The social worker told him the truth. The family that had adopted Anthony had decided they did not want him anymore. They had driven him to the hospital. They had not said goodbye. They had not given a reason. They had not come back.
Before that, Anthony had been adopted at four. Before that, he had moved through foster homes since he was two. Three times in eleven years, the people who were supposed to keep him had let him go.
Peter listened to all of this and asked the social worker where Anthony would be going next.
She did not have an answer.
Peter did.
November 12, 2019
It took almost three years to make the temporary placement permanent. Foster-to-adopt cases move slowly. Paperwork moves slowly. The state moves slowly.
While they waited, Anthony asked Peter the same question over and over: When will I be officially adopted?
Peter never knew how to answer. With foster care, you never really know.
On November 12, 2019, the adoption was finalized. Peter has said in interviews that he could not sleep for the two nights before the court date. He has said the moment Anthony took his last name was one of the proudest of his life.
That afternoon, the new family went home and did what new families do. They ate together. They laughed. Anthony, eleven years old when he had arrived in a stranger’s living room in blue pajamas, was thirteen now, taller, and finally — for the first time in his life — permanent.
What happened after
Peter did not stop after Anthony. He has now fostered forty-seven children. He has adopted two more — a brother and sister named Luke and Isabella — and a small house in Charlotte has become a place where children who have been moved too many times finally get to put their things down.
Peter wrote a book in 2022 called Now I Am Known. He founded a foundation by the same name to support foster children. His Instagram is followed by more than 870,000 people. He has been on the front pages of CNN, the Washington Post, the Today Show, and People magazine. He has become, by a margin most people don’t know about, one of the most visible foster fathers in America.
He is also still, on most weekday mornings, just a single dad in a five-bedroom house with two dogs named Simba and Rafiki, making chapati for breakfast and getting kids to school.
Anthony at nineteen
Anthony is nineteen years old now.
He has told reporters he wants to be a foster-care advocate, the way his father is. He wants to speak for the kids who are still inside the system — the ones who have been moved seven times before they were eight, the ones whose names nobody asks, the ones who are sitting in hospital waiting rooms tonight while a social worker on the other end of a phone line calls down a list of strangers.
Peter is fifty-two. He has said in interviews that being a foster dad has taken a toll. He has also said he cannot stop, because he remembers what it felt like to be the boy nobody asked about.
What we can learn from this
There are about 400,000 children in the foster care system in the United States right now. Roughly 100,000 of them are waiting to be adopted. Teenagers wait the longest. Many of them age out of the system at eighteen and never have a family at all.
You do not have to adopt a child to change a child’s life. You can foster. You can mentor. You can donate to organizations like the one Peter founded. You can volunteer with court-appointed special advocate programs in your county. You can be the Mr. Masiko in someone’s marketplace.
But if there is one thing this story is really about, it is this:
An eleven-year-old boy was abandoned three times before he was old enough to understand why. A grown man, who had been abandoned more times than he could count, opened a door at three in the morning because he remembered.
One safe home changed everything.
One safe home almost always does.
If this story moved you, share it. Somewhere out there tonight, a social worker is calling down a list. Be the person who picks up.
Leave a Comment