In theory, the whole adoption process can collapse during this period. Prospective parents may find that the child is not the right match for them after all. Or, the child’s social workers may conclude things really aren’t going as well as they should. Either side can end it with little or no warning. But in general, the expectation is that social workers have done their jobs properly, that they know both child and adopters well enough to make sure everyone is compatible, that they aren’t going to meet and tear one another apart, that the yearning the child has for parents and the yearning the adopters have for a child will be so powerful that any doubts are subsumed by the hopefulness of the introductory moment and the relief everyone feels at finally getting, and holding, what each so desperately wants.
As we prepare our scrapbook, I wonder what happens if your social worker does not understand who you are, what you think, where you come from, what you believe, how you imagine yourself in five or ten or thirty years, how you see yourself as a person in the world. What if every photo you provide of yourselves for your profile your social worker regards as too sombre, as inadequately ‘fun’, as too ‘cultured’ or ‘serious’ or ‘foreign’? What if you are worn down by the despair of waiting and made vulnerable by familial loss and grief and find yourself saying yes even when doubts remain?
Andrew and I spend days, literally, creating a scrapbook that gives a taste of our lives. It is a true picture, but also a more exuberant one than the life we lead. We have spent the past fourteen years living exceptionally quietly. We are either at work working or at home working or doing things like cooking or exercising or reading or watching movies. We go to museums and galleries. We occasionally attend concerts or the theatre. Our greatest excitement – the time when we are most the selves we feel ourselves to be – is when we leave Britain. Something about this country constrains us, prevents us from being us in the way we are in South Africa or America, or less frequently in France or Italy or Spain or even Sweden. Britain is the office from which we escape to be our real selves for two or three months every year.
For the scrapbook, we choose photos of us together, our family, our closest friends. We plan page layouts and text and lettering. I buy crafting supplies. We take pictures of our home and O—’s new bedroom and the neighbourhood park. As I paste down the photographs, outline them with washi tape, and carefully letter each page, writing first in pencil and then going over the pencil precisely with marker, I find there is something both preparatory and therapeutic about this crafting, as if in telling a story about us and where we have come from, I am also explaining to myself once again why we have chosen this particular way of making a family.
In doing this I find myself falling in love with the idea of this child, and the prospect of the three of us as a family. Excitement and happiness dominate over uncertainty and trepidation, even though such negative feelings are still present in the background, behind and beneath the positive ones. All of this seems like the right decision at the right moment in our lives.
Gemma makes a trip to meet O— and his foster parents in the West Country. She returns to London with a snippet of video recorded on her phone but it hardly tells us anything about him. He looks taller than I imagined, very tall for his age. He could be six years old instead of four. There is something about him, but I can’t articulate what it is. Perhaps it is only that his affect, or his way of moving through space, or the register of his voice as he speaks in the video are not as I expected.
Full of energy, Gemma says. I hope you’re ready for this.
At last, the courts rule once and for all against O—’s birth parents, who have continued to resist his adoption. I look at their social media profiles. In the days following the judgment, they both post cryptic public messages that suggest a sense of the world ranged against them, of suffering from a kind of generalized injustice. The mother’s post includes photographs of all five of her children before they were taken from her. Photographs of herself now, photographs of her children then. Duplicates of her, reproductions of her face, her body, her trace living within each of them, developing upon their own small faces. When I look at O—’s photograph, it is his mother I see. I wish I had never gone looking for information about her, had never seen her face in the first place.
I realize that photography will be something we have to negotiate for the rest of our lives. O—’s mother will continue to share whatever pictures she or the rest of her family may have from his first twelve months. Given the existence of facial recognition software, this means that we will never be able to post a photograph of O—, even on private social media pages, without the risk of revealing who we are and where we are to a family that has demonstrated their entirely understandable resistance to the adoption of their children.
I begin to think about policing the photography of friends and family, telling people they cannot take a picture of my son for fear that his biological parents will find him. How will that be sustainable? Some adoption support groups counsel parents to put masks on their children when they march in an annual adoption parade. At first this struck me as counterproductive, even unseemly, since it appeared to suggest a sense of shamefulness about being adopted. But now I understand that this is a means of protecting the privacy of those new adoptive families, to prevent determined birth parents from locating children the state has taken from them.
Is this the beginning of a process of hiding ourselves, of drawing a circle around our family, trying to make ourselves invisible? If it is, then what are the limits of such defence? What kind of monitoring will it require? Can we assume O— will even go along with it? What happens if he creates a social media profile without our knowledge, with no privacy settings, and starts posting selfies? I’m not fool enough to think we will be able to control what he does online as he gets older. Overnight, his birth family could find him, and so find all three of us.
With that realization I feel the ground beneath us shifting again, as if we no longer have the certainty of stable lives. I wonder what such a sense of vulnerability and precariousness does to a couple, and to a family that is trying to create a life of stability but also of openness. I never want O— to feel as if he is in the adoption equivalent of witness protection. I never want him to notice that we monitor the way people take pictures of him. I want him to feel normal and safe. I don’t want his life or ours to be constrained by paranoia, and yet it seems as if it must be, for his own safety, but also for ours.
This is not a scenario I ever imagined when I dreamed of becoming a parent.
We head west out of London, caught in mid-week traffic, a long journey that takes even longer than it should, so that we can meet the foster parents, K— and T—. They live in a quiet village, formerly industrial but gradually turning into a bedroom community for larger towns and the city that is an hour’s drive distant. Over the last few months, I have been studying images online of their house, the surrounding neighbourhood, the nearest school, trying to discover what O—’s daily life looks like, hoping it will tell me something about who he is, more than the little I can discern from his file or the photographs we have of him, my memory of the video Gemma took.
In my mind O— is always sweet and calm and expectant, sometimes excitable and tearful, but always amenable, ready to be loved and reassured. I do not imagine a terrorizing Romeo, but a self-contained and affable Will.
At the end of a cul-de-sac on the edge of the village the foster parents’ detached bungalow is painted bright brick red, its front courtyard thick with topiaries and climbing roses, overgrown and riotous with life, while the back garden borders open fields. We sit in our car waiting for the appointed time. A pink convertible pulls in down the road and a few moments later a woman with platinum blonde hair strides up and knocks on the window.
This is Marla, another social worker on the team, and the one who will actually be co-ordinating things from now on.
O— is staying with other foster carers for the day. As far as we know,
he has not been told about our visit, and this suddenly strikes me as weirdly, deeply unfair. Somehow, I had assumed that he might be here. Surely, it would make sense to meet the child before we go any further, even if just for a few minutes, even if he was not told who we were? I want to know who he is, how he presents in the world, how he engages with me. Concerns about whether he will fit into our lives have vanished. All I feel now is a desire to speed the process forward.
My chief anxiety at this stage is what K— and T— will think of us. I don’t assume they have ever met a same-sex couple. I suspect that their idea of people like us may be built on what movies and television have told them rather than direct experience. Any actual encounters might not have registered as such or hewed to a version of queer identity very different to our own.
Flamboyant, girlish, lisping.
Camp.
Effete.
Perhaps we are all of those things and I no longer see it.
And what would be wrong if we were? Nothing at all. If Andrew and I had grown up in different places in different times, we might be. But we aren’t, I don’t think. And perhaps that is part of the problem.
When we meet, the foster parents are friendly, a little matter-of-fact. I can understand what K— says but T—’s accent confounds me and I lose half his words. The incomprehension is mutual: most of what I say he asks me to repeat two or three times, and then he looks away or moves the conversation in a new direction, if you can call our exchange of words a conversation. Overlapping monologues. Each side mystified by the other.
I ask questions about the town but neither K— nor T— is forthcoming. Questioning seems not to be part of their idea of social exchange. One talks about the weather and the child who is the point of connection between us, nothing else. I am trying to be friendly in a very American way, asking questions to show interest, but I begin to suspect that my curiosity looks intrusive, even aggressive.
Marla sits on the edge of the sofa and talks us through plans for the coming weeks. The assumption is that next week’s Matching Panel will approve us. Everyone believes this is going to happen since O—’s social workers are in favour of us, our profile suggests we are up to the task, and our own social workers also support it. We have renewed our background checks and health clearances, so once the panel gives their decision we should be clear to proceed.
K— says she will bring most of the boy’s clothes and toys to the panel, because it is expected that we will be coming to get him only a couple of weeks later.
He has so much, so many clothes and so many toys, that we won’t manage it all in one trip, not a chance, K— says. I think of Romeo, the boy in my story, and the way I imagined foster parents who provided only the bare minimum. K— spends everything she gets from the state and more on the children she fosters, that much is obvious. She loves them deeply. Listening to her talk about O—, I have no doubt about that. For all intents and purposes, he has been her child for more than three years, has learned to talk and walk under her and her husband’s loving care.
It is only later that I will come to appreciate the full power of that love.
O—’s bedroom is sparsely decorated, his many clothes packed tightly in the wardrobe and dresser, toys in a giant plastic bin. The whole house smells of fabric softener and air freshener. Artificial, floral. Everything is scrupulously clean.
There is nothing on the walls. No art. No posters. No calendars. There are no stuffed animals, nothing soft or cuddly or cute. I think of my own childhood bedroom, how chaotic it was, how littered with fluffy toys. O—’s toys are all made of plastic, hard and shiny. Most of them make noise and require batteries. These will have to go, I think to myself, quickly processed out of use, replaced with natural, quiet things to fit our quiet lives and the paper-thin walls between our flat and the neighbours’.
But how I loved my own plastic toys, my Star Wars action figures and spaceships and shiny pink ray gun.
He wants two footballs, one for each of his daddies, K— says, so you can kick to him at the same time.
He will be disappointed. We won’t be playing football, or at least I will not. Perhaps Andrew will manage it, the kicking and rough play, the boy who wants to play with robots and toy guns, a boy perhaps not so different from the boy I have forgotten I was, muddy and swinging from trees and addicted to Saturday morning cartoons my mother considered too violent.
When he came, K— says, I tried to bathe him but only my husband could do that. He’s still that way. Won’t have me give him a bath. That’s why I said, he should have two daddies. He’s just not interested in women.
T— walks us to the nursery school where we meet with the head teacher. She tells us about the progress O— has made over the past three years. There is a scrapbook filled with his drawings, as well as photographs of him and his classmates. He looks happy, if a little distant. There is something in his expression, a quality I struggle to interpret. In some of the photographs he looks like a completely different person than the image I have begun to form of him in my mind, as if he is multiple, as if there are several different versions of him, each one wearing the face of his mother.
I ask the teacher if O— is exceptional in any way, either positively or negatively.
No, she says, he’s a very normal little boy, with a lot of love to give.
That phrase again, as if they have all been saying it to one another, the teachers and social workers, as if they have discussed it in advance, agreed on it as the best possible formulation to describe him.
As you can see from his drawings, his mark-making is coming along, she says.
Mark-making. Making his mark. Has he made a mark here, with this school, with his friends, with his foster parents? It is difficult to tell. I want to believe he has.
I look at the drawings, page after page of scribbles. No stick figures or houses or animals that I can discern. I try to remember what I was drawing at four, but perhaps it is a mistake to measure O—’s progress against my own.
Nonetheless, more than anything I’ve heard or read so far, his teacher’s reassurance convinces us this is someone we will be able to manage. If he is unexceptional in any way, just an average little boy, then there is no reason to think twice.
After all, a teacher would know.
A week later we return for the Matching Panel. K— attends, but T— does not, as if the input of the foster mother was somehow superior to that of the foster father, even though T— has had an equivalent duty of care.
Adriana, our senior social worker, has come from London to support us. There are half a dozen panel members, drawn from the social work team and the local council and other stakeholders. Who is a stakeholder in the life of a child up for adoption? O—’s own social workers, Megan and Richard, are present, as is Marla.
The questions are not so different from those we fielded in the panel that approved us as adopters. We speak fluently, we answer every question with confidence. Ten minutes after the meeting is finished, the chair of the panel tells us that the match has been unanimously approved.
I wonder when – if – the emotions of adoption will ever become less complex, less overdetermined than they always now seem. Every step generates not just one feeling, but a concatenation of different and sometimes quite contradictory ones. I am relieved because I feared we would not clear this hurdle, but also satisfied that what we were told would happen has come to pass. At the same time, I am also irritated that we should have been subjected to such interrogation in the first place and impatient to get on with things. Why can’t we just go get the child now, this moment, and take him home? He wants it, we want it, and surely the system in its own dysfunctional way wants it as well?
After lunch, we return for a planning meeting with Marla. She suggests that Introductions should begin in two weeks’ time, and while these might last for as long as a week or two, it is likely that only three days will be necessary. O— is anxious to start his new life, and frankly so am I. I can’
t imagine drawing it out. The shorter the better. Marla encourages us to find a nursery school as soon as possible because the boy needs his routine. She suggests that his foster parents might come back to London with us, to help O— get settled, but K— is quick to say she couldn’t, no, not possibly.
And why is that? Marla asks.
I wouldn’t be able to leave him, K— says.
You mean you’d want to bring him back with you? Adriana asks.
I couldn’t let go of him, K— says.
When Marla suggests that T— might come instead, Andrew and I hesitate. Adriana seems to read our hesitation, and says that really, it’s best in these situations if new parents are left to bond with the child. Better to say goodbye and make a clean start, and then the foster parents can come visit a few weeks later.
No, K— says. I couldn’t do it. My husband maybe. Not me.
But you’d be happy for O— to come back and visit you with his new daddies at some point in the future? Marla asks.
Just so long as I don’t have to see him in his new home. That’s what’s hard, K— says.
At the end of the meeting, T— returns with his car full of toys and clothes. We load what we can fit into our own car, give T— a handshake and K— a hug. She seems to have decided we’ll do and I take comfort in her tacit approval, this passing of the baton.
As we start driving back to London, the toys jostle and crash against one another, setting off alarms and sirens, shouting whole lines of dialogue from cartoon action figures so that we have to stop and repack everything. The smell of fabric softener is overwhelming, and beneath it I think I catch the scent of the boy himself.
The Ginger Child Page 19