The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  “But that’s not true!” she sobbed. “That’s why I’m all broke up like this, because I knew that getting her adopted was the best thing I could do for her. I can’t give the kid anything. Besides, all my friends know what—how she—” She blew her nose. “With you, my kid would of had a chance. But now that I seen her, I’m too selfish to give her up. She’s too darn cute, like a little doll. Like all the dolls I never had when I was a kid. . . .”

  We tiptoed out and left her with her baby. To his eternal credit, Carl didn’t once say, “I told you so!”

  On the way home, Donny asked, “Daddy, what’s the matter with Mama?”

  In a gentle voice, Carl said, “Climb up in her lap and give her a great big hug, son. Mama doesn’t feel happy inside, today.”

  . . .

  Later, I could see that I was luckier than some who dabbled in the gray market. In any placement made outside of a licensed agency, the mother may demand her baby back any time during the minimum of six months to a year, the time it takes to make an adoption final. What if we had brought the little girl home, and the mother had changed her mind several months later, before the child could be legally ours? It would have been like the swooping down of death, to have her pulled up by the roots from our lives and our hearts.

  Later I knew I was lucky, but at that time I thought the bottom had dropped out of my world. I wasn’t ready to give up, but it was the end of hunting babies from independent sources. I dragged Carl back along the weary rounds of the licensed agencies, back to the old, familiar offices.

  The international aspect of our family started quite unexpectedly.

  “Too bad you aren’t Turkish or Portuguese,” the receptionist in one agency said. “We have a little Turkish-Portuguese boy we can’t find a home for. The Portuguese don’t want him because they say he looks like a Turk. If a Turkish family could be found, I suppose they wouldn’t want him because he looked too Portuguese.” She shrugged. “That’s what happens with those mixed-blood children. Nobody wants them.”

  “Nobody?” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Nobody wants them. They are classed as unadoptable, same as any child with a defect.”

  The idea shocked me. Children weren’t like oranges in a packing house, to be sorted over, those with defects thrown in the discard heap. They were individuals, equally loved in the sight of God.

  “In the first place, I wouldn’t call mixed ancestry a defect,” I said. “Would you, Carl?”

  Carl shook his head. “That’s not fair to the child, to label him like that.” I knew he was hit in his soft, idealistic heart.

  Again the receptionist shrugged. “Don’t blame me. Society puts the labels on, I don’t. That’s just the way it is.”

  “If I get a child,” I said, “it’s like getting a Christmas package. It’s what’s inside that counts. The color of the wrapping doesn’t matter.”

  “There’s your second child,” Carl said. “If nobody else wants him, let’s take him home and be done with it.”

  “I’m sure the agency wouldn’t let you have him,” the receptionist said. “The rule here is to perfectly match each child to the prospective parents.”

  I didn’t believe her. “Oh, I don’t think they’d hesitate to let us have him, if they can’t find a matching home.” I was that naïve.

  When we were admitted to the inner sanctum of the head social worker, the lady quickly quashed the eager light on my face. “I wouldn’t even consider such a placement,” she said. “The child you speak about is very dark-skinned, and you are both fair.”

  “Color is a superficial thing,” Carl said. “It wouldn’t make any difference to us if he were black, if he needed a home.”

  “He could be brown or pink,” I added, “red or yellow. We don’t care.”

  The social worker slammed her pencil on her desk and rose to show us to the door. “Either you people haven’t given this wild idea the proper thought,” she snapped, frost on her words, “or else—” She didn’t finish, but I could see that in her mind she was committing us to a mental institution. “I would rather see a child raised in an orphanage, than by parents who look so different. Crossing racial lines is against all our principles of good social-work practice.”

  At home, I asked Carl, “Are all social workers that intolerant? Do you suppose that somewhere else we could—”

  “All right,” Carl said. “All right. You find us a little boy or girl of mixed race. But only one, and then we quit adopting, understand? I don’t know how I’m going to work my way through college with two children as it is.”

  I wrote to every agency, in California and out of it, that I had ever heard of. I wrote to the state welfare departments at each state capital, asking for lists of licensed adoption agencies in that state. Night after night, when Donny had been tucked into bed, I typed letters to these hundreds of agencies across the United States. Many were close enough for us to make trips for personal interviews; others sent application forms, asked questions.

  “Why do you want to take a child of another race?” each agency asked pointedly.

  I said we wanted another child because we loved children and didn’t want Donny to grow up an only child. A surplus of homes existed for the fair and perfect child, while nobody wanted those of mixed or minority race. So we preferred the child who needed our home the most.

  “Won’t it be hard not to show prejudice toward a dark-skinned child?” they all wanted to know.

  How could we show something we didn’t feel? We believed that all races were basically alike underneath, the same in range of intellect, the same in capacity for moral and spiritual growth. Variation in skin color between one race and another was little greater than the wide variation already existing within any one race. Differences were there, and certainly made humans more interesting than if all were stamped from the same cookie cutter, like so many gingerbread men; but we didn’t feel that such differences were important.

  “Do you really think you can bring a dark-skinned child up to your social standing?” the agencies asked. “Don’t you realize that it is more likely such a child would drag his adopted parents down to the level of the subjugated minority groups?”

  We were not concerned with social standing. Skin color was an accident of birth. Such an accident should not give us the right to lord it over those who are born with darker skin.

  “How about Donny?” we were warned. “Won’t he grow up to be ashamed of a brother or sister of mixed blood?”

  Growing up in a tolerant home, Donny doubtless would not understand or appreciate the prejudices of those who felt themselves too good to associate as equals with the majority of their fellow men. Always we would be welcoming friends of other races in our home, and anyone small enough to make snide remarks about Donny’s friends—or brother—might find that he had lost Donny’s respect.

  “But what about the darker-skinned child in your family?” the agencies asked. “Won’t he feel unhappy and inferior, growing up among white people?”

  Any American child of dark skin must learn to adjust to a “white” society. We knew we couldn’t lighten the skin of any minority-race child we adopted, but we could help lighten the load which society indifferently allowed him to carry. We could teach our child to understand and pity those who were saddled with prejudice.

  They kept asking questions, but none gave us a child. One social worker even admitted that her agency had placed no children of mixed race in the past; “unadoptables” had simply been refused agency help, since the chance of placement was so slim.

  “I’m so discouraged,” I told Carl. “All I want is to give a home to one lone child that nobody wants, and I can’t even do that.”

  I felt tired and discouraged, but so did the whole world. The second World War had exploded the uneasy peace of the past two decades. American boys were dying in Salerno and Guam and on the Normandy beachhead. On top of my own small troubles, I grew depressed with the additional burd
en of the world’s tragic sorrows. We were packing up our books and clothes and cooking utensils, preparing to move back to Illinois, where Carl would continue his graduate work; but I had no heart for the trip.

  “How can you be so enthusiastic about going East?” I asked. “We’re not getting what we want—”

  “You’re not getting what you want,” Carl corrected.

  “All right, I’m not getting what I want. Even worse, the whole world isn’t getting what it wants. Where is there general happiness in the world? What place even has the basic Four Freedoms for everybody?”

  “We can’t make the world better by just giving up,” Carl said.

  I looked at my husband, packing dishes in a barrel, his face calm.

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “These last four years have been so long and hard, the world is such a hopeless mess—I don’t see how you can still look forward to three more grinding years of school. What’s the use?”

  Carl wrapped another cup in newspaper and fitted it firmly into the barrel. He stood there looking at me. I could hear our old alarm clock ticking on top of the high-oven stove, and I could smell the fragrance of orange groves on the June breeze which ruffled the curtains at the open kitchen window.

  “What’s the use of my schooling?” Carl said. “Religion is the only force big enough to save man from his own destruction. Science can produce things—and tremendous power. The world desperately needs emotional and spiritual maturity to know how to use these things, this power, for its own good.”

  “All right, preacher,” I said. “I guess I’d have a little more hope for the world, if I had a little more hope for myself,”

  “If you want to see good things come to pass, you have to work for them, and have faith,” Carl said. “Faith for yourself and faith for the world. Remember the mustard seed?”

  “I just didn’t know there were going to be so many mountains,” I said.

  CHAPTER 3

  And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

  FOR three years I had marched around the Jericho citadels of adoption agencies, tooting our family horn, and at last the stubborn walls came tumbling down. Donny was presented with not one little sister, but two.

  Carl had begun his last stretch of graduate work at Garrett Biblical Institute, on Northwestern’s magnificent campus overlooking Lake Michigan. The Methodist Rock River Conference assigned him to two student churches in northern Illinois: one at Hebron, a small town proud of its cows, its corn, and its championship basketball team; the other a country church at Alden, five miles west. Our parsonage, on Highway 47 in Hebron, was a two-story frame house on a corner lot, with several box elders and a pie-cherry tree around the front yard. On weekdays I lived there alone with Donny, because Hebron was too far for Carl to commute daily. He had a room at the Garrett dormitory and drove home only over Saturdays and Sundays.

  As soon as we were settled in our new parsonage, I charged upon all the adoption agencies in the area. Then, showing that often when it rains it pours, two babies turned up almost at the same time.

  Laura came first.

  I still remember that bright fall day, with the sky larkspur-blue, the maple leaves and the cornfields rustling yellow, when an adoption agency called long distance from Chicago.

  “We have a baby girl for you,” the social worker said. “Two months old, a darling little butterball with brown hair and eyes. She’s Eurasian. Her mother was Filipino-Chinese, her father English and French.”

  It was hard to stay by the phone, when I wanted to turn cartwheels around the room. “When can we come for her?”

  “She may be seen any day next week. If you think you’d like her, you may take her home.”

  If, I laughed to myself! No matter what she looked like, I was ready to take her into my heart and love her like my own. I was even mentally naming her already. I would call her Laura, after Carl’s mother, to please my husband.

  Carl cut classes Monday morning so we could drive down for our new baby. At the hospital, a white-masked nurse pushed through the glass doors from the nursery, carrying a blanketed cocoon which cooed and waved two pink fists.

  “She’s beautiful!” I burst out. The baby had almond-shaped eyes the color of milk chocolate, and apple cheeks. Carl reached for her first, then handed her to me to hold. “Can we take her home, now?” I asked the nurse.

  She nodded. “If you’ll give me the clothes you brought, I’ll have her ready by the time you’ve signed the papers in the office.”

  In the car, with Carl driving and Laura cradled in my arms, I was so happy that I sang “Rock-a-bye Baby” and hummed Brahms’s “Lullaby” all the way home.

  “Gee, she’s little,” Donny said, when he greeted us at the front door. He took Laura’s tiny fist in his hand. “Can I show her around the house, now?”

  Two weeks later we brought Susan home.

  Although blond and blue-eyed like Donny, this wee infant was considered unadoptable. Not only was she frail and sickly, but there was also a disfiguring, tumerous red birthmark on her forehead. With her sallow pinched face, her lifeless straw hair, and her swollen red eyes, she looked more like a miniature, shriveled-up grandma than a baby. She was a blighted bud, with no indication that she would ever flower.

  Carl objected violently, at first. “I’ve got nearly three more years of school ahead of me yet,” he exploded. “If I don’t know how I can support tivo children, how can I take a third? And a sickly one at that?”

  “But nobody else wants her,” I said. “Maybe we can pull her through. We couldn’t leave her at the hospital all unwanted, could we?”

  “I guess we couldn’t,” Carl said, and then he shook his finger in front of my nose. “But no more, understand?”

  Two new babies in the house, in addition to three-year-old Donny, kept me so busy I began to wonder how I could stagger through another day. In Cucamonga, when Donny was a baby, Carl had been home nights to take turns on the night feedings. Here at Hebron, I had to manage alone.

  Laura called for a bottle every four hours around the clock, and Susie needed one every three hours around the clock. All day long, all night long, too, I was getting one baby up, changing her, holding her bottle, rocking her awhile, and then putting her to bed just as it was nearly time to be getting the other baby up again. In between the round of feedings, there were batches of formula to be made up and kept cold without a refrigerator. Dishes piled up, the house always needed cleaning, and I never seemed to catch up with the laundry. The parsonage had no laundry tubs or automatic hot water. On our old kerosene cookstove I heated buckets of water, lugged them upstairs, and did the family wash in the bathtub.

  Long after midnight, down on my knees by the bathtub, wringing out heavy sheets by hand until blisters rubbed raw, dragging down two weary flights to the basement to hang up the dripping wash, I would sometimes wonder, Is it worth all this to have the little family I wanted so badly? With bleary eyes I would turn the pages of the calendar, counting the days until the girls would be off their night feedings and I could really go to bed at night, instead of just flopping on the couch between early-morning bottles.

  Donny, always into mischief, didn’t help matters. Around the house he usually was into whatever he wasn’t supposed to be into. When he wandered off, looking for a playmate, he could be exasperating, too. Sometimes he wandered beyond bounds, and I had to comb our little village for him. Sometimes he did unpredictable things, like the time he copied older boys jumping from a chicken-house roof, and cracked a bone in his foot, so that he had to return for a spell to crawling on all fours until the cast came off.

  And he was forever losing his shoes.

  One day he came in from play in his stocking feet, and I said, “Where are your shoes?”

  “My shoes?” he repeated, automatically lifting one foot. He stared, and surprise illumined his small face. He seemed as incredulous as if pixies had just that moment snatched him barefoot.

  “Think, Donny,” I
said. On our budget, a pair of lost shoes was a major disaster. “Where do you remember them last?”

  Donny scratched his blond head. “I guess they fell off in the grass.”

  I took his hand. “Come show Mama which grass.”

  Soon we were standing on the sidewalk around the corner, in front of an empty lot covered with a summer crop of grassy weeds, solid packed and over waist high.

  “Out there, I think,” Donny said. “Someplace.”

  I groaned.

  “Shall I go in and get them?” he volunteered.

  “Please do,” I said.

  He dived in and was swallowed in the green jungle. I could see by the waving path above his trail that he was cutting a shallow circle. He emerged with grass seeds in his hair and sticking out of his ears.

  “Too bad,” he announced. “I can’t find any shoes.”

  “Too bad for you,” I said. “You’re not through looking. Why did you ever throw them in there, anyway?”

  “Didn’t throw ’em in,” Donny said. “I was a cowboy riding, and the bad men were chasing me, and I couldn’t stop.” I sent him in again, and after two or three more desultory forays into the green world, he came out and plopped on the sidewalk. “Nothing but grasshoppers in there,” he announced. “Let’s go home. I’m hungry.”

  I posted him down at the corner, where he could see our back yard and the baby girls taking sun baths in the play pen.

  “You sit there,” I ordered, “and keep an eye on your sisters while Mama hunts. You call me if they cry.”

  Head down, I plunged into the grass, parting the green spears ahead of me and swimming along with a hard-pulling breast stroke, peering through the undersea dimness. After an hour my back felt as if it had been hammered into a sickle. My face was flushed and I had weed seeds in my hair and eyes and nose. I pulled more seeds out of my ears and gasped for breath. I had found one shoe, but I could hear the thin and unmistakable wail of babies crying and I was ready to quit. As I plowed my way out of the grass, I stumbled on the second shoe.