The Best American Essays 2015 (15 page)

Still, I knew better than to think I was a major role model. I certainly wasn't a mother figure. I was more like a random port in the unrelenting storm that was his life. And that was enough. Matthew's lot was so bad that it could be improved, albeit triflingly, with one minipizza at a food court. A kid with higher expectations would have been more than I could handle.

By then more than a year had passed since my miscarriage and my subsequent declaration that I did not want to have a child. Though my husband had been supportive and accepting, he now began to say out loud again that he wanted to be someone's father—or at least that he might not be O.K. with never being someone's father. He wanted to use what he knew about the world to help someone find his or her own way through it. He wanted “someone to hang out with” when he got older. He didn't necessarily need the baby- or toddler-rearing experience. He didn't need the kid to look like him or be the same race. When I asked if he'd consider mentoring or even being an advocate, he said he wasn't sure that would be enough.

The seeds of a potential compromise were planted. Maybe we could take in, or even adopt, a foster child. This would be a child old enough that we might actually qualify as young or average-age parents rather than ones of “advanced age.” (If I adopted a ten-year-old at forty-three, it would be the equivalent of having had him at the eminently reasonable age of thirty-three.)

We knew that any child we took in would surely need intensive therapy. He would have demons and heartbreaking baggage. But we would find the needle in the haystack, the kid who dreamed of being an only child in a quiet, book-filled house. I probably wouldn't be a great mother, but my standards would be so different from those set by the child-welfare system that it wouldn't matter if I dreaded birthday parties or resorted to store-bought Halloween costumes.

I knew that this was 90 percent bullshit. I knew that it wasn't O.K. to be a mediocre parent just because you'd adopted the child out of foster care. A few times my husband and I scrolled through online photo listings of available children in California, but we might as well have been looking at personal ads from a faraway land that no one ever traveled to. There were three-year-olds with cerebral palsy on ventilators, huge sibling groups who spoke no English, kids who “struggle with handling conflict appropriately.” Occasionally there would be some bright-eyed six-or seven-year-old who you could tell was going to be O.K., who had the great fortune of being able to turn the world on with his smile. So as the Central Sadness throbbed around our marriage, threatening to turn even the most quotidian moments, like the sight of a neighbor tossing a ball around with his kid in the yard, into an occasion for bickering or sulking, the foster-child option placated us with the illusion that all doors were not yet closed.

One day, while my nerves swung on a wider-than-usual pendulum between empathy for Matthew and despondency over my marriage, I decided to call a foster and adoption agency. Actually I asked my husband to call. I'd been told in my training that advocates are not supposed to get involved with fostering children, even those who have nothing to do with their advocacy. Matthew was not allowed to go to my house or even to meet my husband or any of my friends. I didn't want to do anything that might be construed as a conflict of interest. When my husband and I arrived at an orientation meeting, I signed in using his last name, something I'd never done before.

“I've got to be incognito,” I said, rather dramatically. “Let's not draw attention to ourselves.”

Each of us was asked to say why we were there. When our turn came, my husband spoke briefly about how we were exploring things in a very preliminary way. Then I spoke about how I was ambivalent about children but that this potentially seemed like a good thing to do. I then proceeded to dominate the rest of the meeting. I acted as if I were back in advocacy training. I raised my hand to ask overly technical questions about things like the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Adoptions and Safe Families Act and throw around their acronyms as if everyone knew what they meant. I asked what the chances of getting adopted were for a twelve-year-old who had flunked out of several placements.

“Maybe this isn't the right setting for these questions,” my husband whispered.

As the meeting wrapped up, the woman from the agency announced that the next step was to fill out an application and then attend a series of training sessions. After that, she said, prospective parents who passed their home studies could be matched with a child at any time and be on their way to adoption.

Her words were like ice against my spine.

“We're not at that point!” I said to my husband. “Not remotely close.”

I suggested that he apply to be a mentor for “transitional-age youth,” kids who are aging out of the system but still need help figuring out the basics of life. He filled out a form, with the slightly bewildered resignation of someone agreeing to repair something he hadn't noticed was broken. The woman from the agency said she'd call him about volunteer opportunities. She never did.

A phrase you frequently hear in the foster-care world is that a child has “experienced a lot of loss.” It comes up in the blurbs accompanying the photo listings.
Jamal has experienced a lot of loss but knows the right family is out there. Clarissa is working through her losses and learning to have a more positive attitude.
These appear to be references to the original loss of being taken away from the biological family, but often they mean that the child has got close to being adopted but that things haven't worked out. With Matthew, I suspected that the trauma of being removed from his biological parents had been dwarfed by the cumulative implosions of the placements that followed. He seemed to know that he'd lost his temper too many times or let himself lapse into behavior that frightened people. But when I asked about this, which I did only once or twice, he tended to offer some rote excuse on behalf of the estranged parents, which he'd probably heard from his social workers. He'd say that they lacked the resources to sufficiently meet his needs. He'd say that they didn't have the skills to handle a kid like him.

About eight months into my work with Matthew, a couple who had been visiting him at the group home and later hosted him at their home on weekends decided not to pursue adoption after all. He'd been hopeful about the placement, and when I saw him a few days after things fell through, I found him pacing around his cinder-block dormitory like a nervous animal. The prospective mom had given him a used MP3 player, perhaps as a parting gift, but the group-home staff had locked it up for some kind of disciplinary reason. He sat down on a bench outside the dormitory with his Kindle, bending the plastic until pieces began breaking off.

“I know what a huge bummer this is,” I said. “I'm really sorry.”

“I don't care,” he said.

Every possible response seemed inadequate, maybe even capable of doing long-term damage.

“I know you probably do care,” I said finally. “But sometimes we care so much about stuff that it's easier to pretend for a while that we don't care at all.”

The temperature was in the high nineties; the choke of autumn in Southern California was in full, scorching force. The Kindle was practically melting into soft, curling shards as Matthew tore it apart. I thought about the $23 he still owed me for it and wondered which was worse, letting him destroy it or lecturing him about how money and the stuff it buys aren't disposable. Both tactics seemed fairly useless, but the latter seemed almost like a joke. The kid's whole life was disposable. Like most foster kids, he kept many of his things in a plastic garbage bag so he could grab and go as needed.

Through angry tears, Matthew declared that he was never going back inside the dormitory and would sleep on the lawn until he could live in a real home. He said that he'd got mad at the prospective mom for not buying him something he wanted but that he hadn't done anything too bad. He said he'd kicked over some chairs but they weren't broken or anything. He just wanted another chance but they wouldn't give him one and it wasn't fair. After a while, I suggested that he put his feelings in writing, a suggestion that was based less on his own predilections than on what I would do in his situation, but it was all I could think of.

“Let's go inside and get a piece of paper,” I said. “And you write down what you want and how you feel.”

He agreed, which surprised me. We went inside and into his room, where blue industrial carpet covered the floor and a low-slung twin bed was draped with a thin blue blanket. He got out a spiral-bound notebook and lay on the floor on his stomach, legs spread slightly and elbows propped up as he began to write. He looked more like a normal kid than I'd ever seen him. I left him and headed down to the common room, where about six boys, some of them older and as tall as men, were sprawled in front of a loud television. I asked a staff member where the bathroom was, and without looking up, she directed me down a corridor that ran through an adjacent dormitory.

I passed another common room, filled with younger children. They were seated at a long table set for dinner and they squirmed in their chairs and fiddled with their utensils. One kid shouted above the others and held a basket of breadsticks over his head so that no one could reach them. I slowed down as I passed the entryway. It had been a while since I'd looked through the state photo listings, but seeing the small, open faces, the feet that barely touched the floor, the institutional food heaped onto institutional plates, I was reminded of the tiny spark of hope those listings had given me and the few occasions when the conversation with my husband about adopting from foster care didn't necessarily feel like bullshit or a pacifier but, rather, like a viable antidote to the Central Sadness.

I returned to Matthew's room. He was sitting on the bed, reading over his statement. He handed me the notebook.

I want to live with ——— and ———. I'm sorry I got mad. If you give me another chance I promise I'll never get mad again.

“Will you give that to them?” Matthew asked me.

“If I can,” I said, even though the decision had been made. Later I realized that telling Matthew to write that note was the cruelest thing I could have done to him.

There are times when I harbor a secret fantasy that one day my husband will get a call from a person claiming to be his son or his daughter. Ideally, this person will be in his or her late teens or early twenties, the product of some brief fling or one-night stand during the Clinton administration. My husband will be shocked, of course, and probably in denial, and then suddenly his face will blanch and his jaw will grow slack. He will hang up the phone and tell me the news and I will also be shocked. Eventually, though, we'll both be thrilled. This new relation will breeze in and out of our lives like a sort of extreme niece or nephew. We'll dispense advice and keep photos on the fridge but, having never got into the dirty details of actual child-rearing, take neither credit nor blame for the final results.

I thought I'd undertaken volunteer work with kids because I was, above all, a realist. I thought it showed the depth of my understanding of my own psyche. I thought it was a way of turning my limitations, specifically my reluctance to have children, into new and useful possibilities. I thought the thing I felt most guilty about could be turned into a force for good. But now I know that I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. Wary as I've always been of our culture's reflexive idealization—even obsessive sanctification—of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.

I'd also tricked myself into believing that trying to help these kids would put the Central Sadness on permanent hiatus, that my husband and I could find peace (not just peace but real fulfillment) in our life together. Instead we continued to puzzle over the same unanswerable questions. Were we sad because we lacked some essential element of lifetime partnership, such as a child or an agreement about wanting or not wanting one, or because life is just sad sometimes—maybe even a lot of the time? Or perhaps it wasn't even sadness we were feeling but simply the dull ache of aging. Maybe children don't save their parents from this ache as much as distract from it. And maybe creating a diversion from aging is in fact much of the point of parenting.

Matthew got transferred to a new group home shortly after he turned thirteen. It was practically indistinguishable from the old one. I took him to Target to spend a $25 gift card I'd mailed him for his birthday, but like the other times, when we reached the front of the checkout line the cashier said there wasn't enough left on the card. Matthew claimed it was defective. On the conveyor belt sat several bags of chips, a package of cookies, and boxes of macaroni and cheese that he wanted to keep in the kitchen at the group home. I pulled out my credit card and paid. I knew he was lying and I told him so. He said he wasn't. He said no one ever believed him. He said he had nothing, that no one cared about him or ever did anything for him. He said no one ever gave him a chance or cut him a break. He said everyone in his life was useless.

We got in the car and he ate his chips as we drove in silence. When I pulled up to the entrance of the group home, he gathered his loot without looking at me.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

Back at home, my husband and I sat down to dinner around our usual time of eight-thirty. We looked through the magazines that had come in the mail. The evening air was still cool, but the daylight was beginning to linger. Soon it would be summer. Friends would start coming over to eat on the deck. After that it would be fall and then what passes for winter. I would continue to work with Matthew, and he would grow older in his group home while I grew older in my too-big-for-us house. My husband would make peace with the way things had turned out—except in those moments when he didn't have peace, which, of course, come around for everyone. Our lives would remain our own. Whether that was fundamentally sad or fundamentally exquisite, we'd probably never be certain. But if there's anything Matthew taught me, it's that having certainty about your life is a great luxury.