The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption

MOTHERS

Today, many days, I play a private game, imagining hypothetical mothers. Not my own mother, who I know well. Not mothers who would bear a child, abandon it, relinquish it, or have it taken away, a child we would then adopt, but mothers who would bear a child for us, altruistically.

I look through profiles of friends and acquaintances on social media, think of possibilities, past promises.

When I see your picture with your husband and children, I remember how you and I pledged to have a child together if we were both still single at thirty-seven. I wonder if you ever think of that now.

At the time, when we were in our twenties, did you want me to say, ‘let’s have a child now, let’s not wait’? Although that was what I felt, I could not muster the courage to say it for fear you would laugh at me in your charming, heart-breaking way.

A couple of years ago, when we saw each other for the first time in more than a decade, it felt to me that not even five minutes had passed. Although we both now have husbands and you have children and another pregnancy would be a risk not worth taking just for the sake of a friend’s desire to have his own child, I cannot help imagining what might have been.

Today, of course, the idea tips us over into the fantastic. But I still think about it, what you having a child for me and my husband, what raising that child, what the closer bond created between us, would do to all of us, for the good.

But I do not expect.

You understand, I hope.

I see your picture, with your two children, your wife, and think about the processes you went through, different anonymous donors, speculating about which traits your children may have inherited from those unknowable men, the way the two girls are so wildly different in appearance and character, both of them dark-haired while you are blonde, as if your genes had left no visible trace on either of them. I think about your generous assertion, after giving birth to the first child, that if you were younger you’d happily get pregnant for us but you could not conceive of a second pregnancy, the first was so difficult and you were getting old, your body could not take the further damage, the risk was so great. And then, a few years later, you decided to try again, for yourself and your wife, and were successful.

I look at you building a career, negotiating the frustrations of distant family and complexities of sibling relationships, doing it all with such an elegant determination to get things right, while worrying whether you will have the life you want in the end.

Does it ever occur to you that we could reach a mutually beneficial agreement that would give you something in exchange for the someone we so desire? Such wondering about your own wondering leaves me feeling poorer and meaner, uglier, because it should not be about money, any of this, but only about love.

You will undoubtedly have your own child or children, and why want the complication of another child, even a child not biologically yours but with that connection nonetheless, of having carried her or him in your body for nine months, a child who would appear before your own children as the first child, the child you relinquished because he or she was not yours to keep.

How would you explain that, if we did it?

And would it be so difficult to explain, in the end?

Would it require no more than saying, I had that child for them because I could? But she is not my child in the way that you are my children, you might say to your sons, your daughters, if that day ever came.

I pass you on the street as you are talking on your phone, saying, ‘No, Kev, honestly, I got it. Don’t you understand I’m serious when I say I don’t want a kid?’ What would happen if I waited for you, a stranger, to finish your conversation and then asked in the politest, least threatening way I could muster, ‘But would you have a kid for us? I’d pay you. I’d pay you however much you want, even if I don’t have it, even if the law won’t let me, I’ll give you whatever you think you need to make it worth your while, I’ll rob banks to pay you,’ and I know, in that thinking, how deep my desperation has become.

It feels as if I spend whole days out in the world, on trains and trams and undergrounds, sniffing out fertility and sympathy and if not willingness then openness and radical politics and the selflessness such an act would require, to do this without paying scores of thousands of dollars to lawyers and clinics.

And yet I still imagine, you know, robbing a bank if that’s what it takes.

(Not that I would.)

I meet you for the first time in fourteen years and although you are now, like me, in your early forties, you are single and unlikely ever to have a child of your own. Sitting across from you over coffee I think, why would it not be possible? I think this and at the same time I know: this will not happen.

Yet my brain oscillates between the wondering and the knowing, and when it does not oscillate, holding one in dominance over the other, it holds both the wondering and the knowing (this cannot be) at the same time, concurrent, living the cognitive dissonance of desire and despair.

I look at you, and you, and you, and you, having one child, two, three, more, sharing photos of them online, expecting us, your friends, to click and like and love and comment with amusement and joy and commiseration when things get difficult, and I think, does it ever occur to you that you have been given a gift you might have shared? By which I mean not the children, obviously, but the exceptional ease with which you and your partners have them.

And this thinking goes on, stretches over years, loops through the lives of all these possible candidates, friends and acquaintances, strangers, colleagues, and the horror of it is that I cannot bring myself to ask the question, to face the disappointment when each and every one of you would, I am certain, say no.

Some of you will read this and see yourself, or not see yourself, and some of you not among the yous will see yourself anyway. And I suspect that some of you, whether you are among the yous I mean or not, will feel anger, irritation, but perhaps also sympathy or compassion, and I know that you might feel things I cannot begin to predict or imagine, that your own capacity for cognitive dissonance, for the wondering and the knowing to settle alongside each other concurrently in your own minds, may outstrip my capacity to imagine what you feel.

And I am sorry if that happens: I am sorry it is happening to you, and also: I am sorry, but that is just what happens, because I desire what you might provide, have provided, still (some of you) may yet provide, no matter how impossible that provision feels or seems to you and me and everyone around us.

*

I suggest to my husband that we send out an email, blind-copying everyone we would potentially consider, explaining what we are doing, what we are seeking, how we expect no reply, if the answer is no we do not want to hear it articulated, silence would be preferable so that when we see you again we can carry on with our relationships as if nothing had ever been said.

But if the answer is yes, then, you know, please write.

It is too great a thing to ask, he says. We cannot ask.

Over time, as months and years pass, I begin to wonder why we could not make ourselves more bohemian. We know performance artists and writers and queer scholars and activists. We are proximate to a milieu that I’m convinced could help facilitate our parenthood, bring forth a constellation of people who might be a community of parents to the child for whom I long.

But perhaps our petit-bourgeois childhoods, our attachment to things, our sense of our own marginality here as immigrants, however privileged we are compared to some, militates against us embarking on a form of family-making that would demand from us and everyone involved a sense of radical fluidity and flexibility. Stable, stuck in our ways, habit-lovers, we are neither radically fluid nor flexible. Surely the bohemian family of multiple parents and multiple homes, in which my own choices about parenting would always have to accommodate the choices and feelings of others in this notional constellation, would drive me mad.

As if the desire itself has not already.

I catch a clip of that film from the 1990s about the murderous rich boy lovers. One turns to the other, man to man, sneering, if you could get pregnant you would, wouldn’t you?

Of course I would.

BIRTH

You and I are standing on the stump of a tree in your front yard, on the parkway, that strip of lawn between sidewalk and street. Your house is a few doors down from mine. We have just exchanged vows, though I am only two years old, you a year older, and now we each unroll a baby from our matching raglan shirts and hold these plastic infants up for our mothers’ approval and laughter.

This has been your idea, the marriage and instant reproduction, you coaching me through the language of vows, providing your dolls as our children. How traditionalist of you to think marriage should precede reproduction, how precocious to understand babies emerge from the lower abdomen.

But how radical, too, that you should suggest I, a boy, might give birth just the same as you.

Forty years later, I find you online, click through the family photos you’ve made publicly available, your three children, flesh and blood, not plastic, three children who look uncannily like my memory of you, the five of you now living in the same city as your parents and your sister and her husband and their three children, all of you so close.

What might have happened if your family had not moved away? We would never have been lovers, because that would have been, for me, an impossibility, for you an exercise in futility and frustration. But perhaps we could have been the sort of friends who remain close throughout their lives, rather than people who drift from such closeness into total strangerhood, so that I wonder now: do you remember me, and our first family? Does someone, you or your mother, still have those children we carried?

QUESTIONS

But would you take a ginger child?

We are sitting in a café in the midst of a London park on a bright autumn day. Mary, the brunette social worker who has asked this question, is in her fifties. It is November 2012.

My husband and I glance at each other, bewildered.

We would take a ginger child, a black child, an African, an Asian, an Australian, a South Pacific Islander, a Caribbean, a Latin American, a Native North American, an Eastern European. We would take a mixed-race child, a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Atheist child.

In this moment, we are open to a child from anywhere, of any race, religion or national origin.

I am American, white, of German, English and Irish ancestry (as far as I know). My husband, Andrew, is South African, white, of Dutch, French and English ancestry (as far as he knows). Given the long history of my family on the North American continent, and of my husband’s family on the African continent, we assume our genetic makeup may be more varied than genealogy and family lore suggest.

This, and the fact of our coming from racially and ethnically heterogeneous countries, makes us believe in our capacity to parent a child of any background or identity or race. And after setting aside the idea of making a family through surrogacy, choosing instead to pursue adoption, we are willing to consider any relatively healthy child.

Yes, of course, we say, we cannot understand why red hair is so often reviled in Britain. We would absolutely take a red-haired child.

Mary is relieved.

We have a ginger child now, very sweet boy, two years old, but no one wants him, she says.

Because he has red hair? I ask, again bewildered.

Parents think ginger children will be badly behaved, she says.

Fears of the Celtic. Fears of the fiery. Misplaced fears. Nothing but rank prejudice. We would take the ginger boy now, this instant, except we are only at the beginning of the process. We have not been vetted or approved as adopters.

What are the red lines? Mary asks. What wouldn’t you be able to cope with?

Serious physical or mental disability, I say.

Autism, Andrew says. Sexual abuse.

What about neglect? Mary asks. Or physical abuse?

We both hesitate, but yes, we could handle a child who has been neglected or physically abused, although in this moment I am not thinking about what the long-term effects of abuse and neglect might be, the degrees of severity, the way neglect itself is also a form of abuse, since abuse means, first, a chronic corruption of ‘practice or custom’, according to my dictionary, and what is neglect but a failure of practice to care?

Physical disability seems clear-cut. I know that I could not look after a child with reduced mobility, who struggled to move through the world. I imagine a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, a child confined to a wheelchair, and know I am not up to meeting such needs.

I know we could not handle a child with a serious chronic disease, such as HIV. I know I could not handle a deaf or blind child. This is not a judgement against children who fit any of those categories, but an honest acknowledgement of my own and my husband’s limitations as potential parents. We would find it too difficult.

Why would we find it too difficult?

The first answer, one to which I will return over the coming years, is that the red lines of capacity and incapacity have been drawn by Andrew’s and my individual traumas, but also by my desire, problematic as I know it is, for us to turn ourselves into that camera-ready middle-class same-sex couple with a toddling baby crawling across the lawn we don’t have in front of the house we don’t own.

I know that desire is selfish, perhaps even unethical, and I wonder if our reservations, all those red lines, disqualify us from being parents at all. Couples with biological children have no guarantee that things will go well, and here in the first meeting about adoption we find ourselves ticking boxes, saying no to one category of complication or disorder or life experience and yes to another.

This form of calculus arises from being made to think about what it means to construct a family without the biological capacity to reproduce. Surely people who conceive biological children are never made to consider what they will or will not be able to handle before ever laying eyes on the child, unless an ultrasound or amniocentesis reveals complications before birth, or unless you know that you or your partner is likely to pass on a particular illness. Which is not to say that such couples don’t consider it, but they are usually not forced to do so.

If you are not asked questions about your own capacity as a parent before being allowed anywhere within sight of a child who might one day be yours, it is possible you never consider what you might or might not be capable of handling.

Imagine a doctor asking a couple struggling to conceive: how would you manage if your daughter ends up with autism? How will you cope if your boy develops ADHD? What is your network of support? How many close friends live near you? How much do you trust them? How many family members live within an hour of you? Who can you call for help in the middle of the night? What kind of leave does your employer offer? What are your financial resources? If you lose your job, will you have the means to meet the needs of your child?

If people were asked these questions, the birth rate would plummet.

Maybe it should.

Being made to think about what you might be capable of handling is enough to shatter every rosy vision of babies crawling over grass in suburban gardens under a clear bright sky. It kills the joy of imagining a family before a solid hope that what you want will even be possible has the chance to take root.

What about serious mental disability? Mary asks. Could you handle that?

Mary’s voice is crisp, cajoling. She has a script. She asks everyone the same questions. Given our answers already, I wonder how she could ask this.

My coffee has gone cold. Young women with babies and toddlers have packed the café since we sat down. A boy is shouting for a muffin. A girl cries.

Mary’s choice of venue, where she meets all prospective adopters, feels like a test. Can we manage to discuss these most intimate questions about parenting and face up to our own childlessness in the presence of so much natural reproduction? Wouldn’t it be more humane to conduct this interview in private?

The truth is, her question about mental disability throws me into murkier territory.

We want a child under the age of eighteen months, preferably as young as possible. How, at that age, can one be certain what disabilities might be at play? We do not require a genius, but we do want someone who will grow to independence. We want to be parents, not lifelong caregivers, and in this way, there is something selfish in our desire to adopt, although the entire British social care system almost never acknowledges this. Adopters must hew to a narrative of altruism: we put ourselves forward to do the job that the state is unable to do. Which is not to say that Andrew and I are unmotivated in part by an altruistic impulse. When we got together a decade earlier, we knew that making a family would not be straightforward. I knew this when I asked him, very early in our dating life, rounding the corner from Broad Street to Turl Street one wet autumn night in Oxford, whether he wanted children. Having decided that I loved him enough to want us to stay together forever, having decided that if children were not part of his vision for his own life then this was not going to work, I had to know. And the truth is, I was not imagining adoption. I was already thinking of alternatives. But perhaps adoption is the parenting role male couples like us are meant by nature to fulfil.

In light of Mary’s question, I ask myself what constitutes mental disability. Is mental illness a disability? Even if it technically is, would I construe it as such?

I could handle a depressed or traumatized child, even one with PTSD, but I could not handle a psychotic one, assuming psychosis would even be apparent in one so young. I know that I cannot spend the balance of my life looking after someone who is seriously mentally ill. I could parent a child with OCD, but not one with autism, unless it was at the very mildest end of the spectrum. I could manage one with ADHD, but not with bipolar disorder.

Epilepsy? No.

Developmental disability? No.

Schizophrenia? No.

Down syndrome, Fragile X? No, neither.

Any serious genetic condition affecting mental ability? No.

Life-threatening nut allergies? Yes.

Why one and not the other? Part of every decision comes down to perception, which itself is determined by social constructions of what each variety of disability or disease or disorder appears to mean. The balance of the decision is produced by being forced, in a café full of mothers and children, to consider one’s own character on the fly, with no chance for reflection.

I know that I am temperamentally disinclined to bend my life towards the management and care of a person with certain kinds of problems. Some problems appear manageable, others do not. And in most cases I am conscious that these perceptions are not necessarily stable or permanent, but highly context specific. This comes in part from living in a country I have adopted, but which has not, I feel, adopted me. I will always be an outsider here, and as someone who is other in multiple ways, I cannot imagine struggling to raise a child with serious medical problems. So I can imagine that if we lived in South Africa, for instance, I might well be prepared to take on an HIV-positive child, but not in Britain. Never in Britain.

Sitting in this café with the grinding roar of a coffee machine and the burble of babies and chatter of mothers and crying of toddlers and sing-songing offers of cake as balm for those children’s anxiousness or sadness or momentary grief, I wonder if all my reservations, each one in turn, should disqualify me from being a parent in the first place. I think of all the people I have heard on television or radio over the years describing the struggles of raising children with exceptional needs, the way so many of them resort to the formulation, ‘we weren’t coping’ or ‘we couldn’t cope’. What do those biological parents do when they realize that their own child’s needs have outmatched their capacity to meet them?

How quickly Andrew and I find the algebra of accommodation comes into play: from imagining an ideal child, an infant willingly given up by its birth parents, a child in ‘perfect’ physical and mental health without reduced capacities, a smiling baby who has been loved and attended to every second of its life – never left to cry itself to sleep, never wanting for food or affection, diaper always promptly changed, read to and cuddled and kissed, hearing songs and going to sleep staring at a mobile hanging above its crib, lovingly bathed and laughed with, soothed and reassured, taken for walks to the park and trips to museums, held up to paintings and works of art to look closely at the details, treated in all the ways my mother treated me as a child – we are forced to consider every possible complication we might face, and the compromises we will inevitably need to make.

This rationalizing happens in the span of a moment in a café crowded with mothers and children.

I have to remind myself how we got here. We were willing to do this because we know other couples who have adopted successfully. Only a few months ago, a friend and her husband adopted a two-year-old girl. A few years earlier, acquaintances in Manchester adopted two boys. I look at their pictures on social media. The boys are healthy. Everyone is smiling. Whatever difficulties they may experience are not presented for an online audience. This is in contrast to some people we know with biological children who sarcastically gripe about the horrors of parenthood (‘kids are the worst’), and others who seem not to be enjoying any of what they’re doing, moaning every time there’s a snow day or school vacation, who have no idea how to fill the hours alone with their children and appear to resent the responsibility of looking after the gift – in some cases many gifts – they have given themselves.

You should not be so ungrateful, not even in jest, I want to tell them.

Mary spends an hour asking us questions and half an hour making proclamations:

It is not important that we are a same-sex couple.

(We didn’t ask whether it was. British law allows for same-sex adoption.)

It is not a problem that I write novels.

(I didn’t think it would be. Why would it? Is writing novels regarded as undesirable in some quarters?)

Although, she has to admit, she wonders what kind of novels I write. She had another novelist who was approved as an adopter, and he wrote gay porn, she titters. As if she thinks all novelists who happen to be men in same-sex relationships must write porn.

No, I don’t write gay porn, I tell her, or any other kind of porn.

Mary tells us that all the children available – nearly all – have been forcibly taken from their parents because of abuse or neglect. In Britain,