The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  59. V. E. Flango and C. R. Flango, “How Many Children Were Adopted in 1992?” Child Welfare 74, no. 5 (September/October 1995): 1018–1032. Also “Intercountry Adoptions Reach All-Time High in 2000,” Adoptive Families 34, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 12. Unfortunately, this essay was completed before the 2000 U.S. Census figures on adoption became available.

  60. Carp, Family Matters, 1.

  61. Beth M. Waggenspack, “The Symbolic Crisis of Adoption: Popular Media’s Agenda Setting,” ‘Adoption Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 57–82.

  THE FAMILY NOBODY WANTED

  CHAPTER 1

  In the Beginning

  I DIDN’T yearn for a career, or maids and a fur coat, or a trip to Europe. All in the world I wanted was a happy, normal little family. Perhaps, if God could arrange it, Carl and I could have a boy first, and after that, a little girl.

  God didn’t arrange it.

  In fact, as our doctor regretfully informed us, Carl and I couldn’t have any children of our own. No children, no sticky fingerprints on the woodwork, no childish tears and laughter, no small beds in the other bedroom. Just barren, empty years, stretching aimlessly into a lonely future.

  I felt quite provoked with God about this, at first. Most of my friends were having their first babies, and some were starting on their second round. The interminable stork showers, where I had to watch complacent Madonnas in maternity clothes preside over their tissue-wrapped gifts, always sent me home for equally interminable weeping spells in my pillow. I couldn’t pass a layette display in a store window without getting a lump the size of a baby rattle in my throat. Every time I walked down the street and saw a fulfilled mother strutting along the sidewalk behind a baby buggy, I was possessed with violent jealousy, envy, and acute self-pity.

  Carl, who is a patient man, finally had enough.

  “For heaven’s sake stop mooning, or you’ll have us both neurotic,” he said. “If having a baby is that important, why don’t we adopt one?”

  The more I mulled the idea over, the better I liked it. Wasn’t motherhood compounded more of love than biology? Once I made up my mind, I was eager to cradle our adopted baby in my arms, to bathe him and give him his bottle, to dress him in fuzzy kimonas and little sweater sets. Warmed with a breathless, motherly inner glow, I planned what must be done.

  First, the nursery. I cleared out the extra bedroom and began work on the drab, stucco-finish walls. All the old calcimine had to be scrubbed off, and the walls scraped clean. Carl, who had recently quit his job as a journeyman painter and gone into business as a painting contractor on his own, was obviously too busy to help; so I borrowed brushes and some pale-pink paint, and did the nursery walls and woodwork myself. Then I sailed around downtown Santa Ana, the southern California town where we lived, on a buying spree. A secondhand store yielded a crib and chest of drawers, which I painted blue. Mother Goose decals came from the dime store, to march around the dado and intrigue the future owner of the room. The best crib mattress money could buy, some pink and blue blankets, small white sheets—everything must be ready.

  “All right,” I told Carl, the morning after the pink and blue rag rug had been laid, the room aired, the crib made, and the sheets turned down, waiting. “Let’s go adopt our baby today.”

  I thought it would be easy. All we would have to do was to walk into the nearest orphanage, specify size, shape, sex, and color, and carry our new infant home.

  I was bitterly disappointed.

  The so-called “orphanages,” we discovered, weren’t full of homeless waifs, just waiting to be adopted. Most of the children were living there on a temporary basis, because their homes were broken by divorce, prolonged illness, or other incapacities of parents. Even bona fide orphans usually weren’t free for adoption; somewhere for each child there was a relative or guardian, unable or unwilling to provide a home at that particular time.

  “If you’re looking for a baby,” the orphanage superintendent told us kindly, “most couples find one through a licensed adoption agency.”

  He gave us the addresses of the two which had offices in Los Angeles. I visited them with high hopes; again my hopes were flattened. Each agency had a waiting list as long as from here to the moon, and a dozen eager couples clamored for every baby needing a home.

  “We’ll send a social worker to make a preliminary study of your home,” one agency director said. “We must warn you, however, that it may be two or three years, possibly more, before a baby is placed with you. We must find a child whose background is perfectly matched to yours, and it must also be a child who is not a better match for anyone ahead of you on our waiting list.”

  It was a dim and distant hope to cling to, but I clung. That is, until the social worker finally made her visit.

  “I’m afraid we can’t even put you on the waiting list at this time,” she told us. “From the information you have given me—no money in the bank, no insurance, a huge mortgage on your house, in debt for your painting truck and equipment—” She raised her eyebrows. “I am sure you can plainly see that, at this point, you are financially unstable.”

  “But Carl is doing so well,” I protested, “considering that the depression is still on! Anyway, he has all the jobs coming in he can handle, and already he’s one of the top painting contractors in Santa Ana.”

  “Yet his business still is a new one,” she said. “Let it get out of the red and on its feet. Wait until your debts are cleared up and you have money in the bank. Then come back and apply again.”

  That looked far enough away to be forever. My last flicker of hope went out like a snuffed candle, and I started weeping into my pillow again.

  “Pull yourself together and find something else to think about,” Carl said. “Why don’t you get some friends and start a junior women’s club in Santa Ana? Or take some postgraduate work at the junior college?”

  Although he was gentle with my grief, he was not particularly disappointed that we couldn’t adopt a child. He liked children well enough, but he wasn’t in any hurry to have one; he had problems enough at that time, without taking on any new ones. It would have been simple if only it were debts worrying him, or the high cost of pig-bristle brushes, or trying to keep good painters on his crew. No, his problems were bigger than that. He was having a tussle with God, too.

  Back in his high-school days, Carl had felt a call to the ministry. Either the call was too faint or the pressure of environment too strong; after several frustrated tries, he had given up the idea of working his way through college, and had gone to work as an apprentice painter. He was president of the Epworth League at Santa Ana’s First Methodist Church when I joined the group and first met him. I never suspected then, in fact not until several years later, when we married, that Carl was taunted by urges to be something more than a house painter.

  “It was just a wild dream,” he laughed, when he told me. “Just an idealistic kid’s daydream.”

  As the first months of our marriage passed, and then the first years, I knew it was more than that. I might be troubled because we had no children; but Carl was troubled over the one thing that could be deeper, a man’s searching of his soul to find its purpose and meaning. He came home from work every night tired, looking older than his twenty-eight years, his face and hands flecked with paint, and dropped with great weariness into his chair.

  “Painting doesn’t satisfy the whole you, any more than the Junior Women’s Club or my classes at the college satisfy the whole me,” I said, one summer evening. Carl was active in the Junior Chamber of Commerce and was heading up Santa Ana’s official Clean-Up, Paint-Up drive, but I knew that these things were not enough for him, either. “If we get the business out of the red and the mortgage paid on the house, if our application for adoption is finally accepted . . . After a few years, if we finally get a child—”

  Carl took my hand. “That would make you pretty happy, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “Even if we
eventually do have one or two children—what I want most in the world—I couldn’t be happy. Not unless you were satisfied with life, too.”

  “Distressing, isn’t it?” Carl said wryly. “A man just two years short of being thirty, who still hasn’t found himself! At least I know what’s wrong.”

  “What?”

  “It’s hard to explain, exactly, in words. But I feel there’s a voice down inside of me, inside all of us. Call it God speaking to us, call it the soul, call it conscience or whatever you like. If we turn to it, we can find help in knowing how to make the most of our lives. But that voice doesn’t speak very loud. If we aren’t still, if we don’t provide solitude for listening—if we don’t try to listen, then we can’t hear it. It’s easy to drown out that voice. Just the bustle and noise of everyday living can drown it out.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “A man can be so busy making a living, he puts off making his life. And then one day he wakes up and finds he’s too old, and it’s too late.”

  “You’re not too old,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Carl said. “Maybe not.”

  The next day I bicycled out to the apartment house which Carl and his crew were painting. I leaned on the handlebars, watching Carl hoist huge ladders and planks as if they were toys, adjusting a swing stage. I liked to come watch him when he was painting; he handled his brush with the quick, sure strokes of an artist. While I was watching, the noon whistle blew. As Carl climbed down the ladder and went for his lunch pail in the truck, he saw me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He brought his lunch over, pushed the standard down on my bicycle, and dusted off an upturned bucket for me to sit on. He sat on the grass beside me and took off his paint-spattered white cap; the tight band had pressed a mark on his prematurely thin blond hair. He smelled of turpentine and paint thinner.

  “I didn’t sleep much last night,” he said. “Here, have a sandwich.”

  “I’ll eat one when I get back to the house,” I said. “I know you didn’t. Every time I woke up, I knew you were awake, too.”

  “And this morning I’ve been trying to let my soul talk to me, instead of telling it to shut up and quit bothering me. If you’re with me, Helen, I’m going to give up my business. I want to go back to college and study for the ministry.”

  “I’m with you,” I said.

  “It’s asking a lot. I’ll need four years of college, then three years postgraduate work at seminary. I don’t know when you’d get the baby you want.”

  I shrugged. I had let my maternal feelings become numb, because it didn’t hurt so much that way. “That’s all right. It would be a long time anyway.”

  “We’re just on the verge of making the business a financial success,” Carl said. “If I sell out now, I’ll sell at a terrific loss. We’ll be lucky to break even.”

  “We’ve started from scratch before.”

  “Our friends will laugh at us,” he warned. “Our relatives will think we’ve lost our minds.”

  “What was it somebody said? ‘If God be for us, who can be against us. . . .’”

  “That’s Paul, I think.” He laid down his sandwich and took my hands in his. “It won’t be easy.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve found that out. The things you want most out of life are never easy.”

  Carl and I enrolled at the University of Redlands for the fall semester. After selling our house, truck, equipment, paint supplies, and all, and with the remaining payments on everything settled, we had barely enough money to get started. We paid one semester’s tuition apiece, one month’s rent on a little cottage in an orange grove, and bought enough groceries to stock the shelves. Our remaining few dollars purchased about half the books we needed, and then we were flat broke.

  “Everybody says we’ll never make it,” Carl said. “We’ll show them.”

  There were many times during that first year at Redlands when I thought that maybe we wouldn’t make it. We tackled any kind of odd job we could find, so that we could keep eating. Carl cleaned chicken houses, and painted for the university on Saturdays; I had a part-time desk job in one of the women’s dormitories, and wrote free-lance articles for the American Girl magazine. For weeks on end we lived on boiled dry beans, and it was a gay day when we splurged by adding a dime’s worth of hamburger. I gleaned dandelion leaves and other edible wild greens, to cook or eat raw, as a vitamin balance to our restricted diet.

  We were closest to going without food the time we ate the rattlesnake meat. I had a small can of it, acquired many years ago as a souvenir, and I kept it on my kitchen-window shelf because it was so pretty. I never intended to eat it.

  The minister of the University Methodist Church teased us about my souvenir. Carl was helping him out as youth director, and the minister was often at our house for either business or pleasure. The first time he saw the can, he picked it up and admired it.

  “When are you and Carl going to open this?” he asked.

  I laughed. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s purely for decoration. You’ve no idea how hungry we’d have to be to eat that!”

  Then came the day when our cupboards were as bare as old Mother Hubbard’s. We had nothing for breakfast and nothing for lunch. That evening, when classes were over, we stood in our kitchen and looked around, and when our eyes met we knew what we had to do. Carl reached for my gaily colored little can, with the gold lettering that said: Rattlesnake à la king—canned in Florida. I took two cards and scraped enough flour from the corners of the flour drawer to make a couple of biscuits. They were a little hard, since I had no shortening or milk, but they weren’t too bad. That was more than I could say for the à la king.

  Rattlesnake is supposed to taste like a cross between chicken and tuna fish. Any resemblance ours might once have had to either certainly had been lost in the long passage of years since it had been canned. It turned out to be something closer to cotton strings in a curdled cream sauce. We ate it because, after all, it had calories.

  The minister dropped by that night for a visit. When he went to the kitchen for a drink of water, he reached for the can, which was back in its usual place on the window shelf.

  “When are you two going to eat this rattle ” he began, and then broke off in surprise when the can came up light in his hand. He turned it over and stared. Carl had reamed it open from the bottom, washed it out, and replaced it on the shelf for me; a few drops of water still clung to the inside. The minister shook his head, then took out his wallet and laid ten dollars on the kitchen sink.

  “Don’t argue with me,” he said. “I know what your cupboards are like, without looking. Go buy some groceries.”

  At the end of that school year, Carl attended his first Methodist Annual Conference, the statewide meeting where church business is taken care of and appointments of pastors to churches of the area are made for the coming year. When Carl came back from the conference he announced, “Our money worries are over, honey! Start packing, we’re going to Cucamonga!”

  “Cuckoo—what?” I said. This was several years before Jack Benny and other comedians began using Cucamonga as a gag name on the radio, and I had never heard of the place.

  “It’s a little village between here and Los Angeles, on Foothill Boulevard,” Carl told me. “They raise grapes in the valley, oranges and lemons toward the mountains. I’ll have the student church there, preach on week ends, go to school on week days.” He hugged me. “Just think, a salary of nine hundred dollars a year! And that’s not all, because there’s a house to live in, too!”

  We moved into the parsonage, a sagging one-story house across the drive from the square-towered stone church on Archibald Street. The first month was busy, with fixing up the house, trying to marshal my weak memory into remembering the right names to go with the right faces in our little congregation, and, above all, getting used to the idea of being a minister’s wife. When I began to feel at home in my new role, with a little time on my hands, I foun
d that my old dreams of having a family just wouldn’t stay suppressed any longer.

  “This little sleeping porch, right next to our bedroom,” I told Carl—“wouldn’t it make a wonderful nursery?”

  “Stop looking so wistful,” Carl said. “No agency in its right mind would give us a baby, now.”

  “No harm in asking, is there?”

  “Now just wait a minute,” he protested. “I’m making nine hundred a year, not a month. I’ve got three more years at Redlands. After that, three more doing graduate study at seminary. It’s going to be all I can do, just to get through school. How do you think we could support a baby?”

  “Would you let me have one, if they offered us one?”

  “You’re being silly,” Carl sputtered. “Of course, after the way you’ve stood behind me, and all I couldn’t—But anyway they wouldn’t, and even if they did, we’d never—”

  “You know what you kept quoting from Matthew, whenever we hit the low spots last year,” I reminded him. “You said that if we had the faith of a mustard seed, we could move obstacles as big as mountains. I think we need a child, and somewhere a child needs us. And I’ve got the faith.”

  My letters to the adoption agencies were filled with the poignancy of my longing. When the summer was over, a social worker came to call. She visited pleasantly in our small, tan-papered parlor, the worn rug on the floor between us, rain drumming wet fingers on the tall, skinny Victorian windows. She took our case history from her brief case and checked over the details with us.

  HUSBAND’S NAME: Carl M. Doss

  BORN: Long Beach, California

  AGE: 29

  EDUCATION: Graduated from Santa Ana High School; one year at the University of Redlands

  WIFE’S MAIDEN NAME: Helen Louise Grigsby

  BORN: Sanderstead, Surrey, England, of American parents

  AGE: 27

  EDUCATION: Graduated from Maine Township High School at Park Ridge-Des Plaines, Illinois; one year each at Eureka College in Illinois, Santa Ana Junior College, and the University of Redlands.