The Unspeakable (15 page)

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.

When I saw her a few weeks later, I asked how the movie was. She told me they ended up not going, that she and a smaller group of friends went out to dinner instead.

I didn't say anything to her. By that I mean I didn't say anything beyond “What? Really? After all that?” I didn't say the thing that even then I knew I should have, which is that $100 was not a small amount to me and that not using the tickets was disrespectful and inconsiderate. I didn't say it because I didn't feel like our relationship was such that I could scold her. I also didn't say it because she hadn't asked me to buy the tickets in the first place. Looking back on it now, I see that they were more of a burden than a gift. As much as she'd insisted that going to the movies with her friends was exactly what she'd wanted to do on her birthday, I now know that you cannot expect a teenager to plan more than one day into the future. It's hard enough to get adults to commit to a social activity until they're sure they're not getting a better offer elsewhere. But I suspect that ultimately what I wanted most from Nikki was for her not to act like a teenager. I didn't like teenagers. I hadn't even liked them when I was one myself. I wanted her to act like an adult, which as it happens was what my parents had wanted from me when I was a teenager and even a young child. So I didn't say anything to her about wasting the movie tickets. I merely reminded myself that this was yet another example of why I should never have children. Childhood itself was anathema to me. The very condition gave me the shivers.

I think in part that's why I was interested in foster children. In some cases, childhood had literally been beaten out of them. And though I had grown up a million miles from anything resembling physical abuse or neglect—if anything I'd been overparented, oversupervised, vested with far too many unmeetable expectations—the foster kids I met seemed alienated from their own childhoods in a way that felt familiar to me. Whereas with Maricela and Nikki the idea in some ways had been to keep them from growing up too fast, foster kids were essentially victims of their own youth. And they knew it as well as anyone. As much as they wanted to be normal kids, there was almost always a sense in them of wanting to get on with things. This phase of being a minor, of having no control over your fate and no say over what you eat or where you sleep or who's acting as your guardian and for how long, was a phase to be endured. No one ever said to a foster child, “Enjoy being a kid now, because one day you'll have to be a grown-up.” It was no accident that when they aged out of the system it was called “emancipating.” It seemed to me like the perfect word. What was adulthood, after all, but a permanent release from the chamber of childhood? Why would they have referred to these children as “minors” (in court documents, Matthew was never referred to as Matthew but as “the minor”) if there wasn't at least some hope of major improvement down the road?

But that was my particular view, which was colored by my own particular experience as a young person who couldn't stand being young—in other words, a twisted view. It also doesn't really hold up when it comes to kids in the child welfare system, since the data on what happens to kids after they age out of the system without a permanent family is dismal. Statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services consistently show that more than half end up either homeless or in jail. Within two years of aging out of the system, as many as half of the young women will be pregnant. Besides, time moves at an excruciating pace for all kids. A month might as well be a year. On the days I went to court with Matthew, I watched child after child, some of them infants in plastic bucket carriers, appear before judges whose jobs essentially boiled down to issuing timelines. Parents were given six or twelve or eighteen months to get their acts together. They were told to go to rehab, to anger-management therapy, and to parenting classes. And when they failed to do so, the clock would start all over again. The children would hear this news and sometimes their faces would go jagged with despair. How was it that they'd been taken away in fourth grade and now they were in sixth? Sometimes they were afraid of the parents and secretly didn't want to go back, though they told the judge otherwise.

Matthew, for his part, was an old hand at court. He looked forward to it because it meant missing school and watching movies in the day-care area, where kids of all ages were kept behind locked doors as protection from abusive parents who might also be in court that day. Though he wanted to be adopted, he no longer expected anything to happen at his hearings. There were no major decisions to be made or battles to be fought. Usually the judge would just remark on how tall he'd gotten or how nice his hair looked.

*   *   *

Initially, I'd thought Matthew would grow on me. But though I learned to identify some of his charms—his facility with technological gadgets, his GPS-like knowledge of the location of every video arcade and big-box store within a twenty-mile radius—I can't say we were great friends. Not that we needed to be. I was never going to be his role model. I certainly wasn't a mother figure. I was more like a random port in the unrelenting storm that was his life. And that was enough. Matthew's lot was so bad that it could be improved, albeit triflingly, with one mini-pizza at a food court. A kid with higher expectations would have been more than I could handle.

I was comfortable with that admission. I was happy to state my limits. I was proud, in fact, to stand up and be counted among those who knew themselves well enough to know that they wouldn't do right by a child and that therefore the only ethical and, for that matter, remotely sensible choice was to bow out of the whole enterprise. But a member of a childless couple can only be as strident as the other half of the couple. And in the aftermath of my miscarriage, during those confused, angry months when I was struggling to understand how it was possible to feel so sad about not having something that held so little appeal in the first place, my husband began to say out loud that he wanted to be someone's father—or at least that he might not be okay with never being someone's father. He wanted to use what he knew about the world to help someone find his or her own way through it. He wanted “someone to hang out with” when he got older. That said, he didn't necessarily need the baby- or toddler-rearing experience. He didn't particularly want to give up his weekends for kids' birthday parties or spend half our income on child care. He didn't need the kid to look like him or even be the same race. When I asked if these needs could be met through teaching or mentoring or even being an advocate, he said he wasn't sure.

And so were planted the seeds of a potential compromise. Maybe we could take in, or possibly even adopt, a foster child. This would be a child old enough to go to birthday parties on his own, a child old enough that we might actually qualify as young or average-age parents rather than ones of “advanced age” (if I adopted a ten-year-old at forty-three it would be the equivalent of having had him at the eminently reasonable age of thirty-three).