One Foster “Parent”

07 Jan 2011 2 Comments

by blackberrysmoothie in Dad

I will begin this post with a disclaimer.  I know there are so many excellent foster parents out there.  I hope our kids will have had them.  I hope we are able to keep in touch with them if they are a big part of our children’s lives.  I am not writing this post to disrespect foster parents.

I am writing about one woman who fostered my father in the 1960s.  I never met L. even though she only died a few years ago.  I was very close with some other of my father’s foster parents, even calling one “grandma”, but when I was growing up, Dad rarely talked about his time there – pretty much only when it was describing something in a time frame ie. “when I was staying with L.”

My dad moved out of her house and in with his friend Ray’s family for his last months of high school.  It was a fairly informal arrangement.  Ray’s mom never got any money from the province in exchange for caring for my dad.  I have no idea if he even told anybody that he had moved.  I’m certain he didn’t tell any government official.  I know this because, after he moved out, L. kept getting money from the province for his care.  Once my father turned 18, he had to sign the back of his support cheques since they were made out to him, as an adult.  He was still being supported by the province since he was still in school – two years in grade 12 and another in grade 13 made him age 20 at his high school graduation.

When he moved out of L.’s house, L. kept cashing the cheques.  She forged his name on them.  She continued this for over a year, including the time when he was at college, 80 miles away.  We know this because the government gave us copies of the endorsed cheques for that time period.  The signatures on the back are not his.  Compared to documents he signed in the same timeframe, they are not even close.  We looked into whether criminal charges might be laid (L. was still alive when we discovered this).  A handwriting expert felt he could not legally testify that the signatures were forgeries because they were “too good”.  There were no signs of hesitation in the writing, as there usually are in a forgery.  L. didn’t hesitate.  She just kept cashing the cheques.

When my dad turned 21, he was entitled to have the residue of the estate money that the province had held since his mother’s death.  According to the province’s records, this was about $4000.  This was in 1967.  In today’s money, that would be about $25,000.   This cheque was sent by the province to my father, although he never received it.  It was cashed, although he never saw it.  This is the one cheque that the provincial government did not have on file, not even a photocopy.   The last address on file with the province was L.’s and the last monthly cheque they sent was mailed to her.

We don’t know for sure what happened.  Because L. has since died, and because everyone who worked at the bank and the post office and the provincial offices has since at least retired and possibly died, we probably never will.   But people must have known.  Why else would there be absolutely no record of that last cheque in my dad’s file with the province?  How could someone like L. go into a small town bank and cash a cheque for that much money and raise no eyebrows with the bank workers?  It has made my previously open-hearted father into a (at times) cynical harsh man.  He is slow to trust now, and that makes me really sad.

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