The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  At the end of Citizen Ruth, Laura Dern’s character does the unimaginable. She flees the warring factions of abortion rights activists and anti-choice zealots, heading off into the distance to make her own choice, whatever it might be. As viewers, we can be certain only of the options that might remain to her: to become a ‘single mother’, one of the most vilified menaces of the 1990s culture wars in America, right up there with the mythological ‘welfare queen’. Or she will do what my husband and I and countless others like us hope she will do for our own sakes: give up her child for adoption, or, failing that, lose all her rights to motherhood because she is unable to look after the child, or care for it, or demonstrate that subjective quantum of good enough parenting required by the state.

  YOU

  I try to imagine what it is like to be you in the first year of your life. I can do this with myself, envision what my infancy was like, the way my parents would have attended to me, how my grandmothers cared for me when my mother was in the hospital for six weeks immediately after my birth. I have photographs that tell me I was not just looked at with joy and adoration, but also held and cuddled and kissed, in a nursery all yellow and white.

  The question is, are my powers of empathy and imagination great enough to imagine what your own life was like in the absence of any information about it that I can trust as reliable or objective?

  I will skip over the few details I eventually learn, the reasons that give the social workers cause to worry, reasons that convince a judge – as far as I understand the procedures – that you and your brothers and sisters should be removed from the family home. A terrible decision to have to make, I am sure, a terrible decision for your parents to accept, and one they will fight to overturn for years to come. Know that they wanted you, wanted always to keep you.

  From what little I know, without rationalizing their failures, I have deep sympathy for your mother and father. I can imagine how overwhelming a household with five children must seem, how difficult it may feel, with little formal education and no jobs, to make a life for themselves and for you.

  But their shortcomings and failures are real. If we believe what we are later told, you and your siblings are not taken without cause, even if there may have been good times amidst the bad, nights when all seven of you were home and happy and laughing, with games and jokes and the warmth of your love for one another. I want to believe there was love there, that some days were good even as others were not.

  SEARCHING

  In preparation for Gemma beginning to search for a suitable match, she asks us to write a brief profile describing ourselves. This takes longer than it should, and Andrew and I are never certain we get it right. Self-deprecation? Self-aggrandizement? Sentiment? Sangfroid? No one tells us what tone we should strike. We end up with a text that pleases neither of us, even if we agree with all that it says:

  We are a loving couple who have been together for more than twelve years and are looking forward to being great dads to a girl or boy.

  We have a circle of friends with young children who live in London, Oxford and Cambridge (as well as Cape Town and New York!). As we’ve been thinking about starting our own family we’ve enjoyed spending time with these friends, seeing how they go about their lives and the kinds of things they enjoy doing together…

  We believe that we can offer a child a loving home and family, stability and long-term security, as well as opportunities to grow and discover and learn. We are keen to provide an environment that will foster curiosity and creativity while respecting that a child will always be her or his own person.

  The discourse of the ‘loving couple’ seems trite, even though it is true, and the formulation ‘two dads’ gendered in a way that makes me uncomfortable. How much better if we could write, ‘We are a politically radical queer couple who, although appearing in the world as male, inhabit identities more complex than binary gender allows, and who want more than anything to raise a child who will be their own person, whatever that might be, and to give that person all the love we have to offer.’

  But the system can barely understand who we are even when we fall back on trite formulations, so we know better than to sabotage our chances at this stage by trying to present ourselves as anything other than what the system sees as ‘normal’.

  ‘Normal’ is what we have to appear to be. As ‘normal’ as any heterosexual British couple, with all the exclamation marks and stodgy sentimentality we can muster. The references to friends in Cape Town and New York are probably a mistake. They make us look too foreign, too unpredictable, although it is true that we have been imagining how we might leave the country and never look back once the court signs off on the adoption and the child – whoever she or he might be – is legally ours. That would be our right, and we might well choose to exercise it.

  It’s true, too, that we enjoy spending time with friends who have kids. Seeing how those children complete our friends’ lives – often in ways they could never have predicted – has helped us decide to pursue this for ourselves. It’s true that we can provide a loving home, a sense of family, financial and other kinds of stability, the promise of long-term security, however modest it might be, and opportunities to explore the world. Even when the language itself is designed to speak to the most conventionally minded social worker, we still mean what we say, and hope that it sounds convincing.

  Later, I will read this description of ourselves and think it both too much (still too foreign, still too highbrow, still too difficult, because we wrote it in complete sentences, with commas and correct grammar, unlike many other profiles I have seen), and also too little (too little of who we really are, in all our strangeness but also our ordinariness, too little that demonstrates how most of our days are as deeply dull as any other couple’s).

  Only a month after our approval as adopters, we receive the first profile, a boy of six months named M—. He has no known health problems, what is described as a happy disposition, and only one foster placement so far. Even better, he was voluntarily given up by his birth parents. When the profile comes through, Andrew is in South Africa and I am in New York but we decide over the phone that we are definitely interested.

  Already we begin to imagine M— coming to live with us, but no one tells us this child’s profile is going out wide across Britain to every prospective adopter. No one says, as they might have: you are competing against straight couples who have been childless for years, who go to church every Sunday, who live in a detached house with a fenced-in garden in a quaint rural village – in other words, couples who will look attractive to social workers in ways we will not.

  No one says what we soon come to understand is likely closer to the truth: that as a bi-national queer couple, both immigrants to Britain, both academics whose lives are centred around books, living in a rented flat in London, even though we have been judged acceptable as adopters, we are probably at the bottom of the heap. Everyone else, except perhaps single adopters, is preferable to us, and even a single British woman adopting would, I suspect, rank higher.

  So although approved as adopters, we must now prove anew, over and over again, that we are a good match for every possible child who might strike us as suitable. And we have to make that kind of case with no sense of who the children’s social workers might be, what prejudices they might harbour, or what evidence they might require that would convince them of our suitability.

  Nor do we know at this stage that a judgment by Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales, has sent a chill through the entire adoption and foster care system.12 Although government ministers will later claim that the law did not change and that social workers misinterpreted Munby’s ruling, the effects are almost instantly clear: a sharp reduction in the number of children available because social workers believe they must now consider even remote family connections as potential guardians before a child is considered as a candidate for adoption.

  When we start, there a
re three times as many children available to adopt on the online linking system we end up using as there are potential adopters. In the next year, thanks in part to Munby’s judgment, and in part to the government’s drive to recruit more adopters, I watch the ratio flip, until there are three times as many adopters as children.

  Three adoptive couples chasing every available child, and all of us hoping, perversely, that more children will come into the system, which means we are hoping, horribly, that more women will have children they feel they cannot look after, or that more women and men will have children they don’t manage to look after properly and whom the authorities have no choice but to remove for the children’s safety.

  How can we be hoping for such a terrible scenario?

  How is this any more ethical than paying a woman to have a child on our behalf with proper legal agreements in place and the woman paid for her time and trouble and risk and everyone clear where each person stands?

  We hear nothing again about the boy called M—. Silence is the only answer to our query. Gemma hears nothing. She writes to his social workers to ask for feedback and receives no response.

  She starts presenting us with other profiles, but none of these strike us as right. The children have serious health problems, disabilities, chromosomal disorders, global developmental delays, histories of sexual abuse, or tortuously complex birth families with whom we would have no choice but to engage because the courts have mandated ongoing contact with one or more birth parents or siblings or extended family members.

  A child who is described as ‘quiet and obedient’ looks as though she may have undiagnosed mental disabilities. We remind Gemma that we don’t feel able to look after children with serious medical or genetic problems. When we keep saying no, reminding her what we are looking for, she sends us a checklist indicating which conditions we do and do not feel able to consider.

  Gemma encourages us to sign up for the online matching platform, which allows us to monitor profiles of children who are available, but these are only the profiles – we come to understand much later – of children who have been judged by their social workers as particularly difficult to place.

  Nonetheless, we start to make enquiries, sending off enthusiastic messages about children who appear in the database. There are descriptions of each child, a handful of photographs, sometimes a video. There are infants and toddlers and sibling groups, white children, black children, children from European parents – many Polish or Eastern European – and children from Roma and Irish Traveller backgrounds.

  In February 2015, I find the profile of Z—, a black British girl under the age of two who has no health problems and no history of abuse. She looks adorable, charming, with an extraordinary smile and bright expression. We send an enquiry, and in less than twenty minutes receive a rejection from Z—’s social worker. I assume this is either because we are white, or because we are a same-sex couple, although it says on her profile that they are open to other ethnicities and there is no suggestion that she needs both a mother and a father, as some profiles explicitly stipulate. Our query is permanently closed, meaning that we cannot ever enquire about her again. Over the course of the next year, I watch Z—’s profile remain on the system, still available, but not to us. We would have taken her then, immediately, that very day, and welcomed her into our lives. We would have given her a loving family. We would have been thrilled to have her.

  Over the ensuing months we become more and more distraught and confused, as Gemma sends profiles that continue to be poor matches for our requirements, while asking repeatedly whether we are looking ourselves, and where we are looking. In exasperation, I write to ask whether she can find out any further information about M— and Z—, or at least if she can manage to get feedback from their social workers about our profile. Although we are not naturally inclined to look for homophobia as an explanation, the failure of M—’s social workers to explain their decision against us and the speed with which Z—’s social worker rejected our enquiry suggests that both may be looking for an opposite-sex couple. Our understanding is that all other factors being equal, and unless there is a strong determination that a child needs a mother and a father, discriminating against a same-sex couple is illegal, and at the very least a breach of policy if that is found to be the case.

  Gemma, however, cannot even see the other social worker’s details because the person has declined further contact. It might be illegal to consider racial difference when placing children for adoption in Britain, but I become convinced that it happens every day.

  In May, while I am on a speaking tour in South Africa, Andrew attends an Adoption Exchange Day where he runs into Eleanor, the wonderful social worker who saw us through Stage 1. She is stunned that we are still searching, that we have not already been matched with a child, and yet she is the first social worker to express any feeling of this kind.

  At one point I ask Gemma’s manager whether the fact that Andrew and I are not listed as ‘White British’ (we are classed as ‘White Other’) in our racial categorization may automatically eliminate us from consideration for children who are themselves ‘White British’ and whose profiles indicate they should be placed with adopters of the same ethnic group. (I imagine matching software only pulling up exact ethnic and racial matches for such children.) In the end, she does not have an answer.

  In writing this, and rereading the email exchanges to refresh my memory, I still feel a sense of injustice. I say to myself and to Andrew, we could have done more. We could have pushed harder. We could have made a nuisance of ourselves.

  Part of this frustration is with myself, with us, that we did not make ourselves difficult and impossible to ignore.

  And yet I also wonder, is our failure to push harder, our failure to be troublesome until we got the child we wanted, not a symptom of our ambivalence about adoption itself? If we really wanted it, would we not have striven tirelessly in pursuit of it? Would we not have read every book ever written about adoption? Would we not have been able to speak so convincingly about adoption that no one would have doubted us for an instant?

  Or is it a symptom of the way the system appears to me now to have worked to make us feel disempowered, to demonstrate to us over and over again that our requests for further information would be refused, that we could shout all we want and be found, in the end, simply difficult, and easy to ignore?

  ANNIE

  When I was in the first grade I was obsessed with John Huston’s 1982 film adaptation of the musical Annie. I had an Annie-themed seventh birthday party with Annie invitations and Annie favours. We played musical chairs in the backyard to the soundtrack from Annie, my mother lifting the needle on the portable record player and sending us scurrying – boys and girls alike – to find our seats. That Halloween I dressed up as Daddy Warbucks with cravat and blazer and a bald cap pasted to my skin with spirit glue. If I had been able to dress up as Annie in her red dress and frizzy curls, that would have been my preference, but I knew without having to be told that this was an impossibility. To satisfy my desire to inhabit the world of the film I had to take the role of the only male character with whom I felt able to identify: the rich man (though my family was not rich) who takes in the orphan and adopts her. How it must have galled my left-wing parents that I dressed up as a Republican billionaire, failing at the age of seven to see the film’s politics, the Bolsheviks trying to assassinate Warbucks because he stands as a symbol of the success of American capitalism.

  In my private play at home, my mother working in some other room, I would put on the record, sing along, and do cartwheels across the dining room. I was Annie, not Daddy Warbucks, or I was both Annie and Daddy Warbucks, since my mother would also sit at the piano playing songs from the musical and I would just as readily sing Warbucks’s ‘N.Y.C.’ as Annie’s ‘Tomorrow’ or ‘It’s a Hard Knock Life’. I could imagine myself both as orphan – the archetypal ginger child in need of adoption – as well as adopter.

  In 2012,
a friend did a tarot reading for me. I don’t believe in the occult, but I was happy to play along. She claimed that the cards said that if we were to adopt, it would all happen quickly, and we would end up with a girl.

  I am suggestible enough that the idea of a daughter took root, and the vision of a little girl in need of a home became stronger and clearer in my mind. Although my relationship with my father has now, years later, settled into a gentleness and affection it has taken us a lifetime to achieve, a component of this desire for a daughter is inflected by anxiety about a genealogy of failure in father–son relationships. My paternal grandfather was a philanderer, an adulterer, an embezzler, as well as being physically (and probably also emotionally and psychologically) abusive. My own father has spent his entire life struggling to recover from that bad fathering (although the failures of mothering in his family were just as acute). As a result, my relationship with my father was always already overdetermined from the moment of my conception.

  The idea that I might fail to break out of the bad models of father–son relationships I have inherited terrifies, while the prospect of a father–daughter relationship that might be built without any prior models offers hope.

  Andrew and I embarked on the adoption process knowing we would be happy with either a boy or a girl, that we wanted to be parents rather than to inhabit any particular dyads of parenting. I want to believe that being a same-sex couple means we can be parents in whatever mould we choose. We don’t have to conform to gender roles because to parent effectively we will need to be both and at the same time mother-fatherly and father-motherly, to borrow and bend Virginia Woolf’s formulation. Nonetheless, I know that raising a daughter would not present me with the visceral memories I retain of being fathered.