The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  Meanwhile, in Omaha, there have been delays with my father’s move back to his old facility. A bed they thought was going to open up has not, and then the social worker is delayed in coming to see him and a bed does become available but the social worker still hasn’t come, and by the time she does come there is no longer an available bed.

  In the midst of these delays, my father begins to fall.

  He falls once, and falls again, and then, visiting the orthopaedic surgeon who performed the half-hip replacement in June, he falls once more, so seriously this time that he needs a whole new surgery, a full hip replacement, and I return on my own to Omaha while Andrew heads back to London to get our home ready for O—’s arrival.

  My father’s cousin and her husband drive up from Oklahoma to support us, and a former colleague does more than his share, has already done more than I could have reasonably expected from anyone. But I am aware as never before just how few people there are who will come to my father’s aid: a cousin, a colleague, and me. He has no other close family, stopped going to church years earlier, stopped having lunch with retirees from his old newspaper, stopped seeing former students for coffees and dinners. Without those circuits of support, it is left to me to decide what to do next and act on those decisions. There is no one else.

  If the first operation and the anaesthesia and trauma of the fall itself produced confusion, the second operation exacerbates it. He still knows who he is and who I am and who his friends and family are, but time and location no longer appear to have much meaning. The details of where he is and how he arrived here remain opaque no matter how many times I explain it.

  Some days in the aftermath of the surgery he thinks he is in an office building downtown. Other days he believes he is recovering in the newsroom where he spent so many years of his working life. In the mornings the nurses are editors or publishers or other former colleagues or sources. He treats his stay in the hospital as if he is on assignment, on a story. In the afternoons he says that he needs to interview the hospital administrator. He is certain that the doctors are afraid of him because of the exposé on medical malpractice he wrote for the local paper back in the 1990s.

  I try to get him discharged from the hospital to his old facility, hoping that a familiar space might help with the confusion, but despite my best efforts the hospital discharges him right back to the nightmare nursing home, and once again I throw myself into getting him transferred to his retirement home. This finally happens after two days of further delays as we wait for a room to open up – waiting for a bed to clear, for someone to recover sufficiently to move out of rehabilitation, or simply to die.

  At the start of trying to decide how to manage the life of a man who suddenly has as many needs as a four-year-old, sometimes as many needs as an infant since he cannot dress himself and cannot walk unaided, the only thing I understand clearly is that he can no longer live in his ‘Independent Living’ apartment, and probably should not have been doing so for at least a year or more, although he was insistent that he wanted to stay there, a decision I respected and supported. Now he no longer meets even the minimum requirements for ‘Assisted Living’. His daily needs are unpredictable. He cannot be trusted to make safe choices. There is simply too much uncertainty, which means the only choice is to place him in the skilled nursing wing.

  It is clear, too, that his confusion is not the result of any lingering side effects from anaesthesia as I had hoped after the first surgery.

  Some days he seems to live over the course of decades, moving back and forth in time. Some days his parents are still alive and angry that people are talking about them in the middle of the night. Some days I have just arrived from London, other days I have been gone for weeks rather than an hour to get lunch. Some days I seem to be in college or high school or living in New York, other days he is still married to my mother whom he divorced twenty years ago. One day I even seem to be standing in the place of his own father, a magnet for all of his frustrations and resentments and anger for my grandfather’s many failures as a father to him.

  And then some hours in those days my father knows exactly where and when he is, so that friends who happen to catch him in those moments, who see him when he is ‘on’ and visit for twenty minutes or half an hour, do not even believe – cannot be convinced – that he is anything other than his old self. Does he really need to be in this place? they wonder aloud. When will he be able to go back to Independent Living? they ask.

  I have no choice but to close up and relinquish his old apartment. In order to do this, I have to make decisions about his belongings. In a moment when he seems to have clarity, I record a conversation in which I ask him about every single item of furniture he owns, getting his permission to donate some things, sell others, and keep what is most precious to him in storage at my mother’s house. Even though they have been divorced for two decades, my parents remain on good terms, and apart from me my father trusts my mother more than anyone else.

  I try to leave him with everything that is most meaningful, and which might help him remember his life for as long as he can. I leave him his mother’s 1940s side table with inlaid wood, his favourite chair although it is now too deep for him to sit in, as many of his pictures and posters and photographs as I can fit on the walls of his new room. Although he no longer reads, I leave him all of his books and bookcases. I leave him his dresser and 52-inch television and DVD player and CD player and CDs and DVDs and ornaments and tchotchkes. I leave him his living will and make a copy for the administrators, so that they will know, as I do, that he wants his body left to science.

  But there is still so much stuff, things he cannot keep because there is simply no room. I spend the next ten days staying in his apartment, cooking for myself, sleeping in his bed, trying to minimize the cost of everything in the face of so many expenses that I cannot fathom how people without my father’s resources manage such transitions. Without money, everything would have to be thrown away, and in some cases even outright disposal bears a cost. Most charities charge for the collection of beds, until I finally find one that will take his for nothing. I deliver towels and bedding and kitchen supplies that he will no longer need to a charity helping Syrian refugee families resettle in the area.

  During those days, working from before sunrise until after midnight, I hardly stop moving. I drive all over the city, buying boxes and tape, making donations, meeting with lawyers, sorting out cable bills and phone bills and banking arrangements. In the apartment, there are files to be packed, bills to be paid, a life to be sorted out that has, I can see, become seriously chaotic since I last visited.

  I work myself to a standstill trying to get everything organized. I eat standing up, the same lunch every day: slices of tofu between slices of bread with tomato and lettuce. My clothes begin to slip off me. I buy a smaller pair of shorts, smaller shirts. I know that I have only so many days. Before I go to sleep, having spent another evening packing china and silver and old family photographs and my father’s reporting archives, his field notes and doctoral research notes and a life’s worth of correspondence, I calculate how many hours are left before I have to leave the city. I revise lists of what remains to be done before I can fly back to London, where Andrew in turn is working himself to a standstill trying to transform our guest room into a bedroom for O—.

  I know how much my father needs me but I find myself caught in bouts of furious resentment. I want to be in London with Andrew as he chooses the bed and dresser and toys and pillows. I want to be present to help him assemble the furniture and decorate the room. I want to be present for the preparations in anticipation of the arrival of the boy who will become our son, to have a final few weeks of calm and reflection with my husband before our lives change permanently. Instead, I am caught in a spiral of crisis management.

  When I walk down the hall from my father’s old apartment in Independent Living, through the communal living rooms and dining rooms, accompanied by the twenty-four-hour soundtrack
of easy-listening versions of songs from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, past the on-site hair salon and through the Assisted Living wing, past the giant fish tank and bird cage and the stained-glass light of the chapel, into the silence of the Skilled Nursing annexe and my father’s new room, a trip that takes ten minutes and is more than half a mile in length, I find him sitting in his bed or his new motorized easy chair, staring up at me, saying, Where have you been?

  I’ve been sorting out your life, I want to tell him, but I keep my tongue in check.

  At last, when his apartment is clear, when the movers have come to take the furniture we are keeping and the boxes that contain his files and have driven them off to deliver them to my mother’s basement in New York, ready to be shipped back to Omaha if my father should miraculously recover enough to leave nursing care and return to independence, I go to say goodbye.

  He knows why I have come. He will not look at me.

  HIDDEN

  As the idea of O— begins to settle in my daily thinking, I am haunted by this half-buried hope: adopting him does not rule out having a second child through surrogacy at some point in the future. I know what this thinking betrays: that an adopted child alone will not satisfy my desire to be a parent. My wish for a child is as much the consequence of a biological impulse to reproduce as a psychological and emotional urge to raise and educate someone with whom I hope to have a permanent bond, someone who will be present at the end of my own life, someone who might have grandchildren in whose faces I can see the inscription of my genetic legacy. Because it feels too shameful, too outrageously selfish, I don’t even share this hope with Andrew. Instead, I find myself trying to understand it, to process and tame it, by thinking about three stories that explore similar scenarios.

  The first of these is the extraordinary novel Agaat by South African writer Marlene van Niekerk. I read it when it first appeared in English translation in 2006, and over the last several years Andrew has been writing about it for his study of postapartheid South African fiction so that it has continued to be a part of our lives. It is the story of Milla de Wet, an Afrikaner farmer who informally adopts a physically disabled ‘coloured’37 girl in apartheid South Africa, raising the child as her own despite the disapproval of her husband and the local white community. When Milla becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son, however, she ejects the adolescent Agaat from the house, moving her into an outbuilding and forcing her to work as nursemaid to her baby, Jakkie. Milla’s betrayal traumatizes both her and Agaat in different ways, although Agaat embraces Jakkie, becoming a sort of surrogate mother to him.

  Brutal and unflinching in its examination of the way that biological connection is allowed to supersede affect in the heart of the adoptive mother, the novel suggests that any failure is chiefly Milla’s. Had she been willing to fight against her own and her husband’s racism and the racism of apartheid society and so allow Agaat to remain in the home, a de facto daughter if not a legal one, then Agaat and Jakkie could have grown up as loving siblings instead of child and nursemaid. Agaat’s furious resentment is reserved for Milla and her husband because they rescued her from a life of privation and abuse only then to reject and expel her from the heart of the home. As if to demonstrate her capacity to be one of them, she masters all the markers of Afrikaner domestic and pastoral culture, becoming a living archive of folksongs and folklore, an accomplished embroiderer and gardener and cook, and a more capable and knowledgeable farmer than either Milla or her husband. And it is she who stays behind to nurse Milla in her final sickness after Jakkie has emigrated, abandoning his mother and the farm.

  The book moves me to wonder: if we adopt and then have a child through surrogacy, will I be able to continue to keep O— as a child (not just as my child), to be sure that I never allow myself to turn him into a caregiver to the baby I might have, that I never ask more of him than I ask of that other, hypothetical child, that I continue to demonstrate to him he is as much my child as the one with whom Andrew or I would have a genetic link? I start imagining a lifetime of policing my engagements with O—, measuring out the love I give him against the love I give to that other child, my own child (I can’t help thinking), because I would want to do it correctly if we were to do it at all.

  I know that the social care system tries to enforce these boundaries while also undermining them. On the one hand, there is a natural expectation that adopted children not be tasked with the care of other children in the home (particularly biological children of the adoptive parents), or at least I think I remember being told this in our initial workshops. There is an expectation that adopted children should not be required to work for their place in the home, that we might give them ordinary chores of an age-appropriate kind, but perhaps rather less than we would give biological children. On the other hand, the system has demonstrated to us in countless ways that we will always be in the eye of the state, that they will always be watching to make sure we don’t fuck it up. We have the sense too that because of O—’s large birth family, the claims of those other people on his life, his love, and his future, will potentially always be greater than our own.

  The second story, a popular and banal one, is from Jon Robin Baitz’s soapy television series Brothers and Sisters, in which Kevin (Matthew Rhys), the gay son of the Walker clan, and his partner Scotty (Luke Macfarlane) try to start a family. After much disagreement, they decide to have Scotty’s friend Michelle (Roxy Olin) act as a surrogate. A year later, after Michelle has a miscarriage, Kevin and Scotty begin to explore other options, finally adopting nine-year-old Olivia (Isabella Rae Thomas), who has been in foster care. By chance, Kevin and Scotty later discover that Michelle lied, did not miscarry, and has been keeping their son, Daniel, secret from them. After initially resisting their demands to turn over the child, Michelle abandons Daniel to their care, leaving him not with them but with Kevin’s straight brother to be delivered to him and Scotty before she disappears from the series.

  Andrew and I watched these seasons of the show in the years we were trying to decide how to start a family. If anything, this dramatization of adoption, and the show’s characterization of the adopted child, helped reinforce my initial resistance. Olivia has the qualities I had come to think of – however subjective, problematic and incorrect this sense may be – as ‘adopted child energy’. I know that this is largely, perhaps entirely, a social and cultural construct, but it is one that repeatedly marks the adopted subject as volatile, as someone who will always struggle with attachment to her adoptive parents.

  I see this too in other depictions of adopted children, such as Suzanne ‘Crazy Eyes’ Warren (Uzo Aduba) in Orange is the New Black. Her middle-class parents, notwithstanding their best intentions, cannot save Suzanne from her traumatic beginnings or from the problems that only gradually become apparent, nor can they seem to help placing Suzanne in situations during her childhood that repeat the effects of those early traumas, and which make her feel her difference from other children. Popular stories like this often present the adopted child as the child with problems that cannot be overcome, even by the most loving and well-meaning liberal couple in the suburbs, those families that supposedly have all the material and intellectual resources to fix any problem. However brilliant and creative Suzanne turns out to be, she remains easily swayed, co-opted, usable as a pawn by the more powerful, and just as easily ostracized. Her early traumas remain largely insurmountable.

  Olivia in Brothers and Sisters also has hidden problems (her illiteracy only gradually comes to light), as well as biological relatives who contest the claim of the adoptive parents (her homophobic brother mounts an unsuccessful legal challenge to the adoption). But Brothers and Sisters also offers a consoling fantasy: that it is possible to reconcile the emotional and psychological needs of the adoptee with the sudden arrival of a queer couple’s own biological child, and that the pressures of the adoptee’s potentially bigoted biological family members can be managed, even domesticated, until everyone is able to live in a
state of harmony and openness. Although Olivia reacts badly to baby Daniel’s arrival, imagining that Scotty and Kevin no longer need or want her, they manage to reassure her so that everything comes right in the end. They become a happy and settled family of four, Olivia bonding with her cousins and shedding the insecurity of her attachment with implausible ease.

  I imagine this possibility: we will adopt and, some years later, perhaps sooner than we think, find a way to have a child through surrogacy, and we will do so with all the tenderness and care required to reassure O— that such a decision does not mean he is second best, that the biological trumps every other category of connection, as Agaat suggests (as indeed American Horror Story: Hotel suggests in its own fantastical way), and we will manage the dynamics of family life so that our adopted child will never feel himself less than a full member of the family.

  But how? How could that reassurance and management and negotiation of love and our own biases ever really be possible? How could O— be certain that such a decision was anything other than a mark of his insufficiency? Or, how could we ourselves be certain that he was certain of this? Are narratives that insist on the inescapable primacy of the biological in fact the ones that I have to listen to more attentively?

  The final story I begin thinking about is Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché. At first I assume that my return to a film I enjoyed and was perplexed by more than a decade earlier must have to do with my ongoing interest in the social and psychological effects of surveillance. But when I watch it again, I discover that isn’t the case. Not at all. I have forgotten that the film is also inescapably about adoption, about the promise and ultimate failure to adopt and the irreconcilability of the biological child to the one who, in this case, was meant to be adopted.