Who is this child? Do his clothes and possessions tell us anything substantive about him? The social workers have decided he is a match for us, and we have been through a process first of agreeing, saying almost blindly, yes, we really are a match for him! we want this boy we haven’t met just on the basis of photos and the way that you have described him, and then articulating all the ways in which we will meet his needs, which have been presented to us as quite ordinary. In the moment, what uncertainty there is does not feel overwhelming, and if the social workers who know him trust that we are the right match, then we have to believe them.
We have to trust that everyone has O—’s best interests and our own – which are ultimately also his – at heart.
When we get home, we unpack the toys and clothes, filling the child-sized wardrobe. I start an audit of the books that were sent with us. Some strike me as inappropriate for a family with same-sex parents. They reinforce normative gender roles or suggest a world in which only families with parents of the opposite sex exist. Some of them focus in an almost fetishistic way on the unsurpassable love of mothers.
What ideas have already been poured into this boy? He did not have the start in life we would have given a child in our care from birth. Judging from the books, he has been exposed to rather old-fashioned notions about gender and, for all we know, sexuality as well. He will be full of opinions, tastes, even strongly held beliefs, which it may take us years to change. And I know that we may never succeed.
Every book I judge either inappropriate or bad I pack away in a box.
He won’t miss them, I tell myself.
At Marla’s urging, we start looking for a nursery school. I drop in unannounced on a local private kindergarten. When I mention that my husband and I are adopting, the head teacher’s face twists. Is it because we’re a same-sex couple, or because the child is adopted?
There is a waiting list, she tells me. It’s really quite long.
Hesitantly, she gives me a prospectus, but even if she had been more welcoming I quickly decide this is the wrong place – too expensive and too authoritarian. At the top of their bullet-pointed list of beliefs is ‘respecting property’.
We turn next to another independent school that looks good online, but when we visit the space is dark, chaotic, and filthy, the garden nothing but a waste of mud and stone. Even worse, the head teacher looks as if she cannot understand why two men are here together, then makes an awkward point of saying that they’ve had same-sex couples in the past and it’s never been a problem.
We didn’t expect it would be, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I want to say, I guess it must be. I keep my mouth shut. I smile. Andrew smiles.
Children are crying, there are too few adults, pandemonium breaks out as a squad of kids runs from one side of the room to another. Marla has told us O— thrives on routine, so such a disorderly environment would never work.
At last, we settle on the local council-run school which has beautiful facilities and an egalitarian ethos. The bubbly head teacher waits for us to ask the question about diversity and says, yes, in fact, there are a number of same-sex couples with children already enrolled. Families of all different varieties, races, religions, nationalities. There is a sand play area, wooden toys, everything clean and bright and well maintained, but also relaxed. Perfect, we think, and only a ten-minute walk from our house. We sign the enrolment forms and agree we’ll be in touch by the end of September to decide when O— should start.
Meanwhile, we wait each day to hear whether the Agency Decision Maker at the council charged with O—’s care has signed off on the match. We were told this was just routine, no more than a rubber stamp, and given that all the social workers and members of the Matching Panel were in favour, there is no expectation the ADM will delay. When we check with Marla, she says the ADM has been on holiday. She hasn’t got to it yet and needs to read all the files and reports. But it should be soon, very soon.
A week has passed and we are halfway into the following week, just days short of the day we are meant to meet O— for the first time, the date we agreed with the social workers and foster parents, who are preparing for his departure.
Still there is no decision.
The day before we are scheduled to meet O—, we finally receive word that against the advice of the social workers and the Matching Panel the ADM has refused to sign off on the match.
The news is so devastating we hardly know what to think.
Is this it? Is this the end? We phone Adriana but she doesn’t seem to know. Neither does Marla. This has never happened before. No one knows what the protocols are, what procedures have to be followed, whether we even have the right to appeal.
At first, all we know is that the ADM has concerns, but these are not articulated to anyone who is communicating with us. Concerns of what order? I start to think that perhaps, just possibly, the ADM has read my books, or even ‘Interior: Monkeyboy’, and did not like what she found.
We are stunned and puzzled. All the social workers are stunned and puzzled, or at least say they are. Every time we talk to one of them, they tell us this is unprecedented, which only makes it worse. Why is it that we find ourselves in the position of being the first? Why must we be the exceptional ones when we just want to be seen as ordinary?
We push for more information. There are delays, failures to reply, confusion, and then, a week later, Adriana forwards us the ADM’s memorandum finding against us.
It turns out that the ADM is alarmed by our description of ourselves as ‘queer’ rather than ‘gay’ and wonders how this will affect O— throughout his childhood and adulthood. More bizarrely, she suggests that I fled the US after 9/11, ignoring my own clear statements that I had been admitted to Oxford months before the attacks and was already planning to go. What was difficult at the time was deciding to follow through on my plans instead of remaining at home, but in the eyes of the ADM I was running away from a traumatic event. To her, this suggests that I am not up to parenting a child who himself has been traumatized. Furthermore, she doubts that we will be able to parent a child who may end up having any number of as yet undiagnosed problems. I remind myself that we have been told time and again that O— is normal, that he has no diagnoses of developmental or other medical problems, and has cleared all of his screenings.
As I read the ADM’s words, I feel ill. I feel angry. Months and years later, I will still feel angry, my chest will always tighten with outrage. I feel once again as though the system has failed to understand us, as if our queerness and foreignness and our professions work in concert to make us terrifyingly other.
I know that the ADM was trying to do her job conscientiously. But would she have been concerned, I wonder, by a straight couple who chose to describe themselves as an ‘opposite-sex couple’, or who performed political consciousness of their gender, perhaps describing themselves as ‘cisgendered’ in their adoption workbooks, in the same way that she is concerned by our description of ourselves as ‘queer’. Would she have been as concerned by a British adopter who happened, for instance, to move out of London after the 7 July 2005 terror attacks to go to university somewhere else in the country as she is by my departure from New York?
Whatever the dynamics of her decision making – and I genuinely want to believe that she was motivated by concern for O—’s wellbeing and nothing else – it feels as if, once again, we are being subjected to forms of bias that operate throughout the entire network of social care and adoption, popping up just when we least expect them.
We have a right to appeal so we compose a comprehensive response to the ADM’s memo, addressing every concern and reservation she raises. It feels like the most important document either of us has written and it also feels totally inadequate, as if we are trying to cram into ten pages all the arguments we can marshal to justify our suitability to parent a boy we have never met.
To strengthen our case, we ask friends – a dozen couples who have children with whom we’ve sp
ent time in recent years – to write letters of support. Over the coming days, letter after letter arrives, each one written with extraordinary generosity and love, each one demolishing all the ADM’s reservations about us. My sense of outrage gives way to a wholly unexpected feeling that a group of people, most of them outside of Britain, care deeply about us. But what does it mean that we can muster so little support closer to hand? What does it say that after a decade and a half of living here nearly all of our closest friends are not British? Why does this country refuse us over and over again, making us feel in numberless ways that even though we both now carry British passports we are not actually valued, not really wanted, and always viewed with suspicion, or simply misunderstood?
A new Matching Panel is scheduled for mid-October and in advance of this Adriana compiles the letters from our friends, our letter addressing the ADM’s memo, and submits them to the council responsible for O— with an accompanying letter she has written in support of our appeal. We decide that we cannot put ourselves through attending this second panel, cannot have the same or even different questions posed, cannot manage to repeat what we have said before. The whole experience has been traumatizing in ways we could not have anticipated. Instead, Adriana attends the new panel on our behalf.
As with the first panel, the decision is in our favour, the match approved a second time.
We have been living with the child’s toys and clothes for nearly two months, passing a bedroom ready for him, a bedroom whose door we have kept closed since the ADM’s decision, because it is too painful to look at that empty space, at the toys and books sent by friends, at the signs of the care we have taken to prepare for this child.
These are weeks that he could have been with us rather than living in a state of confusion and disappointment because his foster mother has been telling him since June that we were on our way, that we would be imminently arriving. I suspect that this is what she understood. Perhaps the social workers led her to believe this would be the case. She told O—, I am certain, in the belief that she was preparing him for what was to come, promising him that the permanence for which he longed (‘the forever family’ in the parlance of the social care system) was soon to be his.
Rather than the council doing all it might to end this interminable waiting, we now have to wait for a different Agency Decision Maker to sign off on the match once and for all. One would think this should happen quickly, without delay, if only out of a sense of human decency.
Days pass.
A week.
Another week.
We know again that K— has told O— we’ll be arriving on a particular day, and yet we never come, and this makes us into two daddies who have repeatedly disappointed him before he has even met them.
At last the new ADM finally signs off on the match at the end of October. On the first of November, K— phones and puts O— on the line to speak with me.
Hello, Daddy, he says, and my heart almost stops. I struggle to speak.
He talks about some toys his foster parents have recently bought him, although much of what he says is unintelligible, his accent so thick I can understand few of the words.
This is my son, I think, a boy who already calls me Daddy without hesitation. It is exhilarating but also bewildering, difficult to make sense of what I am feeling, or to know what I should be feeling.
There is excitement, but also a sense of slipping out of the real and into a place in which my emotions are no longer under my control, as though I have become someone who is acted upon by others rather than acting himself. It is both liberating and destabilizing. I no longer know what I am supposed to say, what is expected of me, perhaps because the whole experience has been a process of being radically and repeatedly misunderstood, subjected to misreadings, rendered the object of other people’s judgements and interpretations, never allowed to feel as if I have the agency to do anything other than submit and comply and defend myself when attacked.
After these weeks spent living in a suspended state, waiting for the yes we have been hoping for, once again time is short. Marla is anxious to start the Introductions, while Adriana is concerned about their planned brevity. Perhaps the brevity has to do with resources, I begin to think, perhaps this West Country council needs the Introductions to last only three days because that is all it can afford.
Once more, days pass without clarity. Our tickets have not been purchased, the accommodation has not been booked, the social workers have difficulty finding something suitable. I offer to do the bookings myself and submit receipts at the end of it all, but they are hesitant. No, they will take care of it.
Then, at last, two days before we are due to leave and only through our insistence that this cannot be put off again because we have already notified our employers that we will be on leave and we have already spoken to O—, who is expecting us to be there after months of delays, the tickets and bookings come through. We fly because Marla has decided that travelling by car or by train – though either would be just as easy, even easier, than flying – is not advisable. O— would not manage a long car journey. And on a train, well, on a train he could easily run away. Anything but a plane would be too much. And too much for us as well.
In hindsight, this might have given us pause, but at the time it did not.
In the moment we cling to our sense of relief and the urgent desire to meet our son. We are ready to say yes to anything.
ME
Most people must think about their own childhood when they are on the brink of becoming a parent but I suspect that such reflection is more considered and troubled, or troubling, for people in same-sex relationships, and especially for those who have had to struggle in one way or another to make parenthood possible.
As we pack our bags and clean the flat, reinstalling the safety latches on cupboards that I put in before the first Matching Panel and removed when the tedium of unhitching them every time I wanted a knife nearly drove me to tears in the weeks when it seemed as though we had hit an inescapable dead-end, I catch myself thinking of the child I was.
I was a mama’s boy. Teacher’s pet. Perfectionist. Over-achiever. These were the epithets I heard as a child, alongside Fatboy and Faggot, because I was overweight from the moment I started attending school. I was always effeminate and more gender-nonconforming than I realized until the questions about whether I was a girl or boy became so painful to hear at the age of twelve that I began consciously to self-correct, to square my hips when I walked and listen for the wrong intonation in my voice, to close the door to the den at home when I watched MTV and danced along to Madonna and George Michael and Prince.
So, although I did not have red hair, except in one curious season when I auditioned to be an understudy in a touring production of Camelot that wanted blonde boys for the part and the chemical treatment left me vividly strawberry, I was ginger in the sense of being queer, and ginger also in the sense of being ‘cautious, careful; gentle’, as well as ‘easily hurt or broken; sensitive, fragile’. I was ginger in all of those ways, not least because of the bullying I experienced throughout my school years, however mild it was compared to what many suffer. I was also often barely in control of my rage at home. It could explode out of nowhere but was always directed at my father. I did not act out in school, not as far as I can recall, although I was often socially inept, incapable of knowing how to deal with most of my peers. I did not direct my anger at my mother or the cats or the neighbours or the very few children I could call my friends in the earliest years of my childhood.
The fear that I continue to carry, even as Andrew and I reorganize the child’s bedroom for the umpteenth time and make sure that everything is spotlessly clean and the house looks welcoming and warm for his arrival, is that I will fail to be the parent I would wish to be. There is no way of knowing, not until O— is in my presence and I in his, not until I discover what kinds of buttons he will push. The reassurance I have, I remind myself, is that my mother did her best, intentionally
or not, to be an androgynous model of nurture and strength and care and compassion and education and comfort and discipline and capability.
Remember that model of parenting, I tell myself, and all will go well.
INTRODUCTIONS
SUNDAY
In the dusk we drive from the airport through villages and towns, across stretches of farmland and industrial sites, following directions on our phones and trying to recall, in the dark, how the countryside looked in August, the way the road took us along rivers and towards the coast. I take a wrong turn and we miss the B&B, double back, find it on a quiet street in a village ten miles distant from the one where K— and T— live.
Our self-catering flat is in a farm’s converted outbuilding, with sliding glass doors that open onto a field white with sheep and surrounded by high hedgerows. Marla chose this place, she told us, because it will be cosy enough to bring O— here on the third day of the Introductions, the day before we are meant to fly back to London.
But the flat is ugly and soulless with warped laminate flooring and tatty upholstery, the air heavy with the odours of a thousand fried dinners and Indian takeaways, of manure and mildew and unaired rugs. Everything is damp and grimy.
Andrew and I decide we don’t have the energy to cook, but the nearest place open for dinner is half an hour away. We end up at a seaside restaurant where we pick at the food, as if our appetites have abandoned us.
How strange it is that we are here while the child we are meant to adopt is waiting only a short drive away. We could go there now, this instant, and see him. Why do we have to wait? Why do we have to follow social workers’ schedules? So much of this process has been dependent on us doing what we are told, being docile and passive. What if we weren’t? What if we said, enough of this, we’re going to do things our way from now on?
The Ginger Child Page 20
