I Can Say This Now
On the way to the courthouse, traffic on the 110 freeway slowed to a stop. Ahead, a peekaboo of flashing lights. We’d given ourselves more than enough time to get there, but not enough for a full freeway closure.
I imagined what might happen. I would call our attorney. We would miss the court date we’d waited six months for; eventually we’d be granted another, but that fresh expanse of calendar would open up more space for something to go wrong. A blood relative suddenly wanting custody? A fuck-up by myself or my partner?
Then, as quickly as it stopped, traffic picked up again. Someone else’s tragedy had been ushered off the road, and we were free to go about our day.
The Edelman Children’s Court was a pinkish building with aqua trim, perched at the top of a hill just east of Downtown Los Angeles. It looked like an office complex or a hospital. Like the latter, it tried to make itself appealing to the children whose memories it would invade. Cartoon clouds on the ceiling, stylized palm trees flanking the front desk.
Seven and a half years ago, we’d finalized the adoption of our oldest son, Dash. Today we were going to do the same for Joey, our seven-month-old. They say judges like adoption cases. They’re usually happy occasions, even if the circumstances are bittersweet.
Our families and a handful of friends met us on the third floor, where our attorney gave us careful instructions about what kind of phone usage was and wasn’t allowed inside the courtroom.
When we were called, I asked Dash to put away his iPad, which is how I spend about a third of my life. He’d been cheerful this morning; he understood, as we did, that this was an important step, but also largely a formality. We’d completed our initial home study back in 2019. Joey’s first parents had done their part over the summer, and we’d diligently met with a case worker from the Department of Children and Family Services in November. This bright day in late January was about finalization and celebration.
“You can’t make me,” Dash said, a common refrain in these months of life-with-a-baby upheaval.
I would make him, I thought. I pictured myself lifting him, iPad and all, and carrying him screaming into the courtroom.
But as quick as a cleared freeway, he handed over his iPad.
A few minutes later, we were raising our right hands in front of a judge in a black robe and a green face mask, her gray hair in short twists.
What she said wasn’t unlike a wedding vow, though of course Joey couldn’t say his I do. Did we understand that he was now, in every legal sense, like our “natural born child,” which conferred on him certain rights, including the “right of inheritance”? We did. I hoped my body would take in this information, and worry a little less.
We took pictures with the judge, and the bailiff handed Dash and Joey teddy bears with rainbow-colored fur. Dash whispered to me, “I know what you’re going to do now: C-R-Y.”
He knows me well. I didn’t cry right then, but after we all went out for pizza, and my sister got ready to head back to work, we held onto each other tightly, and it all came out.
“We’ll find other things to worry about,” she cry-laughed.
*
The next day, an unknown number popped up on my phone. For the first time since 2020, I didn’t wonder if it was related to an adoption opportunity, or the disruption of one.
*
The morning of our court date, Dash said, “I think the judge will say yes. It’s like, almost one hundred percent. But if they say no, we got to know Joey for a nice long time.”
I couldn’t quite tell whether he was bracing for something to go wrong—after all, he’d ridden the same roller coaster of four failed matches that we had—or thinking what most older siblings do at some point: Is it too late to send this kid back?
Maybe both.
Later that day, Dash walked past Joey and put his hand, fingers splayed, in his little brother’s face. It wasn’t violent, but it was a bit aggressive, like lunging at someone to see them flinch.
Dash said, “Joey, you’re a loser.” Then he added, “At kickball. You’re the best at drinking formula.”
Over the past few months, when people asked C.C. and me how Dash liked being a big brother, we said he was the sweetest to Joey, which was usually true. He hugged him and comforted him and staged goofy pretend dialogues with him in a baby voice. We also conceded that Dash was not the sweetest to us, or to other little kids. He was suddenly, deeply frustrated by our friends’ toddlers, and even his four-year-old cousin.
“Her voice is so annoying,” he complained.
Even a preschooler at the park, who gave Dash about two minutes of attention.
“He won’t stop following me,” Dash said. The boy was not following him.
So C.C. and I saw his small, post-adoption pivot as progress. We theorized that maybe it now felt safer to have regular big-brother ambivalence toward Joey. We’d all been holding our breath for so long. We’d all been on our best behavior.
*
The adoption process encourages and even necessitates best behavior, as I’ve complained about before. As a lifelong seeker of gold stars, I leaned way in, even as I grew cynical about the adoption industrial complex. Eventually and increasingly, I voiced my frustration with the process. But for as long as our goal was a baby, I couldn’t admit to mixed feelings on that front.
Once Joey was with us, I worried and worried and worried. Because he was a preemie. Because of post-traumatic adoption stress. But there was another piece that I couldn’t say aloud, not even fully to myself, not before he was legally ours: I resented having a baby.
As a family of three, C.C. and Dash and I had our issues, but we’d established our groove. We loved to go on little trips and see friends and family on weekends and watch Star Wars and get croissants from Starbucks. By the time he was six, the smothering days of the pandemic were behind us, and though he was never the most independent kid, I could read or write while he watched TV. It was a good life.
And then this baby came along and disrupted everything. But it wasn’t a disrupted adoption, so I couldn’t complain. Right? We’d worked so hard to get here. This was what we’d wanted. Babies were a blessing, everyone knew that.
Anxiety seemed permissible, somehow, although certainly C.C. tired of mine, and I tired of it myself. Instead of thinking, Having a baby is a slog. Trying to do things and go places that work for an eight-year-old and an infant and two adults is almost impossible, I thought, Is he rolling over enough? Is he regressing?
Behind my worries about his development was a form of catastrophizing. What if he stays a baby forever? was, in some sense, my real worry. What if I never get to relax or feel free again? There are, of course, conditions that cause people to stay toddlers developmentally for life. We’re all one very serious traumatic brain injury away from being that person. But so far, Joey has shown no signs of being anything other than a fairly typical baby with a bit of preemie-related catching up to do.
I resented Joey for making me worry (though no one “makes” me worry). I resented C.C. for being the one who wanted a second child slightly more than I did. I resented her for resenting my ensuing anxiety.
She has rightly noted that she has to carry the mantle of emotional even-keel in our family, as Dash and I melt down in our various ways, but she too felt the burden of a new baby. An extrovert, she despaired when Dash resisted (because of his own anxiety, because he wanted to control something) things he would normally love: baseball, theme parks. She was frustrated by how impossible it seemed to find a babysitter, and how we were spread so thin financially that we could barely pay one anyway.
We were all mad and sad, but we couldn’t hold it against Joey. He hadn’t asked for any of this. We, quite explicitly, had. Joey was as serene and smiley and charming as a baby could be. So we gnashed our teeth and growled at each other instead.
Dash broke into tears one night at bedtime. “It’s so hard having a baby,” he sobbed. “But he’s so cute.”
I hope that knowing he’s here to stay—that he’s like our natural born child—allows us all to treat him as such. Maternal ambivalence is already a bit of a taboo, if one that is slowly lifting, and I think it’s more so for those of us with something to prove: adoptive parents, queer parents, perhaps also parents of color and very young parents, though I don’t fall into those categories. I hope that being free to long for freedom almost as much as I once (twice) longed for a baby takes the edge off my anxiety. I don’t know if I’m there yet. The magical thinker in me still wants to amend every gripe with a P.S. to the universe: But I love him. But I want to keep him.
Six weeks ago I was worried that he wasn’t rolling without great effort. Now he rolls all over the place in both directions and rocks back and forth on his hands and knees, gunning his engine in the direction of crawling. That’s not a brag; it’s a reminder to myself that life does not stay still, no matter what.
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