Progress report: one year

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". Why do I get the feeling the guy who coined that idiotic phrase was verbally abusive?
We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of what surely will rank as the biggest rejection of our lives: being told by Family and Children's Services that we were unfit to parent an adoptive child.
It still looks monstrous written out loud, there, doesn't it? Especially if you've paid any attention to the news over the past year. Maybe we're a bit sensitive, but it does seem as if the media's out to rub it in: one foster kid found starved to death here, another adopted girl sexually abused there...do they really think we're that bad? Worse than that, even, since the majority of these kids in the news had been under the care of Children's Aid at some point or another. Somebody actually felt these parents met the grade...and we don't?
Yes, we're overly sensitive, but when you get burned with words like that, it's kind of a given. You tell people the story, and on one level you welcome the commiseration--"How could they say such a thing?! You two would make great parents!" That feels good, a salve for the burning words of rejection. But on another much more private level, you can't help but think what's going on in your sympathizer's mind. Wow. There must be something really bad about those two. I wonder what it might be...
This is, of course, the insidious harm of words, so much slower to heal than mere broken bones. You can tell yourself all you want that they called it wrong, that they're full of shit, but then you get to thinking: you've been snubbed by professionals. These people are experts in the child care field, and their jobs depend on placing kids properly. Do they know something you don't?

And the reason they gave us! That our house "didn't feel like a house with children in it"! Maybe that's because it didn't have any children in it at the time. I don't know what the social worker was expecting to see--toys scattered hither and yon? Barney the Dinosaur wallpaper? It never occurred to me to ask, either. It was such a huge shock to be turned away, after all we had gone through, that I couldn't process thought until sometime long after. Once coherence returned, I tried mightily to figure out what the real reason was. There had to be one, because the reason we got was such patent bullshit. There must be something really bad about us two. I wonder what it might be...

One of the first reactions I had, once the shock had worn off, was I should have lied. You see, I put every last wart and flaw out there on the table for Children's Aid to pick at, naively believing that honesty is the best policy. I did it this way for several reasons, not the least of which was this approach had worked for me in the past. If you go in ready to acknowledge you're not perfect, I've found, people are a lot more willing to accept your imperfections. Except in this case, one of those imperfections might have done us in.

Eva worried that it was something she had said or done, or something she was, and that I might blame her, and that I might decide to go have kids with somebody else. I worried, conversely, that I had irrevocably spoiled her dream of raising a child, that she would take it out on me, that our marriage would suffer and perhaps die.
All utter nonsense, of course. Before I met Eva, I'd decided not to have kids at all, simply because I felt that on my own, I lacked sufficient parenting skill. I recognized my missing skill set--and a great deal more besides--in my wife, who had convinced me of the rewards of being a parent. It wasn't so hard for me to shift gears. Besides, just because our social worker had turned against us didn't mean we should turn against each other. I was never an athlete, but the old saw "we win as a team, we lose as a team" rings true.
Eva had long ago come to terms with the fact she would never have children of her own. Being told she couldn't parent someone else's child was a nasty blow, but my darling has absorbed nasty blows in the past and come out the stronger for it.

So: this was neither my fault, nor Eva's fault, nor even our fault, exactly. I got the feeling that whatever the issue was, it was something that couldn't be helped. Possibly the poem I showed Tom was the straw that broke our backs. I've printed it in this blog before, but I'll reprint it here, because (a) it's short and (b) it just might have some bearing on why we were rejected:

ADOPTION

I came and wept
and laughed and slept
and grew
I ran and played
and dreamed and prayed
and knew
You took me in
as your own kin
and then
you let me be
both loved and free
and when
we'd fully grown
you'd fully shown
your worth:
My mom and pa
Who never saw
My birth.

Awww. I wrote that in a hopeless fit of optimism, neck deep in the process. Looking at it now with a jaundiced eye, I can't help but notice the subtext: we took in a stranger and made her our own.
And that's really what I believed adoption was about. Trouble is, Children's Aid seems to believe otherwise. As far as I can tell, the ideal adoptive parent is never supposed to consider themselves the parent. You're told over and over and over again that adoptive kids never forget their birth family, no matter what, and that they shouldn't, no matter what, and that it's inevitable that they'll grow up and go off and search for those birth parents, leaving you with the sense you'd had a....room-mate...for all those years. My insistence on moulding the child into a healthy adult--even one (perhaps especially one) with enough self-esteem to make it on her own, and just possibly credit us with a job well done--could that have stuck in Tom's craw?

Silly, maybe. But no sillier than the rejection itself, as far as I'm concerned.

It's all what a friend of mine would call a moo point now, anyway. It happened, there's nothing we can do about it: we're moving on. I do wish we hadn't bought this house, though. It's not that there's anything wrong with it--every place we've lived in has been a step up from what we had before. But this house was pretty much designed for children, a fact very much on our minds as we toured it.
We'll make do, and make improvements, and (current plans indicate) in seven to ten years we'll sell and move to a bungalow in a mature neighbourhood. By then, too, I hope to have made some kind of mark on the world through my writing. And Eva, who enriches every life she touches, will hopefully and finally see that she enriches every life she touches.

And that's our life, in a nutshell.