The Ginger Child Read online

  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, there is no culture of young mothers giving up unwanted pregnancies. It happens, but only very rarely.

  Somehow, this is news to me. And the idea of being presented with a child taken from its birth parents is chilling. How is this approach to forming a family any less ethically compromised than surrogacy?

  Although Mary has told us nothing we do not already know, there is a quality in her tone, a patronizing, shaming edge, a desire to shock and put off any prospective adopters still clinging to rose-tinted visions of parenthood, that irritates the hell out of me.

  As we walk back to the car, I tell Andrew I cannot do this.

  We have to find another way.

  TERRY

  Terry is four and I am six. Our mothers met each other volunteering. Terry has recently been adopted. He has an older brother, Todd, also adopted. Terry has dark red hair that falls to the nape of his neck. While Todd, adopted from a South Korean orphanage, is calm and sweet-natured, Terry, adopted from the state foster care system, is totally out of control.

  Because their parents have to be out of town for a night, Terry and Todd stay with us.

  For Christmas that year, I received an electric train set. The circular track is bracketed to a large square panel sealed in green plastic. The train – an engine and half a dozen cars – goes round and round with mesmerizing speed and elegance.

  Every week my mother takes me to the Union Pacific corporate headquarters in downtown Omaha to see the exquisitely detailed model trains in the lobby, engines mounted on plinths with buttons which, when pushed, make the wheels turn. We took the train to California and back when I was four, and although the crew forgot to refill the water tanks in Denver and there was nothing but fruit juice and booze until we reached Arizona and the train smelled of vomit and on the way home I lost the stuffed horse with velveteen hooves that my aunt gave me for Christmas, trains remain the most thrilling machinery I can imagine.

  I love my train set more than my cardboard brick building blocks and Star Wars action figures, more than all my puppets or stuffed animals. The electric train is the pinnacle of my possessions and waking up to find its huge green track propped behind the tree was the greatest Christmas surprise ever.

  Perhaps because I am an only child growing up on a street where everyone else is much older, my playdates with other children, boys in particular, often end badly. I hate sharing as much as I long for friends.

  Terry insists on playing with the train. Though I hesitate, my mother says I should let him have a turn. We sit on the floor of my playroom in the basement of our house, a playroom that was the bedroom of the previous owners’ teenage daughter, and which is carpeted with mustard-yellow wall-to-wall shag pile beneath a suspended ceiling of acoustic tiles. Disco seventies chic.

  Terry runs wildly around the room. He throws my toys. Somehow, he breaks the train within moments of starting to play with it. Or at least he breaks some element of the electronic mechanism by forcing the train along the tracks.

  Bewilderingly, my parents never have it fixed and for years the track and train cars gather dust in a corner of the basement utility room, until eventually, once my attachment to them has attenuated, we sell them at a garage sale with the disclaimer that the set needs repair.

  The train is beside the point. My encounter with Terry is the first time I am conscious of meeting someone who is adopted. My mother has explained what this means. She explains, too, that Terry behaves the way he does because he is adopted.

  And the association sticks:

  An adopted child, I am already conditioned to believe, is a child out of all control.

  NUCLEAR

  When I phone my mother to tell her that Andrew and I have decided not to pursue adoption, I am surprised at how relieved she sounds.

  You know, she says, I was about to adopt a child from South Korea when you came along.

  No, I never knew this.

  Oh, sure, it was all in the works. I’d been in touch with the agency, we went through the interviews, it was going ahead.

  She had miscarried and, instead of trying again immediately, she thought she and my father should adopt.

  I never knew about the miscarriage either. How is it that I have reached my late thirties without knowing either of these things? Or did I know them at one point, perhaps a decade or more ago, and found the information so unsettling I repressed it?

  I feel a sudden sense of loss for the sibling I never knew, a feeling more like melancholy than sadness or grief, and which leaves me wondering who that other person might have been, or if I myself might have been that other person, arrived earlier, in a different form, a different sex. I try to imagine what it would have been like to have an older brother or sister, whether it would have made growing up with my father easier or more difficult. Or, what would it have been like to have a Korean older sibling? How might that person have shifted our family? Would it have saved us from ourselves, from the triad that was so disastrous for each of us? Might my father and Korean big sister have bonded in ways that would have made my childhood even worse than it was? Would she have resented my arrival and usurpation of her place and taken out her frustrations on me? Or would the Korean child have been enough? Would that girl’s or boy’s arrival have condemned me to nonexistence?

  Surrogacy is a good choice, my mother says. It means you won’t have all the complications, all the other people involved. It can just be the two of you and your child. Your own child.

  My parents decided early on in their marriage that they would not have children, instead devoting themselves to teaching and journalism and activism. It was the early 1960s. They lived first in California’s San Joaquin Valley, my mother teaching in schools where the children of Mexican farmworkers sat alongside the children of families who had migrated west during the years of the Dust Bowl.

  Later my parents moved to Los Angeles, then to Chicago, then Baltimore, each move prompted by my father’s graduate studies or jobs. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the press coverage of the 1968 protests in Chicago during the Democratic Convention and following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. My parents were often participating in those protests themselves, being teargassed and going to bear witness to the murder of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and finding their community organizing group in Evanston infiltrated by the FBI (or so they suspected).

  My mother was teaching in Lincolnwood, Illinois, fighting alongside other teachers for equal pay and the right to wear slacks instead of skirts. They won the battle of fashion but not of finance. At some point in her early thirties, my mother tells me, as my father became ever more consumed by his work, first as a doctoral student and then as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, she realized if she did not have a child she would spend the rest of her life alone.

  As she commuted to work on her master’s degree, she had time to think about this on walks from the train station through Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, keys poking out between her fingers because they lived in a neighbourhood where women had been attacked and murdered, as happened in the alley behind their building on the first night they moved there from Chicago. My parents mistook the screams for a cat fight and only discovered the truth in the morning.

  After Nixon’s resignation, they moved back to California because my father, who was being groomed to become the Baltimore Sun’s Washington correspondent, felt compelled to return to the San Joaquin Valley, where my mother had lived since the age of seven, where she did not want to live again, where my father had taken a teaching job without first asking how she felt about it, where they bought a bungalow in Fresno on the affordable end of Van Ness Avenue, known locally as Christmas Tree Lane, where, in due course, I spent most of the first
two years of my life, crawling and toddling around a garden that my mother later told me reminded her of Munchkinland and that seemed, from the vantage of my Omaha childhood with its apocalyptic thunderstorms and tornados, its inhuman winters and oppressive summers, like a lost wonderland from which I had been unjustly removed.

  I have not asked whether the pregnancy that ended in miscarriage was planned, whether she convinced my father to start trying, or if it was a surprise to him, or a surprise to them both. I have never asked my mother if she was on the pill, or what kinds of birth control she used. If they were about to adopt a child from South Korea, my father must have agreed to this at least. And when I was conceived, had she convinced him to try again, or was it an accident, even a planned one?

  I never have the courage to ask these questions.

  In a way, I don’t need the answers.

  GENETICS

  Put off by our meeting with Mary to discuss adoption, I start investigating surrogacy. Andrew is less convinced. He worries about the cost, especially since we don’t own property, and he worries about the ethics of paying a woman to produce a child, but I begin fantasizing about being present in the hospital room for the birth of our baby. This fantasy is so bewitching I become convinced I would spend everything we’ve saved to have a child, would be content to stay in our small rented flat if it could just be the three of us together without the complications of birth parents and birth siblings and birth grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and the constant intervention and monitoring of the state.

  When I talk about our plans with a gay friend in New York, he makes a snide comment about all the gay couples he knows breeding ‘trophy babies’. I don’t even try to explain that there is nothing ‘trophy’ about my desire for a child of my own. I want a baby with whom I share more than a legal relationship, a child who has the legacy of my family in his or her genes. Like so much else I have been feeling lately, I recognize the selfishness of these desires.