Safe
A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A heartrending and unforgettable memoir of an unlikely journey to parenthood through America’s broken foster care system.
What does it take to keep a child safe?
As a long-time strategist and activist fighting for better outcomes for foster children, Mark Daley thought he had the answer. But when Ethan and Logan, an adorable infant and a precocious toddler, entered into their lives, Mark and his husband Jason quickly realized they were not remotely prepared for the uncertainty and complication of foster parenting.
Every day seven hundred children enter the foster care system in the United States, and thousands more live on the brink. Safe offers a deeply personal window into what happens when the universal longing for family crashes up against the unique madness and bureaucracy of a child protection system that often fails to consider the needs of the most vulnerable parties of all—the children themselves. Daley takes us on a roller coaster ride as he and Jason grapple with Ethan and Logan’s potential reunification with their biological family, learn brutal lessons about sacrifice, acceptance, and healing, and face the honest, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious challenges of becoming a parent at the intersection of intergenerational trauma, inadequate social support, and systemic issues of prejudice.
For fans of Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, Stephanie Land’s Maid, and Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family, this touching and suspenseful memoir highlights the impossible choices all parents, in the foster system and beyond, face in raising children today. Safe shines a much-needed spotlight on how this country treats the most vulnerable among us, sounding a vital call to overhaul a thoroughly broken system.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daley, a former communications director for Hillary Clinton, debuts with a heartbreaking memoir about foster parenting. Daley and his husband, Jason, got married in 2015 and were eager to have children. After considering surrogacy, they changed course when a friend shared her experiences growing up in foster care, spurring the couple to look into becoming foster parents. Soon after getting approval from Los Angeles County, Daley and Jason welcomed brothers Ethan (13 months old) and Logan (three months) into their home. Despite inconsistent visits from the boys' birth parents, who struggled with substance use and neglected the brothers in the early months of their lives, an appeals court ruled that Ethan and Logan had to be returned to their biological family after just a year and a half with Daley and Jason. The bulk of the narrative details the couple's unsuccessful efforts to regain custody of the boys; eventually, they adopted three siblings in 2020. ("Does this story have a happy ending?" Daley writes in the conclusion. "Yes and no.") Across the memoir's middle stretch, Daley lets his frustrations with the foster system fly, yet he manages to do so without compromising his strikingly compassionate tone. The result is a gripping and earnest examination of the meaning of family.