some ways but it also gave her some certainty in a very confusing childhood.
Because no child, Goddess or not, should have to save her parents. We try to make sure she knows, through everything we say and do, that it's supposed to work the other way around.