Becoming Parents
“Do you get to choose how many kids you have?” my 7 year old niece asked me last week.
“Sometimes,” I replied. She cocked her head at me.
“I wanted 2 daughters, I had one, and I ended up with none,” I said. Her mouth fell open.
“Sometimes life is different than we plan,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, and the conversation drifted as it does with kids.
She’s too young to remember my ex-wife or to have met my foster daughter. You could say the person she knows as Titi Forest is someone who’s through the billboard of their life, many plot twists, grief ceremonies, and radical acceptances past where I ever imagined I’d be.
As a childless parent, my story makes many people uncomfortable. They often don’t know how to hold my parenthood journey when I tell them.
“Well, everything always works out for the best,” they might breathily say, wringing their hands. Or, “if you put your mind to it, you can do anything. You could still be a parent. It’s never too late.” They gaze into the distance, hoping their magical thinking will make them feel better about my life. This last one is hilarious in its particular disconnection from the fact that I’m close to 50, and have moved on to other life dreams.
In case you’re wondering, the appropriate response is something like, “that sounds really hard,” or “wow, that’s a lot to have gone through,” or even, “how did you get through it?” Be with my story in compassion and curiosity. Let it knock around inside you, feel it without trying to silver line or diminish it. It’s uncomfortable but there’s nothing that needs to be denied or fixed.
The marketing warlocks have been spoon-feeding us the delusion that if we’re good enough and deserving, we’ll get whatever we want whenever we want it. But this entitlement creates a schism from reality. Reality is, that hard things happen in our lives and it doesn’t mean anything about the virtue or innate goodness of the protagonists. It means that life is complex and variable. The manifest world doesn’t exist merely for our enjoyment. Nor do we deserve the version of our life inside our heads simply because that’s what’s there. This desire to bend life to our whims is bad and unconscious sorcery and incorrect thinking.
My wife and I initially had a friend agree to be our known-donor. We’d signed legal documents and everything, and were on the last step of getting his sperm. We were in our mid-30s and all committed to and pleased with the arrangement, or so we thought. Out of the blue, his newish girlfriend got weird about it and he pulled out, so to speak. So we went to the sperm clinic. We inseminated each other at home for many months. I got pregnant but miscarried at 7 or 8 weeks.
I consulted a fertility expert who told me, among other things, to drink filtered water instead of tap water.
When I told my wife this she fell over.
“Oh yeah, if we just drank less Seattle tap water, we’d be more pure, more fertile. Is there anything else we can blame on women’s lack of purity?” she laughed some more and shook her head. She’s a family medicine nurse who works with addicted mothers. These women struggling with intense dependence on hard hard drugs found themselves pregnant all the time.
Looking back, I’m pretty sure my issue was low progesterone. The fertility expert also never mentioned, but I want to tell you, dear reader, in case it’s helpful, that if you inseminate again right after a miscarriage you’re more likely to become pregnant quickly because your hormones are all primed. Post-miscarriage you’re in this limbo of sorts where your body still wants to be pregnant, so things like timing ovulation don’t matter like they normally do. But I didn’t know this then.
A third of all pregnancies spontaneously miscarry and, between trusting my body and not wanting to carry an unviable pregnancy to term, I wasn’t that upset about it. It was nothing that wasn’t grieved and released.
Plus, after miscarrying, a wild feeling came over me that still remains. Relief. My body didn’t want to grow another human inside of it. It was a strange feeling because, aside from always wanting to be a parent, I was taught that birthing and raising a child was the pinnacle of my existence. I’d very much hoped my wife would get pregnant, but it turned out, for reasons that aren’t mine to share, she couldn’t.
So we became foster parents with the plan of adopting from the system. We took the courses and submitted every part of our lives to invasive interviews and scrutiny by case workers with the power to accept or deny our ability to create a family this way. Inspectors combed through our house telling us to move that and install this. All of which we did.
And for the next part of this story, dear reader, I ask you to hold a significant amount of complexity with me. My invitation is to pause perhaps after each paragraph, and let it land.
Rotten from its inception, the foster system’s initial purpose was to Anglicize the native children of Turtle Island, aiding through formalizing, the colonization process. The white man forcefully snatched kids from their families, cut off their hair, and ripped their native languages from their mouths. It severed kids from their culture and ways of life. We learned this in the training.
Tribes are effectively countries within the country, with their own governments and sovereignty. In 1978, the year I was born, the Indian Child Welfare Act passed, which attempted to support tribes’ sovereignty over their children. To my knowledge, ICWA does not address or repair the devastation and damage that was done for the decades and decades prior.
Also part of the training, we were guided through visualizations to empathize with where the foster kids were coming from. Sure, we were doing something good in becoming foster parents because there are a lot of kids that need homes. And.
We imagined what it would be like to suddenly land in the care of strangers. We imagined smelling that new house and eating the strangers’ unfamiliar food. In another visualization, we were guided through having to leave everything familiar and that we cared about behind, with no warning. What of our things would we put into a trash bag to take with us? How might we attempt to adapt to totally foreign circumstances, with no one familiar to help or comfort us? We were admonished to acknowledge to our foster placements that our house probably felt weird.
We learned about Adverse Childhood Experiences. And we were told that to take a child, even one who was neglected or abused, away from familiarity itself created ACEs. The kids we’d be parenting already had ACEs, and them coming to us through the system created more. So to be a foster parent is to knowingly take part in generating further trauma for the children. The system knowingly creates trauma, PTSD, and CPTSD for every child who comes in contact with it.
The foster system itself is a display of Brokenhearted Culture. Yet the people who trained us were some of the most angelic humans I’ve ever met. Big-hearted, benevolent, boundaried, loving, and accepting adults who fostered and adopted child after child, and who gave their lives to this cause.
This situation is paradoxical and complex, so it’s not a matter of figuring out THE solution. I don’t want kids abused or neglected in their bio homes or otherwise. And I don’t think adding to their trauma should be happening. I don’t have the answers but I do feel that being able to hold the intricate layers without ignoring or denying what’s so is part of us being good adults for our children.
One day, before receiving our official license, we got an email offering us our first placement, and could she be dropped off tomorrow morning.
We looked at each other as we read over Laylay’s profile. She seemed like a great match. We congratulated ourselves for apparently being licensed and went to Target to get her shampoo and conditioner.
And this is where my wife’s and my stories begin to diverge, where we arrive at a crossroads. Some of which I’ll recount in the next piece, Foster Parenting.
