When Teresa, Paula and Penny McLain entered the foster care system in Fresno, California in 1970, they were aged six, four and three. Their father had been sent to a work camp for holding up a drive-in movie theater. A few months later, the girls’ mother, Jackie, went out to the movies with a boyfriend—and never came back.

From then on, as middle sister Paula McLain describes in Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses (Little, Brown, March 2003), the three sisters were at the mercy of a foster care system that managed throughout to do at least one important thing right: keep the girls together.

McLain, who holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and currently teaches poetry and waitresses in Madison Wisconsin, writes in a style that is both clear-eyed and lyrical. She describes the scariest, saddest, and strangest moments in crystalline detail, yet lavishes the same skill on the mundane everyday texture of life.

One effect of this is to make it clear that McLain and her sisters will not play the role of anyone’s victims—that the life they led, while it contained abandonment, abuse and violence, was also full of the pieces, at least, of an American childhood: bikes, Barbies, best friends, ponies, schoolgirl crushes. It’s just that the pieces never make a sturdy whole, and as the girls move from the Spinoza’s to the Clapps’ to the Fredericksons’ to the Lindbergh’s there is the constant sense of waiting for another shoe to drop, another domestic time bomb to explode.

Here is how McLain describes her feelings as the Fredericksons, a young childless couple who had at first seemed to offer a possible happy ending for the sisters, tell the girls that they can’t stay any longer: “I felt sad as Samantha and Tom took turns clutching us tightly, but also relieved. Wanting to stay with them was like wanting to live in the model home, or in the Barbie townhouse I coveted because it folded neatly into a suitcase with a handle on top. All the furniture was glued down inside so it didn’t go flying when you moved the house. Real things flew and fell into pieces, this much I knew.”

It was from this home that the girls moved on, their things once again packed into plastic garbage bags on the floor of their social worker’s car, to their fourth and final placement with the Lindbergh family in the baked hot countryside outside Fresno. By then, the girls were aged 10, 8 and 8. They would stay with this strange, flawed family until graduating from high school.

There, they first played the role of subservient playmates to the Lindbergh’s daughter Tina. Then, banding together, the three sisters attached themselves fiercely to their foster father, Bub, a man of eccentric enthusiasm and optimism whose home was littered with half-finished projects. “It is true that my sisters and I fixated on Bub, attached ourselves to him like coral, like urchins, like sea sponges. I had never known any grown up like him. He had wild ideas, and as soon as one popped into his head, he just had to see if he could make it so.” It’s an attachment that ends in a betrayal – but McLain remains loyal to the memories of the adventures and good times that Bub created.

Their foster mother, Hilde, was another story, hiding the girls’ clothes, hoarding food, meting out fierce punishment with a broom handle for the breaking of some idiosyncratic household rule. “To us, she was a mom-size armadillo, all shell and no shelter—and it made me nuts,” writes McLain. “I simultaneously wanted her to love me and hated that I cared. I looked to my sisters to see how they were handling the problem of Hilde’s impenetrability, but found no help. As far as I could tell, Teresa didn’t give Hilde a moment’s thought… Although (Penny) wasn’t getting any more affection than Teresa or I, she didn’t stop trying to find it, cuddling up to the petrified log of Hilde on the couch after dinner, leaning forward to touch a fuzzy wand of Hilde’s hair in the car.”

Throughout, writes McLain, the presence of her sisters was the thread that held her life together: “They were there, in every home, in all the kitchens and cars and front yards. Every time I had to endure a sleepless first night in another new room, I could, because a few feet away, or behind a thin wall, my sisters were curled, scritching their feet just like I was, saying the tired thread of a prayer that Granny had taught us as soon as we could talk.”

As young adults, the three sisters briefly share a house together, and it is at this point that their mother re-enters their lives, coming to visit and inviting the girls to join her with her then-husband in Michigan. First Teresa and then Paula take her up on this offer. As in the rest of the story, McLain doesn’t provide any neat resolution here—her adult relationship with her mother remains haunted by things unsaid, apologies not offered, not accepted, and not even really expected.

At the end of the day, writes McLain, “The future is placeless, faceless, open as the backseat of a car heading anywhere at all. The past is a plastic garbage bag between my feet, hot air through a window. My sisters are with me.”

Talk Back

If you’ve got comments or questions about this story, we’d like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips.

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Susan Phillips is the executive editor at Connect for Kids.