The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  Court-appointed advocacy is a national program designed to facilitate communication in foster care cases that are too complicated for any one social worker or lawyer or judge (all crushingly overworked) to keep track of. 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 several times a year 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 the basement by her foster mother because she’s become violent and the state insurance plan won’t cover her antipsychotic medication. Advocates are required to see the children at least once a month, and are encouraged to take them places and help them with schoolwork. But they are not mentors as much as investigators—sometimes even de facto judges, since judges often rely heavily on advocates’ recommendations when making their rulings.

  Like my interest in being a Big Sister, the urge to be a child advocate was mostly an urge to inject something into my life that, for lack of a better way of putting it, had nothing to do with my life. As huge in many ways as that life was, it often gave the sensation of an isometric exercise requiring the foot to repeatedly draw very small, perfect circles in the air. I wanted some bigger, messier circles. Moreover, I didn’t want these circles to intersect with anything related to my professional career. If I’d wanted to find volunteer opportunities that kept me in the orbit of my regular crowd, I could have taught creative writing to prisoners or joined the hipsters who worked at drop-in tutoring centers in gentrifying neighborhoods. But I didn’t want to go that route. I wanted to be in a different neighborhood entirely.

  Children who wind up in foster care aren’t just in a different neighborhood. They inhabit a world so dark it may as well exist outside our solar system. This was certainly the case with Matthew, the boy I was assigned to shortly after I completed my advocacy training. Compared with him, Maricela and Nikki might as well have been upper-middle-class children of suburbia, complete with riding lessons and college funds.

  Matthew was the child of no one. Of course, that’s not literally true. He had parents. At least, he’d had them at one time. But they were permanently out of the picture, as were any number of others who’d endeavored at times to take their place. Matthew was a longtime foster child. He lived in a group home, one of a hundred or so children who had proven incapable of functioning in traditional family settings. He ate his meals when he was told to, watched whatever happened to be on the television in the common room at any given time, and put himself to bed every night. When I met him he was about to turn twelve. He had been living this way on and off since the age of six.

  There is very little I am permitted to reveal about Matthew, starting with his name, which is not Matthew (just as Maricela’s is not Maricela and Nikki’s is not Nikki). I cannot tell you about his parents or what they did to land their son in the child welfare system, but I can tell you that it’s about as horrific as anything you can imagine. As with just about everyone else in this story, I cannot provide a physical description of Matthew, 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. He’s not necessarily any or all of those things but I’m going to plant that image in your mind and move on.

  Was Matthew a cute kid? A charming kid? A kid with potential? People seemed to think so when they first met him, but then things had a way of going south. That was the pattern, anyway. His housing history covered the demographic spectrum. I can’t give specifics, but let’s say there’d been middle-class suburban couples, single moms, gay dads, and large evangelical Christian families. Some had wanted to adopt him but then changed their minds when he started feeling safe enough to test their loyalty by making their lives hell.

  On my first meeting with Matthew, he wanted me to do what many advocates do for their assignees and take him to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal (the meal of choice, it turns out, 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) and what I might do to help make his life a little better. In my training sessions, I’d learned that it was a good idea to bring a game or toy to break the ice. After much deliberation, I had settled on a pack of cards that asked hundreds of different “would you rather” questions: “Would you rather be invisible or able to read minds?” and “Would you rather be able to stop time or fly?” Matthew’s enthusiasm for this activity was middling at best, and when I got to questions like “Would you rather go to an amusement park or a family reunion?” or “Would you rather be scolded by your teacher or by your parents?” I shivered at the stupidity of not having vetted them ahead of time. He had no parents to scold him or family reunions to attend. This was like asking someone with no legs if he’d rather walk or take the bus.

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

  “Uh-huh,” Matthew said. This would soon be revealed as his standard response to just about everything. It was delivered in the same tone regardless of the 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 we go to the zoo or to the automotive museum, which had an interactive children’s exhibit devoted to the inner workings of cars, but he said he wanted to go shopping at Target. He’d recently had a birthday and received gift cards he wanted to redeem. I would figure out soon enough that currency for most foster kids took the form of gift cards from places like Target or Walmart. The retailers allocated a certain amount for needy children, which meant that social workers and advocates would unceremoniously bestow them on their charges on holidays and birthdays. Matthew’s moods, it often seemed, rose and fell with the cards’ balances.

  On this shopping trip, the first of many, 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, including a card worth $25 that I’d picked up at the advocacy office and just given him. But, as with so many outings with Matthew, he had enough money to burn a hole in his pocket but not enough to get anything he actually wanted. He wanted something digital, preferably an MP3 player. The only thing in his price range was a Kindle reading device. I tried to explain the concept of saving up a little while longer, but he was determined to buy something right then and there and insisted that he wanted the Kindle. Even after I warned him that he was going to regret the purchase as soon as he got home, that he’d told me he didn’t like to read and, besides, he would still have to pay for things to put on the Kindle, he remained adamant and took it to the checkout counter, where somehow it turned out he was $25 short anyway. The cashier explained that there were taxes. Also, somehow it appeared that one of his gift cards had already been partially used. Matthew’s face began turning red. 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 the $25. I lent it on the condition that he’d 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 an alternative word.

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

  I tried to sound light and jokey. I tried to sound like the opposite of how my mother would have sounded in such a situation. My mother would have pulled me aside and explained the condition
s of the agreement in the most serious tones possible. My mother had been a very serious person. She would let you know your shirt was on backward using a voice most people keep in reserve for statements like “Grandpa’s had a stroke.” At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood. If a situation starts to feel too heavy, I will not hesitate to make a joke or say something sarcastic just to push away the feeling of my mother sitting me down and somberly telling me that black and navy don’t go together. I do this to a fault. I do it especially with kids and I would do it with Matthew more times than I could count.

  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 even as he flipped annoyingly between two awful pop stations I found myself basking in the ecstatic glow of altruism. I was a difference maker and a wish fulfiller. 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. These were not feelings that rolled around all that often in my regular life.

  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 (finish column, get shirts from dry cleaner, start writing new book). Rarely did anything seem to warrant any special pride. And though I wanted to believe that I was just bored, the truth lay elsewhere. The truth was that the decision not to have children, which I’d made somewhat unilaterally around the time I signed up to be an advocate, was wrecking me day by day.

  As much as I’d never wanted to be a mother, my relationship with my husband had turned me into a bit of a waffler. If I was going to have children with anyone, it was going to be him. He was patient and funny, not to mention tall and handsome and smart. In other words, outstanding dad material. So outstanding, in fact, that wasting such material seemed like an unpardonable crime. Besides, among my personal theories is the idea that it is not possible to fall in love with someone without picturing—whether for one second or one hour or fifty years—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 about a year earlier, this small curiosity, combined with the dumb luck of finding and purchasing 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 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 either about to become unfathomably enriched or permanently ruined. Then I had a miscarriage. Given that I was forty-one, 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 ambivalence.

  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 (at least the kind of trying that comes before medically assisted trying, which for a forty-one-year-old may be tantamount to not trying). After three months of dizzying cognitive dissonance (This is me, using fertility-test sticks? This is me, seeing an acupuncturist?), I walked into the guest room that my husband also used as an office and allowed myself to say the thing I’d been thinking my whole life: I didn’t want a baby. I’d never wanted a baby. I’d thought I could talk myself into it, but those talks had failed.

  I remember that as we talked I was lying on the cheap platform bed we’d bought in anticipation of a steady flow of out-of-town company. I remember looking at the ceiling and admiring the lines of the window frame and the ceiling molding. I remember that the curtains, which were partly raw silk and looked expensive despite my having bought them for cheap on the JCPenney website, were lifting gently in the breeze. There was bougainvillea outside, along with bees and hummingbirds and mourning doves. There was a big grassy lawn where the dog rolled around blissfully scratching his back, and a big table on the deck where friends sat nearly every weekend eating grilled salmon and drinking wine and complaining about things they knew were a privilege to complain about (the cost of cable television, the noise of leaf blowers, the problem of not having enough time to pursue one’s art). And as I lay on that bed it occurred to me, terrifyingly, that all of it might not be enough. It was possible that such pleasures, while pleasurable enough, were merely trimmings on a nonexistent tree. It was possible that nothing, not a baby or 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 okay,” he said.

  Except it wasn’t, really. From there, 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 presence that would have been our child. It had even, in the back of my mind, come to have a name. It was the Central Sadness; that was the only thing to call it. 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 (always the barbecues with toddlers underfoot; always a friend’s child interrupting conversations mid-sentence; always the clubby comparing of notes about Ritalin and dance lessons and college tuition, which prompted us to feign great interest lest we come across like overgrown children ourselves). It haunted our sex life. Not since I was a (virginal) teenager had I been so afraid of getting pregnant. I wondered then, as I had a hundred times before when this subject arose, 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 then call it a day. How hard, after all, would it be to go back to being the people we’d been before? How easy would it be to stop trying to become the people we apparently didn’t have it in ourselves to be?

  * * *

  Compared with this existential torment, foster care advocacy was a cakewalk. 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 foster kids mostly required dealing with adults. It meant talking to lawyers and meeting with school administrators and sitting around the courthouse all day when there was a hearing. It meant spending a lot of time on the phone with another, much more seasoned advocate, who was supervising me. As onerous as all of this might have been for most people, I found that I loved it. I loved talking to my supervisor. I loved hanging out in the tiny attorneys’ lounge outside the courtroom, where there was always a plate of stale supermarket pastries next to the coffeemaker and the lawyers stood around in clusters complaining about the judge, their clients, the whole hopeless gestalt. I was fascinated and moved by the family dramas playing out in the courthouse waiting areas. There, teenage mothers wept into their cell phones and men with shaved heads and tattoos sat glumly next to women who were presumably the mothers of their children but might also
have been their own mothers—or their sisters or cousins or aunts. Everywhere there were children with women who were not their mothers but who had taken custody of them when those mothers got arrested or became otherwise indisposed. Occasionally there would be a physical altercation and an officer would have to intervene. There was a sheriff’s station in the basement next to the cafeteria. There was paternity testing on the second floor. The courthouse was its own little planet of grimness and dysfunction. By contrast, I felt bright and competent.

  And I took genuine pleasure in helping Matthew. He may have seen me largely as a chauffeur, but the truth was I actually had pushed for some changes on his behalf and thus solved a few problems for him. I can't disclose what they were, but suffice it to say they were the kinds of problems that a kid with a family would simply never run up against, problems stemming mostly from the fact that he lived in an institutional setting and was essentially being raised by committee. It was the kind of help I think I’d subconsciously wanted to provide for Nikki. I wanted to contribute to her life without intruding upon it. And deep down maybe that’s what she’d wanted, too, when she signed up for all those mentors.

  As it was, I always had the sense with Nikki that she’d rather be just about anywhere else than with me, even when she’d been the one to initiate an outing. One year, near her birthday, we’d been at the mall and she’d expressed a desire to celebrate with her friends by going to a certain movie on opening day. Unfortunately it was one of those movies that sell out before their titles even go up on the marquee, even if they’re playing on multiple screens, and Nikki didn’t have a credit card or any way of purchasing tickets ahead of time. And though she didn’t ask me to buy her anything, I considered her plight and offered to buy six advance tickets for her and her friends. This would be her birthday present, I told her. As long as she was sure she’d be able to secure a ride to the theater and assemble the whole group with no one dropping out at the last minute. She said she was sure. She seemed happy as she tucked the tickets into her purse, taking care to put them where she wouldn’t lose them. I was happy, too, though somewhat surprised at myself for impulsively forking over more than $100.