Читать книгу Fall or Fly - Wendy Welch - Страница 11

2

A Different Kind of Love Than I Wanted

Deep down, part of me always wanted to adopt. Watching my son grow up alone because we couldn’t have any more, it crossed my mind a lot. One day my wife said, “A friend is looking for someone to adopt her grandbaby because her son is in prison for fifteen years and the baby’s mom doesn’t want him at all.”

In my mind were fears like: Oh, they will get our hopes up and then change their minds, and there will be nothing but trouble the whole eighteen years from the biological parents, and I guess there’s no such scenario as a normal couple just wanting to give up a baby from an accidental pregnancy.

But word came that the dad wanted us to have this baby because he couldn’t take care of it, and the mom was a wild child living the fast life. She used drugs, and she just didn’t want the baby. It was Super Bowl night when we got a call that said she was going into labor. We threw a few clothes together and hit the road. I got to hold him soon after he was born. He was screaming his head off—little did I know that would be a way of life—but what I most remember was how bright pink he was. I thought, “The pink panther!”

I was so excited to hold him but still really cautious of getting attached for fear of the mom changing her mind. She actually was holding him and feeding him quite often. I remember seeing that and thinking, I knew this was too good to be true! She is going to change her mind!

But she didn’t, thankfully. I had a lawyer there with the legal papers. If we hadn’t been there, Social Services would have taken him due to the drugs. When our son was born, they found in her system THC (which is Pot), Meth, Cocaine, and LSD. And that’s how I got my son.

—adoption dad

THE ROAD from fostering to adoption can be an arduous journey. It’s not surprising that some find the yo-yo activity of courtroom appearances and parental-rights visits excruciating and hunt for ways around it, as Hutton’s parents did. Others have that decision thrust upon them.

While Coalton isn’t big on expensive private adoptions, it has a fast-track equivalent often found in rural areas: the hand-picked mom.¹ These private-but-mostly-unpaid transactions stem from parents who know they won’t be allowed (or don’t want) to keep their babies; often the birth mom or her mother will choose someone they know to raise the infant in question. Based on interviews, the most common reasons for a birth mom’s willingness to give up her child here in Coalton are substance abuse and illness—usually cancer. In third place comes Mom’s need to finish college, and behind that, her new boyfriend’s refusing to raise another man’s kid. Children caught in the crossfire of this last situation are more often of elementary-school age than infants.

Being singled out for such an honor-cum-responsibility as raising your blood relation’s child pretty much bypasses the state system’s fostering plan and goes straight to “adopt,” yet it is fraught with social peril. The new parents may wind up entangled in a long-term and ill-defined relationship with people they probably know well and see on weekends—at church or in the local elementary school, since these adoptions are often in rural communities. While moms seeking a good parent usually turn first to their own sisters, mothers, or mothers-in-law, they don’t have to. Mom may also not be the one pulling the decision strings.

Appropriate relatives asked to take the baby may be eligible for assistance under KinCare. This program goes under different names in different states, but it’s the DSS family-first plan. Extended family foster the child while Mom (or sometimes Dad) gets it together. During this time, the child is not eligible for adoption. If Mom doesn’t mention members of her extended family when her children are taken, social workers try to track them down. Relatives who wind up overlooked during that hunt are eligible to bring litigation when termination of rights comes up, so it’s in the best interest of the state to find them if Mom doesn’t offer names.

One of the reasons that handpicked adoptions can get messy is their degree of informality. Another is how much harder it becomes to push a birth mom away or curtail her rights by court order when she’s the one who gave you the child. Coalton is a region fueled by a dying coal industry and a thriving kinship system, a place where at least some of the extended family are likely to live in the same vicinity. Coal isn’t king here; family is. A judge may say it’s okay for you not to let the bio mom see her child once she’s signed him over to you, but the community never will. And if the community includes her extended family, which it probably does, God help you when you bump into one of the home team at the gas station or grocery store, because they’re going to say something. Probably in a carrying tone of voice.

Hutton’s wife, Kim, was adopted by her birth mother’s boyfriend’s sister. Birth mother Kristin moved in with a guy—call him Jim—who didn’t want another man’s kids. Kristin “gave” her oldest daughter, Janice, to her grandmother and three-year-old Kim to Jim’s sister, Annette. (Annette and her husband would have taken Janice as well, but she had a different dad, and he wouldn’t let anyone but his former wife’s mother have her.) Kim’s dad was nowhere to be found, so boyfriend Jim signed the termination papers as her bio father. Which probably made the whole adoption illegal, but who was watching?

Appalachian kinship systems are complex, but Kim’s adoption staggered even the clan within which it happened; the whole extended family on both sides lived within twenty miles of one another in a community sprawled across a back holler (the regional term for a mountain hollow, or cove). Kim and Janice even attended the same church as their birth mom for a while—until Kim grew old enough to ask questions. Kim grew up knowing that her sister lived nearby but never got together with her outside of church, which she stopped attending when she was “maybe five or six.”

To avoid confusion, references to Kim’s mom from here forward mean Annette, her aunt-by-marriage. (Jim and Kristin married a few years later.) Her birth mother will be called Kristin. The arrangement between the two women was a handshake; Annette received no money via KinCare. The formal adoption flew through uncontested; use of the legal system remained minimal, or someone might have cried foul on Jim’s signature as birth dad and questioned the “agreement” Annette and Kristin drew up regarding visitation rights.

Although Kim’s mom had signed a document written by Kristin stipulating she could come see Kim on a regular basis, Annette began to find ways to prevent these meetings. Because the agreement was less legal than a gesture of good faith between them, both sisters-in-law stretched its nonbinding language until it broke. Ties were cut by the time Kim started school.

Without a state stipend, her mom sent Kim to the county elementary school in designer clothes, had her hair professionally cut and styled, and enrolled her in dance lessons—which Kim hated. Part of the tension that developed between the women may have stemmed from their different economic classes. Annette’s husband, Rick, was career military; Annette was a teacher. For whatever reason, her mom didn’t want Kim associating with Kristin and Jim (no fixed source of income) as she grew up.

But Kim had questions and a wound that wouldn’t heal. “Why did she want to get rid of me? Why was I not good enough for her? How come she handed me off and ran away? I really, really wanted to know why she gave me up without a fight.”

Yearning to know why blotted out the sun in her world, gnawed the strength from her bones, and destroyed her self-identity. Kim managed to keep the anger bottled inside until need met opportunity one winter weekend when she was visiting her grandmother.

Spending a few days with Mamaw was not unusual for Kim if her parents went out of town. Don’t confuse Mamaw with Kim’s maternal grandmother, who raised her older sister, Janice. The family called that woman Grandma. Mamaw was Annette’s mother. As readers have already worked out, that also makes her the mother of Kristin’s boyfriend-turned-husband, Jim—the guy who didn’t want Kim and her sister around. Such an inconvenient detail not only complicates the story but invites the inbreeding jokes for which Coalton residents have no patience.

It is perhaps easier to turn pain into humor at the expense of others than to consider the implications of Kim’s stepfather’s sister also being her mother, the stepfather being the reason she couldn’t live at home, or his mother’s being the babysitter of choice, when Grandma-by-blood sat eight miles away with Kim’s older sister, Janice, in her home.

One fateful weekend while staying with Mamaw, Kim just up and asked her to call and see if Kristin and Jim could come over.

“I don’t know if Mamaw was surprised. She’d didn’t act like it. She’d raised two generations of teenagers [including Jim’s daughter from another relationship] by then, so maybe not. Not much phased that woman, I have to say. She just picked up the phone and called them, and they said they’d come over.”

Understandably nervous, Kim tried to calm herself: It’s not like you’ve never seen them before. You’ve talked to them plenty at funerals and weddings. But this time, she would be able to ask The Question without extended family hanging about, eavesdropping and reporting back to Annette. Kim knew her mother wouldn’t like what was about to happen and didn’t want to hurt the woman who had raised her.

Mamaw lived by the side of a two-lane highway that was the main thoroughfare for the holler. On pins and needles while waiting for Kristin, Kim remembers thinking every car that passed might be her mom (Annette), come home early. She feared Mamaw might have called and told Annette what Kim was doing. But she had to know. There was no turning back.

Kristin and Jim lived about six miles away. They entered Mamaw’s dark-paneled living room as night was falling, and things started out awkwardly. In the midst of Mamaw’s fussing over getting everyone soda and a snack, Kim realized that she couldn’t find the nerve to ask. Instead, they sat, Kristin and Jim on the couch, Kim on the piano stool, Mamaw flitting through the room like a butterfly, taking her armchair, rising to the kitchen, and returning. Kim recalls that they “talked, had a few good laughs.” As Kim recalls, the closest she came to asking what she really wanted to know was her question “Why don’t you ever come see me?”

But she knew the answer before Kristin gave it: Annette didn’t want her around. Kim accepted this; the moment passed, and so did the opportunity to ask The Question.

Two years later, Mamaw died, prompting “the funeral of the century. I’m there at the funeral home with my real family, and my bio family is there, every last one of them, including my sister, and my grandma by blood, and this cousin named Dewey, and he was a really nice guy, and you have to remember, I haven’t seen any of these people in years. Once Mom found out about that night at Mamaw’s, we had us a real crackdown. But my mom is upset that her Mama’s dead, and she’s all raw inside, and all she sees is me hanging out with the enemy instead of by her side. Please keep in mind I was only twelve. There were a lotta things I didn’t get then that I can see now.”

Tension mounted. Annette had wanted her daughter to read a poem Annette had written for Mamaw, but when the time came, she told Kim not to trouble herself, stood, and read it in her own breaking voice. From then until Kim left home for good, that funeral became “the festering sore that could not close.” The first insult thrown in an argument, the baseline measurement against which everything Kim did wrong as a daughter was pitted, the yardstick for inadequate parenting: Mamaw’s funeral.

Kim describes her teenage years as “ups and down, just like any teen and her parents.” Options not available to a more traditionally formed family didn’t help. When it became difficult to deal with her mom, Kim had “another mother,” a woman she didn’t think of as Mom but could turn to if she wanted to leave home. Of course, between the normal teen angst and the added weight of “too much family” in a tight geographic space, she inevitably did. One night in the middle of a fight that included the funeral yet again, Kim packed a bag, called Kristin and Jim to inform them that she was on her way, and left.

She stayed two, maybe three weeks in Kristin and Jim’s trailer that first time, until her mother came over and begged her to come home. Annette swore things would be different. Kim’s dad (Rick) was an alcoholic; he never raised a hand to either of them, but he yelled. A lot. Annette was the classic description of bipolar, although not formally diagnosed. Kim had grown adept over the years at interpreting how her mother’s footsteps sounded coming into the kitchen; treads ranging from light to heavy indicated what kind of day Annette was having, and consequently what kind of day Kim and her dad could plan to have.

Kim doesn’t feel victimhood or hold grudges about the alcoholism or the bipolarity. “I knew she loved me, and if it was a different kind of love than I wanted, she was still my mom. I went back, but every time we’d get to fighting, I’d pack or she’d up and tell me to pack. It was like the yo-yo from Hell, back and forth up and down the road between the two of them.”

Crazy-glue families splintered and put back together in mismatching patterned pieces abound in the rest of the world just as much as in Coalton. Adrian LeBlanc’s dissertation-turned-narrative entitled Random Family is set in New York City; it’s an excellent read on the myriad ways people in big cities create affiliations regardless of DNA’s bonds. Paula McLain’s memoir Like Family describes a similar confusion of foster care life in California. The added burden in places like Kim’s back holler is, odds are good that some of your neighbors are part of your crazy-glue family, while others are members of your blood kin. Some are both. Thus the networks of dysfunction are smaller, tighter, and probably sharing the same roads to get to and from most places. You can run; you can hide; but by the time you’ve settled into your secret refuge, someone in the community has called both your mothers to tell them where you’re staying.

In my bookstore hangs a tea towel embroidered with the saying “In a small town, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing, because somebody else does.” When Kim and Hutton saw it during her interview, she laughed.

“That,” she says, pointing. “That.”

Kim left home on extended-family couch-surfing adventures more and more as the years rolled by—not least because she found an ally next door to Kristin’s in her maternal grandmother’s husband, the man who with his wife had raised Janice (Kim’s older sister). Grandpa and Grandma owned the farmhouse whose yard hosted Kristin and Jim’s trailer.

“I loved him from the minute I met him. The first time I met him, we were at a birthday party, one of those crazy times with the whole holler there, family, friends, kit and caboodle, and I walked up to him and said, ‘I bet you don’t know who I am,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I do, you’re my granddaughter Kim.’ And I loved him from that minute on.”

Kim stayed with Kristin most of the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school. One afternoon she came out of the house, upset from a phone call with Annette. Grandpa was sitting on the porch, drinking beer. He listened to her tale of woe and then said, “I wish I’d taken you in myself.”

Kim started crying.

“It was one of the best conversations I ever had with him, over beer. He loved his beer.” Kim’s smile speaks volumes as her eyes fill again with tears.

Emphysema took Grandpa the next summer; Kim went home and remained there until two weeks after her eighteenth birthday, during her senior year of high school. Then she moved back in with Jim and Kristin, remaining through graduation. Annette told her husband they would not attend their daughter’s ceremony after such a display of ingratitude and disrespect. By this time, Jim was terminally ill, but the man responsible for Kim’s leaving home at the age of three came in his wheelchair, Kristin pushing it, to watch Kim graduate.

“Family is weird,” Kim says. “That’s all.”

Kim recognized that more than one rite of passage lay at hand. Her maternal grandmother (widow of her beloved Grandpa) hugged Kim at the graduation party and said, “Now you’ll come join us for good.” Although she had moved back after her birthday with that intention, Kim felt in the moment of that hug that her decision wasn’t just about where she was going to live or who her mother and father “really” were. The time had come to accept or break with the patterns repeating around her. To ignore the community judging Rick for returning early from his stint in Iraq to look after Annette when she contracted cancer. (When he pointed out that Annette couldn’t look after their daughter alone while sick, fellow members of his church said, “She’s not your daughter. You should’ve stayed and done your duty.”) To reject living like Kristin, who took in and raised her husband Jim’s grandson after he had refused to help raise her daughters. Not to be like her sister, Janice, whose oldest child was adopted by his foster family and her second son placed with Kristin after she petitioned the court via KinCare.

“That holler was one big merry-go-round of people taking care of everybody else’s kids, and a community acting fit to judge everybody else for it.” The generation that didn’t raise their own kids wound up raising their grandchildren.

Realizing that “the only way to make money there for a woman was build a meth lab or become a nurse,” Kim followed in her father’s footsteps and joined the army. Packing in as much travel and education as she could, she made friends with people from very different places, got informally adopted by the family of her best friend in Canada, and turned herself into a stable adult. “It was me or nobody who was going to make that happen. So I did it.”

The tension with her mother never resolved. “She was proud of me. My dad was proud of me. But we never really got it together.”

After her army stint, Kim returned to the back holler filled with relatives but soon got herself an apartment in Walker City. Her job in a medical office—“Yeah, I did become a nurse, so there,” Kim says with a laugh—introduced her to Hutton. Kim was twenty-seven, married, and mother to a little girl when her mom died. Soon after Annette’s funeral, she and Hutton left the baby with a friend while they stopped at Food City for groceries. As they shopped, Kim said, “I wonder what Mom will have to say about us leaving Jessie with the neighbors just to run an errand.”

Hutton froze, a green pepper in his hand. That’s when she remembered.

For an instant, Kim thought, Dang it, I don’t have to worry about what Mom thinks anymore; I’m finally free. Then she burst into tears in the produce section.

That’s what family is like, isn’t it? Make jokes about the holler and the complicated mess of Appalachian kinship systems if you will, but one of the most basic relationships on earth still boils down to crying in public because your judgmental mother won’t ever yell at you again. It’s a little frightening to realize that our deepest interactions and needs reduce to a phrase as simple as that ready-made Facebook relationship status, “It’s complicated.”

Bio or adopted, welcome to the messy side of family.