Irish Catholic + German Jew = Guilt to Infinity... and beyond!

My eczema doesn't lie. It flares when I do, so I'm striving to not put myself in a position to lie. My right ear, left eye, upper lip and scalp are quietly on fire the closer we get to finishing jumping the hurdles necessary to be on permanent loan of a child. 

I'm sure civilians, the ones who get to make their own babies for free, often without even really trying, have these dark nights of the soul, questioning whether they have the endurance, stamina, guts, selflessness, organization, patience and love that raising a child demands.  "But people do it every day", we tell ourselves as a means of providing comfort. But then I add unhelpfully, "And almost all of them completely fuck it up".

Consider for a moment what it means to be a person of Irish Catholic German Jewish descent- to be, in other words, me.  Did my parents actually think the mingling of their blood, genes, neuroses, pale useless skin, soft teeth, weak gums, alcoholic tendencies (on both sides), clinical genetic depression (on both sides), extremes of height (or the lack thereof), preponderance towards eating starches and naturally high cholesterol levels-- did my parents truly think this out before they had three of us? Clearly not. 

And then they raised us, as best they could, with next to no money and years of tumult. I'm still rather stunned that it didn't occur to them that they might give birth to a drug-resistant strain of super-neurotic, barrel-chested fantastically guilt ridden short rashy, boundary-free half breeds who require lifetimes of therapy, but they didn't. Thank god for the timely invention of Lexapro. It could have come sooner, for my taste, but better late than never... I'm just saying.

And yet, despite the genetic yahtzee our parents played on us, we turned out to not be career criminals or sociopaths or even terribly bad people. In fact, my sisters are excellent parents of their own stunning children. 

But what do we have that not everyone else has? Guilt. 36 karat, studded with blood diamonds and very busy refracting prisms of brilliant hard expensive light while fund raising for schools and neglected animals. My sisters and my collective guilt could be made into a venom that would bring the most corrupt genocidal African President for Life to his knees weeping to be executed to relieved of the deeply crushing guilt eating away at his viscera.

Guilt has made us as successful as we are, and kept us from being more successful than we are.  Guilt has made us obedient in our rebelliousness. We 'eff' up with the best of children raised in the era of play-room/basement bars, but none of us has really thought outside the box in terms of joining cults or creating new cults or cult-hopping until finding one suitable to drink the ultimate Kool-Aid for.

Guilt- both curbed and unleashed has inspired many artists to create and creatively destroy- from James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill,  Arthur Miller, William Saroyan, Steven Spielberg, Paul Rudnick, Spalding Gray,  Madonna, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Wendy Wasserstein, Erma Bombeck, Michael Jackson, Tina Fey, Lady Gaga, and I believe this trend will only bear itself out perhaps one generation past mine, due to the weakening stranglehold of Catholicism on working class saps looking for the right things to keep their kids from doing what they did.

And guilt brings me back to my fear- of being a bad parent and my biggest current guilt-ridden struggle. It appears my guilt will flow freely from childhood throughout adulthood- I felt guilty for being a bad kid, and now, while I prepare for a kid, I will try not to feel guilty about being a bad mom.

The biggest challenge to me being a benevolent, groovy awesome mom will consist of me not using my prodigious environmental-genetic, titanium Teflon guilt-talent to make my kid feel guilty (in order to feel less guilty about being a bad mom) and all through all this- I still get to feel like a guilty child- despite being able to wave to fifty from here.

My Mom hates my blog title. She's trying very hard to not suppress my creativity, she respects my talent and feels like I can write like the dickens, but she doesn't like my slightly edgy and ironic use of 'bastard' in relation to my future foster child. She worries it will hamper our getting our baby and she ran it past her book club. They all winced at the word 'bastard'.  One woman, who was apparently born a bastard, way back in the 40s, told the book club that her parents called her their "Love Child", and I finally understood what that Diana Ross song was all about.

I have no truck with the phrase "Love Child", but in this age where we can all smell the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, is calling a child born out of wedlock a 'bastard' still a bad word?  Why is it that Angelina Jolie can basically get away with having six bastard children? She's not married and her adoptive and birth children are all technically, poetically, rebellious in an Ed Hardy kind of way, bastards.

I have friends who are grown, healthy 'bastard' people- I intend the use of the word the way someone might still use "mulatto" or "stewardess"-- in a completely "isn't this a fun antique word redolent of a time when people had to be married to have children or risk banishment from society?" kind of way.

So now I grapple, stung and swollen with guilt, wrestling the scaly itchy crocodile of eczema that punctuated my wool-ridden childhood in a way that really begs a graphic novel- I grapple now with not being a parent, but being a mommy-whipped daughter. Do I change my blog title to Where is My Love Child Foster Child? Because if I don't change it, I will feel guilty. And if I do change it... what will I feel? Less itchy? Less me? Less guilty?  Less like a bad future mom? For changing my vision and voice for my... mother or my child? Or me?

A mercenary mother... am i?

It was bound to happen. The moment one travels from being a gentle, relatively ego-free, live-and-let-live, wanna-be foster-to-adopt mother to someone contemplating calling DCFS on an at-risk pregnant woman because you want her child.  This woman has given birth to two children; both have been taken from her by the DCFS, for understandable but tragic reasons. And yet, she is due to deliver another baby next month. Her second child was taken from her in January, 2010 and despite having to go to court to prove she is capable and worthy of having custody of her second baby- despite all that- incredibly, she got pregnant again, by the man who was responsible in no small part for her losing custody of her second baby. 

And now she's a month away from delivering another beautiful, bright girl.  This will be her third child in 3 years, her second baby born in a year. This woman is bright, beautiful,  goal-oriented, determined to right her life and complete her education to climb out of her own foster-home-pocked childhood. Under normal circumstances, I'd be rooting for her. But now, I just want her baby, because I know she has good, attractive, sturdy genes. I am rooting for her to fail. I have become a foster monster.

Parenting is a slippery slope- all parents know this.  If I were to skid a personal degree or two and make a phone call, I (or someone else like me) could be fast tracked to adopting her gorgeous girl by the end of January, 2011. And who would blame me? I rationalize my devilish theory that a newborn might only serve to drag the mother down; it will ankle her education, and sideline her goals for a long, long time. She is only twenty. She'll have plenty of other chances once she's stable to make more babies, right? I'm 48. I'm running out of time. Give me that baby. But her truth is deeply complex and not so easily dismissed-  as is anything involving the rights of parents and children who genetically belong to each other but due to legal reasons cannot be left intact.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning of our Foster to Adopt journey- but like all over-written stories, I will start with yesterday then go back to the beginning from there. Bear with me.

Why, just yesterday morning I was hungrily eye-balling one of those gamine yet largely pregnant women who pepper Silver Lake with their long hair, longer legs and immense bellies- making pregnancy both sexy and fertile yet cellulite-free.  These be-legginged hotties only leave me feeling like someone genetically more welcome at Claude Akins' regular poker night than the fecund warm waters these babymamas tiptoe photogenically through.

After that, I went to the home of the lovely gay man and his partner, the ones who inspired us to go to the Foster to Adopt Agency in the first place. They had done all the legwork of finding the best agency around, went through the Foster System three years ahead of us, and basically became our sponsors. They told us what to expect, as they had experienced the worst trauma imaginable of what can happen in Foster Care then were ultimately rewarded for their pain by the Best Case Scenario in Foster Care (more on that later).

It took a few days to screw up the courage to call the Foster to Adopt Agency.  I feared being deemed unworthy to parent someone else's child. I mentally pre-rejected us.  Our combined ages make us persona non grata in all girl booming adoption sources like China.  Our combined freelance incomes make an all girl booming China adoptee impossible even if our combined ages were under 100.  The fact that we rent and are far from owning, and that we aren't yet married are marks against us.

Our sponsors reassured us by telling us that there are so many thousands of children in Los Angeles County in desperate need of foster parents, which was a double-edged reassurance, indeed. They also allayed our fears by explaining that we held the foster parent Yahtzee card- we were white, educated, a couple, stable (by who's standards?) and most important of all, we clean up good and present well. Our sponsor let us know that single women who work at McDonald's are also striving to become Foster to Adopt parents, so we were going to do just fine. Yes, that is the ugly underbelly of foster parenting: you get paid, per child.  So, there are people who go into this business of professional parenting as if it were a work from home business- as opposed to those who just want to create a family by any means necessary.

We called, stammered our way through the initial phone interview, signed up and drove to Culver City for months of classes on how to become professional parents.  We met Social Workers- impossibly blonde, lovely, 22 year old, UCLA graduate white middle to upper class girls (with no student loans to fret over) who get to enter people's homes and decide whether or not their infants and children are at risk. These are the people who my partner and I have to win over. But there is no need to win. Our sponsors were right. We pretty much won by showing up. We were the only white couple there.

Nothing the Foster Agency did supported my feelings, but it was evident from class one. We were golden.

In our very first class in Foster to Adopt, I learned nothing more than the gaping maw of disparity between the educations of those who are white and everyone else.  The irony was that I never truly knew just how shockingly imbalanced a decent education (based on race) is in America. No where was this educational disparity more evident than an adult education program aimed at stopping the ignorance that feeds child neglect and abuse by providing a safe haven for at-risk children. I didn't realize how lucky I was to be branded by those fierce nuns until I was forced to become a student of parenting...

The hardest lesson to learn in Foster to Adopt is that the kid is not yours- I was constantly corrected by the golden social worker, the lovely and inspirational Instructor, that I was not there to learn how to adopt, but how to foster to adopt.  I was signing up to co-parent someone else's baby or child- and adoption was no guarantee, privilege or eventuality. I might be handed a baby to raise and love and adore until the birth parent righted themselves and sailed off with their child, forever.  It took a good four weeks for me to accept that.  I resisted- oh did I resist.  But that won't get you a baby. Or a needful baby a decent home. For however long that decent home happens to be yours.

It is like accepting death. You refuse, you bargain, you fight, you do all the other steps I can't recall at this moment, and finally you accept. I know I may fall in love like I have never loved before and I may have to hand that child off to someone else. I know it in the part of my brain that knows and accepts things like tragedies in Indonesia... but I don't know it in the part of my brain that is forever changed by personal tragedies, like by my divorce... you don't know that loss till it happens smack dab to you.

So we take the foster classes- we travel from Los Feliz to basically LAX for our classes- we shyly get to know the other couples and the nice single women who finally skipped over on the man of their dreams part of the equation and were racing ahead to the happy family algorithym. We do the homework, we write the essays, we answer the questions, we volunteer for the classroom exercises, we share each others' losses and triumphs and grand-baby pictures - and all along we are told that not all of us, despite showing up weekly, will be picked. This agency is watching us learn and struggle to comprehend just what the difference is between a crack baby and a fetal alcohol syndrome baby. Guess which one is a better bet in the long run, brain development-wise? Guess again. Crack babies rule.

Some are there just to learn and get certified to become foster parents- they've raised kids, they're retired and they have empty days and extra bedrooms. Not to mention, they have experience with children.  They are in class to learn how to care for children while their little futures are decided in courtrooms,  and provide the stability that they have tested on their own children. And grandchildren. But this time they hope to get paid for it.

I'm not going to lie. The money is a plus. We will take those checks. Until we are able to make that baby our baby. Once we are lucky enough go on the next journey, to adoption of our future offspring, the checks will stop coming. And the automatic health insurance (for every foster child in Los Angeles, until age 21) will stop. So, as in everything else- foster to adopt is a two-sided coin.

Be careful what you wish for and be even more careful of what you don't wish for.

Because both will come true.

Realizing you are a mother already... a childless mother.

I didn't even realize I had already become a mother.

I'd been medicating myself dutifully, caring for the OCD that had grown out of control and threatened to take over my whole being. Learning late in life to mother yourself is still mothering. I recovered from a terrible relationship in record time, because I figured out how to mother myself out of obsessing over someone clearly and definitively incorrect for me. He also will remain forever crucial to my life direction for telling me that I'd be a terrible mother. Whenever I dare to drift out of the sanity lane and think kindly on this person, I remind myself that he said that to me, and then I self-correct.

I created a business whereby I professionally mother beings who were somehow, crazily willing to pay me to come to their homes and do what mothers do- support, encourage, organize, suggest, and nudge them toward their personal and professional goals. Not to congratulate myself but as an example of professional mothering, I wrote and read eulogies aloud for one client, who had two dogs pass away on the same day.  The things that only a mother would do, or not judge someone for doing.

I took in dingy, handicapped animals and saw them through the remainder of their aimless little lives. I took over a writer's group from a friend who had to move on as his wife was actually having actual children and then mothered the writers and actors that came into and out of the group. I mothered various strangers at a public writers gathering every Tuesday night for three years in a bar, where I even mothered one of the bartenders... and then the bartender's family when he died in a car accident.

I write this not to deify myself but to explain how, in the absence of a child, a person can compulsively mother others and not always to positive ends.  Ann Landers (or Eleanor Roosevelt- two exemplary professional mothers) brilliantly wrote than no one can take advantage of you without your permission- so I gave permission far and wide for myself to be turned inside out for the betterment of others, friends, lovers, strangers and anyone with a limp.

My sisters and I share this obsessive mothering genome. We were raised by the consummate professional mother - who lost her mother early and tragically.  Our mom lost the template of how to be a mother at the age of sixteen, so she covered all the bases by mothering the hell out of us and everyone she ever met. If my mother were to write a memoir, the title would be, "You'll Never Guess Who I Sat Next To On The Plane"- she collects everyone she comes across and mothers them into submission. My mother was a kindergarten teacher in Harlem for nearly 20 years, so she mothered in the trenches with the best of them.  So, I come by my mother instinct honestly. Lexapro does help. A tad.

But as I write these words, with three dogs, a cat and my beloved all hanging in the kitchen with me, I am simultaneously struggling with my fear of finally becoming a real, true, actual, factual and no give backs mother.  I'm terrified actually. I can't possibly be considering myself as someone else's mother. I feel huge surges of selfishness roiling just under the surface. I have nightmares where I lose my baby because I just really wanted to take a nap.  What if I just don't feel like being a mom one day? Can I take a day off from being a mom? I don't think so. I worry less about being a not good mother than about spontaneous urges to go AWOL once I am irretrievably given a child to be a mother to.

I'm terrified of not being able to find time to write again. To exercise, to drink to excess with friends in a bar, to take a walk when I feel like it or see a movie just because. It feels so petty and spoiled but it's true.

Worst of all, all I seem to see in the news is evidence of mothers and fathers who do horrific things to their children. This is the factory where our future child is being manufactured. So not only do we get someone else's kid, but they get to make the child to their damaged specifications, then we get to live with and shape the rest of our lives around the rest of it.  Good times.

I run free with doubts of my ability to do this, to mother someone who actually needs to be mothered, but truth be told- every time my fiancee and I see a baby of any race, age, gender, we play a little game. He'll turn to me or I'll turn to him and say, "OK, someone just hands you that baby and says, "Here's your child." And we smile at each other and say. "OK. That's our kid."

First you cry...

Actually, I didn't cry as much as I thought I would.  Blame it on Lexapro, or getting older, or the fact that I had spent so much time alone before meeting the Canadian that when I did finally find him, I was astonished to meet someone who was more of a man than me.  They say nature abhors a vacuum, so, due to the prolonged absence of a man, (or perhaps the cause of it), I became the person I would lean on... and take shameless advantage of. I fixed cars, planted trees, hooked up routers, modems, killed insects and assembled furniture, including an outdoor restaurant heater that quite possibly weighed more than I did.  I could still get pregnant. I just couldn't get arrested... romantically speaking.

After a two and a half year dry spell of absolutely zero sexual congress that involved another human being, I got myself some. It did take a village to get me laid.  Friends advised me in almost Karl Rovian intensity and I finally sexed when I was well into 42. And I got pregnant, most likely the first time out of the gate. That's right, I broke a dry spell longer than JFK's entire presidency and scored a sperm touchdown that very same night.  And the sperm was courtesy of a friend of some twenty years that I had entrusted my born again virginity to.

I miscarried before I even realized I was pregnant. And it was painful. And it was on the floor of my gay best friend's house during a predominantly gay male party. I was the hag curled up on the floor, trying to remain as charming and blithe as humanly possible while holding a bottle of icy vodka to my lower belly.

But that's another story. When it became increasingly clear to myself and my determined, devoted Canadian that our ovulation chart, thermometer and pre-natal vitamins were going to have all the in vitro impact of the African fertility statues my mother picked up in a tourist shop while on white-lady safari in Kenya, we grieved in degrees.

Sure, there was your average anger/frustration, your dime-store denial (which we still dabble in), the run of the mill bargaining and all those other registered trademarks of the Kubler-Ross death patent. We are still working on accepting that there will not be an adorable, impossibly pale and hopefully not too rashy smaller version of the two of us running our lives any time in the foreseeable or unforeseeable future.  Perhaps it is a blessing- the Canadian is a recovering alcoholic while I still practice the art of drinking- we share eczema and psoriasis and a panoply of medications to make us bearable to ourselves and others... but if all these felons, teenagers, Palins and crack heads can procreate willy nilly, it just seems slightly unfair that we cannot.

But that is just how it is.  So, we grieve while celebrating all our friends and their lovely, beautiful babies.  I grieve seeing chic pregnant women hiking and sailing into pre-natal yoga, I grieve seeing them breastfeed, I gape in awe at how their hormones enrich their skin and hair and fashion sense.  I grieve for what I cannot ever do, and in that letting go, I understand just how much of an every day sort of miracle a child truly is.

And so, the next step is adoption. There is an earthquake in Haiti, babies who need homes, and there are friends who find their children, and not as a result of their own genitals doing anything particularly smashing. So, that's what we plan to do next.

when does one turn to other's children to raise?

We met late. I was 45 when the Canadian knocked my socks off, in that gentle way only well-mannered, sober Canadians seduce and woo- which is not me, nor how I seduce, woo, drink, talk or live.  I do nothing gently.  But we got on.

We used birth control exactly three times before we knew we were gonna be playing for keepsies.  We've essentially been married since a month after meeting.  So, we played without a goalie and tried to make a creature out of our own ingredients.  He knew about ovulation from trying to get his ex-wife to carry his load. He kept a chart on the fridge of my cycles, we took my temperature, which oddly never goes above 97 degrees, ever, and we sexed constantly. We connected once and I lost it early on, bleeding for two weeks straight.  Good times.

My egg numbers were surprisingly hefty, at first. But without insurance, and tons of disposable or indisposable cash, we were playing without a goalie and without helmets.  And the ice of aging is hard. One month I had the egg count of a 16 year old nubile girl and two months later, the egg count of a neutered 16 year old basset hound.

 It's ironic, in a distinctly un-Alanis Morrisette way. I played carefully. I didn't have a kid between junior and senior year like my dear friend from Catholic all girls school. I didn't have kids with any number of tools, douches, drunken louts and sad clowns that litter my romantic runway. I kept my uterus tidy and HPV-free for the right sperm- and I met him too late to use that uterus for its designated purpose. So, for all fertility intents and purposes, I didn't have a kid when I wasn't in a responsible, stable, or financially feasible place to bear and raise a child right- I waited for all my ducks to line up, and those retarded ducks took their sweet ass time lining up but they finally did, and now I'm a man.

We could have taken credit cards out and done the fertility by any means necessary thing that is quite popular in the East Coast - West Coast birthing culture- but spending a quarter of a million dollars to have our ingredients grow a person just seemed... too much about us. I am no Gandhi, but I just didn't want to exercise my ego that much. That, and the economy collapsed, so the credit card offer carnival of two years ago folded up its tents and left town.  We were gonna have to DIY if we were to get a kid.

We are still in love, I'm 48 now, we are even going to get married, but before then, if we are lucky, we will be handed someone else's unlucky child- gender, race and age unknown- to raise for as long as the courts will allow us to.  So, we will have a foster child, but until we make it legal, our foster kid will be a bastard foster kid. Can't wait!

So, this is my blog- we are in the foster to adopt system, and since we aren't hitched yet (the very idea of making a wedding makes my long dormant eczema resurge to my face) we are searching for our bastard foster child. If you see our kid, let us know. Much appreciated.

Coming up in following blogs-

how best to acquire a kid: buy one straight out or just rent?

Foreign made import or export?

Gay friends who pioneered our foster to adopt path.

Taking professional parent classes.

My work with foster teens.

The whole journey from 'just us' to 'all of us'.