Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

Another Seat at the Table

  FOR JACK AND Pat Kiernan, adoption was a first choice, not a last resort. It was a powerful instinct. Jack grew up in his grandparents’ house from about the age of seven after his parents were smacked around a lot by life—health troubles, emotional trials—and found it hard to make their children their supreme priority. His mother’s parents, Marty and Marge Gallaher, saw trouble ahead for their grandson, too. “They saw that the wheels were coming off the wagon,” says Jack. “They scooped me up and said, ‘You’re coming with us tonight.’”

  Jack didn’t formally pack up and leave his mother’s house on the north side of Chicago. Marty and Marge didn’t apply for any kind of legal guardianship. He just began to spend more of the week at his grandparents’ house, where the refrigerator was full, there was a quiet place to do homework and two adults who would listen to him, and he could be certain that he was bathed, fed, and had clean clothes. One day, Jack was writing a book report at their dining table when he realized, “Gee, all of my stuff is here.”

  When Jack and Pat met and fell in love, they began to talk about getting married and starting a family. Jack talked about his grandparents and the difference they had dared to make in his life. It sharpened their view of the kind of parents they wanted to be, which inspired Jack and Pat to think of adoption first.

  “The way I had been raised had everything to do with it,” says Jack. “To me, parents were two people who were in your corner when you needed them most.” Jack and Pat, who were then reporters and had come to live in Atlanta, knew that there were troubled youngsters all around them who might be able to regain a grip on their lives if two people stepped in to them bearing care and kindness.

  So Joey, now twenty, came to them from the foster care system when he was two. His birth mother used drugs and couldn’t quit. His father was tall, Canadian, and nowhere to be found. Ian, now in his early twenties, was born into a family with drug and emotional problems and was passed through a succession of homes in the foster care system from the time that he was five. He came to Jack and Pat when he was ten. They had a son, John, in the traditional manner, and they thought their family held just about a full hand when they heard about a bright fourteen-year-old girl named Beatrice who had passed through group and foster homes and was currently bedeviling a nice older foster mother in Jackson, Georgia, who didn’t quite know what to do with her. Jack and Pat were able to adopt their new daughter as she turned fifteen. And within just a few months, Bea was pregnant.

  “Some days, I wanted to pull the hairs out of my head,” says Jack, who now works for the American Automobile Association in Dallas. “But every day is different. Every day there’s something memorable.”

  Jack and Pat Kiernan’s sons and daughter didn’t suffer insecurities from not knowing their birth parents. They knew their birth parents—and they were often their biggest problems. Joey, Ian, and Beatrice all came from households in which their parents took drugs and often drank, beat their spouses and/or their children, or let them go hungry with inattention and neglect.

  “So Bea, Ian, and Joey have all had their challenges,” says Jack. Of course, so have Bush and Kennedy kids. “It’s tough enough growing up on the set of Leave It to Beaver,” he says. “Our kids were born into much tougher places. Nothing was ideal. And you know what? They’re turning out to be wonderful adults.”

  He says that Beatrice, for example, has become a fine mother. “A great mother,” Jack emphasizes. “She works hard and is doing the best she can. Children can look up to her.” When Beatrice returned to complete high school while she worked, Jack was particularly proud.

  “Single young mother in high school, everyone thinks they know about you. What kind of person you are. Do you know how hard that must be? I admire the hell out of her,” says Jack. “The best we could do for each kid is to help them to learn from their own bumps and bruises, and all the shots life is going to throw at them. It’s so great to see them grow up into nice young adults.”

  Which may be the most remarkable testament to the way lives can be turned around by adoption. Tough young kids who, in their early years, probably saw little reason to think that being nice earned any reward have become genuinely nice young men and women. And what I find best about the way that Jack Kiernan speaks of his children is that he directs credit to them, not to himself and Pat. He is a father who remembers how children, even when ringed by love, can feel ever alone.

  JOEY HAS HAD drinking and drug problems, but he has been sober for four years. People who have never had to subdue that kind of beast clawing from inside may find it hard to grasp the fortitude it takes, hour by hour, to stay sober for a lifetime (which may be why Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are often more successful, over a longer period of time, than more expensive and exclusive addiction centers). Jack Kiernan says that his son Joey has developed that kind of character.

  “He’s a battler,” says Jack. “He’s struggled, he’s fallen down, he’s gotten back up. He’s battled it. And I’m real proud of him.”

  A few years ago, Joey came out of thirty days at a treatment center near Houston and marked the occasion by going to a six o’clock Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in suburban Dallas. He carried his Lewisville Cardinals baseball jersey and cleats in a bag by his feet.

  “I’m Joey, and I am an alcoholic.”

  “Hellooo, Joey.”

  When the meeting ended at seven, Jack Kiernan sped off for the local ballpark. Joey pulled on his uniform as Jack drove, fast. They got to the game in about the fourth inning. Joey’s manager saw them pull up and signaled Joey: he was going in to pinch-hit.

  Jack Kiernan was a young sports reporter when we met, and my godfather, Jack Brickhouse, loved him; Jack and I were among Uncle Jack’s pallbearers. Jack Kiernan is the best ranking imitator of Jack Brickhouse’s Wrigley Field home run call (“Back, back, hey-hey!”), and can re-create plays from thirty years ago (“Santo—to Beckert—to Banks—double play!”).

  But I have never known his voice to be so woolly with excitement as when he tells me what Joey did when he reached the plate:

  “After about four, five pitches, the pitcher hung a curveball. Joey pounded a hard line drive over the third baseman’s head. I tell you, it was a screamer. I don’t think Ron Santo could have pulled it down. The ball hooked it into the corner, and Joey got a stand-up double. I’ll never forget him standing at second with a big goofy smile on his face. I was fighting back tears. And not very well. I thought, ‘This kid has gone down so many wrong roads. But now he’s fought his way back onto the right one. God is looking out for this kid.’”

  God and a couple of other people I can think of who are in his corner.

  JACK WAS WORKING for an Atlanta television station and was embedded with a U.S. Army infantry division along the Iraq and Kuwait border a few years ago when he was able to cadge a few minutes on a satellite phone to call Pat and tell her that he thought he might be able to come home for the Christmas holidays.

  “I have some interesting news, too,” Pat told him. Jack thought he was the one who was supposed to have interesting news.

  “Beatrice,” she told him. “Looks like she might be pregnant again.”

  “How did this happen?” Jack asked, and realized just as quickly that the answer to that was pretty obvious, even in the Christmas season.

  “It was someone at school,” Pat confirmed for him.

  “I’ll be home in ten days,” he told her. “Sweetheart, we’ll make this work. Whatever it takes, you know, we’ll make this work.”

  Bea’s sons—Jack and Pat’s grandsons!—Bobby and Chuck are funny, playful, and smart. “We love them,” says Jack. “They keep things light. Busy, but light. Can’t imagine things without them. Love them.”

  Jack Kiernan is not a father who inserts the word “love” in every other sentence, the way some chefs will throw another pat of butter onto almost anything for richness. If you keep count, Jack says “flexibility” and “understanding” at le
ast as often.

  “Each kid came to us at a different stage in life,” he says. “They had some heavy baggage they were carrying all alone. We tried to take some of that off their shoulders. You can’t take it all, and not all at once. We don’t compromise important principles. We have rules. But we try to understand the children we have and what’s going on with them. We try to be flexible. We try to remember: as tough as it ever gets for us, imagine what it’s like for them. I look back on my life when I was nine years old, lonely and unhappy, and living behind a taffy apple plant,” he adds. “Now we’re very happy, all of us, and I guarantee you, things are never lonely or dull around here.”

  Ian is about to go into the army. Joey is about to go to college, and plays baseball and hockey (hockey in Texas—do they make slap shots between the arms of a saguaro cactus?). And Beatrice—Bea has enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Do you think a young woman who made some mistakes but went back to finish high school while being a good mother to two young children might have some qualities of grit and drive that will motivate other young sailors, too?

  Marty and Marge Gallaher are gone. Jack’s mother is still a part of his life, in part because growing up with his grandparents let some of the sting out of his relationship with her. But not all. A few years ago, when Joey, Bea, and Ian were all going through touchy, risky, and demanding times, Jack says that his mother called and tossed off a remark like “Well, what can you expect when you adopt kids like that?”

  Jack Kiernan didn’t favor his mother with another sincere oration about the special joys of adoption, or about the singular satisfaction of helping children who need love to navigate the rocks and shoals of life. That would have been like reciting Pericles’ funeral oration for her in its original dialect. And he did his mother the ample favor of not reminding her why he had wound up in his grandparents’ house. Instead, Jack Kiernan told his mother, “That’s none of your goddamn business.”

  It must be gratifying to have learned enough about life to be able to tell that to your mother with such authority.

  “IT’S KIND OF HARD not to say to yourself, ‘What would their lives be like otherwise?’” says Jack. “I don’t know. I don’t think about that. As long as they know that at the end of the day, they have brought so much joy into our house. Even the stuff that’s challenging. You get through it, and you all learn something. You all get better. You’re reminded of what life is all about.”

  While Beatrice serves some of her tours of duty in the navy, Jack and Pat will be legal guardians for Bobby and Chuck (a legalism so that if either of them twists an ankle playing soccer, Jack and Pat can sign an approval for the school nurse to treat it). When Beatrice’s boys join their thirteen-year-old son, John, the Kiernans will have a full house once again. Three boys: loud music, slamming doors, a packed pantry, and lines to get into the bathroom. Pat and Jack are exhilarated.

  “I hope this doesn’t end with Pat and me,” he says. “Maybe one day, with their own families, our kids will look to find some child who really needs them. I mean, we’ve never said it out loud like that. But the thought might come to them quite naturally. I hope. Maybe they’ll look around one night during dinner and say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s another seat at the table here.’”

  Skin Deep

  CAROLINE AND I went to several adoption agency presentations. Against all expectation, I was impressed by all of them. They often began with the announcement, “Everyone has heard a story or two about the couple that filled out all of their paperwork, paid their fees, and bingo—got pregnant.” After the small, nervous laughs subsided, the person at the front of the room would say, “We’ve all heard those stories. But there is no correlation between filling out forms and getting pregnant. If you’re here because you think adopting will somehow make you pregnant, you might want to leave during the break.”

  And I think a few people didn’t come back after cookies and coffee.

  Then someone else would say, “If you are adopting a child from China or Ethiopia, remember that you will become a multiracial family. Go home and ask yourself if you have a problem with that. Don’t worry—we’re not reporting anyone. We are not looking for a ‘right’ answer. We just have to be certain that you know what you’re doing.” I respected them all the more.

  I HAVE ALWAYS been skeptical when someone proclaims, “I’m color-blind. I don’t see race.” For one thing, it seems to me the assertion is often made by someone who protests too much. For another, why boast about having limited vision? Race is part of who and what we are.

  I know that our daughters are Chinese. I love who and what they are. They go to a class to sing songs in Mandarin, make dumplings, and observe holidays (and I thought Jews had a lot of holidays). However, whole weeks go by in which I may not see our girls as Chinese. For one thing, they are so many other things, too: American, French, tied into Catholic, Quaker, and Jewish families, and connected to Chicago, California, New York, and Normandy. For another—they’re our daughters. I look at them and see stories, memories, and the way they can both put their hands behind their waist and strut like their mother (like Napoleon; or so I imagine).

  Of course I know they are Chinese, and I don’t want to act galled if someone innocently identifies them as such because it is written on their faces (I am still amused by ringside announcers who, in a match between a black and a white boxer, identify them by the color of their trunks). But while our daughters’ ethnicity is one of the first labels that can be fixed on them, it does not account for and outweigh everything else that they are.

  So far, I can count on one hand the number of outright racial remarks that we have overheard about our daughters. Those comments were so ridiculous, uttered by such obvious fools, that I felt it was more important to worry about our daughters’ reaction (they had none) than to correct (a euphemism for clobber) the speaker.

  Still, my wife and I have also felt that a few family members find our daughters endearing and adorable but not quite certifiably members of their family. (One elderly aunt recommended that we get our daughters the surgery to Europeanize their exquisite eyes. “Then they’d really look like your daughters,” she said. “They really are our daughters,” my wife reminded her.) Could race figure into their attitudes? For some people, maybe adoption itself takes some getting used to. We assume that in good time, the elemental kindness of all our family members will overtake whatever else they may feel.

  I sometimes contemplate the day that some boor or outright bigot makes some kind of racial comment to our daughters that they will be old enough to understand. I hope I will be around to protect and console them. I also kind of hope I will not be there: I am quite sure that I could not be held responsible for my actions. I have tentatively decided that if and when this happens, it should be on the soccer field. Our daughter can shrug off the comment, turn around, and kick a goal. Then she can walk past her tormentor and say, “And you know what, buddy? I’m Jewish, too!”

  FOR ALL THE ATTENTION that transracial adoptions receive in the press, they amount to less than 10 percent of all adoptions. This figure includes international families such as ours, in which children from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are adopted into families that, statistics say, are predominantly white and heterosexual.

  (And a lot of Jews. Caroline came home with our girls from their Sunday morning Chinese class one spring to report that there would be no Chinese class the next week. “Why?” I asked. “Because of the Jewish holidays,” she replied. Wasn’t it obvious? Only in America …)

  Some of the most unfortunate thinking on transracial adoption traces back to a venerable source. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a famous statement detailing their opposition to transracial adoptions—“for any reason,” they said, and continued:

  We affirm the inviolable position of black children in black families where they belong physically, psychologically and culturally in order that they receive the total sense of themselves and develop a soun
d projection of their future.

  Ethnicity is a way of life in these United States, and the world at large; a viable, sensitive, meaningful and legitimate societal construct.… Only a black family can transmit the emotional and sensitive subtleties of perception and reaction essential for a black child’s survival in a racist society. Our society is distinctly black or white and characterized by white racism at every level. We repudiate the fallacious and fantasized reasoning of some that whites adopting black children will alter that basic character.

  Special programming in learning to handle black children’s hair, learning black culture, “trying to become black,” puts normal family activities in the form of special family projects to accommodate the odd member of the family.… These actions highlight the unnatural character of transracial adoption.

  These words sound archaic today—or worse. But there is an ugly history that makes minorities (Jews included) intelligently suspicious. Most of the ancestors of African American families didn’t sail past the Statue of Liberty but docked after a murderous journey as slaves, not immigrants. America wasn’t the New World, brimming with opportunities, but a killing ground of cotton fields and slave shacks. Aboriginal children were once torn from their families and given to white Australians. There were orphanages and mission schools in America that saw it as their duty to rob Native American kids of their identity and make them Christian. There are scandals today in which infants from Ethiopia or Central America are given to Western families in what seems to be a straight cash deal.

  I make no comparison, but I also try not to forget that my parents were considered to have a “mixed marriage” in the 1950s. Six million Jews had just been murdered in the Holocaust, and many good people felt that those who survived shouldn’t dilute their number by marrying gentiles. A few people in both our Irish and Jewish families felt, as strongly as did the black social workers, that my mother and father were foolishly heedless of the bigotry to which they would sentence their children in a racist society (it’s an old story with bigotry—we say it’s always someone else, not us, who harbors hatred).