The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  PROPERTY OWNED: None

  OTHER SECURITIES: None

  BANK ACCOUNT: None

  INSURANCE: None

  The social worker droned on, going down the two pages of the questionnaire we had filled in. Here it comes, I thought, ready for a last-ditch argument about the things that are more important than money, such as families and love. I waited for her to suggest that we apply again in seven or eight years, when Carl was through college and seminary and settled in the full-time ministry.

  She didn’t.

  God bless her, she shut her portfolio, smiled like an angel, and said, “I have a baby for you.”

  Just like that. “I have a baby for you.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Then I shut my gaping mouth and tried to look reasonably bright. I knew I couldn’t have heard right.

  The angel smiled indulgently. “He’s a chubby little fellow with blue eyes, and a perfect match for you two.”

  “Where—where is he?” I stammered. “When can we have him?”

  “He’s in the city,” she said. “I’ll give you a note for the hospital, and you may pick him up any time in the next few weeks.”

  “Weeks!” I shouted, running to the coat closet. “We’ll go right now!”

  Carl studied the storm outside. “We’d better wait until tomorrow. The car—” He smiled an apology at the social worker—“the roof on our Model A leaks.”

  I flung my arms into my coat and grabbed an umbrella, waving it. “No matter,” I shouted. “I’ll hold this over the baby. Carl, you can wear my rain hat!”

  An hour later we were sitting on the edges of our chairs in the hospital and a nurse was laying our Donald in my arms. I had to blink a few times before I could see him clearly. He was six weeks old, and his blue eyes looked at me with a charming, blank stare. Even to the nearly bald blond head, he was a chip off his adopted daddy.

  I pulled back the blanket and touched his narrow head with tenderness. “Is he a forceps baby?” The nurse gave me a curious look, so I added lamely, “I just thought his head seemed sort of pinched in.”

  This brought a big laugh from the nurse. “He has a most normal and beautiful head. You don’t know much about tiny babies, do you?”

  “I never even held a tiny baby before,” I confessed.

  “You’ll learn,” she smiled.

  “Yes,” I said, laughing and crying at the same time in my great happiness. “Yes, I’ll learn.”

  That night Carl helped me fix a makeshift crib beside our bed. For his first few weeks, little Donald slept in a big drawer laid across two facing straight chairs. A quilt folded in the bottom was the mattress, a piece of oilcloth cut from my kitchen tablecloth provided a waterproof cover, and pillowcases were just the right size for sheets.

  Donny slept like a doll that first night; the next morning, when I took him up and dressed him for the first time, he seemed unbearably fragile, with arms and legs like matchsticks. I was afraid his limbs might break if I weren’t careful, and I picked him up and laid him down as if he were made of glass. The first time I took Donny for his medical check-up, I gasped when the doctor grabbed our baby by one elbow and the opposite leg and swung the poor infant up on the scales. The good doctor was amused at my wide eyes, my hand over my mouth.

  “His arms and legs won’t come off,” he soothed. “Babies are more durable than you think.”

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t bring myself to take chances. It was a month before I could trust myself to lower a soapy baby into a tub of water, and I was nearly as nervous about those first daily sponge baths. Not only did I need space on the round oak dining table for towels, the dishpan filled with warm water, clean diapers, pins, soap, talcum, swab sticks, baby oil, and all the rest of the requirements for the ritual of the bath, but I also needed space to prop my indispensable baby book. Unless I followed the book one step at a time, I was afraid I might leave something out or do something wrong. I was as serious as a small child at a circus, but Carl thought I was uproariously funny.

  “Don’t just stand there and laugh,” I told him the first day. “You could at least hold this book and read off the directions to me as I go.” I was testing the water with my elbow and worrying because I didn’t have a bath thermometer. The book said you ought to have a bath thermometer.

  “You don’t need one,” Carl said. “Put Donny in, and if he turns red it’s too hot, and if he turns blue it’s too cold.”

  “That’s an old joke, and not even funny,” I said. “Read what comes next, after the part where I remove his clothes and let him kick for five minutes.”

  “Wring the washcloth in warm, clear water,” Carl read, after finding the place, “and gently wipe the baby’s face. Take a fresh cotton swab for each ear and nostril, being careful to—”

  “Stop!” I cried. “You’re going too fast.”

  “By the time you get to the end of the chapter, the poor little fellow will turn blue,” Carl said, laying down the book. “Here, let me do it.”

  As the oldest in a spread-out family of six children, Carl had observed enough about babies to add to the natural self-confidence he had about any new venture. Without hesitation he soaped, rinsed, and dried Donny, slipped him into a shirt, neatly pinned the diaper, then tied on a white kimona.

  “Nothing to it,” Carl grinned, as he kissed his shining son.

  That week the women’s society in our church gave a surprise baby shower, with enough blankets and baby clothes to make Donny a well-dressed young man for the rest of his babyhood. The church people took Donny into their hearts, and Donny loved them right back. He was a most sociable baby, perhaps because he went everywhere with us, in his basket or in our arms, to church services, board meetings, house calls, and potluck suppers.

  By the time he took his first steps, he was a confirmed explorer, and his exploring nearly always got him into trouble. He was the original little Dennis the Menace.

  Since he was no longer able to sit reasonably still during the worship service, his roaming was confined to our fenced back yard during church time. One broiling summer Sunday, the high-school girl who was watching him in the back yard became engrossed in her Sunday school paper, and Donny climbed over the gate. Leaving his sunsuit where it had caught on the fence post, he toddled across the driveway and up the tall front steps to the open door of the church. Completely and unselfconsciously naked, he made a beeline for the pulpit, calling out cheerily, “Hi, Daddy!” as he eluded my frantic clutch from the front pew.

  His insatiable curiosity continually drove him to try out new things for taste. He’d put anything into his mouth that would fit and wouldn’t bite him first. I knew enough to keep such obvious dangers as iodine, laundry bleach, and kerosene out of his reach, but his imagination was more inventive than mine. To my knowledge he sampled everything from laundry soap to grasshoppers and shoe polish; and it was probably a good thing that many of the un-doubtable other things weren’t in my knowledge. I worried enough as it was.

  One day I found him on the floor with a torn-open package of winter woolens, playing marbles with the moth balls. Suspicious, I looked closer. There were sugary crumbs around his mouth. My heart started to panic in my throat as I snatched him up and smelled his breath. It reeked.

  “Donny,” I cried, “quick, tell Mama! You didn’t eat any of those white balls?”

  “Naughty, naughty, not eat nassy stuff,” he said solemnly. “Don’t taste good, nope.” He pointed to a chewed-up moth ball, spit out under the bed.

  I dashed to the phone and frantically dialed the doctor. Our doctor was used to this.

  “He couldn’t have eaten enough to harm him,” he reassured me. “Give him lots of bread and milk to wash it down. He’ll be all right.”

  Donny’s special weakness was for bottles. They fascinated him; if he had been Alice in Wonderland, he would have drunk himself tall, short, and clear out of sight in no time. He tried hair tonic, ink, concentrated vitamins, vanilla, vinegar, liquid shampoo,
and anything else he could lay his chubby little fingers on when no one was looking.

  “I keep things put away,” I sighed, as I dressed Donny in his little white suit to go see the judge. “About the only thing else I can do is to keep my fingers crossed. It’s a wonder we’ve raised him this far.”

  After Donny had first been placed in our home, a preliminary petition for adoption had been filed at our county superior court. For a year our home had been supervised by regular visits from the social worker. Now her report on Donny’s adjustment, and the agency’s approval of the adoption, had also been filed at the court; after several delays because of a crowded court docket, we had an appointment with the judge for the granting of the final adoption decree.

  As is customary in most adoption cases, the hearings were held in private session in the judge’s chambers, instead of in open court. We arrived early and waited in the corridor, restraining Donny from dashes to investigate the elevator buttons, dropped cigarette butts, and a spittoon.

  “I feel as tense as I did when I was waiting in the minister’s study before our wedding,” Carl said. “Of course the social worker said that there would be no trouble, that the adoption would go right through. But I’ll still be glad when this is over, and Donny is actually all ours.”

  When the judge received us in his chambers, it was something like a wedding, except that it was more in the mood of a civil one, rather than a church ceremony. The clerk of the court came in and asked us to raise our right hands and solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which we did. Then the judge talked to us, pointing out what we already knew, that this was a lasting and permanent obligation, that adoption would grant us the same legal relationship to our son as if he had been born to us, with all the mutual rights, privileges, and responsibilities of natural parents and children.

  This should be a ceremony in a church, I thought, with organ music and candles lighted, and flowers. These vows, which Carl and I were taking, were just as sacred and enduring and meaningful as the marriage vows we had taken six years before. Would it not be more fitting if we were all standing before an altar, the minister saying, “Do you take this child to be your lawfully adopted son, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do thee part?” And Carl and I could answer, with deep feeling, “We do.”

  The adoption completed, we each took one of Donny’s hands and went back along the corridor, down in the elevator. As we walked down the outside courthouse steps, Donny hopping between us and singing a tuneless song, Carl said, “Well, Helen, have you everything you need to make you happy, now?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  “What else?”

  “A little girl,” I said. “Donny’s such a sociable little boy. He ought to have a little sister.”

  “Oh, no,” Carl groaned. “Give my wife an inch, and she wants a mile.”

  “I don’t want a mile. I just want one more little baby.”

  “In the first place,” Carl said, “I’m much too busy going to school to be bothered by such a family load. In the second place, you know we absolutely couldn’t afford another one. And in the third place, lucky for me, I’m positive that no agency would let us have a second child in the first place.

  “I’m remembering that mustard seed,” I said. “I’ve still got faith.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Blind Alleys

  WE would never have had an interracial family if I had not been blocked by countless blind alleys in my search for a younger brother or sister for Donny. Asking to adopt another child was as futile as asking for the moon.

  “You should be thankful you even have a first child,” one social worker reproved me. “If you knew how many financially capable homes are on our waiting list, with no child at all, you wouldn’t even ask for a second.”

  I wasn’t discouraged, at first. Month after month we made the futile rounds to different adoption agencies. Endless hours dragged by in agency waiting rooms, with Carl muttering under his breath about the foolishness of the whole quest and trying to read snatches from his schoolbooks, while I jounced Donny on my lap. I was almost ready to give up, when friends began to suggest, “Try this doctor—he sometimes finds homes for babies of unwed mothers.” Or, “I know a lawyer . . .”

  This was not a black market; babies were not sold, like so much merchandise. It was rather a gray market, because nonlicensed parties who arranged adoptions, no matter how kind the intentions, were working outside the meaning of our California state law. A licensed agency is legally allowed to be a blank wall between natural and adoptive parents; although pertinent information may be exchanged through the agency, this does not include names or addresses. Natural and adoptive parents never meet, and it is best for the child that this is so. The agency also has a large number of babies to place, and an even larger number of homes on the waiting list, so there is room for choice in deciding on the best home for each child. Licensed agencies provide the safe and sane road to adoption; but for us, now, that road was apparently closed.

  Why not take the chance? I thought. If I wait until an agency will approve our home, Donny will be almost old enough to have a child of his own. I began to contact doctors and lawyers who might have babies to place. With mixed hope and fear, I jumped into the gray market.

  One night a doctor in a small maternity hospital in the city called me on the phone.

  “Do you remember the unwed mother I told you about when you were here?” he asked. “She’s anxious to leave the hospital in the morning, and wants to see her baby girl placed with a reliable couple first. She expressed a preference for a minister’s family, so I recommended you.”

  “We’ll come immediately, right now, tonight,” I babbled excitedly.

  Carl clapped his head, muttered under his breath, and went out to start the car. I was putting together a going-home layette from the nicest things I had saved of Donny’s baby clothes, when Carl came back, shrugging.

  “Take your coat off, Helen. The car won’t start.”

  He looked like a condemned man who had just had a reprieve. I shook him. “Honey, if you’re stalling—if you’re just trying to get out of this, be honest and tell me.”

  “Call back your doctor,” Carl sighed, “and tell him we’ll be there before noon. First thing in the morning, we can coast the car down the hill to the garage, and get it fixed.”

  As I dialed the long-distance operator with a shaky finger, I mumbled, heartsick, “I just know we’re going to lose that baby, unless we get there tonight.”

  “Now don’t you worry,” the doctor reassured me, when I got him on the phone. “There will be plenty of time to work everything out when you get here tomorrow. I haven’t told any others about the baby. The mother has said positively that she won’t change her mind. So don’t worry.”

  The next morning Carl put Donny and me into the old Ford and pushed us down the hill to the garage. When the car was fixed, we rattled into the city. I sat on the edge of my seat gripping the box with the baby clothes, while Donny bounced up and down on the seat between us. At the hospital, the doctor took us in for a brief introduction to the mother. She was sitting up in bed, putting on a liberal application of lipstick and looking quite pleased with the prospect of leaving the hospital.

  “If I ain’t glad it’s all over with,” she confided. “Now I can live again.” She looked us over critically, and nodded. “Yep, I’m glad my kid’s going into a preacher’s home. Maybe she’ll get a good raising, like I never got.”

  The doctor took us back to the nursery and put into my arms a baby girl with long-lashed blue eyes and soft curls of brown hair. Even Carl began to look interested.

  “I’ve delivered a lot of babies,” the doctor said, “but this one’s the prettiest yet, for one so young. Bright-eyed, too.”

  I fell in love with her immediately. So soon, so quick, she seemed like our very own. I hated to give her up to the nu
rse, although in an hour I would have her back in my arms to keep.

  “Now if you’ll step down the hall to my office,” the doctor said, “I’ll tell you what I know of the background. Then we’ll go over the papers which you and the mother must sign.”

  The unmarried mother, he told us, had only a fourth-grade education, and worked as a waitress in a cheap hotel. The baby’s father, a bus boy, disappeared before the baby was born. The mother could make legal arrangements to give her child to anyone, subject to later court approval; but if she just walked off and left her baby, she would be liable to arrest for criminal abandonment. If she wished to be dismissed from the hospital without her child, the legal relinquishment papers must be signed first.

  I found it hard to sit and listen to the doctor. I yearned to return to the nursery, dress our new baby in the clothes we had brought, and hurry home with her, safe in my arms.

  “Ever since the mother entered our hospital,” the doctor went on, “she has insisted she has no desire to keep her child. We have suggested several agencies here which could help her. There is one which would board her child for her while she gets on her feet. She just hasn’t been interested. She has refused to nurse the infant, even to see it.”

  With the papers in hand, we returned to the mother’s room. My premonition of the night before turned out to be true. She was sitting up against her pillows, her face tear-streaked, and in her arms was the blue-eyed baby. I knew, even then, that we would never take that baby home.

  The doctor looked surprised. “I thought you refused to see your child.”

  She nodded, sniffling. “Everything would of been much better, if I never did see her, too.” She looked down at the baby, and fresh tears streaked her heavy make-up. “That little red-haired nurse just busted in here a minute ago and dropped her in my lap. She—she told me to look real good at what I was giving away.”

  Carl gave the mother one of his understanding smiles. “Don’t you worry about us. If you’ve decided to keep your baby, I’m sure you’re doing the best thing. Who has a better right to raise that child?”