Adoption story in brief

When I was a child in the 1970s, my father would say as we drove past what he said was a “children’s home” that if I didn’t behave myself he would turn me over to them. He was a crude, confused man, but this was nonetheless meant to be, I believe, on the safe side of a joke, not a real threat. But as children are prone to do, I took it extremely seriously, and it worried me, though I was not sure that life in a “children’s home” couldn’t conceivably have been more pleasant than my life at home with Butch (my dad’s apt nickname). Lucky for me, my parents divorced before I was ten, and my life began to improve, slowly but steadily right up to this very moment. As I grew up with my mom and siblings in small-town Ohio and my confidence that I would never be handed over to a “children’s home” was strengthened by time, my fascination with “children’s homes” did not fade away entirely. I thought of “children’s homes” as shady red-brick buildings with matronly, grumpy, but loving ladies looking after their clean, placid children. I imagined boys reading Huckleberry Finn aloud to one another under the sheets. I imagined having a dozen close friends among my intelligent, eccentric fellow inmates. I never saw inside a “children’s home” until 2001, when I worked in one upstate for a year. It was, to say the least, nothing like my vision. Most of the “children” weren’t even children anymore, but severely disabled adolescents, most of whom, for their sad variety of reasons, weren’t expected to live long. There was one child in the house, Chris, an autistic and diabetic 8 year old with severe problems; he didn’t speak; he banged his head against the wall, he bit, he cried, he screamed. I liked him. It was my privilege to spend time looking after him. He was a boy with a powerful need to be responded to in a way that necessarily included his sometimes being tightly held. I tucked him into bed several times a night by tightly wrapping him like a mummy in a sheet, his arms pressed against his sides. Chris made a deep impression on me because I felt his mute, constant plea to be held and loved. Every moment of his life, it seemed, he was pathologically obsessed by his lack. Knowing Chris redoubled my desire to adopt. My ideal has always been that I would simply say to any adoption agency: Give me the kid who needs me. With no regard for what type of child they would send. I have a perhaps foolish but persistent belief that it’s a moral duty for everyone who is able to to adopt a child without much regard for his characteristics. In April 2001, my life changed dramatically for the better. I was working at the time in the office of an escort service, answering the phone overnight and dispatching hustlers to the service’s clients around Manhattan. My job was to take the client’s credit card and bill them $300 per hour, per boy. One customer, an antiques dealer on the Upper East Side, had a monthly “party” with a group of escorts in his apartment and racked up a $16,000 bill, not including the cocaine, which one of the guys told me filled a large urn on the coffee table. It was hardly the kind of life I really wanted for myself. I was reluctant to leave behind a scene I had once lived in more fully, having been a hustler myself for a couple of years at the end of the ‘90s. I was looking for a real job, and in April of 2001, I landed one along with a new boyfriend. And I turned 33, all within a few days. In the fall of 2002 my boyfriend and I, who had been together for about 18 months and were 31 and 34 years old, contacted the Council on Adoptable Children to begin what we expected to be a longish process toward adopting a child from the New York foster care system. Nearly six years later, a fourteen-year-old boy moved in. Between 2002 and 2008, there were long stretches of time in which nothing whatsoever happened: COAC was useless when it came to matching us with a child. They did arrange to contract a social worker to come to our apartment and write our home study. The young lady spent about ninety minutes with us and then she wrote her report, which is the single document used by county adoption workers to find the right parents for their children. Our home-study, we would discover much later, was woefully inadequate, insufficiently detailed, and distinctly lacking in information about my past, which included a period of time described in my book Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling, during which I abused drugs. I was not inclined to discuss the details of that aspect of my life with the social worker in our apartment, and I had been advised not to offer up that sort of information by a lawyer friend, but I would not have lied if she had asked about the book I told her I had written, which was published in 1999. Given that my past was more or less securely in the past, I was not troubled by its influence on my present. But adoption workers in Chemung County, many hours west of New York City, would be “concerned” about it five years later, with consequences that were painful for us and disastrous for the boy we thought we were going to adopt. Having given up on COAC, we contacted Lutheran Social Services in February 2007. We had heard they were not homophobic and were effective in matching gay couples with suitable children from New York State. Our first meeting was productive: looking through the “Blue Books,” a large collection of looseleaf files containing photographs and short descriptions of the children available for adoption in New York State, we spotted a boy we thought could be the right one for us. He was eight, with only “minor psychiatric diagnoses.” In the sentence or two the children are allotted to speak for themselves in the “Blue Books,” this boy said that he wanted “no moms, only dads.” We inquired about him and before long were told we could meet him if we were willing to make the long drive to Randolph, NY, where he was in a children’s home. We drove west for many hours, and finally arrived in the tiny town. We met for a few minutes with the social worker in her office, and then she went to fetch the little boy. We had brought our dog, a friendly boxer named Tulip, because we had heard the boy was fond of dogs. Tulip appeared to be as nervous as we were. When we first laid eyes on the boy, as he entered the building, we pretty much fell madly in love with him. He was an energetic, cute, adorable kid. He bonded instantly with Tulip. “She’s a little hyperactive,” my partner said. “So am I!” the boy replied. We took him to a nearby lake, where he immediately removed his shoes, rolled up his pants, and got into the water. We skipped stones and played with Tulip. The little boy called us Mister. “Hey, Mister,” he would say. “Watch this!” He was desperate for fun, and he was making the most of it. It was a blissful hour. We took him back to the children’s home and sadly took him back to his “unit.” We passed, along the hallway, a padded room in which a teenage girl was screaming and crying. We met again with the home’s social worker and told her we were definitely interested in the boy, and we asked if we could see him again while we were in town. We were told we could visit him again the next day, a Sunday, and could spend the whole day with him. We were not coached in any way about what to say or not to say. We were not advised against “getting his hopes up.” We were given no reason to doubt that we would be able to adopt him. We were, in fact, encouraged by the social worker to begin forming mutual attachments with him, which strikes me now as institutionalized child abuse. The children’s home knew us only by way of our 90-minute home-study. We could easily have been murderous pedophiles disguised as a nice gay couple; we could have been adherents to the strictest, most corporal-punishment-friendly parenting philosophy or religious claptrap: they did not know us at all when they sent the boy off with us for the day that summer Sunday, and it was grossly irresponsible of them. Our daylong visit was a great success; we all loved one another. Having an ice cream cone early that evening in an Amish parlor, the little boy looked up at us and smilingly said “I fee like I died and went to heaven.” We felt the same way. Three days later was July 4, so we asked if we could see him again for a long holiday weekend. Yes, the worker said, we could take the boy with us for five days from Wednesday to Sunday, spending the nights in motels, visiting amusement parks and lakes and pretty much whatever we wanted to do apart from driving all the way to NYC and back. So with his bags packed, we headed out for a good time. We gave him presents. For five days and four nights, we had a great time together, one day at an amusement park, another at a “water park,” then two nights camping in a cabin by a lake, making campfires, roasting marshmallows, walking in the woods, swimming in the lake, fishing, boating, whatever we could find to do that would amuse him. We found him to be tightly wound and indeed somewhat hyperactive, certainly a handful, but overall just what we wanted. He seemed perfectly capable of attaching to us, and by the end of those five days, we were all of us thinking of the adoption as a done deal. Much, now, to my regret. On July 11, 2007 I received a phone call from the social worker in Chemung County whose job was to oversee adoptions there. She was “concerned,” she said, by the discovery (I had just been Googled) that I had written a book that was published in 1999. Why hadn’t I revealed this scandalous information before? I explained that I had discussed my career as a writer with the home-study writer, but that I had never been asked what my work was about, and furthermore had never been asked about my adult past. I had been asked briefly to describe my childhood (which was not a very happy one), but not much at all about my life since then. Well, the social worker said, she would get back to me. For now, she said, visits with the boy would have to be during the day in the immediate vicinity of Randolph. So we drove out there again, rented a cabin by the lake, and spent two lazy days with our boy. Splashing around with Tulip in the water, he said to us, “I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun before.” We felt the same way. We were happy as could be, though in the backs of our minds there was anxiety about that phone call. We were asked to send a copy of my offending book to the county social worker. They requested time to read it. They read it. Then they called to say they were satisfied; having read about my life, they saw no reason for our visits not to resume. This call came on a Friday afternoon. Ecstatic, we immediately changed our plans and called the “unit” to tell the boy we were coming to see him again the very next day. We could almost hear him jumping for joy. We were hopeful again that the adoption was going to happen after all. Half an hour later, another call came: someone at the children’s home, we were told, had overruled the county’s decision, and we were not to visit the boy that weekend. Floored, we had no choice but to call the boy again and explain that for reasons beyond our control, we couldn’t come that weekend after all. The little boy sobbed, and after hanging up the phone, so did we. It was pretty much the worst day of our lives. We never saw the little boy again. Among the many things we were told in the brief period of time we spent at the Randolph Children’s Home was that adoptions take time, which we already knew and expected. In fact, we were surprised at the speed with which things were moving. We had no idea we would be able to take the boy on a five-day trip so early in the process. While the social worker was explaining to us that it could be weeks, not days, before the boy would come to New York City to visit us in our home, she happened to mention that some adoptions take longer than others, and that one adoption they were doing, through an agency called Family Focus, was taking many months because the agency was so deliberate and slow and careful. I took note of that, and I remember thinking to myself about how sensible it seemed for an adoption to be deliberate, slow and careful. I remembered the agency’s name. After we had fought all the battles we could fight for the boy in Randolph, including letters to Governor Spitzer and the state commissioner and anyone else we could think of, we were told unequivocally that the adoption would not “move forward” under any circumstances. We sadly gave up. We could only imagine how the broken attachment and the canceled plans affected the little boy we had come so quickly but honestly to love. It was a heartbreaking, terrible corruption of justice. Six months later, still very sad and somewhat despondent, I called Family Focus to ask if they could help us. Well, they said, they didn’t know if we would be able to adopt that particular boy, but we might be able to adopt another, and they would certainly be happy, they said, to work with us. “I think it’s great that you wrote a book about your experiences,” they said, “and I don’t see why that should prevent you from adopting a child.” We went there for a meeting. They read my book. They inquired about the boy from Randolph and were told that we could not adopt him or any other child from Chemung County. Why? Because I had not told them about my book; they had had to find out about it themselves. What other “secrets” could we be not telling them about? As soon as we had sat through the required (and excellent) information sessions at Family Focus in early 2008, we were told that they thought they might have the kid for us, and they told us about David. Fourteen, healthy, very smart, and “questioning his sexuality.” He might not do so well, they said, in a suburban house with a straight couple of Republicans, who probably wouldn’t adopt David anyway. “Perfect!” we said. And it turns out that it really was the perfect match. We were well suited to the Family Focus transition method—we embraced it wholeheartedly (even if that wasn’t immediately apparent to Jack, the agency’s adoption director, who nicknamed me “Jump the Gun Rick” because I wanted David to move in fast). But I learned to follow Jack’s lead. After David moved in last March, I confided in Lisa, our main contact there, every time anything out of the ordinary had me worried or anxious, and every time she gave me good advice and helped me defuse the situation. Family Focus is very good at turning what might appear to some a weakness (like my first book, or David’s being “maybe gay”) into the person’s very appeal. Jack matched my experience to David’s developmental requirements, and he did it with great confidence and wisdom. Without Jack arguing my case, I would not have been able to adopt. The Family Focus method is designed to protect the kids and to give them a deep-seated feeling, backed up by reality, of control in the adoption process. David chose at six points to move slowly ahead. This protracted probation period has been exactly what was needed for us to begin to feel like a real family. We didn’t call ourselves a family until now—we were a “maybe” family. Now David is my son and I’m his dad forever. David asked me once if he thought I would love another child (if I had adopted one instead of David) as much as I love David. In other words, he seemed to be asking, Is David special? Good question, I said. I told him that I didn’t know if I would be able to love any child, but I had been prepared in advance to try to love the child I adopted. I began by trying to love David, but quickly found that loving him required no effort. Soon after we met, I began to form a genuine attachment to him in particular, and that attachment has deepened into real love for David. I thank my lucky stars every day that I was given the chance to adopt David. It’s his particular self that I love so much. Strange as it may seem, I feel as though I lived the first half of my life preparing to adopt him. I consider it one of the strangest, most mystifying and wonderful synchronicities that he and I landed at the same time on an intersection of one another’s paths and that we both had the wherewithal to adopt one another. There is no child on earth I would prefer to David. If I could have my pick from all the children in the world, my choice would be him. My only regret as a parent (so far) is that I can do too little for David. He deserves more attention than I alone can give him. It’s my fervent wish that all the people in my life should take a more active role yet in David’s life. I wan them to keep in touch with him, to do what they can to keep him upright and strong as he prepares to be an adult. To show him, often, that the only kind of love that really matters is active love. I want David to have a more productive, more engaged, and more tranquil young-adulthood than the one I managed to survive. With some help, David will be able do much more than survive. We don’t yet know what he will do with the rest of his life, but I can guarantee that it will be interesting and unique.