Counting Down: A Memoir of Foster Parenting and Beyond
Categories: Kindle Store, Kindle eBooks, Biographies & Memoirs

When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster fifteen years of involvement with a traumatized yet resilient birth family. They fell in love with Michael (a toddler when he came to them), yet they had to reckon with the knowledge that he could leave their lives at any time. In Counting Down , Gold tells the story of forging a family within a confounding system. We meet social workers, a birth mother with the courage to give her children the childhood she never had herself, and a father parenting from prison. We also encounter members of a remarkable fellowship of Appalachian foster parents—gay, straight, right, left, evangelical, and atheist—united by love, loss, and quality hand-me-downs. Gold’s memoir is one of the few books to deliver a foster parent’s perspective (and, through Michael’s own poetry and essays, that of a former foster child). In it, she shakes up common assumptions and offers a powerfully frank and hopeful look at an experience often portrayed as bleak.


Publisher: Ohio University Press; 1st edition (February 26, 2018)
Publication date: February 26, 2018
Language: English
File size: 439 KB
Text to Speech: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced typesetting: Enabled
X Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Sticky notes: On Kindle Scribe
Print length: 256 pages