Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family

A candid, unforgettable, and often hilarious memoir of two dads daunting quest for fatherhood.

At nearly forty years old, Mark Daley was at the top of his game––the owner of a booming business, a roster of celebrity clients, and newly married to Jason, the man of his dreams––but Mark yearned for more, a family. At odds with biology, Jason and Mark flirted with surrogacy before ultimately deciding to strive for adoption through the foster care system. Determined to avoid the tragic fate experienced by members of his family, Mark and Jason skipped into fostering with the gleeful naivety of fairytale heroes.

What does it really take to keep a child safe? Mark thought he had the answer, having grown up with foster-adopted cousins and been an advocate for child welfare agencies. But when Logan and Ethan, an adorable infant and a precocious toddler, entered their lives, Mark quickly realized he and Jason were not remotely prepared for the uncertainty and complications of foster parenting— much less the emotional roller-coaster of knowing that for their family to stay together another family had to break apart.

Seven hundred children enter the foster care system in the United States every day, 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 suspenseful journey as he and Jason grapple with Logan and Ethan’s potential reunification with their biological family, and learn brutal lessons about sacrifice, acceptance, and healing along the way. Daley’s witty, compassionate voice grabs readers from the first page, as he faces the honest, heartrending, and sometimes sidesplitting challenges of parenting and loving children whose future with him hangs in the balance.