Former Foster Child Retains a Nurturing Spirit
PRESS DEMOCRAT Jynessa Lazzaroni was 9 years old when her mother gave up on parenting and gave up all three of her children to foster care.
Lazzaroni is now a precociously wise and sympathetic woman of 20 who expends little energy dwelling on years of ricocheting from foster home to foster home or sleeping on couches through long, lonely stretches as an adolescent runaway.
She gently describes her mom as "more of free spirit" than someone equipped to feed, clothe, shelter and care for a child, much less three. "We never did really have a home," the Santa Rosa-born Lazzaroni recalled. She said that for most of the years she and her brothers did live with their mother in Sonoma County, "we were always staying with somebody else." But at least her mother made the attempt, for a time, to parent. Lazzaroni said her father was a perpetual no-show.