Then, just before Valentine’s Day, he develops an infection and returns to the hospital for treatment. He seems once again to be recovering until, one morning, he suddenly passes away.
By chance, Andrew is already in the country. I fly out. My sister-in-law and her youngest daughter fly out. Relatives from across South Africa drive or fly to be there for the memorial service.
Andrew takes in hand most of the arrangements for the service and tying up the estate, co-ordinating with lawyers. He manages everything with a dizzying efficiency and calm, but in the midst of that calm, on summer mornings in the Western Cape, the floral arrangements wilting after only a few days no matter how much care we lavish on them, I look at him and worry, because in my American way I expect to see grief manifested in tears and sobbing or rage and depression, and I see none of those things.
In April, just after Easter, Gemma contacts us for the first time in months, sending a profile of a boy, O—, who is about to turn four. She wonders if we might be interested. Yes, I respond after quickly reading through his profile, we are.
I will look back on this moment and think that our emotional vulnerability made us desperate for this particular child to work when we had always insisted we wanted a child much younger, under the age of two, as close to newly arrived in the world as possible. What else but our own vulnerability and need for the promise of another life, the promise that our own lives would have meaning beyond us, as our parents’ lives presumably have meaning – at least in part – because of our own existences, could explain our willingness to shift the boundaries of what we desire, let alone what we feel able to manage?
We have expressed interest in dozens of children and never been judged appropriate enough even to merit a first meeting. But O—’s social workers do want to meet us, and this feels like a sign that it might be meant to happen, even as we try to protect ourselves against further disappointment.
O—’s foster mother, Gemma tells us, thought he’d do well with two daddies.
SARA AND CATHERINE
Christina is a social worker. She is single. It is the mid-1990s. When I meet her, she has an adopted daughter, Sara, who is seven, and has just adopted Catherine, a four-year-old Korean girl. I meet them that summer when I am working as a ‘mother’s helper’ or ‘manny’ for a family who have a house on a lake in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.
Sara attends the same school as the two girls I am looking after, although she is on scholarship. She is wiry and loud and needy, seems to want constant reassurance, craves boundaries and then rebels against them. Christina is always patient and teacherly in her mothering. She and I have an instant rapport and we often go swimming together with the mother I’m working for and her two girls.
I spend many days with Sara and Catherine, who is adorable and cuddly, but also has a stubborn streak. She spent her first years in an orphanage, but what this means is that her needs were met from birth, even if imperfectly so. She was fed, clothed, kept warm, but perhaps not loved, unless we can imagine an orphanage worker who might have held her when she cried. She has an infectious laugh, likes to be cuddled and carried. She seems, for the most part, a child who has come through loss and landed on her feet.
Sara, on the other hand, was adopted from Boston’s foster care system. Christina tells me stories of Sara’s wild, hour-long tantrums in grocery stores when she refuses to buy her candy, the girl screaming, ‘You’re not my mother! I hate you!’ Christina calmly tells Sara that she is her mother, will always be her mother.
If someone as patient and skilful as Christina still faces such a response, how can adoptive parents with fewer skills possibly cope?
A couple of years later I see Christina and her daughters at a party. Catherine is flourishing. She wears an extravagantly ruffled pink dress and flits among the adults, telling jokes, making people laugh. She is socially astute, charming and confident.
Sara, now ten or eleven, is in the midst of a tantrum. She has perceived a minor slight against her. She seethes, pouts, sits in a corner crying. When she has had enough of everything, she screams.
Years pass. I fail to keep up with them, but now I go looking for clues, and realize that I am in search of reassurance. I find Sara online. She looks well. She works as an actress, has several credits to her name, is elegant, graceful, with a poise I sometimes caught glimpses of when she was a child, striking poses by the pool. She seems to have a good relationship with Catherine, who has made visits back to South Korea, even to the orphanage where she used to live, which looks like a bright and happy place, full of smiling children. And they both appear to have good relationships with Christina, so that it seems as though, despite the difficulty of those early years, things have turned out well, even kind of great.
Nonetheless, I’m not sure that the narrative of difficulty overcome, the promise of everything coming right in the end, is enough to convince me. I don’t know if I’m as strong as someone like Christina, or even if Andrew and I together are as strong and resilient as Christina was on her own.
ON PAPER
O—’s file, at least the parts of it to which we are given access, includes only a few photographs of him and a lengthy report ostensibly about his background, although it is almost entirely about his four siblings and parents and offers very little description of him or his early experiences. Nearly all of what we learn about his first year of life is, I come to suspect, a matter of supposition. Our sense of those first twelve months ultimately comes not from the file – which only paints a picture of the household, the parents, the older siblings – but from what people tell us, and we accept everything we are told without question.
O—’s parents have been resisting the adoption of their children, fighting it in the courts. When we first learn about O—, the case is still not settled and his parents have one last chance to appeal, although the social workers are confident the court will find against the young couple.
We are given the full names of the parents, so I go looking for information about them. I need to know what kind of people they are in a way that the report does not tell me.
This is not difficult. Intimate details of their lives are publicly available on their social media profiles, visible for all the world to access. There are baby photos of their children, photos of them at later stages, a photo of O— around the age when he and his siblings were finally removed from the home.
In photos of the parents themselves I find people who look nothing like the monsters I have been imagining. They are young, much younger than I, and although they must be in their mid- to late-twenties the way they present themselves strikes me as adolescent. To my relief, both have favourite books listed on their profile pages, children’s books, fantasy. I imagine meeting them at some point in the future. If they read, then these are people I could potentially talk with for five minutes or ten, even an hour, if circumstances required. Fantasy novels might provide sufficient material to build a temporary bridge strong enough to support us all for the duration of our interaction.
I mention to Gemma that we have looked at the parents’ profiles on social media, and that this was, to our surprise, reassuring. We feel positive. We want to move forward. We book a date for the boy’s social workers to meet us.
Richard and Megan arrive on a warm morning in June. Richard jokes that he would have liked to stay the night and see the city but Megan is anxious to get back to the countryside, so once they have visited another couple who are under consideration as O—’s potential adopters they will take the train home. We have no idea whether the other couple is same-sex or opposite-sex, whether they own their home, if they live in a flat or a house, if they have a garden or a dog, if they are British or foreign-born like us.
I want to ask Richard and Megan why they thought we’d be appropriate in our small rented flat with shared garden for a boy who is used to life in open spaces, but I’m too anxious for them to choose us to risk giving any reason to doubt.
Rich
ard is loud and affable. Megan is reserved, a little skittish. I have baked two kinds of muffin. They both eat one of each. Megan tells us that O— has lots of love to give, and would keep us on our toes.
He’s full of energy. He just doesn’t stop, but he’s a sweet boy, full of love. Full of love, she keeps saying.
She has brought other photos, more recent ones. We see his shock of bright red hair clearly for the first time. On his own, removed from the contextualizing scale of adults or other children, his age is difficult to judge. He looks thoughtful, a little wistful, sometimes smiling, sometimes pensive, trudging across fields on long walks with his foster father.
Cheeky, Gemma says, holding up a photo that shows the little boy with a glint in his eye, a smirk, rosy cheeks, a spike of red hair.
He does have a cheeky smile, Megan says, but he’s got a lot of love to give. A lot of love. He’ll need at least one long walk each day, maybe two, she says.
As if he were a dog.
Sometimes more than that, says Richard. He’s always on the go.
An hour later they have left and we try to get on with our lives, try not to invest too much hope in this. They are waiting on the court to hear the parents’ appeal, and that will happen in August.
Weeks pass and we assume they must be going with the other couple.
Then, late in June, Richard phones to say they would like to choose us, if we’re still interested.
At first, we aren’t sure what this means. There still seems to be an element of uncertainty given the pending appeal. But when we ask her about this, Gemma says that no one thinks the court will find in the parents’ favour.
And this means we should get ready, because it’s almost certainly going to happen.
Cautiously, we begin telling our closest friends and family. Our mothers are overjoyed, Andrew’s nieces and sister and brother-inlaw are thrilled.
But when I phone my father in Omaha, there is a stunning silence before he speaks.
I guess that means you’re never moving back here, he says.
We would move to the US if we could both find jobs there, I say, which is true, but finding two academic jobs in the same place is not easy.
Two days later, my father falls and breaks his hip.
YOU
Years have passed in your life. At the end of June in this year, not long after your fourth birthday, your foster mother tells you that you’re getting two daddies. Your friend Charlotte at school got two mummies and went away, and now it will be your turn. They’re coming next week to get you, your foster mother tells you.
But next week could mean anything to you.
Next week is tomorrow or tonight or yesterday, and you start asking when your daddies will be coming.
When the actual next week comes and the daddies do not come because they are not yet allowed to come, and your foster mother tells you that it will take longer, that the daddies are not coming, that she can’t say how long it will be, and this happens in the car park of the shopping complex where you go to play on the swings, you begin to scream.
No one tells us this until months later, no one tells us that your expectations were raised far too early, before anyone had made any final decisions, before anyone was certain that they were going to choose us, before we were certain that we would choose you. No one tells us that you have spent months being disappointed in us, in our failure to appear as promised, that we have already let you down, that we have already made you doubt our reliability, our commitment to you, to looking after you, before we have even had a chance to say hello.
CHILD PARENT CHILD
In July Andrew and I fly to Denver and then drive eight hours across Colorado and Nebraska to see my father. I think of the last time I made this trip, when I moved my father from California back to Omaha, and I think of an earlier drive, when I was twelve and my father decided he and I should try to fix our relationship by driving on our own to Colorado, stopping for a couple of nights at Fort Robinson State Park in western Nebraska, and how those trips alone with my father were some of the longest hours I have spent in my life, because there was so much to say and none of it could be said, not when I was a child, not even when I was an adult.
In the car with Andrew, imagining some future in which he and I and O— will be on this same road going to visit my father, perhaps only next year, I think about how different it will feel because I will make myself into a parent rather than a father – by which I mean, I’ll be a father in category only, but will have to inhabit the categories of both mother and father, providing what society so often insists is unique to each.
Andrew and I talk about how our lives will change. We discuss hypothetical parenting situations. We think about what will happen if O— has problems not revealed in the reports. We imagine future situations in which we will have to interact with his siblings and parents and extended family. We begin to imagine a life with him, a life changed by him, and we are full of excitement and a sense of readiness for however that life develops, whatever final form it takes.
But we know him only through the narrative of other people in which he is, at best, only fleetingly visible. In my experience, social workers are not natural writers. If the children they describe were characters in a novel, we would call them flat, two-dimensional, nothing but ciphers or caricatures or stereotypes.
Our picture of O— is composed of physical and behavioural traits and a few photos, but no sense of who he might be now, or what kind of person he might have the potential to become in our care and with our love. We have seen no videos, cannot imagine what he sounds like, how he speaks, the quality of his laugh or the timbre of his cry. The descriptions of him have failed to make him live except as suggestion, so he exists for us as a person of near total possibility, and in that rough outline of personhood I begin to endow him with the qualities I hope that he has, rather than waiting to discover the person he already is.
We arrive in Omaha to find my father discharged to a substandard rehabilitation centre instead of the retirement home where he has been living for the past six years. The facility is on the western fringe of the city’s suburbs in an ugly neighbourhood of strip malls and fast food outlets.
From the moment Andrew and I walk through the doors, we are faced with the archetypal nursing home nightmare that I remember from childhood school trips to sing Christmas carols. The building stinks of urine and faeces and overcooked, mass-produced food. Elderly residents sit goggle-eyed in wheelchairs, drool drizzling from their chins. In the staff there is a tone of voice, call it Midwestern Nice Gone Rogue, that I haven’t heard in more than twenty years. It is the flipside of all the superficial congeniality, artificial sweetness soured by a growling roar of rage that can explode without warning because the people who contain it live in constant denial of its existence.
When I ask questions, the nurses and orderlies act as if they cannot understand my accent. A man twice the size of me looks to a woman even bigger and says, as if I could not possibly understand his words, What did he say?
My father is in a shared room in the rehab wing. It is a space of weird angles, five walls of unequal length that produce a disorienting zone divided by curtains and lit with fluorescents which hum and pop and can never be turned off, even at night.
There are two televisions, both tuned to maximum volume on different channels. The other patient in the room looks near death. There is more medical paraphernalia than I can process: wheelchairs and walkers and bedpans and bed urinals and leg braces and compression socks and megapacks of adult diapers. On my father’s bedside table there is a stack of giant chocolate bars and on the chair several issues of the local newspaper. On the walls there is nothing apart from two mirrors, one for each resident.
I start making plans to have him moved to the rehab wing of his retirement home, a much nicer place, a nursing home on the model of a five-star hotel, which is clean, does not smell, and where no one sits around unattended or ignored. It is the kind of ‘graduat
ed care center’ that people like me feel persuaded to trust because it presents such a reassuring image, no matter when I turn up, no matter whether I have given the staff warning of my visit or not.
Before I can get my father moved back to the other place, I have to leave Omaha and return to New York for speaking engagements. He will be moved in a few days, I’m told, as soon as a bed is free and a social worker from the state can come to check that his needs will be met in the other facility. This seems ludicrous given that the other facility, the place that is his home, is so obviously better than the nightmare rehab centre he is in at the moment. How, after four decades with no such complication, is my life suddenly and continuously dependent on the will of social workers?
Back in New York, we visit two couples who have become friends over the past several years. They are both opposite-sex couples, both with four-year-old sons, Elijah and Jack. On the night we have dinner in Elijah’s suburban home, the boys are electric with the simple happiness of being together.
As we eat, they paint at an easel in the dining room, covering a sheet of paper with vivid blues that represent, for them, a giant chocolate chip cookie (a conflation, I suspect, of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster with the food of his greatest desire). Elijah’s older brother, Sam, keeps the boys entertained as the adults talk, and I marvel at how easy this life with children looks. If this is what family life is, I have no doubt Andrew and I can do it.
We stay overnight with Elijah and Sam and their parents. The next morning, while Sam shoots hoops in the driveway, Elijah lazes peacefully next to me watching TV on the couch as he succumbs to a cold. His mother takes a picture of us together and I think how, in another year, we might be visiting them with O—, he and Elijah and Jack playing anarchically together. And then, when Elijah’s father comes home from the bakery with a muffin instead of a donut, Elijah has a tantrum. But it’s a tantrum of the kind I would expect. It lasts ten minutes, there’s a little four-year-old foot stomping and crying and anger, and then it passes. I can do this, I think. Andrew and I can do this together.
The Ginger Child Page 16