The Unspeakable (16 page)

Of course, the experience would be nothing like the typical child-rearing experience, but neither of us was after that, especially not me. Having never craved a child, I didn't crave the intimacy that came from raising someone from birth. This child could be more like a mentee, an exchange student, a distant relative who visited for the summer and decided to stay on because we could afford him opportunities unavailable back home. Of course, any child we took in would surely need intense therapy for years or even forever. He would have demons and soul-breaking baggage. But they wouldn't be Matthew-level demons. We would find the needle in the haystack that had Ivy League potential. We would find the kid who dreamed of being an only child in a quiet, book-filled house with parents who read
The Times Literary Supplement
over dinner. Sure, I would probably still be a bad mother, but I would be one according to such wildly different standards than those set by the child welfare system that it wouldn't matter if I dreaded birthday parties or resorted to store-bought Halloween costumes. All that would matter was that I was more fit than the teenagers weeping in the courthouse.

I knew this was 90 percent bullshit. I knew that it wasn't okay to be a lackluster parent just because you'd adopted the child out of foster care. A few times, my husband and I scrolled through online photo listings of available children in California, but we might as well have been looking at personal ads from a sad, faraway land that no one ever traveled to. There were cerebral palsied three-year-olds on respirators, huge sibling groups that spoke no English, girls who had “trust issues with men.” Occasionally there would be some bright-eyed six- or seven-year-old who you could tell was going to be okay, who had the great fortune of being able to turn the world on with his smile. So as the Central Sadness throbbed around our marriage, threatening to turn even the most quotidian moments, like the sight of a neighbor tossing a ball around with his kid in the yard, into an occasion for bickering or sulking or both, the foster child option functioned as a pacifier. It placated us with the illusion that all doors were not yet closed, that we still had the option of taking roads less traveled, and, best of all, that we could wait ten years to decide if we wanted to.

Or we could look into it sooner. One day, while my nerves swung on a longer-than-usual pendulum between pity for Matthew and despondency over my marriage, I decided to call a foster and adoption agency. Actually, I told my husband to call. Advocates aren't supposed to get involved with fostering and I didn't want to do anything that might give the appearance of conflict of interest. He signed us up for an orientation and I told him he had to do all the talking. He agreed to this plan in much the same way he agreed to certain home-improvement projects when I suggested them, which is to say mostly accommodatingly though without tremendous relish. When we arrived at the meeting, I signed in using his last name, something I'd never done even once before.

“I've got to be incognito,” I said. “Let's not call attention to ourselves.”

There were about thirty people at the orientation. It was the most racially and socioeconomically diverse crowd I'd seen since I last appeared for jury duty. This agency was known for its outreach to the LGBT community and there were several gay couples in attendance. There were also a lot of singles, including a man wearing a dress, jewelry, and full makeup, though he'd made no attempt to hide his five o'clock shadow. We were each asked to introduce ourselves and say what had brought us. One male couple said they were deciding between adopting out of foster care and working with an egg donor and a surrogate. They both wore hipster glasses and one had on what appeared to be a very expensive suit. They sounded like they had big careers. A young woman explained that she'd spent time in foster care herself as a youth and was now ready to give back by adopting a baby. She couldn't have been older than twenty-one and was wearing a hat and a puffy coat, even though it was probably 70 degrees outside. If I'd seen her in another setting, for instance the public library, I might have thought she was homeless.

“I'm interested in an infant only,” she said. “But also LGBT. Those are my main two things.”

She wanted a gay baby. Or a transgender baby. No one in the room seemed to find this unusual.

When our turn came, my husband spoke briefly about how we were just exploring things in a very preliminary way. Then I spoke about how I was ambivalent about children but that this potentially seemed like a good thing to do. I then proceeded to completely dominate the rest of the three-hour meeting. Instead of being incognito, I acted like I was back in advocacy training. I raised my hand constantly, asking overly technical questions about things like the Indian Child Welfare Act and the American Safe Families Act and throwing around their acronyms (ICWA and ASFA) as if everyone knew what they meant. I asked what the chances of getting adopted were for a twelve-year-old who had flunked out of several placements.

“Maybe this isn't the right setting for these questions,” my husband whispered.

“But I genuinely want to know the answers,” I said.

As the meeting wrapped up, the woman from the agency announced that the next step was to fill out an application and then attend a series of training sessions. After that, she said, prospective parents who passed their home-studies could be matched with a child at any time and theoretically be on their way to adoption.

Her words were like ice against my spine.

“We're not at that point!” I said to my husband. “Not even close. Not remotely close.”

I suggested he apply to be a mentor for “transitional age youth,” which are kids who've emancipated but still need help figuring out the basics of life. He filled out a form, again with the slightly bewildered resignation of someone agreeing to repair something he hadn't noticed was broken in the first place. The agency woman said she'd call him about volunteer opportunities. She never did. We both figured it was because I had acted like a complete lunatic. If the agency had any sense, they'd give the homeless-looking woman a gay baby before letting us near any kids for any reason.

After the meeting, I was mortified for weeks. I felt like I'd gotten drunk at a party, like I'd launched into some blowhardy rant before throwing up into a ficus tree. Slowly, though, I began to understand why I acted the way I did. The notion of adopting one of these kids was so discomfiting that I'd unconsciously tried to soothe myself by turning the meeting into something I could handle, which was being an advocate. It was one thing to look at the children in the photo listings and imagine which one might be bookish and self-possessed enough to live comfortably under our roof. It was another to sit in a room with people who were really serious about it, people who were going to work fewer hours or go out to dinner less often or travel less freely in order to have the family they had always wanted. And I knew we were not those people. We did not match the profile of foster parents—the good ones or the bad ones. We were not known for our patience. We were not ones to suspend judgment or lower the bar. We'd once entered our dog in a charity “mutt show” (ironically, of course) and seethed for days when he didn't even make the finals in his category, which was “best coat.” I told my husband that if he was really interested in mentoring he should call the agency and tell them so. He said he'd try, but he never got around to it.

*   *   *

When I was Nikki's Big Sister, one thing I'd always noticed was that people smiled at us a lot when we went out. At least they did when we were in the various necks of my woods, like the Farmers Market or the independent movie house or my local Trader Joe's. I guess it made sense. She was a black teenager and I was a white woman. Moreover, I was a relatively young woman. Both of us looked like we quite possibly had better things to do than hang out with the other. But there we were nonetheless, and baristas and ticket takers would subtly nod their heads in approval. The few times I actually ran into acquaintances when I was with Nikki, I'd introduce her as “my friend” and then watch their faces leapfrog from confusion to curiosity to surprise before landing on (at least what I assumed to be) blazing admiration.

“It's so amazing that you do that,” friends would say when the subject of my mentorship arose in conversation, which rarely happened unless I brought it up, which I almost never did. Though I put in the requisite time with Nikki, even taking her to a Big Brothers Big Sisters holiday bowling party, which I think she might have enjoyed even less than I did, there always seemed something counterfeit about our dynamic. Very few people knew I was doing this volunteer work, mostly because in mentioning it, I felt like I was eliciting praise for something that didn't actually warrant any. Back when I'd been attempting to mentor Maricela, I'd actually gone out and bought a Polaroid camera so that we could take photos and incorporate them into a scrapbook made from construction paper and what was left of the glitter I'd brought in the first time. This activity hadn't been my idea. It had been among the suggestions listed in the Big Brothers Big Sisters orientation pamphlet. Maricela had been less than keen on the project, wanting to talk instead about how she needed a new soccer uniform but her mother wouldn't pay for it.

Around that time, I visited a friend who had just had twins. I picked up each of her babies, patted their bottoms, and then put them back down. They were warm and soft, yet still at that scary tiny stage. Truth be told, I love babies when they're between about five and eight months old, and I told my friend she'd be seeing a lot of me when they reached that age. She laughed and asked what I'd been doing lately. I had a Polaroid photo of Maricela in my purse and I took it out.

“She's pretty, isn't she?” I said.

“She's gorgeous,” said my friend.

It was true that Maricela was a very pretty girl. But I'd spent a total of about three hours with her at that point. The ownership implied by that statement felt almost obscene. On our second session, she'd turned to me and asked, “What's your name again?”

“You're going to be an amazing influence on her,” my friend said. “She is so lucky to have you.”

A few months after that, I met my husband. I was attracted to him immediately. As I've done with just about every man I've dated, I thought about what it would be like for us to be parents together. I pictured us coaxing our child to take at least one bite of peas. I pictured us shaking our heads in bemusement at her precocious vocabulary. But you're never the real you in the beginning of a relationship. Eventually things get serious and you return to yourself. And from there the relationship either ends or makes a commitment to its imperfections. Either way there is loss. That's not the same as saying either way you lose. It's more like either way you have to accept that you didn't go the other way. But that acceptance is itself a loss, the kind that if you think about it too much might cause you to go a little crazy.

*   *   *

A phrase you hear a lot in the foster care world is that a child has “experienced a lot of loss.” It will often come up in the blurbs accompanying the photo listings.
Jamal has experienced a lot of loss but knows the right family is out there. Clarissa is working through her losses and learning to have a more positive attitude.
At first glance, you might think these are references to the original loss, the dismantling of the biological family. But most often they mean the child has gotten close to being adopted but that things haven't worked out. With Matthew I often got the feeling that the trauma of being removed from his biological parents had been dwarfed by the cumulative implosions of the placements that followed. He seemed to know that he'd had a hand in at least some of these disruptions, that he'd lost his temper too many times or let himself lapse into behavior that frightened people. But when I asked about this, which I only did once or twice, he tended to offer some standard-issue excuse on behalf of the estranged parents, which he'd surely heard from his social workers. He'd say they lacked the resources to sufficiently meet his needs. He'd say they didn't have the skills to handle a kid like him.

Matthew had been taken to a number of adoption fairs over the years, a concept that floored me when I first heard about it. These were organized events such as picnics or carnivals where adoptable kids and prospective parents were supposed to mingle and see if they liked one another. It struck me as a barbaric form of speed dating. But caseworkers insisted that the events were benign, that the point was for kids to have fun regardless of the outcome. The same went for a local television news station with a regular segment that practically advertised kids who were up for adoption.
Clarissa is a wonderful young lady who likes to play dress-up and needs a forever family
, the anchor would say.
Jamal has a mean jump shot
. Then there would be a field report showing the child “having a special day” riding trail horses or getting “ace tips” from a professional athlete who'd been enlisted to show up for half an hour and interact with him on behalf of some charity. This same news station also had a weekly segment featuring shelter animals that needed homes.

About a year into my work with Matthew, he experienced yet another adoption-related loss. A couple that had been visiting him at the group home and later hosting him for weekend visits had decided he wasn't the right fit for them after all. He'd been hopeful about this placement, and when I visited him a few days after things fell through I found him pacing around his cinder-block dormitory like a nervous animal. The prospective mom had given him a used MP3 player, perhaps as an unspoken parting gift, but the group home staff had locked it up for some kind of disciplinary reason. He had his Kindle, however, which he'd never used, and now he sat on a bench outside the dormitory, bending the plastic until pieces of the device began falling off.