by Meghan Daum
* * *
A phrase you hear a lot in the foster care world is that a child has “experienced a lot of loss.” It will often come 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. At first glance, you might think these are references to the original loss, the dismantling of the biological family. But most often they mean the child has gotten close to being adopted but that things haven’t worked out. With Matthew I often got the feeling 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 had a hand in at least some of these disruptions, 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 only did once or twice, he tended to offer some standard-issue excuse on behalf of the estranged parents, which he’d surely heard from his social workers. He’d say they lacked the resources to sufficiently meet his needs. He’d say they didn’t have the skills to handle a kid like him.
Matthew had been taken to a number of adoption fairs over the years, a concept that floored me when I first heard about it. These were organized events such as picnics or carnivals where adoptable kids and prospective parents were supposed to mingle and see if they liked one another. It struck me as a barbaric form of speed dating. But caseworkers insisted that the events were benign, that the point was for kids to have fun regardless of the outcome. The same went for a local television news station with a regular segment that practically advertised kids who were up for adoption. Clarissa is a wonderful young lady who likes to play dress-up and needs a forever family, the anchor would say. Jamal has a mean jump shot. Then there would be a field report showing the child “having a special day” riding trail horses or getting “ace tips” from a professional athlete who’d been enlisted to show up for half an hour and interact with him on behalf of some charity. This same news station also had a weekly segment featuring shelter animals that needed homes.
About a year into my work with Matthew, he experienced yet another adoption-related loss. A couple that had been visiting him at the group home and later hosting him for weekend visits had decided he wasn’t the right fit for them after all. He’d been hopeful about this placement, and when I visited 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 an unspoken parting gift, but the group home staff had locked it up for some kind of disciplinary reason. He had his Kindle, however, which he’d never used, and now he sat on a bench outside the dormitory, bending the plastic until pieces of the device began falling off.
“I know what a huge bummer this is,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Every possible option 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 90s; 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, enabling his mostly consequence-free existence by 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 was now declaring 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 he’d gotten 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 some chairs over but they weren’t broken or anything. He said he just wanted another chance but they wouldn’t give him one and it wasn’t fair. After a while, I suggested he put his feelings in writing. Admittedly, this suggestion was based on what I would do in his situation, not what he was necessarily inclined to do, 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. I’ll walk away so you can do it in private.”
He agreed, which surprised me. We went inside the building and into his room, where blue industrial carpet covered the floor and a low-slung twin bed was covered 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 as tall and muscled as men, were sprawled out in front of a too-loud television. A staff member sat on a stool in the kitchen examining her long, freshly lacquered nails. I asked where the bathroom was and, without looking up, she directed me down a corridor that ran through an adjacent dormitory.
In that dormitory, I passed another common room, this one 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 and of course there was one kid shouting above the others and holding a basket of bread sticks over his head where no one could reach them. Unlike the boys in Matthew’s unit, these were actual children, little tykes who looked in some cases as young as four and five. Gathered there at the table, they could have been tiny summer campers in the mess hall. They could have been Cub Scouts gearing up for their nightly eating contest, after which they’d go off to the evening sing-along and then their cabin bunk beds and, eventually, home to their parents, who would take both pride and sorrow in the knowledge that their children could cope so well with being away from home at such a young age.
But these children were already home, of course. There was no going anywhere from here, except maybe to foster families or, if they smiled big enough, adoptive families that may or may not have the resources to sufficiently meet their needs. I slowed my pace slightly as I passed the entryway. It had been a while since I’d looked through the state photo listings (the more time that went on, the more my online self-soothing practices leaned toward looking at photos of puppies), 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 once gave me. I was reminded of the small handful of kids whose profiles I’d looked at more than once. I was reminded of the few occasions in which the conversation with my husband about adopting from foster care didn’t necessarily feel like bullshit or a pacifier but, rather, 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. There was no way I could give them anything. The decision had been made. Later I would look back on this moment and realize that telling Matthew to write that note was the cruelest thing I could have done to him.
* * *
Sometimes I think perhaps my greatest wish is that one day my husband will get a call from a person claiming to be his son or 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. He’ll say, “I’m sure you’re mistaken” and “I don’t recall the woman you�
��re talking ab—” and then suddenly his face will blanch and his jaw will grow slack. It will be like that absolutely tour de force moment in the Mike Leigh film Secrets and Lies in which Brenda Blethyn, playing a mother who gave her daughter up for adoption decades earlier, meets the young woman for the first time and sees that she is black. With great kindness (with a maternal sort of kindness, actually), Blethyn’s character explains that she cannot possibly be the girl’s mother. But then she gets a faraway look in her eyes and is jolted by a long-suppressed memory, her face scrolling through several lifetimes’ worth of emotion in just a few seconds.
My husband will have that kind of moment. And then he will tell me the news and I, too, will 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 gotten into the dirty details of actual child rearing, take neither credit nor blame for the final results. My husband would experience the satisfaction of having a grown child to hang out with and be proud of when the occasion called for it. I would experience the satisfaction of not having to be anyone’s mother.
Barring that scenario, I’ve sometimes thought my husband should donate sperm to a lesbian couple. They would live far away and send us photos every now and then. We’d visit sometimes and attend graduations and maybe by the time the child reached college age we’d have saved so much money not raising kids ourselves that we could kick in for the tuition. Once the kid was at college, my husband could get on the phone with him and help with assignments, lecturing him on comparative politics and trying to explain organic chemistry. I’d overhear snippets of the conversation as I puttered around our pristine, art-filled, and distinctly child-unfriendly home (perhaps there’s a steep spiral staircase or a large malamute) and smile at the it-takes-a-villageness of it all.
If I learned anything from working with Matthew—and with Nikki and Maricela—it’s that no such town exists. I thought I’d undertaken this volunteer work 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 unwillingness 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 in some ways I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. As wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s rote idealization—even obsessive sanctification—of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for a whole other kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could triumph over the abuses of horrible natural parents.
I’d also tricked myself into believing that trying to help these kids would somehow put the Central Sadness on permanent hiatus, that my husband and I could find peace (not just peace, but real satisfaction) with our life of dog hikes and quiet dinners and friends coming over on the weekends. 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 agreement about wanting or not wanting one? Or were we sad 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 turns out to be the whole point of parenting. Maybe, since the beginning of time, it’s never really been about anything more than that.
* * *
Matthew got transferred to a new group home shortly after he turned thirteen. It was practically indistinguishable from the old one, right down to its proximity to the local Target. I took him there to spend the $25 gift card I’d mailed him, but when we reached the front of the checkout line the cashier said there was only $3.29 left on the card. Matthew claimed it was defective. He said he hadn’t used it. On the conveyor belt sat several bags of chips, a package of cookies, and multiple boxes of macaroni and cheese that he wanted to keep in the kitchen at the group home. He hadn’t even bothered to try to stretch his budget to buy electronics. There were several people behind us. I was afraid he’d have an outburst either right there or in the car so 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 up his loot without looking at me.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
He slammed the door behind him and walked quickly toward his dormitory, as though late for something. Dinner would be served at 5:00. At the old place dinner had been at 5:30 and Matthew was peeved at the change in schedule.
Back at home, my husband and I sat down around our usual time of 8:30. We ate some grilled fish. I drank a glass of wine. We looked through the magazines that had come in the mail, pointing out articles to each other while intermittently talking about our day. It was a good meal. 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 what passes for winter. Then the spring would roll around again and we would still be right there, eating our fish and reading our magazines. Our conversations and our sleep would remain uninterrupted. Our lives would remain our own. Whether that was fundamentally sad or fundamentally exquisite we’d probably never be sure. But who can be sure of such things? And what’s so great about being sure, anyway?
THE JONI MITCHELL PROBLEM
The Joni Mitchell problem is essentially a problem of perception. It plays out like many problems of perception do, under a cloud of insecurity that sweeps in on the winds of cluelessness. Here is a common scenario. You are spending the weekend in the country with friends. These friends are educated and possessed of that patina of coolness that comes from liking certain musical artists (say Leonard Cohen and Paul Westerberg and Wilco and Sonic Youth) and majoring in something not altogether useful in college (English or Art History or Medieval Studies—certainly not Business) and working at a creative and/or intellectually stimulating and/or do-gooder, socially conscious type of job. They read serious literature and hip graphic novels and when they watch TV (if they watch TV; even though it’s now possible to watch TV without an actual TV, some of them still cling to the late twentieth-century smarty-pants posture of “I don’t own one!”) it’s almost exclusively the high-end cable dramas. Again, their musical tastes run toward coy minimalism. Except when it comes to Prince. They all like Prince. They really hate Sting.
So you’re in this house in the country, doing the dishes after a communally prepared meal, and somehow the subject of Joni Mitchell arises. Maybe it was prompted by someone asking “Who’s the best singer-songwriter of our time?” or “Who’s the best Canadian recording artist?” or “What do you mean Björk is derivative—derivative of whom?” And Joni Mitchell’s name will be invoked and someone will say, “God, I can’t stand her,” and someone else will say, “Yeah, it’s like she’s yodeling or something,” and yet another person will say, “Yeah, but Blue is an amazing album.”
Before you know it, the proprietor of the country house will have gone to the record cabinet and pulled out one of Joni’s records. This record will invariably be either Song to a Seagull or Clouds. Moments later, the room will be drowning in Joni’s trembling soprano and aching schoolgirl lyrics—“Marcie in a coat of flowers / steps inside a candy store”—and someone will be yelling, “Christ, turn that off now!” and someone else will say, “I remember my mom listening to this,” and the proprietor of the country house (who may be one and the
same as the person who remembers his mom listening to Joni; in fact, this may be his mom’s copy of Song to a Seagull, stashed away in the country house with John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High and all seven volumes of the Firestone Christmas albums) will say to you, “But I thought you wanted to hear it. You just said you liked Joni!” to which you will sputter some jumble of “Yes, but not this” and “Never mind” and “Forget what I said.” And you will insist that he stop the music immediately and replace it with Sounds of Silence or, better yet, actual silence. And later that evening you will lie in bed clutching your iPod and scrolling through the hundreds of Joni tracks that, in some cases, feel less like songs than an aesthetic nerve center. And you will think about the Joni Mitchell problem, which is the problem of either being not liked or being liked for the wrong reasons. And you will think about how you’ve been lying on your bed listening to Joni and thinking about some version of this problem for the better part of thirty years and how this in and of itself—the lying on the bed, the thinking, the unending emphasis on some problem or another—is itself part of the problem. And you will feel at once ecstatically connected to the world and terrifyingly apart from it.
But enough about you. This is about Joni and me. I realize the clause “Joni and me” has been written upwards of 10 million times, mostly in diaries with flowers drawn in the margins and in sonnets written in galloping pink cursive. I realize that there is nothing original about being a late twentieth-century-born female who feels that nearly every major life event (first love and heartbreak, leaving home, next love and heartbreak) was accompanied by a Joni song that was custom-written for the occasion. But I’ll just come out and say it: The vast majority of those fans are not fanning properly. They think they’re peering into the furthest reaches of the artist’s soul. They presume the lyrics are confessional. They assume they’re listening to love songs. They assume this woman who writes lines like “I want to knit you a sweater / I want to write you a love letter” is the mouthpiece for romance-crazed girls everywhere.
