The Best American Essays 2015 (14 page)

When my husband and I married, we both saw ourselves as ambivalent about having children. Since then, aside from a brief interlude of semi-willingness, my ambivalence had slid into something more like opposition. Meanwhile, my husband's ambivalence had slid into abstract desire. A marriage counselor would surely advise a couple in such a situation to discuss the issue seriously and thoroughly, but, wrenching as it was not to be able to make my husband happy in this regard, it seemed to me that there was nothing to discuss. I didn't want to be a mother; it was as simple as that. And as if to prove that my reasons weren't shallow or rooted in some deep-seated antipathy toward kids, I decided to return to kid-related do-goodism. This time, though, I would not be going to the mall or buying useless art supplies. I would not stumble through the motions of being a role model. Instead I would go where I was really needed, where the mall was beside the point. So I became a court-appointed advocate for children in the foster-care system. It was there that I met Matthew.

There is very little that I am permitted to reveal about Matthew, starting with his name, which is not Matthew, as Maricela's is not Maricela and Kaylee's is not Kaylee. I cannot provide a physical description, but for the sake of giving you something to hold on to I'm going to say he's African American, knobby-kneed, and slightly nearsighted, and had just turned twelve years old when I met him. I cannot tell you about his parents or what they did to land their son in the child-welfare system, but I can say that it's about as horrific as anything you can imagine. They were permanently out of the picture, as were any number of others who'd tried at times to take their place. Matthew lived in an institutional group home with about seventy-five other kids. He'd lived in quite a few of these places over the years, and, bleak as they were, they'd come to represent familiar interstices between the preadoptive placements that he inevitably sabotaged by acting out as soon as he began to get comfortable. Like many foster kids, he felt safer in institutions than in anything resembling a family setting.

Court-appointed advocacy is a national program designed to facilitate communication among social workers, lawyers, judges, and others in particularly complicated foster-care cases. The advocate's job is to fit together the often disparate pieces of information about a child's situation and create a coherent narrative for the judge. This narrative takes the form of written reports submitted to the court and is supplemented with actual appearances in court, where the advocate can address the judge directly. Sometimes the information is simple: this child wants to play baseball but needs transportation to the practices and the games. Sometimes it's gothic: this child is being locked in her bedroom by her foster mother because she's become violent and some glitch in the insurance plan has temporarily stopped coverage of her antipsychotic medication. Though advocates are encouraged to develop a relationship with the children they work with, they are not mentors as much as investigators.

I'd been told that Matthew's problems were neither as simple as needing a ride to baseball practice nor as dire as being locked in his bedroom. During our first visit, he told me that what he wanted most was for me to take him to McDonald's. (The Happy Meal, it turns out, is the meal of choice for the unhappiest kids in the world.) But I wasn't allowed to take him off the grounds of the group home, so we sat in the dining hall and hobbled through a conversation about what my role as his advocate amounted to. (He already knew; he'd had one before.) In my training sessions, I'd learned that it was a good idea to bring a game or a toy. After much deliberation, I had settled on a pack of cards that asked hundreds of “Would you rather” questions: “Would you rather be invisible or able to read minds?”; “Would you rather be able to stop time or fly?” Matthew's enthusiasm for this activity was tepid at best, and when I got to questions like “Would you rather go to an amusement park or a family reunion?” and “Would you rather be scolded by your teacher or by your parents?” I shivered at my stupidity for not having vetted them ahead of time.

“We don't have to play with these,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Matthew said. This turned out to be his standard response to just about everything. It was delivered in the same tone regardless of context, a tone of impatience mixed with indifference—the tone people use when they're waiting for the other person to stop talking.

The next time I saw him, I was allowed to take him out. I suggested that we go to the zoo or to the automotive museum, but he said he wanted to go shopping at Target. For his recent birthday he'd received gift cards from his social worker and also from his behavioral specialist at the group home. He seemed upbeat, counting and recounting the cash in his pocket (he received a small weekly allowance from the group home) and adding it to the sum total of his gift cards, which included a card worth $25 that I'd picked up at the advocacy office. He wanted something digital, preferably an MP3 player. The only thing in his price range was a Kindle. I tried to explain the concept of saving up a little while longer, but he insisted that he wanted the Kindle, even after I reminded him that he'd said he didn't like to read and that he would still have to pay for things to put on the Kindle. He took it to the checkout counter, where he was $25 short anyway. The cashier explained that there were taxes. Also, it appeared that one of his gift cards had been partly spent. Matthew cast his eyes downward. He wouldn't look at me or at anyone, and I couldn't tell if he was going to cry or fly into a rage. There was a line of people behind us, so I lent him $25 on the condition that he pay me back in installments.

“Do you know what installments are?” I asked.

“No.”

“It's when you give or pay something back in small increments.”

I knew he didn't know what
increments
meant, but I couldn't think of another word.

“So now you haven't just gone shopping—you've learned something, too!” I said.

Once we were back in the car, I found a piece of paper, tore it in half, and wrote out two copies of an IOU, which we both signed. Matthew seemed pleased by this and ran his index finger along the perimeter of the Kindle box as though he'd finally got his hands on a long-coveted item. I gave him command of the radio, and as he flipped from one Auto-Tuned remix to the next I found myself basking in the ecstatic glow of altruism. When I dropped him off at the group home, the promissory note tucked in his Target shopping bag along with the Kindle and the greasy cardboard plate that held the giant pretzel I'd also bought him, I felt useful. I felt proud.

It had been a long time between accomplishments. At least, it had become hard to identify them, as most of my goals for any given day or week took the form of tasks, mundane and otherwise, to be dreaded and then either crossed off a list or postponed indefinitely (
meet article deadline
,
get shirts from dry cleaner
,
start writing new book
). Little seemed to warrant any special pride. And though I wanted to believe that I was just bored, the truth was that the decision not to have children was like a slow drip of guilt into my veins.

My husband was patient and funny and smart. In other words, outstanding dad material. Wasting such material seemed like an unpardonable crime. Besides, I've always believed that it is not possible to fall in love with someone without picturing what it might be like to combine your genetic goods. It's almost an aspect of courtship, this vision of what your nose might look like smashed up against your loved one's eyes, this imaginary cubist rendering of the things you hate most about yourself offset by the things you adore most in the other person. And a little over a year after we married, this curiosity, combined with the dumb luck of finding and buying an elegant, underpriced, much-too-large-for-us house in a foreclosure sale, had proved sufficient cause for switching to the leave-it-to-fate method of birth control. Soon enough, I'd found myself pregnant.

It was as if the house itself had impregnated me, as if it had said, “I have three bedrooms and there are only two of you; what's wrong with this picture?” For eight weeks I hung in a nervous limbo, thinking my life was about to become either unfathomably enriched or permanently ruined. Then I had a miscarriage. I was forty-one, so it was not exactly unexpected. And though there had been nothing enriching about my brief pregnancy, which continued to harass my hormones well after vacating the premises, I was left with something that in a certain way felt worse than permanent ruin. I was left with permanent doubt.

My husband was happy about the pregnancy and sad about the miscarriage. I was less sad about the miscarriage, though I undertook to convince myself otherwise by trying to get pregnant again. After three months of dizzying cognitive dissonance, I walked into the guest room that my husband used as an office and allowed myself to say, for once and for all, that I didn't want a baby. I'd thought I could talk myself into it, but those talks had failed.

As I was saying all this, I was lying on the cheap platform bed we'd bought in anticipation of a steady flow of out-of-town company. The curtains were lifting gently in the breeze. Outside, there was bougainvillea, along with bees and hummingbirds and mourning doves. There was a grassy lawn where the dog rolled around scratching its back, and a big table on the deck where friends sat on weekends eating grilled salmon and drinking wine and complaining about things they knew were a privilege to complain about (the cost of real estate, the noise of leaf blowers, the overratedness of the work of more successful peers). And as I lay on that bed it occurred to me, terrifyingly, that all of it might not be enough. Maybe such pleasures, while pleasurable enough, were merely trimmings on a nonexistent tree. Maybe nothing—not a baby or the lack of a baby, not a beautiful house, not rewarding work—was ever going to make us anything other than the chronically dissatisfied, perpetual second-guessers we already were.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I meant this a million times over. To this day, there is nothing I've ever been sorrier about than my inability to make my husband a father.

“It's O.K.,” he said.

Except it wasn't, really. From that moment on, a third party was introduced into our marriage. It was not a corporal party but an amorphous one, a ghoulish presence that functioned as both cause and effect of the absence of a child. It had even, in the back of my mind, come to have a name. It was the Central Sadness. It collected around our marriage like soft, stinky moss. It rooted our arguments and dampened our good times. It taunted us from the sidelines of our social life (the barbecues with toddlers underfoot; a friend's child interrupting conversations midsentence; the clubby comparing of notes about Ritalin and dance lessons and college tuition, which prompted us to feign interest lest we come across like overgrown children ourselves). It haunted our sex life. Not since I was a teenager (a virginal one at that) had I been so afraid of getting pregnant. I wondered then if our marriage was on life support, if at any moment one of us was going to realize that the humane thing to do would be to call it even and call it a day.

Compared with this existential torment, foster-care advocacy was almost comforting. Though it was certainly more demanding than Big Brothers Big Sisters, I found it considerably easier—or at least more straightforward than traditional mentoring. For one thing, advocating for a foster kid mostly required dealing with adults. It meant talking to lawyers about potential adoptive placements and meeting with school administrators about Matthew's disciplinary issues and sitting around the courthouse all day when there was a hearing. Despite the mournful quality of it all, I found not just gratification but actual enjoyment in my efforts to help. I liked spending hours on the phone with my supervisor, a more seasoned advocate, lamenting the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the child-welfare system. I liked sitting around the tiny attorneys' lounge outside the courtroom, where there was always a plate of stale supermarket pastries next to the coffeemaker and clusters of lawyers grumbling about the judge, their clients, the whole hopeless gestalt. I was moved by the family dramas playing out in the courthouse waiting areas. Everywhere there were children with women—relatives, neighbors, foster mothers—who had taken custody of them. Occasionally there would be a physical altercation and an officer would have to intervene. The courthouse was its own little planet of grimness and dysfunction. By contrast, I felt bright and capable.

Matthew was smart in the way a lot of longtime foster kids are smart. He was a quick and reasonably accurate judge of character, and as soon as he determined that someone was not a threat he began the process of figuring out what the person could do for him. As much of a downer as this behavior could be for people with romantic ideas of helping troubled kids, it was a perfectly understandable survival mechanism, and I grew to respect it. Much of the work I did for Matthew took place behind the scenes. I made sure that his highly competent, crushingly overworked lawyer knew what his less competent, also crushingly overworked social worker was doing. Working with an education attorney, I got Matthew out of his raucous, overcrowded public school and into a calmer learning environment. But though Matthew was vaguely aware of my efforts, what he seemed to most appreciate was my ability to transport him to places like Target and GameStop. In turn, I grudgingly appreciated his GPS-like knowledge of any such place within a twenty-mile radius of wherever he happened to be at any given time. Not that we didn't have our teachable moments. One afternoon, after taking Matthew out for giant burritos, I gave my leftovers to a homeless man sleeping in the alley near the restaurant. At first Matthew was confused about why anyone would do such a thing, but as we continued down the street he said he wanted to give his food away, too, so we turned around and walked back toward the man. Matthew was shy about approaching him, even whispering that he'd changed his mind. But after he set his food on the sidewalk and skittered away, his look of surprised delight suggested that he'd momentarily stepped into a different life, one in which charity was something he could provide as well as receive.