The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  If there is a point the social workers are trying to make about the transparency of one’s lies or the impossibility of knowing whether lies will be legible as such, then it is not made clearly, nor do they suggest that this might have been their intention. What the exercise does is leave me unmoored, but also on guard, because we are being asked to reveal so much about ourselves to strangers. I begin to wonder whether it is a test of our capacity to be vulnerable, to set ourselves on a new path in life that will require ongoing and radical forms of vulnerability.

  Caroline and Claudia have organized a varied programme. There are guest speakers, including an adoptive mother who tells us she has not had a week go by without seeing a social worker since adopting two brothers fifteen years ago. The boys have been especially challenging and the mother looks exhausted. She is thin, shrivelled, and says she has not slept regularly for years. She gives the impression of someone barely holding it together.

  Another guest speaker, a woman whose children were taken into foster care and subsequently adopted, has managed to get her life back on track. With her new partner she has another child, who is thriving. She talks about the difficulty of that early separation from her children, and the further difficulty of trying to explain to them in subsequent contact how it is that her new child is allowed to live with her while they are not.

  I begin to think about the possibility of adopting a child whom the courts might require to have direct contact with one or both of its birth parents, or with biological siblings who might be in foster care or placed with other adoptive families or who even might live with the birth parents or other relatives, and suddenly the entire proposition seems wildly complex and freighted with greater uncertainty than I had allowed myself to imagine.

  What would it mean to have to negotiate not just our own relationship with a child we might adopt, but also our relationship with that child’s extended biological family who could prove hostile to us in ways that would always be unpredictable? My mind is given to imagining worst-case scenarios. I start to envision encounters with knife-wielding biological fathers, being stalked by screaming biological mothers, navigating weddings and funerals and birthdays with people who might hate the sight of us for the rest of our lives. An orphan would be better. Where are all the orphans? Where are the sweet-natured Annies and Oliver Twists?

  There is lunch, there are tea breaks, the sandwiches are adequate, and we sit in our plastic chairs, either perched with plates on our laps, or pulled up to tables. We try to make small talk with the other participants, but every interaction feels forced.

  *

  The most positive voice in the programme of speakers is a man who adopted a brother and sister several years earlier. The siblings are now flourishing and, at the ages of seven and eight, show no sign of any long-term ill effects from their difficult early beginnings. He says the happiest day in the whole experience was when the adoptions were finalized in court and he could say goodbye, permanently, to the social workers. Even now he is impatient with them, with their vocabularies of grief and trauma and loss, and it strikes me that in fact he has not said goodbye permanently, he is still in the orbit of the social care system, drawn back to report, to present himself as a success story.

  Happiness and normalcy, however those might be construed, however subjective and potentially problematic, are always possible, he insists, especially once you get away from the social workers.

  The following day, Caroline, who is my age, sidles over to me during a tea break and says that she has looked up my books but won’t, she assures me, read them before she’s written her report on Andrew’s and my participation in the workshops. I want to say, you mean we’re being assessed even while we’re sitting here and answering your inane questions and participating in role-playing activities that have as little to do with real parenting as pruning roses might? No one told us we were being assessed already. And then I want to say, why should my books have anything to do with my ability to parent? Do you turn up to other prospective adopters’ places of work and linger outside the window just to see where they work, but promise not to go inside in case you might notice something that would prejudice you against them? It seems a bizarre thing to say, bizarre that first Mary and now Caroline, these two senior social workers, would somehow feel it acceptable even to suggest the possibility that my creative work might impinge upon my capacity to parent an adopted child, even if they were both scrupulous about not reading the books until after all was said and done, however it might be done.

  I want to say, go ahead, read the books, and you will see that they are attuned to the experiences of people affected by trauma. But I also know that the dark mood and even darker events described in my first two books might be enough to prejudice such people as Mary and Caroline against me. If he can imagine that, well, what might he be capable of doing? Imagination and action, fantasy and capacity, seem blurred in their questions. And why is creativity itself so suspect? Would they say the same thing to a heterosexual woman novelist? Or a straight male visual artist? Or a composer? An actor? A theatre director?

  At some point in the course of these days, the medical officer in the adoption team comes to speak to the group. Although frequently bored or irritated by the other activities and presentations, I have been able to see their value, admiring both the honesty and quality of the information presented even when the tone has shifted into a wheedling downbeat wooliness that seems to occlude truth rather than reveal it.

  The medical officer is different.

  She perches on the edge of a table and takes us through an interminable series of slides and short films. Blunt and yet weirdly ironic about the consequences of physical and sexual abuse, she even resorts to gallows humour about the physiological effects of different forms of substance abuse.

  Her demeanour tells us that she has seen everything and regards it as her role to kill our last illusions that we will ever be matched with a child one could hope to call ‘normal’. They will all of them, every last one, be seriously fucked up, even if, by some miracle, we get a child at birth, which is never going to happen. The trauma of separation from the birth mother does irreparable harm, she says, and for all the others, well, there’s a reason they’re up for adoption. They haven’t been given up freely by their parents. They’ve been taken because they’ve been badly treated, and that bad treatment has lifelong consequences to the brain and body and mind.

  Even the system itself, I realize, is determined to construct adopted children as out of control, almost as destined to fail.

  This would be bad enough but I also notice two other things that trouble me. The medical officer does not conceive of the children having come from anyone but a mother. Birth fathers do not exist in her schema in any way whatsoever, and there is no suggestion that a child might grieve or be traumatized by the loss of one. At the same time, there is an assumption only of an adoptive mother, and not a single reference to an adoptive father, let alone two fathers.

  At the end of the workshop, I complain to Caroline. What does such a presentation say to the male couple who cannot locate themselves in the narrative being offered? What does that do to our sense of how the system sees or understands us, assuming it understands us in the first place?

  For the first time she looks tense. Her chin trembles. She chews her lip and nods but does not have an answer.

  I’ll feed that back, she says.

  YOU

  You are born. About this time there is so little I will ever know. I know it is a spring birth, as if you, too, are one of May’s flowers. I know that you are your parents’ fifth child. Beyond that, I know almost nothing, and must pick through the details I eventually learn to sketch a picture of what might have been. Only the people who were there will know for certain, only they can potentially tell your story as it actually happened.

  If I were to fill in the blanks in my knowledge, I might imagine that for the first hours of your life you are utterly adored. I want to believe
your arrival is full of joy and contentment.

  This is what I would wish. The rest is a matter of conjecture, of perhaps.

  Perhaps your mother giggles and sticks out her tongue at you, blowing raspberries. Perhaps she gives you a traditional name not because she has a taste for tradition, but because it is the name of an actor she fancies.

  Perhaps your father is there to hold you not long after your birth. Perhaps he is affectionate, kisses you, cuddles you, finds himself brought to tears by the sight of you, as I would have been in his place, if you had been mine.

  Perhaps the three of you take a taxi home – or your grandmother, your mother’s mother, comes to give you a lift while your grandfather looks after your four brothers and sisters.

  Perhaps, for the first time since your birth, you cry in the car because you are hungry and your mother tells you to shush. Perhaps that is the first time she shouts at you, if she shouts at you, as I hope that she did not. I have no way of knowing.

  Perhaps your father tells her to feed you and your mother says she just has and your father tells her to feed you again and this time she does, and you settle, and the crying comes to an end.

  Perhaps, when you get home, your mother announces she’s going to bed and places you on a blanket on the floor of the living room, so that your siblings can toddle over to see what you are. Perhaps they lean over your supine form, poking you, sticking out their tongues, blowing raspberries themselves as a television roars in the background.

  Perhaps.

  WORRY

  Between the two workshops in October and December, we go for medical check-ups that constitute no more than answering a few questions, giving a urine sample, being weighed and measured. I have lost ten pounds since I last weighed myself, as if the preoccupation of thinking about adoption has sped up my metabolism.

  No blood test? I ask the doctor.

  No blood test, she says, and signs the form.

  It feels like a strange moment of the system trusting us, whether it intends to or not.

  Our background checks come back clear, and we begin completing our fifty-page workbooks. On the first page it asks us to draw a spider with legs representing our expectations and worries.

  Only eight legs?

  Only eight expectations and worries? How many of each?

  Could it be an anatomically incorrect spider?

  I have so many worries, so few expectations.

  I cannot think in this way, so I re-format the page, killing the spider and producing instead a table of responses. I wonder what the social workers will make of this refusal to bend myself to their form. Is the spider a test of our capacity to complete juvenile worksheets and colouring books? Are the best prospective adopters inclined to decorate their pages with glitter and sequins and feathers? I start to fear that the system might expect a male couple in particular to perform a fabulousness that Andrew and I cannot muster.

  I have only one expectation, of a rigorous but fair process. Only one leg, if I had stuck with the spider, and so many more to represent worries.

  It still has not been made clear how many home visits we can expect, of what duration they will be, or what will be covered over the course of these visits. (And in the end, it is never made clear how many home visits we should expect, how frequently they will occur, or how long each one will last. Everything is vague.)

  But these are minor concerns, little posterior legs on the spider of expectation and worry, when compared to the large, elongated anterior legs, thick with hair, upon which are articulated my concerns that the social care system views the entire process of adoption through the lens of trauma, refusing to countenance the possibility that one might be motivated by the simple desire to create a family.

  As if that were ever a simple desire, and yet is that not how all human cultures inevitably treat it unless you happen to be single or a same-sex couple?

  The thinking rather appears to be that the most suitable adopter is one embarking on the process for entirely selfless reasons, and doing so as surrogate for the state, with the implicit suggestion that if we are lucky enough to adopt a child, that child will never really be ours, not entirely. Until it is an adult, it will be liable to reclamation by the state (if the state judges us inept). At least, this is the impression I have formed: that being already in the eye of the state, these children will continue to be watched until they are adults. Even if this is not actually or not always the case, there is no denying that once the child has reached adulthood, it will have the freedom to turn its back on us and return to the arms of its birth parents, shunning us as the inept stand-ins for the better parenting it imagines it might have had.

  I say it rather than he or she, because I am trying, still, to imagine a child in the abstract, without gender or personality.

  And while it is true that altruism is a significant part of Andrew’s and my reasoning behind the impulse to adopt, it is no less important than the selfish desire to create a family.

  The other large twitching leg of worry is about prejudice, and my experiences over the next three years will do little if anything to dissipate this feeling. I worry about encountering people in the system who are biased against same-sex couples adopting. This concern is based not only on my experiences of homophobia from at least the age of ten onwards, but on having read various blogs by same-sex adoptive couples in Britain – male couples in particular – who have experienced undisguised bias and prejudice from social workers across the country.

  In writing my responses, I adopt a tone that is both formal and, I hope, elementary. I try to be clear, to sound authoritative. But reading it once I have finished makes me uncomfortable. I write of the absence of joy in the process but can see no joy in my own formulations, no articulation of the guarded hopefulness I feel, only the guardedness itself, and the impulse to criticize a system that is only just getting to know me.

  The next page offers questions that Andrew and I must answer together, questions that wonder what we are worried about – always this foregrounding of worry, anxiety, concern – and what we have to offer. I wonder why the form requires us to start with the negative (with worry) rather than the positive (with what we can offer).

  Since honesty seems a requirement, we are honest.

  We are worried about contact with the birth family over the long term and how this might affect a child’s bond with us. We worry about how the birth family might view us as same-sex parents, and how my modest public profile might complicate contact with siblings, birth parents, extended family, and our desire to have some semblance of a private life.

  We worry about being equipped to meet the emotional and psychological needs of a child who has suffered any form of abuse or neglect. (I wonder, is this particular worry not sufficient to stop us in our tracks? Any child we might adopt in Britain will have suffered abuse or neglect, almost without question. This is what we’ve been told.)

  In terms of what we can offer, we claim to be empathetic and committed to each other, which we both believe is true. We mention our experiences of looking after children, our love of reading, art, music, cooking, travel, all things we would share with a child. We assert our commitment to equality and a sense of global consciousness informed by our childhoods in the United States and South Africa. We describe the stable home we would provide, the network of friends and family who would support us, and the unconditional love we would offer.

  The workbook asks us to draw a picture of a ‘twisting path’ representing our journey to this point, including bridges but also obstructions, including ‘boulders, chasms and landslides’. We are asked to rank a list of reasons for adopting from most acceptable (altruism being the obvious intended response) to the least acceptable (this end of the spectrum is all about adopting to strengthen a relationship or fill a gap or prove one’s worth to a notional wider community).

  They also want to know why our own parents had children, and this is the first question that gives me real pause. I know that m
y father did not want children, a fact my mother shared with me when I was only twelve. My mother made the decision, and either my father changed his mind or he went along with it because he was afraid of being alone. In Andrew’s case, he was unexpected, a late-in-life baby, but no less wanted for that. We are asked to rehearse what we most look forward to in parenting. We make noises about offering the kind of love and nurture we ourselves experienced, although I think about wanting to be a different sort of father to the one I had – in fact, not to be a father at all, but instead a parent, without the baggage of fatherhood. This is something I do not write and never mention to anyone other than Andrew. Some things, I decide, are none of the social workers’ business.

  The first major section of the workbook ends, again, with worry. What five things worry us most about being a parent? We have no difficulty coming up with a list:

  1. The long-term welfare and wellbeing of a child in an unpredictable world.

  2. The experience of a child with same-sex parents in a society that is not uniformly accepting of such relationships, or indeed of same-sex couples raising children.

  3. The quality of a child’s education in a system driven by standardization.

  4. The influence of a child’s peer groups once she or he goes to school.

  5. Being able fully to meet the emotional, psychological, educational and social needs of a child with a very different background to our own.

  Is it the case that being a parent means finding ways of managing worry without losing one’s mind, or feeling overwhelmed or helpless or torn apart by despair?