As we count down to the day of her arrival (sixty, forty-five, forty, possibly even fewer) infants who look like she no doubt will appear in my field of vision every time I leave the house. Blond-headed, bright-eyed, fat-cheeked and neckless they gurgle and coo over their parents’ shoulders in line at the bank; they wave about their round little arms from grocery carts to point at milk, at apples, at everything. I see them and push back my babies five years when they too waved and gurgled as they accompanied me on our daily rounds — always happy, always compliant, always lovely — and some not quite vanishingly small part of me wishes I could repeat the process with N.’s latest offering.
Irrational as it is I know I’m not alone. The mother of the fourth child calls to tell me about her latest visit with N., one which left her wrung-out and near frantic with worry over her health, relationships and living situation. I don’t want to listen; I don’t want to know. In fact I won’t listen to N., but because this woman has known N. just a year and has not yet built up the level of resistance I have in six I let her vent. “I wish there was something I could do,” she worries.
I know, I tell her. I do too.
“We’d take this baby if we could,” she says.
I know, I tell her. I know you would.
“But we just can’t,” and even though I’ve not asked for it she recites again the many reasons that adding to her family would be unwise. She leaves off one reason which I learn later that week on Facebook: that they are going on vacation at exactly the time the new child is set to arrive and as I read it a flash of irrational anger pops in front of my eyes. They would go on a cruise rather than take their baby’s new sibling! I whine, but as quick as that it’s gone. Responsibility for a new child far outlasts (and out-costs) any holiday they could plan and even without this impediment how could I blame them for not wanting to take on another child so soon? Knowing what I know how monstrous would I be to blame them?
But I know the alternative because it has happened before: Lacking an N.-approved placement the new child will be born and go home with N. where for some weeks or perhaps months they will struggle — how hard I am certain we do not want to know — before the state steps in and the child is sucked into the system. I was the safety net when this happened with N.’s second child. I could not be the safety net when this happened with N.’s third child, and that child is now lost despite my gentlest efforts to contact his family through the agency and directly after the child’s mother reached out to N. on Facebook. Both times I received no answer, which is impossible to bear. Impossible. I’m irrationally angry at them too. Or maybe the anger is not so irrational because I cannot see any logical reason for not wanting some contact — any contact! — with your child’s biological family.
Not even one.
I don’t make decisions irrationally but to prevent the loss of another sibling my mind ratchets and whirls in an effort to figure out a way that I could mother this new baby. I can’t — I know I can’t. The fee to the agency alone runs upward of ten grand, and three children already subdivide my time and attention far more than is fair to them. It’s not in the realm of possibility; it’s so far removed from being feasible that even to consider it would be as much of a waste of time as it would be to plan out a beach vacation with my new boyfriend Spike — in other words foolish, misguided and more than a little pathetic.
None of this, however, will stop my mind from whirling.
