Getting A Life

The story of my son, RDCV*

Someone dropped by on my About page to remark upon my statement that I have lost a child to adoption. Some of the things she said got me thinking that perhaps telling the story might interest some of my other readers as well. I guess this is going to come across as dry or something, but it’s been a long time and it’s late right now and I’m kind of tired. (I am about ready to swear off coffee because once again, having a second cup made me sick.)

I married in March 1995 to a guy I’d known for about a month and a half. Sean was born a year later. So it was not a shotgun wedding, but we still started our family pretty quickly. At the time it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, as he and I both worked full-time (my maternity leave lasted six weeks, mostly because of understaffing at work) and we were pretty much on top of our bills. We had a great little guy and we were crazy about each other.

Then we moved.

I am not the most internally motivated person. Even when I manage motivation it takes me a while to build up steam and get going. This has always been true; it’s rare that I’ll jump right up and do something. (The one exception being getting involved with someone new, but I consider that a problem, not an asset. Hopefully it’s a problem I’ve outgrown. We’ll see.) On top of that, North Carolina was a completely different job market and I could not seem to find any 8am to 5pm file clerk jobs like I had had in Georgia. This made finding daycare very difficult. I thought I had found a provider at one point but apparently she had misunderstood my son’s age somehow and she called me at work one day a couple of weeks into my new job to tell me that she couldn’t continue watching him. She was a military daycare provider and they were very strict about adhering to numbers and age mixes and that kind of thing.

I wound up bouncing around to one or two more jobs and getting frustrated and giving up, which was a horrible thing to do as we had bought a house when we moved, and we also had a credit card to pay off. Long story short, between that and other stresses to the marriage, we were on the brink of divorce by the time my husband got in trouble right after the New Year in 1999. He had broken into a building on Fort Bragg that New Year’s Eve and stolen a bunch of computer equipment. Yours truly had to turn him in. Much mayhem ensued.

At the end of it I was staying in a weekly-rate motel north of Memphis and wrote to his mom asking her to come get Sean and keep him for me til I could get on my feet. She’d already offered, and I finally caved in when I realized that if I had had trouble coordinating daycare and weird work hours with a husband around, it was going to be that much harder with nothing but weed-smoking relatives nearby who had their own problems and didn’t really want to help me. My mother-in-law came to get Sean on my ex’s birthday. I’m sure it was complete coincidence.

Right after she got him back home I got a nasty letter from her stating that he was six months to a year behind in his verbal skills and she was sure I’d done something to him and she and her husband (not Sean’s biological grandfather) were going to sue for custody (I had given them an in loco parentis) and a few other choice things about my character and fitness as a wife and so on.

I was gobsmacked. I guess I had felt there was something weird about my son, but as his father and I were not paragons of normalcy ourselves and as no one, not even his daycare providers, had ever mentioned to me that there might be a problem, I hadn’t thought much about it. He was my first child and I didn’t know much about little kids. I knew, also, that I had been slow in learning to talk.

Unfortunately, I also knew that I barely had enough money to keep myself in an apartment and my car insured. I certainly didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer, and I wasn’t sure about legal aid. I was, however, pretty sure that even if I could manage to get their help, the judge would take one look at the state Sean was in and immediately blame me and I would not have a chance in hell. And I’m pretty sure my MIL knew that too. So they got him with no legal battle from me.

Next up, a year or so down the road, was the prospect of divorce. I still didn’t have the money for a lawyer, and now they were telling me that in the state of Florida (where they lived by then), if neither of the birth parents were custodial they would both owe child support. My ex had just gotten out of prison and was a convicted felon; his job prospects were not what you’d call the brightest. My car had died by then and I was getting by on the charity of friends to get back and forth to work. Neither of us was in a position to have chunks of our pay sent to his parents.

So… They suggested being allowed to adopt him. Again, having no lawyer to fight it, I caved in.

The adoption was finalized Halloween of 2000. Sean sat singing to himself at the table while the grandparents and the judge talked it over and he looked at Sean and then at them and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?” She told me about it afterward and I wanted to slap the officious bastard. Maybe it was easier than yelling at her.

In 2002 the MIL left a message on my then-homepage’s guestbook offering an apology “for all the things I have said to you about this child.” It turned out they had a family friend who worked in speech therapy, and he happened to play with Sean one day. He took them aside afterward and said, “Have you had him evaluated for this?” It turned out Sean has a disorder called a central auditory processing deficit, in which his hearing worked just fine but his brain had trouble processing about fifty percent of the new words he heard. This explained why he was so slow in learning to talk; he couldn’t parse what he was hearing!

I found out later that very young children develop what is called receptive language before they ever really learn to speak; basically, your infant understands your words before she can repeat them. Sean had missed this important milestone to some extent, so he couldn’t learn to express what he didn’t know.

In retrospect I do remember that interacting with him was… odd. I could tell he was a smart little boy, and I did sometimes seem to get through to him, but mostly he seemed impenetrable. About the only thing we did together verbally was count things, in the last year or so that I had him. He had learned what counting was before he was even two years old, and by the time he left me, when he was almost three, he could count to twelve and muddle through the teens and say, “Twenty!” He also recognized some letters. We just weren’t really communicating with one another.

Talking with him is still weird because he had a late start and because he also tested as having a genius IQ (the MIL initially told me he tested at 160, and now she says she thinks the person who tested him let him off easy, which I think is hooey but I’m prejudiced), so he doesn’t think like most of the rest of us do–his mind goes places you would not expect. But the point is I can talk with him now, at least sometimes.

It’s just… It would have been nice to not automatically have had the worst assumed about me. It would have been nice to have had more choices when I was faced with adversity.

I’m afraid I am not someone to consult about the virtues of adoption. My situation with my son was not the only time I had intimate acquaintance with the issue. I went through an extremely bad patch with the father of my daughter during my pregnancy with her, which ultimately killed the relationship. Although my children are almost nine years apart in age, I caught a former so-called friend talking about me on LiveJournal intimating that my unfit little self was dropping them like kittens while she had to take fertility drugs and suffer, even though she had a job and a house and a husband. (I was a full-time college student when I got pregnant with my daughter.) I had another so-called friend offer to take my daughter when I was contemplating giving her up, until my MIL told me she wanted to keep the siblings together if that would be possible, and then the friend guilt-tripped me for changing my mind. I’ve heard stories of Americans adopting babies from third-world countries only to wonder later if they might have been guilty of child theft, but they don’t seem to be losing much sleep over it. Poor women, and especially poor white mothers of white babies, or poor ethnic women of cute ethnic babies, seem to be viewed as brood mares for the infertile middle class and rich. It’s disgusting, and I won’t condone it.

My daughter recognized my voice shortly after birth when they brought her into my room. She was crying, and I called her name and she immediately calmed down. I can’t believe that children taken from their mothers in infancy don’t know what is going on, and I can’t believe they don’t suffer for it. God only knows the mothers do. Adoption is fine for children who absolutely can never go back to their parents again, but all too often, that is not how adoption is used.

My mother-in-law told me later that even if she had known I didn’t cause my son’s speech problems, I still wasn’t fit to keep him with me. I want to know where this committee is that weighs every mother’s fitness. So I can beat them all to a bloody pulp, the same way they did me, only emotionally.

edit: Speaking of my issues with adoption, here’s another one. They “need” babies, they are “entitled” to have children–more so than us nasty poor sluts!–but when the child is not “normal”, they can’t handle it.

The former friend who guilt-tripped me about my wanting to keep my children together also guilt-tripped me because I don’t like the way adoptive parents turn down disabled children. My logic is that when you give birth to your own, you get the luck of the draw, and that even when your child is so-called “normal” at birth, bad things can happen later. About the best she could do was, “Don’t I have a right to a child that my husband and I can handle?” This is the kind of mentality of the people who go around splitting up families so they can have their own. Nuh-uh.

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*Reader’s Digest Condensed Version.

I get by with a little help from my ‘rents

Making Do With Help From Mom and Dad is an interesting article over at Wise Bread about the financial advantages of getting help from your parents when you are just starting out. Even if they just babysit for you when you have kids, or pay part or all of your college tuition, it can make a huge difference in your net worth later on.

It was interesting seeing what one of the commenters had to say that with the way things are now, how expensive everything is compared to how little young people are paid when they’re just starting out, it is foolish for parents to just let their kids sink or swim if they want them to do well in the long run. This is a decent rebuttal to the trend of accusing baby boomers of spoiling their kids just because they help them out or let them live at home a bit longer.

My experience was a little bit different. I went straight from a young adult just a few weeks out from my high school graduation, to entering active duty in the Army. Of course if you leave out the grueling training and the fact you’re being paid to be able to kill people on a moment’s notice, being in the military is rather like staying home with your parents only with a paycheck and uniforms. You have free lodging, someone cooks for you, and someone tells you where to be and how to act. So, contrary to the stereotype that the military helps people grow up, my experience was that the Army kept me somewhat in the nest when I should have been testing my wings and flying on my own. Nevertheless, it was life as an adult and in many ways I was officially “independent” from eighteen onwards.

I did eventually move back in with my parents–one at a time, as they were divorced–but it was an on-again, off-again affair as I tried to figure out how to make it on my own post-marital-breakup. I was 25 when I left my husband, 26 when I moved in with my father the first time, and 31 going on 32 when I moved in with him the second time. At no time did I stay with him for longer than six or seven months. It just didn’t feel right to me.

I have also had financial help from my ex-mother-in-law, who still somewhat considers me part of her family. In fact, that’s one of the personal loans I now owe, because she paid tuition for at-home medical transcriptionist training that I never finished. The school was fine; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was twofold: (1) My little girl’s dad kept promising and then failing to help me get my studies done when, even as young as she was at the time, my daughter needed my utmost attention and I couldn’t be constantly interrupted by a young infant needing to be held or whatever. (2) I was not at a place emotionally where I could deal with the workload. He and I had had a very nasty breakup while I was pregnant with my daughter and I was depressed about 99 percent of the time, and the last thing I really cared about was school. I had taken it on largely out of desperation that I would not be able to support myself if he kept abandoning me, and even though my concerns were valid, that’s not a good reason to go to school. You have to want to be there for its own sake or you won’t do well. Or, at least that is true for me.

Nevertheless, that’s one more debt racked up and nothing to show for it.

The other way my ex-MIL helped was during the pregnancy itself; even though her son had nothing to do with it, the baby was to be my older child’s sibling, so was still important to her (ex-MIL). Without her I would have had to figure out survival on $500 a month with a rent of $350. I was showing by the time my little girl’s dad kicked me out, and although pregnancy discrimination is not supposed to be legal, it’s impossible to prove in an employment-at-will state. I also wasn’t completely sure I wouldn’t have more health problems; I had already suffered a bout of severe inflammation and joint pain early in the pregnancy and had had to undergo three glucose tolerance tests because my initial blood sugar lab had come back slightly high. It was a fairly precarious time for me, all in all. Without her I would have wound up on welfare or worse.

So while I would not say parental or in-law-parental help improved my net worth any, it certainly improved my quality of life at a time I really needed that. The experience has left me with an understanding that should either of my children ever need me in their adult lives, I would gladly do what I could to keep them safe and off the street (barring them taking undue advantage of me in some way) because to me, that is what parents are supposed to do. Americans are almost unique in expecting children to live completely independently of their parents at adulthood, and I’m not sure why we’re so convinced that’s how all people should be, but I am willing to put my children’s welfare above social opinion.