Small Shoots

Cam turned 16 a couple of weeks ago and it has given me pause -- mostly due to the fact that my body, like most others, comes to a screeching halt when deprived of oxygen. I have learned to take a moment before darkness overtakes my vision, and kick-start my brain into remembering to take a breath -- Big Gasp and Exhale -- that's better.....

Most 16 year old kids are moving rapidly toward independence by driving away and hanging out with friends in places a mother is not meant to know about. Cam is obsessed with vehicles and talks a lot about driving, but when I gave him a driving lesson recently, he really just wanted to sit in the driver's seat with his arm out the window, the keys in the ignition, cool shades on his face, and fiddle around with the radio and turn signal.

In spite of all the great things he has learned over the last decade, the reality is that Cam, for the most part, requires the same amount of supervision now as he did when he arrived at age 4. This is not to say that he doesn't have a sack full of skills and talents, but independence just isn't one of them. The infamous 'They' say that he may yet achieve a much higher level of maturity, but 'They' don't live here and are not responsible for sending him out into the world to live in his own space and take care of his own needs.

So, while other mothers are renting tuxedos and buying corsages and threatening to cut the shaggy locks that hide teenage secrets barely disguised in their child's eyes while he sleeps, I am taking one step closer to the phone book in order to find an attorney who will help me through the process of becoming my son's legal guardian the minute he turns 18. Intellectually,I get it. He is who he is, where he is, and he is a great human being - filled to the brim with way more humanity than most. I adore him and, if he were to never leave home, I couldn't ask for better company. He's quiet, funny, sweet, helpful, and notices things worth noticing. His needs are simple in life: Matchbox cars, a few bicycles, miscellaneous yard equipment, and plenty of PB&J with bananas. He doesn't ask for much.

But emotionally, I am just as hard-wired like the rest of those Other Mamas who are sending their sons out into the world. As much as Cam has learned, I feel like I should have succeeded in teaching him more by this point. As relieved as I am that he is that he is content to pretend to drive, I wish for him to be able to do the real thing. As passive and undemanding as he is, I wish he would have a tantrum and yell and scream at me and tell me what he wants. As content as his is with his life, I would give my right arm for him to aspire to something ---- anything. And, yes, ...... sigh...... as undemanding as his is, and as much as I enjoy his company, I must confess that I really do want my house, brain, and body back to myself at some point. I have been stepping on and tripping over the same matchbox cars for the last 12 years and my feet really hurt.

So, like a good gardener, I survey my freshly planted field every day - anxiously anticipating the first signs of germination evidenced by small green shoots emerging from the soil. This morning, as he was beginning his commute to the end of the driveway for the bus, lunch bag and Matchboxes in hand, he snarled and grumbled "I'm going to find one of those (free) Real Estate books for France. I'm going to grow up and get on my motorcycle and drive all the way to Paris and live there by myself so I can do whatever I want without anybody supervising me at all!" I replied that that sounded like a good plan, but that he might run into a snag when he eventually hit the Atlantic Ocean. Sighing and turning to me just a bit in his fit of pique, he said "Duh, Mom, I'll just catch the next ferry" and stomped out the door.

As the echo of the slamming door faded, I continued to lay on the couch and chuckled to myself - enjoying the moment. Hey, my teenager thinks his mom is an idiot! My little green shoot for the day -- who knows what it will grow into?

Luna and broken promises

A week later, I arrived at their home – a 90 minute drive from mine – at 8am. Cam was awake and playing, but Luna was still asleep. Patty, the foster mother, had already presented me as “Mommy Caddie” to the kids. “Mommy Caddie is here to play with you today” she told Camaro.He didn’t seem as shocked as I was by this title and was quickly busy playing with his cars and trucks and showing me his big jar of pennies and his tank of fish. While his diaper was getting changed and he was being dressed for the day, I waited with Sly, their foster father, in the kitchen. He told me that Luna was a slower riser than her brother, but that she would be up soon. Evidently, her routine was to ease into the day slowly. She would get herself a bottle of milk and sit on her foster dad’s lap for about 10 minutes or so before getting down to play or interact with anyone.

A few minutes later, little Luna padded in and looked around. I recognized her immediately. Here was, without a doubt, my child. My daughter whom I had not yet met, but whom I had known all of my life. My jaw dropped to the floor. I watched adoringly as she opened the fridge, procured herself a bottle, walked over, and climbed up onto her usual morning perch. She settled herself and looked over at me. Almost immediately, clenching the nipple of her bottle in her teeth, and, without breaking eye contact, she slid down, walked the few steps to me, stood in front of me and silently raised her arms to be lifted up. Inwardly speechless, and outwardly stunned, I instinctively reached down to pick up this child as if I had been lifting her my whole life. Settling her on my lap, she fit perfectly. She held on tight and refused to let go for the next 11 hours. Thus began the whole visitation part of the adoption.

At no time in the whole long process did I ever feel as adrift and clueless as during this process. I felt in a no (wo)man’s land betwixt and between caseworkers, procedure, and status. There were no guidelines, no protocol, no supervision. Sly, Patty and I were pretty much left to our own discretion, and we had very different ideas of what and how visitation and disclosure to the children should go. They were in favor of telling the kids that they were getting old, and so the children would have to go to a different home. I pointed out that I, too, would one day be older and perhaps that wasn’t a good thing for them to be worrying about in the coming years. Then they thought that telling them that Patty had hurt her back might help them to understand whey they needed to move -- ??? – And if I were to get hurt at some point in the raising of them – what might they think? You get the picture……… As it turned out, Patty and Sly had never gotten around to telling the children that they weren’t their birth parents. They were of the opinion that since they might not understand, truth was irrelevant and beside the point. At any rate, we muddled through as best we could – my visiting Camaro there, him visiting me in my home, and eventually including an overnight that was, looking back, arrived at much too quickly.

As I put him to bed that first night, and the inevitable tears and heartbreaking pleading to be returned to his daddy and mommy came rolling out of him, I couldn’t help but cry myself, and wanted nothing more than to jump the both of us into the car and drive the hour and a half to take him home. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of awful system I had become a part of? What pain was I inflicting upon an innocent child “for his own good” and was it really the right thing to do? Who was I to take such drastic measures and to witness and participate in such trauma? It felt all wrong. By removing him from everything and everyone familiar to him, I felt like I was part of breaking an unspoken promise to this sweet little being who had had so many promises already broken in his short life – promises that I suddenly realized I, in my upbringing, had always been able to take for granted. It broke my heart. We held hands as we lay there and cried our separate tears.

Planning

The room at DSHS Children and Family Services was about 8’ square, and painted an imitation baby blue, with plastic stick-on baby Disney characters around the top of the walls. The room held the sickly smell of fruity disinfectant peculiar to governmental institutions – someone’s idea of dressing up clean where clean could never be – trying to cover up the splat and imprint of toxic emotions that no scrubbed on detergent could ever wash away. Muffled cries and shouts of confusion, anger, fear, and grief seeped through the walls from adjoining rooms where recalcitrant and belligerent parents pleaded with caseworkers for the return of their strung out and exhausted young children. Doors slammed and raging, disheveled parents swore as they paced the hallway belligerently. Caseworkers followed and tried to calm and contain them. I felt dizzy and faintly nauseous. Following the lead, I entered the room where the caseworker sat at a small round table with a 12” stack of files in front of her. Stunned and intimidated, I asked if all of those files pertained to Camaro. Nodding apologetically, she explained that this was all she could put her hands on at the time, but that she would show me the rest of them another time. She hoped that all we needed for the purposes of this first meeting would be found in the stack she had brought. As I was realizing that I really should have listened to my mother and done this with another adult, my caseworker gave me a friendly shove to keep me moving and I squeezed around to the back of the table. Hemmed in by the caseworkers on one side and the foster parents on the other, I felt as if there wasn’t enough air in the entire city for what I needed in order to survive. All eyes started by looking to me, and I had no idea where to begin or what to say.

I kept expecting some sort of test. Sure, I had filled out pages and pages of application forms. I had answered more questions than I had in the 5 years of undergraduate and graduate school combined. I had been through classes and interviews; had written my biography; and had shown and explained every nook and cranny of my home to several people who took copious notes on what I ate, how well I cooked and how I spent my money. I answered questions about how I filled my time and my views on discipline and education. I had been grilled on my upbringing and my plans for the future. I had checked lots of boxes on huge lists of attributes and abilities and disabilities that I was willing to consider and not willing to consider in a future son or daughter. I had read books and books on every aspect of fostering and adoption that I could lay my hands on. I had remodeled my apartment to accommodate the rules and regulations that needed to be met regarding bedrooms and stairs and bathtubs and square footage per child and basic safety. I had made arrangements with the principal at school, and had tentative childcare plans. I had slowly, over the course of a year, extricated myself from all of my extracurricular and volunteer positions. I had spent countless hours pouring through bulging 3” binders in which every sheet of paper contained a photo and descriptive paragraph of a child or sibling group in need of a permanent home. I had met Camaro and thought long and hard about whether or not this was the right thing. In short, I was as ready as anyone could possibly be. But sitting there, none of that mattered one tiny bit anymore when weighed against the gravity of the situation. How does one prepare to make such profound changes regarding the life of an innocent child, and how in heaven’s name can you ever do anything more than cross your fingers and take your best guess?

Sitting there, the realization washed over me that there was no test forthcoming, and that the system was as simple as someone jumping though all of the hoops, all the while showing interest and enthusiasm. Once done, all one need ask for is any particular child – any one among hundreds, and someone would be very grateful and relieved to hand them over. What kind of world is this??

I honestly don’t remember much from the meeting until the end. I guess we chatted about Camaro, I told a bit about me, the foster parents grilled me, and then we set up an initial visitation time (a week hence) where I would go to Cam’s foster home and spend the day with him. The plan was that then the foster parents and I would take it from there until we reached a mutual “moving in” day at some point in the future weeks or months. Somehow it was all settled, and suddenly I wasn’t entirely sure I had made the right decision. I was even sort of wondering if I had made a decision at all. I was suddenly overcome with that feeling I call “Vous-ja-de” – the sudden and exceedingly clear realization that you have never done anything like this before in your whole life. I was scared stiff.

As we were getting up from the table, another caseworker entered the room to talk to his co-worker. We all sat back down and waited. She then turned to me and said “Before you go, you should know that Camaro does have a younger sister, named Luna, that he is very attached to. She’s 2 1/2 and also lives in the same foster home, but is not yet legally free. She does not appear to have any extraordinary needs, and the State is still looking to reunite the family, but in the event that it isn’t possible, she will be available for adoption. The two children are only 19 months apart in age and are very bonded to each other. Would you consider adopting her as well, if she were available at some point in the future?” Answering as if someone had just offered me a free ottoman to go with my new living room chair, I replied that of course I would. What else could or would I have said? With that, the meeting was over and we left. Stunned, and with my mind kind of blown, I followed the agency caseworker out the door. I was glad she had driven – I was shaking too much to drive.

The Beginning

I was 31 when it hit me – with all the subtlety of a drive-by shooting. I had just closed my classroom for the day and was beginning my drive home. I rounded the corner onto the main street and glanced across the car and out the passenger side window for a last look at the school. My heart leapt into my throat and I gasped. Quickly registering the empty seat beside me, my foot went to the brake and I swerved. “Oh my God!” I thought, “I forgot my child!” This thought was of course, followed shortly by the next thought, “Oh - that’s right - I don’t have a child.” Somewhat shaken, I wiped the sweat off my palms and continued homeward, slightly amused and more than a little disturbed by what had just happened.

I had been arguing with some inner voice for quite a while. The voice kept pushing and nagging me to look into adoption. I was not so willing as to run to the nearest agency upon encouragement, even if the voice seemed to be coming from within. I mean, who knows where that voice came from? And although I consider myself open-minded, I was, and am not, a reckless fool. But, in the face of tricks like these, I decided a little concession might be in order. Perhaps a little half-hearted and insincere research at the local library would quell the stranger in my gut……

It took me a while to find the section in the library – most things take me a while to find in the library – in spite of the neat little cards in the cool little wooden drawers with the brass handles. But I finally found the section, and spent the next hour or so perusing the literature. “What an obscure thing to be doing,” I thought. Still held at virtual gunpoint by The Voice, I finally selected two books and calmly checked them out.

Once home, I drew the curtains and looked at them more closely. I skimmed a few pages here and there, and put them down. Then I picked them up again. Then I put them down again. Then I picked them up again. I sat down and, over the next 2 days, read both of them cover to cover. The next day, I pulled out the Yellow Pages and looked up under “A” for adoption. (In case you are wondering, it’s right there on the first page.) Feeling totally intimidated and half crazy, I bumbled my way through calls to several agencies and requested information to be sent to me.

Through the practical process of elimination, and in another round of information gathering phone calls, I found myself talking to a social worker for quite some time. After about an hour, I finally accepted her oft repeated offer for a formal meeting.

I told myself that this was all just to satisfy the noisy malcontent in my midst, and that I wasn’t really doing this. I was, after all, just a 31 year old young woman with a cat and a cozy, neat house. No partner, no home ownership, no nest egg, and no solid plans for parenthood anywhere on the horizon.

But one thing led to another, which led to another, until, at some point a couple of months later, I realized that I was no longer considering this – I was actually doing it. And I found that I was very happy about that.

By the time I met Camaro, he was 4 and I was 33. I met him at what’s known as a “Kids’ Fest”. Kids’ Fest is an annual event put on by a few local adoption agencies whose goal is to unite searching parents with searching kids. It’s billed as an entertainment event, and they do go all out, but everyone knows that it’s an incredibly awkward time of tense parents looking over hoards of equally tense kids – all checking each other out and hoping desperately to be chosen by someone. It’s absolutely excruciating. Effective, but excruciating.

I had heard about Cam from my caseworker just a few weeks before, and he seemed a promising candidate. We were told that he’d be at Kids’ Fest with his foster parents, and that I should look for him. I had been told to look for a tiny blond boy with his foster parents, and that he’d have a nametag on.

By the time I’d hung up the phone I was, of course, already in love with him, and had the whole romantic scene played out in my mind………….. He’d walk through the doors and I’d know who he was instantly. We’d catch each other’s eyes and he’d run to me – sure of who I was. He’d be dressed casually in neat, colorful cotton clothes, and be ready to play. He’d grab my hand and we’d be off on some mutual adventure……. We’d be in such love that he would move in the following day and we’d just ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.

As it turned out, I finally spotted him atop his foster dad’s shoulders – green snot pouring out of his head from what turned out to be a chronic sinus infection, dressed in an old t shirt 2 sizes too big and not an agreeable color at all. He was indeed tiny – more the size and appearance of a 2 year old - and crying from all of the noise inside the gymnasium. His head was an odd shape and, frankly, I was disappointed. He was not the idyllic picture of cuteness, and I suddenly had no desire to meet him at all. The foster parents were kinda scary looking……. But I also wasn’t sure of how to avoid them. They had been told that I would be there, and they were obviously looking around. It took me 3 approaches until I finally swallowed hard enough to introduce myself. Once they knew who I was, the foster parents immediately asked me to join them outside where it was quieter. Cam stopped crying immediately. Once placed on the ground, he walked up and grasped my finger. He waddled around in his diaper checking out all of the vehicles. His eyes and feet never stopped moving, and, with the exception of asking everyone we saw “Hey, where’s your truck?!”, he just repeated everything I said.

While listening to Cam with one ear, in my other ear, the foster parents grilled me bluntly and mercilessly between long drags on their cigarettes. Clearly they were nervous, and definitely not the shy, patient, take-your-time-and-watch-a-bit-and-see type. I stumbled after Cam – totally bewildered.

I had been told that he had “global developmental delays”, but that no one really knew what that meant – both currently and for the future. As a special education teacher, that didn’t scare me a bit. Heck, I dealt with that every day easily enough. But, now, being dragged around by a tiny, toddling, echolailic four year old whose eyes never seemed to stick on anything for more than a portion of a second, and who was clearly obsessed with vehicles, I wasn’t sure about being called “Mommy.”

What had I done, and just how had I gotten here???

But as my circulation returned to normal, and I sweated out enough adrenaline, I started to enjoy this weird little kid. I, too, was overwhelmed by the inside crowd, and preferred to be outside. I noticed that he was quite at ease with himself and seemed to have a sense of who he was. He enjoyed himself and others immensely. He was not bothered by the fact that I was a stranger, and readily dragged me along – oblivious to everything else but having a good time. He was not at a loss as to how to entertain himself and laughed from his heart. He was comfortable in his own skin. I didn’t expect that level of settledness from someone so young. I had to admire that.

We parted at the end of the party – them visibly hopeful, and me inwardly overwhelmed with the idea of “picking out” a child. Days and a couple of weeks went by. I had never picked out a child before, and had no idea of how to do it. In fact, whenever I thought about it, I was nearly overcome with how weird and alien a concept it was. Should I adopt Camaro or keep looking? What was it exactly that I was looking for? How would I know? Was he too old? Too young? Should I get a girl? Should it be a boy? What would I do next? Would he like me? Would my friends and family like him? What if they didn’t? Would I like him? And just how does one become a mother overnight? Come to think of it - what is a mother, anyway?!

It took some time for my emotions and thoughts to calm down enough to see straight. And then, one day as I was driving around the city doing ordinary errands on an ordinary day, I knew. It was quiet, and not what I expected, but I knew that I did want to adopt him – whatever that really meant.

I called the caseworker and she set up a meeting.