In desperation, we ask if he’s hungry. Yes, he’s ready for dinner. We had intended cooking here, but he has no interest in the pasta we have on hand.
He wants a sandwich. Another ham sandwich. And we are too tired to argue.
We find a farm centre with a shop and a café where he orders a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread. This is also our chance to eat, so we both order sandwiches and sit in the children’s play area, watching O— eating happily, occasionally sticking out his tongue at us, kicking his feet, squirming. And then he’s done. He’s had less than half of it.
When we arrive at K—’s and T—’s house, their daughter and grandchildren are there. O— calls the daughter ‘auntie’ and the grandchildren his ‘cousins’. It occurs to me for the first time that this couple who have looked after so many foster children, who have their own adult child and grandchildren, are only a few years older than we are, no more than in their late forties.
We are meant to spend the evening alone with O— and his foster parents, give the boy his bath, read him a story, put him to bed, and come fetch him on Thursday morning before flying to London. I had imagined this last night as one of gentle and careful reassurance, us demonstrating that we would look after him just as well as K— and T—. But O— is suddenly caught in a game with the other children and Andrew and I recognize that we will never get him bathed and put to bed so long as the whole family is present. There is no indication when the auntie and cousins might be leaving.
How will we ever be able to extricate him – and ourselves – from this extended foster family who seems not to want him to go? Is it even right to take him from them? Are they not the family that he actually needs? There is no question that they love him, that he fits into their lives, has a place here, and has definitely made his mark.
Already, in some essential way, I know that we are giving up on this, without having spoken to each other about what we are feeling.
We say goodbye to O—, but he’s not interested.
He seems not to care that we’re leaving.
He does not hug us.
He does not ask us to stay.
He does not ask us to give him a bath or put him to bed. He seems totally unconcerned by our departure.
He is immersed in the family that has raised him since he was twelve months old. For more than three years they have been his family and loved him and treated him as their own.
His bond is with them, not with us.
By the time we get back to the B&B we are in crisis. We rehearse everything that seems to have gone wrong, everything that feels unmanageable. We have both been distressed by the fact that we could not speak to each other about anything of substance for the whole day, we who have done nothing but speak to each other for fourteen years, every day, sharing everything. We have both been upset by the feeling that this child has suddenly come between us and silenced us, on this most critical of days. We don’t know how to understand what we have seen, but the boy we have met seems to bear little resemblance to the child who has been described to us over the course of the past six months. And on the basis of what we have observed, we begin to imagine a future in which we might have a permanent duty of care.
We have seen none of the boy’s social workers since Monday, have not spoken with any of them since Tuesday.
We phone our friend R— who has been checking in with us regularly these past few days. We explain the situation, everything we have noticed, everything that has happened, how overwhelming it feels.
She listens, she asks gentle questions, she says there would be no judgement against us on her part if we decided we could not do this.
We cannot bring ourselves to phone either of our mothers.
We cannot bring ourselves to phone any other friends or family.
If there is only one person we can think to call, what happens when there is a much more serious crisis? The sense of loneliness and isolation is central to the complex terror of this moment. I feel torn apart by the urge to run away and an equally paralyzing determination to stay and see this through.
We phone Adriana, our senior social worker. We tell her what we told R—. She is alarmed that we have heard nothing from Marla, and astonished that we were allowed to take the boy for such a long trip on our own.
A museum like that, it was simply too much, she says, too overwhelming. It should have been something small, local.
Yes, we say, we can see that now, but it has given us a glimpse of problems not reflected in the files, problems that no one ever articulated to us over the last six months. I tell her what the head teacher told me, the concerns that she voiced for the first time, yesterday.
But it is clear that Adriana does not want us to change course. She tells us to stick with this. There will be difficult times, but it’s impossible to know anything for certain. He may come through it all brilliantly.
But that note of uncertainty is ultimately what helps us make our decision. Perhaps there is nothing that could not have been healed by a secure family life, but in this present moment of crisis, one that is as much about the political as the personal, it is a hope in which we find ourselves unable to place our trust.
If we had both been British, if the families that are scattered across the United States and South Africa were instead concentrated here, could be called upon to come to our aid, to babysit, to give us a break when we needed –
If we had close friends living near us in London, the kinds of friends we could phone in the middle of the night if there were an emergency –
If we were an opposite-sex couple who did not also have to negotiate social acceptance or rejection or even ordinary tolerance of our union and the family we might become each day of our lives –
If we had grown up here and understood instinctively how this society works, how class and its constraints operate, how and why we signify in the ways that we do –
If Hillary Clinton had not lost and America did not in this moment seem a place in which we might never choose to live, as we had thought for some years we might –
If all of those things were true, then perhaps we might have been the right people to adopt this child.
But they are not. And we are not.
I don’t remember whether the tears start that night or only the next morning, but we talk until very late, past midnight, and come to no resolution. I find myself arguing against giving up. We worry what our friends who have supported us will think, what our colleagues and families and mere acquaintances will think. We even worry what the foster parents will think.
We worry most of all about what this will do to O—.
But we also worry what it will do to him if we proceed as planned and everything goes to hell. Would that not be worse than disappointing him now?
We sleep separately, Andrew in the bed, me on the couch. Not because we are divided but because the mattress is terrible and every time one of us turns over the other wakes.
In the morning, we get up hours before dawn.
THURSDAY
The tears start again quickly, but it’s not me who’s crying and that is what makes it so alarming. At this point, in the fourteen years we have been together, I have seen Andrew cry – really cry – only once. Now he is in floods of tears, burying his face in my neck, my chest. He says he is terrified of losing me and fears that this boy will occasion that loss. He is terrified of a life in which we go whole days without being able to speak to each other. He is terrified of struggling to form a bond and then finding, perhaps years later, that the claims of the birth family will always be stronger. He sobs uncontrollably. I hold him. I ask whether we might think of taking the child on a trial basis, for a week or two, and seeing whether he adjusts, whether we adjust.
But what if he doesn’t? What if we don’t? Wouldn’t it be worse, Andrew says, to take him to London and then to say no, we can’t do this, you’re going back to foster care? Wouldn’t it be kinder to end this now? I try once more, I suggest it again
, but I also feel – and it’s a feeling I do not share with Andrew in this moment, do not share with him for many months to come, not until he reads these words in a draft of this book – a sense of relief that we are not doing this, because nothing about it feels right.
It feels instead as if we entered into this, considering a child much older than we ever wanted, because we were desperate and grieving. Something about this situation, Andrew says, has triggered his grief for the loss of his father, precipitating a grieving process he did not manage at the beginning of this year, and now all of that grief, not just for his father but also for the idea of becoming a parent and having the kind of relationship with his own child that he had with his father, has coalesced around this boy who does not know any of this, who cannot understand it, who should never have been put in this situation, just as we should never have been.
I phone Marla. I tell her that we cannot do this. At first, she does not understand.
I say it again, more clearly this time.
What, not at all? she asks.
Not at all, I say. We cannot do this.
I try to explain to her why we have reached this decision.
But everything was going so well on Monday, she says.
Yes, but you have not seen us since Monday, I say. You haven’t even been around.
She does not try to talk us out of it. In retrospect this seems strangest of all. As if she expected this was a possibility.
She comes to meet us at the B&B. We give her his car seat. We give her the pad of paper and markers and crayons. We want none of it. Throughout all of this, Andrew is crying, sometimes sobbing. He cannot speak to her.
She asks that we follow her to the nearest town, thirty miles away, where the council offices are. She wants us to have a debriefing with her and Richard.
It is rural rush hour. A trip that should take half an hour takes twice that. Marla is on her phone, holding it to her ear, steering with one hand. At a traffic light, she takes out a brush, starts brushing her hair vigorously, almost violently. When the light turns green, she doesn’t put down the brush, keeps drawing it through her long blonde hair as she drives.
When we reach the offices, Andrew says he can’t manage this. I get out of the car and tell Marla that I will come in alone. No, she won’t accept this, as if she could compel us to do what she asks. She knocks with her knuckle on the passenger window, badgers Andrew to come inside, pestering him until he relents.
We have to be buzzed into the building. There are teenagers lounging outside who look like they might recently have been released from prison. In the dingy room where we sit down with Richard and Marla there are toys scattered everywhere, as if a group of animals had been set loose to wreak havoc. Richard in particular seems barely able to contain his anger with us. They ask for an explanation. I rehearse again what I already said to Marla on the phone.
To his credit, Richard says that it’s certainly better that we reached this conclusion now, better that we listened to our doubts and did not proceed than make things even harder for the boy.
We say how sorry we are, and we mean this. We feel the guilt of saying no to O— more acutely than any other feeling of grief or loss or disappointment or embarrassment at our failure to follow through on what we had planned.
On the drive to the airport, Andrew continues to cry, sobbing. He cries on the walk from the car rental return to the terminal. I take his arm, support him, have to stop when he suddenly stops, unable to proceed, and coax him forward. He cries at the check-in desk and through the security screening and at the gate and walking from the gate onto the plane and in the seat on the plane and then, at last, he stops crying ten minutes after we are in the air for the breathlessly short flight back to London.
I have held myself together all morning. I did not cry from the moment we woke up, through our hours of conversation and decision, through the debriefing with the social workers, through the drive to the airport, through the check-in and boarding and flight, through the trip from the airport back into central London and home on the Underground. I did not cry or even feel moved to cry until I walked in the door of our flat and then, reaching the top of the stairs, I walk almost blindly, without thought, with no more energy, over to the couch in the living room, collapse down upon it, and sob. I have never sobbed like this in my life. This is sobbing over which I have no control whatsoever. Andrew comes over and holds me, asks if I’m crying because I regret the decision we’ve made. No, I don’t regret it. I’m just so sad that it didn’t work out. And what I don’t say, because I can’t get the words out between sobs, is what Andrew said earlier this morning: that I fear, as he fears, that this might have been our only chance at having a family.
I am grieving for that.
We close the door of the bedroom full of books and toys and bright pillows and photographs of San Francisco and Cape Town. We do not open it for days. Perhaps weeks. We cannot open it. We cannot bear to look at it. It contains the child’s toys and clothes. It contains the ruins of our hope.
At night, unable to sleep, I hear the ADM saying to her colleagues: You see, I was right, they weren’t an appropriate match. They run away from trauma. They just can’t face it.
AFTER
We go to a two-day conference that Andrew and a colleague had organized a year earlier. She undertook to run it alone when we knew that Introductions were going ahead. It is a way of not being at home alone with each other and the room that was meant to be O—’s.
I tell a friend who will later become a colleague that I will write about it, that it will come quickly, I have to write about it to understand what has happened, but then I find that the pain of writing about it is so great it takes almost another year before I can begin in earnest, and even then, when the pain should not be so sharp, weeks pass during which I cannot bring myself to turn to this project, because every moment remembered is agony, every description of what happened scrapes off the scabs, rubs salt deep in exposed tissue, lights a match and holds it against my heart.
I cannot escape the sense of profound loss coupled with anger at a system I feel certain did us and O— a grave injustice. And containing it all is the feeling that we disappointed a child who did not deserve that to happen, who needed a different kind of family entirely.
As I write these words I have a pain in my chest and tears in my eyes. As I reread and revise them, the pain returns. I wish we had never tried. I wish we had not wasted four years of our lives struggling to achieve something at which it seems we were destined to fail. One day, when I start scrolling through the photographs stored on my computer, I am shocked to find ones of us taken over the course of those three days. I had forgotten them, blocked them out entirely, and their sudden appearance on my screen creates a series of small explosions in my gut and my chest and I find myself doubling over, swiftly quitting the application so that I don’t have to look any more at the child’s face, at my face in his presence, at the joy I felt being a parent in those few captured moments.
A parent for not even three days.
Is that, I wonder, the only parenthood I will ever know?
In the weeks that follow, commuting to work on tubes and trains, I will suddenly find myself overwhelmed and trying to hold it together until I can stumble into a restroom or my office and cry. When a well-meaning colleague asks me questions I talk as long as I can, wait for her to leave, close the door, crawl under my desk, lie down on the floor, and cry for twenty minutes before I have to compose myself to teach a class.
Near the end of November, I ask Andrew whether he might want to get married at Christmas. We made plans back in September to go to the Hebridean island where his sister and brother-in-law live, to spend the holidays with his mother and nieces, and my mother and her partner, and of course with O— as well. It was going to be a big family Christmas. We rented a cottage for a week. Non-refundable. All the close family will be there.
Yes, he says, let’s do it.
For a month
we have been battling with Marla to arrange for the pick-up and shipping of O—’s toys and clothes. In desperation, I phone Adriana and ask her to intervene. If this isn’t taken care of before the holidays, I say, I’m going to donate them. I can’t have them in the flat any longer.
She suddenly sounds furious.
It would be incredibly wrong to get rid of them, she says angrily.
Wrong even though, back in September, when the ADM said no to the match, K— herself told me we could just donate everything? The boy wasn’t attached to any of it, not to the toys or the clothes or the books, that’s what she said. He has no sense of attachment to anything, not even to objects.
But okay, I say, then you make the effort to get Marla to arrange shipping.
At last the pick-up is arranged, and we say goodbye to all the belongings that stood briefly as the sign of the child’s intended place in our lives. Before Andrew’s mother arrives, we dismantle the bed and sell it. A family that lives nearby purchases it for their growing daughter. I give away the child-sized easel to neighbours who have a three-year-old. I want all of it gone, everything that speaks of a child. I unscrew all the cupboard latches and locks and throw them away. All the paraphernalia that remains I donate to a charity shop.
We don’t usually take some of these things, the woman at the shop says, but I am already halfway out the door, cannot possibly be asked to take home what I can barely stand to contemplate.
The books from friends we keep, carefully packed away, waiting for a day when they might yet be put to use.
We try to throw ourselves into the festivity of the holidays but neither of us feels any joy. As we drive to Scotland with Andrew’s mother in the back of the car, I think of how impossible a day-long drive to Glasgow from London would have been with O—, how the ferry crossing would have been fraught with anxieties about him running off and falling overboard.
Is it February? It might be January. In any case, time has passed. Adriana asks us to come for a meeting to discuss what happened and how we might wish to proceed. Although she is sympathetic, the system needs someone to blame.
The Ginger Child Page 23