In the almost-seven years I’ve known her I’ve been forced to scale back expectations of my children’s mother’s emotional capabilities. At first I — and everyone else, I think — took her to be only slightly less mature than what was suggested by her chronological age. But the years have not delivered additional advancement and events, if anything, have shown our original assessments to be almost tragically overstated.

This has not happened overnight, nor in one fell swoop. Each year, each baby, each interaction has demonstrated that what we all hoped for is just not there. It sounds cruel to admit but it does no one any favors to pretend. And yet it’s hard to remember her limitations and never more so than now, when after months spent making plans to raise her latest (and last) baby it’s become impossible to ignore how far away she is from being able to meet that goal.

I’ve seen it in the past two months in a hundred different things. She’ll IM me from the only working computer she has access to, which is in the house of the woman who currently has custody of her child. Are you visiting with baby? I’ll ask, and she’ll tell me that the child is fine, is being bathed by her grandmother. Aren’t these visits set up specifically for you to interact with the child I’ll want to ask but won’t, because I know the answer from the grandmother: N. is there in body but in spirit not so much; she’ll hold the child for five minutes until she cries, at which point frustration sets in and the infant is surrendered to more competent arms.

Half the time she arrives late and leaves early. Sometimes she’s too ill or sleepy to provide care. “Just bring her over to me,” grandmother told me she requested a few week back. “I’m too tired to get up but she can lay here in bed with me while I sleep,” and I am thankful, so very, very thankful, that grandmother is wise and strong-willed enough to answer that request, in no uncertain terms, no.

This is not what I pictured. I foresaw that grandmother, hands already full with four other small children, would allow N. unlimited access to her house and new baby. I imagined she’d have N. hopping between laundry dishes diapers bottles all day long and would fudge her hours to the state so that her little helper would not be lost. I thought — and it shames me to admit it — that quite possibly the baby would spend all her time with her mother and would be trotted over to grandmother’s house only for visits from the state.

None of this has happened. Grandmother is taking this very seriously, very seriously indeed — and it shows. The child, along with her four paternal half-siblings, her grandparents, her birthmother, her maternal half-sister and her family, the two maternal half-siblings I’m raising and the rest of my family,¹ all convened here recently for food and conversation. The new child glows with good heath and care. She’s got the charming forearm fat-roll and mushy chin that speak to sufficient nutrition. She smelled reassuringly of formula and diapers. Her head bobbled about, mouth trailing drool around a stuffed-in fist as she followed the antics of her siblings. When I faced her to me she cooed back to my nonsense conversation, breaking into goofy toothless grins at the more scintillating bits. And when that got old (and after a few words of instruction about how she best liked to be held), her nodding off was as swift and drama-free as anyone familiar with the ways of newborns could hope.

She is, in short, reassuringly well cared for. I can tuck away the hotline number and turn my worry — not that it does any good — toward her mother. Would that there were a hotline number for her.

The question is how much further can our expectations fall? And at what point will our hope be only that she can continue to stay alive?

*Falling knife

1. In case you are counting, this adds up to ten children and seven adults, and that is a whole lotta pulled pork. [↩]

The adoptive mother is not, in general, offered congratulations. “Are you sure you get to keep him?” is a much more likely response, as is “When will it be final?” and — always a favorite — “Aren’t you worried they’ll want her back?” Each possibility is conveyed without fail in a tone of the deepest worry; word and inflection together express not joy but fear and as much as the adoptive mother might desire if only for a moment to put aside doubt and just celebrate it is seldom an option.

And yet despite the flakiness, despite the irresponsibility, despite the vast number of previous children the biological mother has borne she is always, and many times over, offered congratulations. It hardly seems fair to be so celebrated for doing so little. A smarter person would no doubt avoid entering into situations where comparisons between mothers (if only in my heart) cannot be avoided, but about these things I am in no way smart. So when, one day before the induction, it comes to light that every other support person (a week ago there were plenty; “No need for you to come,” I was breezily told) has bailed and I am asked please can you come I need you please, I rearrange schedules and line up sitters and trek to her town to attend to the latest arrival.

Is it altruism that prompts this sacrifice? Oh that it were. I wish I could say that I go to her births with a pure heart but I can’t, because in some not insignificant way I go because I want to be her. I let my hand be squeezed tingling purple all the while wishing that I was the one doing the squeezing. I listen to her pant and moan and feel anger that she instead of I got such simple, careless fertility. I see her body open — so quickly! so easily! — and gnash my teeth that mine didn’t do the same. And when hours later I show the exhausted yet radiant new mother how to stroke a fuzzy cheek ’til the mouth yawns wide and the breast (I hold my own, a move unforgotten eleven years later, to demonstrate) is ready for latching, I wish I were a good enough person that I could just be with her instead of nursing in my withered heart such deep, ugly envy.

On the way home, crying like an ungainly fool, I remember the lesson from the very first day of adoption training, a lesson which at the time could not fit inside my head alongside visions of fat happy infants. “Adoption is not a cure for infertility,” we were warned. “If you successfully adopt a child you will still be infertile. You have to deal with that grief as a completely separate issue. It never goes away.”

I wish I could say she was wrong.

It was his birthday, and as my babymama, babydaddy and all their various and sundry partners both past and present¹ live their lives out on Facebook I used that venue to wish him a very happy day. It was a big birthday for him not because it was one that ended with a 0 or a 5 but because his newest child² was set to be born quite literally at any moment.

If you didn’t read the note in the last sentence you should. I’ll wait.

Got it?

So not only was this babydaddy celebrating his birthday but he was also waiting for the birth of his child, and it should here be noted that this baby would be only the third one that he’s seen born, or been a part of the mother’s life during the pregnancy, or had any hope of raising. The others gestated and arrived with this young man wholly or entirely out of the picture. Two of these cases are the most known to me as I was at the birth of both. One I am raising; the other I watch being raised at a distance of some sixty miles with a measure of sadness and joy the relative levels of which rise and fall depending on the day, my mood, and how well I manage to shove it completely out of my head.

I’ve watched this man, the father of my son; in the six-plus years we’ve known each other I’ve seen him age twice that, and while we’ve never had the almost parent-child relationship I enjoy³ with N. I do care for him not only for his sake but for the sake of our little boy who will someday need to know more about his paternal ancestry.

On his birthday as I left my brief wish on his wall I noticed that N. had beat me too it. “Happy birthday, honey,” she said. “Call me as soon as you can. Can’t wait to see you next week. I love you very much.” I’d been under the impression that things were good⁴ with the woman who would soon be bearing his child and that he and N. were at that point only friends. Hm, I thought. I guess that’s recently changed. And I thought nothing more of it until later that day when a reply to my birthday greeting brought me back to his wall and I saw the Springeresque shitstorm that in the interim had rained down upon N’s head.

“Leave him alone,” most of the respondents said to her, except not nearly so succinctly⁵. “Cause trouble between him and the new girlfriend and we’ll fuck you up,” the rest said, and if it had been just that I would have thought Oh N., you poor young fool, what did you think would happen in declaring your love like this? and nothing more.

One reply, however, stunned me to the point that I blinked my eyes and shook my head because I could not believe what I was reading. I relay it here in all its resplendent glory because it’s just too painful to attempt a summary of what is so heartbreakingly, exhaustingly, word-by-every-last-word wrong:

U know u wrong for wantin anything to do wit him now after all you done. U gave his kids up to strangers instead of there own dad. U lost him when U signed those papers to give up those kids!!! He has always been there in one way shape or form for his kids but no one has given him a chance to prove himself til now.

As we’d been raising his sister⁶ for the fifteen previous months one could hardly make the case that we were strangers. And in both instances I watched months pass with no move on his part to assert his parental rights, not even after being informed in excruciating detail of the free or almost free steps he’d need to take. Believe me: I watched. I watched in both cases where N. was concerned but with the utmost interest where my son was concerned, and I watched him do absolutely nothing. I knew every step he’d have to take. He took not even the first.

Becoming the single father to children who sprang into existence through a woman he no longer loved would be nearly intolerable for anyone. Add poverty, underemployment, lack of education and a host of other issues too painful to address to the mix and it’s no bleeding wonder he chose to allow the decision to be made without his participation. I blame him for this not at all.

Do I blame him for not shutting down the comment above? Yes, oh yes. And at some point I may decide to take ovaries in hand and tell him that in the future I’d very much appreciate him tossing in a few kind words in the direction of the “strangers” who raise his son and give him every possible chance to be involved in his life.

There is no lasting benefit in going toe-to-toe with his friends on Facebook, and commenting solely for the sake of drama holds no draw. Yet I cannot stay quiet, so when even a night spent performing dramatic readings from his Facebook wall is not enough and the words have no place else to go I write them here.

You don’t mind, do you?

1. And no doubt future [↩]
2. This is number eight, if you are counting [↩]
3. Most days, and fret over the rest [↩]
4. or as good as they get [↩]
5. Or grammatically [↩]
6. his biological half sister [↩]