This Child

"I no longer wish to parent this child."
Have you heard the news?
Well, if you have been to this blog before, you know sometimes I get inarticulate when I get upset, so I've been thinking more than usual about what I want to say here. I apologize if I'm nonetheless incoherent and rambling, but I know I have to get this off my chest.

What does it mean to be a parent? To be a family? To make a commitment?

When I was 10 or 11, my dad took off, and I never saw him again. Don't be sorry -- I consider his absence a stroke of luck, because my father was a criminal, an addict, and a compulsive liar, and I ended up with my mom and the two best grandparents any child could ever have. But I spent a lot of time in my childhood thinking about what it meant to have had my father leave. At times I wondered if it marked me somehow. Was I unlovable? Was I a loser? Was I only half as loved as my friends? And I wondered how I might pay the price; after all, I knew at least one friend whose parents didn't feel comfortable having her play at my house because of our "situation." I knew it was not my fault that my parents divorced or that my father defrauded people or that he left. I knew, too, though, that I carried his genes, and I wondered if that did make me tainted, if I would grow up and steal or drink or have addictions. I wondered if I would leave my children someday. I simultaneously vowed to be nothing like him and to worry that I might not have a choice given my DNA. And while I was not ashamed that my father had walked out on us, I sometimes felt embarrassed that I had no one to take me to the Father-Daughter picnic kind of thing.

Along the way, surrogates come into all our lives -- people you adopt or who adopt you as the next-best-thing-to-kin. We have soul sisters, father figures, borrowed Grannies and all the rest. We build a community based on love connections rather than blood ties. But sometimes when conflicts arise in those connections, and sometimes when endings happen, people end up saying, "Well, blood is thicker than water." Sometimes people feel that if you aren't related to them, it's easier to walk away away from you. And then the sting returns... and then if you lose that person, you feel acutely reminded that you don't have those blood ties.

I don't say goodbyes as easily as some. I believe in commitment. I believe in wedding vows and til death do us part, I believe that when you adopt a child you are their family the same as any other family.

Oh, sure, I might fantasize about running away from home as much or more than the next girl, but the truth is, I believe strongly in responsibility to home and family, in putting the good of the tribe ahead of the good for myself.

If I make a promise, I mean it. If I make a bargain, I keep up my end of the deal. Sometimes I still wonder what part of my father I carry inside me, but I'm nearly as old now as he was when he fled, and so far the only family resemblance I'm aware of comes in my ruddy cheeks and blue eyes.

I do not know the woman from Florida in the news for sending her adopted child back to Russia with a note saying she longer wished to parent her child. In fact, I know very little about her, because I can't bring myself to follow the news coverage. I heard the basics on the radio while I was driving, and before the 30 second piece ended, I had tears in my eyes and turned the station. I guess I have always reacted strongly to stories of child abandonment, I guess I always will. But I wasn't thinking of my father when I heard that story. I was thinking, as I always am I guess, of my children.

What if my Rooster was orphaned, had no family to raise him? Would he be unadoptable? Would he suffer a similar fate to the boy from Russia who was turned away for having too many issues?

Children are beautiful little beings we fantasize about when we want to start families. Then the come home, still beautiful and small, but much harder than we imagined. They come with dramas and they take enormous effort and they can pummel you sometimes with their force, flatten you with their needs. But parents who choose to have them (biologically or legally) make a promise, a commitment, a sacred pact. To me parenthood goes something like this:

I will love you, my child, no matter how hard it gets. I might not like everything about you, but I will do my best to raise you to be a person you will love, who will have things to offer the world, who will love your life. I will shelter you, I will protect you, and I will teach you. Wherever I have a home, you have one as well. Your childhood will not last forever, and so I will treat it as a sacred space in time, and I will use it to help you begin the best future you can have. I will be your parent, you will be my child, and nothing can come between that.

As someone who admittedly kvetches ad naseum how hard I find it to parent, and how difficult it seems my children can be, I really cannot imagine doing anything else. I cannot imagine ever walking away. I cannot fathom writing down the words, "I no longer wish to parent this child."