The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  When I saw her a few weeks later, I asked how the movie was. She told me they ended up not going, that she and a smaller group of friends went out to dinner instead.

  I didn’t say anything to her. By that I mean I didn’t say anything beyond “What? Really? After all that?” I didn’t say the thing that even then I knew I should have, which is that $100 was not a small amount to me and that not using the tickets was disrespectful and inconsiderate. I didn’t say it because I didn’t feel like our relationship was such that I could scold her. I also didn’t say it because she hadn’t asked me to buy the tickets in the first place. Looking back on it now, I see that they were more of a burden than a gift. As much as she’d insisted that going to the movies with her friends was exactly what she’d wanted to do on her birthday, I now know that you cannot expect a teenager to plan more than one day into the future. It’s hard enough to get adults to commit to a social activity until they’re sure they’re not getting a better offer elsewhere. But I suspect that ultimately what I wanted most from Nikki was for her not to act like a teenager. I didn’t like teenagers. I hadn’t even liked them when I was one myself. I wanted her to act like an adult, which as it happens was what my parents had wanted from me when I was a teenager and even a young child. So I didn’t say anything to her about wasting the movie tickets. I merely reminded myself that this was yet another example of why I should never have children. Childhood itself was anathema to me. The very condition gave me the shivers.

  I think in part that’s why I was interested in foster children. In some cases, childhood had literally been beaten out of them. And though I had grown up a million miles from anything resembling physical abuse or neglect—if anything I’d been overparented, oversupervised, vested with far too many unmeetable expectations—the foster kids I met seemed alienated from their own childhoods in a way that felt familiar to me. Whereas with Maricela and Nikki the idea in some ways had been to keep them from growing up too fast, foster kids were essentially victims of their own youth. And they knew it as well as anyone. As much as they wanted to be normal kids, there was almost always a sense in them of wanting to get on with things. This phase of being a minor, of having no control over your fate and no say over what you eat or where you sleep or who’s acting as your guardian and for how long, was a phase to be endured. No one ever said to a foster child, “Enjoy being a kid now, because one day you’ll have to be a grown-up.” It was no accident that when they aged out of the system it was called “emancipating.” It seemed to me like the perfect word. What was adulthood, after all, but a permanent release from the chamber of childhood? Why would they have referred to these children as “minors” (in court documents, Matthew was never referred to as Matthew but as “the minor”) if there wasn’t at least some hope of major improvement down the road?

  But that was my particular view, which was colored by my own particular experience as a young person who couldn’t stand being young—in other words, a twisted view. It also doesn’t really hold up when it comes to kids in the child welfare system, since the data on what happens to kids after they age out of the system without a permanent family is dismal. Statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services consistently show that more than half end up either homeless or in jail. Within two years of aging out of the system, as many as half of the young women will be pregnant. Besides, time moves at an excruciating pace for all kids. A month might as well be a year. On the days I went to court with Matthew, I watched child after child, some of them infants in plastic bucket carriers, appear before judges whose jobs essentially boiled down to issuing timelines. Parents were given six or twelve or eighteen months to get their acts together. They were told to go to rehab, to anger-management therapy, and to parenting classes. And when they failed to do so, the clock would start all over again. The children would hear this news and sometimes their faces would go jagged with despair. How was it that they’d been taken away in fourth grade and now they were in sixth? Sometimes they were afraid of the parents and secretly didn’t want to go back, though they told the judge otherwise.

  Matthew, for his part, was an old hand at court. He looked forward to it because it meant missing school and watching movies in the day-care area, where kids of all ages were kept behind locked doors as protection from abusive parents who might also be in court that day. Though he wanted to be adopted, he no longer expected anything to happen at his hearings. There were no major decisions to be made or battles to be fought. Usually the judge would just remark on how tall he’d gotten or how nice his hair looked.

  * * *

  Initially, I’d thought Matthew would grow on me. But though I learned to identify some of his charms—his facility with technological gadgets, his GPS-like knowledge of the location of every video arcade and big-box store within a twenty-mile radius—I can’t say we were great friends. Not that we needed to be. I was never going to be his role model. I certainly wasn’t a mother figure. I was more like a random port in the unrelenting storm that was his life. And that was enough. Matthew’s lot was so bad that it could be improved, albeit triflingly, with one mini-pizza at a food court. A kid with higher expectations would have been more than I could handle.

  I was comfortable with that admission. I was happy to state my limits. I was proud, in fact, to stand up and be counted among those who knew themselves well enough to know that they wouldn’t do right by a child and that therefore the only ethical and, for that matter, remotely sensible choice was to bow out of the whole enterprise. But a member of a childless couple can only be as strident as the other half of the couple. And in the aftermath of my miscarriage, during those confused, angry months when I was struggling to understand how it was possible to feel so sad about not having something that held so little appeal in the first place, my husband began to say out loud that he wanted to be someone’s father—or at least that he might not be okay with never being someone’s father. He wanted to use what he knew about the world to help someone find his or her own way through it. He wanted “someone to hang out with” when he got older. That said, he didn’t necessarily need the baby- or toddler-rearing experience. He didn’t particularly want to give up his weekends for kids’ birthday parties or spend half our income on child care. He didn’t need the kid to look like him or even be the same race. When I asked if these needs could be met through teaching or mentoring or even being an advocate, he said he wasn’t sure.

  And so were planted the seeds of a potential compromise. Maybe we could take in, or possibly even adopt, a foster child. This would be a child old enough to go to birthday parties on his own, a child old enough that we might actually qualify as young or average-age parents rather than ones of “advanced age” (if I adopted a ten-year-old at forty-three it would be the equivalent of having had him at the eminently reasonable age of thirty-three).

  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.