Your Nothings Come Back

Spaulding: I want a hamburger. No, cheeseburger. I want a hot dog. I want a milkshake. I want potato chips...
Judge Smails: You'll get nothing and like it!
- John Barman and Ted Knight in "Caddyshack"

When I was 15 years old and dating Robin, I was so angry at her one day -- about what, I can't possibly remember -- she broke up with me, or I broke up with her -- the drama and passion of two teenagers in love is a frightful, nonsensical thing -- but I was so angry that day, I said out loud in front of her mother, "I hate her. I hate her so much right now."

And her mom Ruth, no stranger herself to strained relationships and painful journeys of the heart, took my hand in hers, and sighed and said, "Listen to me, the opposite of love isn't hate...the opposite of love is indifference." And that, in a nutshell, turned out to be the single most accurate description anyone has ever given me of what love is and what love isn't.

Our two adopted children do not yet love us. They don't exactly hate us, although out of principle, they did spend much of their first two months telling us they did, vehemently and insistently, until we took it off the table by making the words "I hate you," a disciplinary misstep in our house.

"Go ahead and feel it," my less-than-noble theory goes, "but none of us will survive this transition to new familyhood if we have to hear it out loud ten times a day." Healthy or not for their freedom of expression, nobody gets to say "I hate you" in our house anymore, and that's just the way it is. Hate your situation, but you're not going hate your dads. Not verbally anyway. That dog, children, just won't hunt. So suck it up and find a few new words to express your pain and your anger. In an early world of unteachable hurdles, at least we'll teach you that much.

And honestly, they don't really hate us. They're just adapting to a whole new rainstorm of shit from a world that's already pelted them with an umbrella load already. They like us well enough as friends and babysitters as long as they get exactly what they want and we bow to their every whim, which unfortunately, as parents, we can't do frequently. Other than that, all bets are off.

Now at the four month mark, J1 and J2 still have an ongoing and utter indifference to our existance as a whole. They've had lots of parents before, and they're duly unimpressed that we're next in line. We're no more "chosen" than a random couple on the street. No more "official" than a fart in the wind. That's how much substance we have. Glimmers of hope are present, but rare. On most days, they could clearly could care less if we love them or not, and they're certainly, vastly, unanimously uninterested in loving us back.

Geoffrey: I remember my third birthday. Not just pictures of the garden or the gifts, but who did what to whom and how it felt. My memory reaches back that far, and never once can I remember anything from you or Father warmer than indifference. Why is that?
Eleanor: I don't know.
Geoffrey: That was not an easy question for me and I don't deserve an easy answer.
Eleanor: There are times I think we loved none of our children.
Geoffrey: Still too easy, don't you think?
Eleanor: I'm weary and you want a simple answer and I haven't one.
- James Goldman, "The Lion in Winter"

Sometimes I worry that I feel like I don't love them either. I have to be very careful of how I phrase that, because someday they will inevitibly read this and wonder if I did. And the answer is yes, of course I did. I did and I do.

But as much as I love them, I equally loved the picture of who I thought they would be before they got here, and in a way, I'm already mourning for what our family didn't turn out to be.

"Parents have a mental picture of the "wished for" family. It may be vague or well-formed, but it exists. After a placement, the anticipation of the dream family is supplanted by committment to the real family. If parents unknowingly adopt a special needs child, grief follows. As these various feelings and thoughts are recognized, parents tend to move into a state of sadness, acknowledging the differences between their wishes for their child and their child's reality." - Deborah D. Gray, "Attaching in Adoption"

Of course Adam and I love them. We started loving them before they even met us, when they were just two names and two outdated snapshots on a Department of Family Services bio sheet. By the time they arrived in our home, Adam and I were so emotionally invested in the roller coaster worry of "getting or not getting" them, we wanted to cover and smother them with hugs, kisses, protection and open-armed joy on the first day we met them.

But even after four months and numerous textbook predictors, we had no idea how difficult love unreturned, coupled with a myriad of behavioral, neurological and psychological challenges, would actually be. On most days, it leaves us so emotionally drained and utterly, heartwrenchingly exhausted, it's all we can do to retreat to our bed at night and stare silently at the ceiling, each of us wrapped in our own blanket of grief, hoping to find one more ounce of energy to utter the few hopeful words that might conceivably comfort the other so we can wake up and start it all over the next day.

At hopeless times like these, it's hard to identify these children as even belonging to us. On the hardest days -- and there are many -- we feel like they can't possibly be ours. Like someone left us two very bad kids to babysit, and it's up to us to figure it out, and the real parents aren't ever coming back. We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are the real parents. And it's every bit as terrifying as it is joyful.

They remind us all the time that we're not their real dads. Don't think for a minute that turn of the biological screw escapes their arsenal. I'm amazed at the inherent ability of a six and seven-year-old to hurt us and and enjoy it. Their difficult lives have made already made them sophisticated masters of passing out pain, and whether they learned it by neglect or emulation, God help them, they do it very well. And for a long while at least, it's Adam and I who will have to pay the daily price for all the others who were collectively responsible for their mostly-missing childhood. Seven long years of other people's errors, and here it is, all for us. Turn the fan on high and toss in 365 days worth of dog turds. Times seven.

Exhausted in the midst of another scowling staredown last night, I turned to Justuce, who has recently been diagnosed with ODD, or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, yet another series of letters to Google, medicate and treat through therapy, and said to her, ""It must be so difficult to hate me this much all the time. It must take up so much of your energy. You really don't have to."

I continued in words way too grown-up for her to process, desperately hoping she might catch a glimmer of understanding, that I'm here and begging, trying so hard to reach her.

"All the sad things in your heart," I told her, "I know I can't take them all away. Nobody can. But I wish you could talk to me about them so we can try to make them not hurt so much. I promise I want to help you. I'll be the best dad I can and I'll give you so much love, but you have to come out and meet me. Talk to me about all the things that are hurting your heart. Help me help you."

And she looked at me blankly, scowled again and walked away.

Everything I need to say to her is too grown-up to say to a seven-year-old, and nobody's trained me to bring it down to her level. I need to tell her exactly what I just said, but I don't know how to do it yet in a way she'll connect to. And all of these wise old doctors and therapists and "professionals" of ours don't seem to have the language for it either.

"Parents may not understand the extent of the needs of their child until several months into the placement. By then, parents have often used all of their energy and reserves. Parents may have a reality-based perception that the quality of their lives has taken a sharp, downward turn. As parents get increasingly tired, it becomes more difficult to organize and make decisions that will benefit the family for the long haul." - Deborah D. Gray, "Attaching in Adoption"

I'm under no illusion that the addition of these two new children and their cornucopia of problems hasn't drained my reserves and completely altered my relationship with Adam in a fundamental and identity-changing way.

Where once I bragged that Adam and I never fought, never argued never shared a terse word, now I snap at him in front of houseguests when I find out Justin's three days of therapy has just turned into four. The effortless brotherhood we once so arrogantly, naively credited to the so-called strength of our own strong hearts has been replaced, diluted, called into question by the sheer exhaustion of parenting such frightfully difficult and uncaring children.

And I say that with no ill reflection on who they are, rather simply on where they are. They aren't yet ready to accept me and Adam as their parents, nor should anyone expect them to. But the fact that they haven't is still very painful. It's still demeaning to our hearts because we love them so much. We see them cuddling and cozy with everyone else but us and we feel so entirely unimportant, deflated, ridiculous and worn down. I used to spring out of bed in the morning with a smile on my lips and carpe diem in my heart. Now I wake up in the morning afraid of what each new day will bring. What new pressure or what new rejection.

Now I quietly take my little blue Zoloft, hoping it'll take the edge off the tears that will almost certainly be welling in my eyes, just below the surface, all day long. Four days out of the week, I'll reach for the Butalb my doctor prescribed to squelch the migraines that arrived, wrapped in a bow, not at all suprisingly coinciding with the exact placement date of the children. I didn't have these things before the children came, and now I do. And the fearful part of me is always thinking, "what's next?"

I want to say, "you can't imagine what it's like to work this hard and not be loved back by your children," but that would be arrogant. As sure as the day is long, a hundred of you parents out there with unruly teenagers feel the same way. Problem is, my unruly teenagers are only six and seven years old, and I didn't get the pre-school cuddling that led up to it. I have no "before" to fall back on. No wistful, "well, at least they loved me once." We hit the ground running with their built-in rejection. We prayed for them, but found out the hard way they sure as hell didn't pray for us.

I broke down crying talking to my friend Amy yesterday. She reads this blog and remembers the heartaches and challenges raising her own adopted son. We were talking about therapy and medication and how hard this all is just from a scheduling standpoint -- the enormity of trying to fit in all this special care with simple things like meals and playtime and showers and homework -- it all just seems like an impossible, ridiculous juggling act right now -- and I said, "Amy, it would be so much easier to do all this if they only just loved me a little. If they'd only just give me a glimmer of hope or throw me a bone."

And I broke down crying because (a) I feel it, and (b) I feel so selfish for feeling it.

They're just not ready to love us yet, plain and simple. It's not their job to do it and it's not in our best interest to expect it. I said to Adam yesterday, "We just have to face the reality of this. We have to do all of this, work this hard, even harder, and not expect any affection in return. For a long, long time." Note to moms and dads who plan on adopting older children. Knowing their rejection is perfectly normal doesn't make it any less likely to break your heart.

We watch Justuce and Justin happily and contentedly cuddle up to anyone but us, friends, family, people they've just met, and it fills me with such sad, complete envy, I imagine they're doing it just to spite me, and of course, they're not. They're just little kids and they just want to cuddle. They just don't want to do it with the two new pseudo-parents the State of Nevada stuck them with.

I wish it were us they were casually clinging to. We're glad they find arms to embrace them and give them shelter, because they need it so desperately, and for whatever developmental or transitional reasons, they clearly can't ask it of us yet. To love a child who needs to be loved in return, but to watch them, time after time, crawl into someone else's arms for comfort is a level of grief I never thought I'd know. "Here I am, pick me," my heart practically screams. But off they go to someone else's arms. And I have to watch it and smile, like the old Nat King Cole song, because it's fundamentally what they need the most. They just don't want it from me.

Smile though your heart is aching
Smile even though it's breaking
That's the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what's the use in crying...

And I sound like a broken record, because I've written before about the pain of this unique, unrequited love, and even though I'm tired of listening to myself too, it doesn't ever stop hurting, so here it is again.

Eleanor: What's the matter, Richard?
Richard: Nothing.
Eleanor: It's a heavy thing, your nothing. When I write or send for you or speak or reach, your nothings come. Like stones.
- James Goldman, "The Lion in Winter"

I quote "The Lion in Winter" a lot more than I probably should. It's my favorite movie, perhaps because it so deliciously, perfectly captures the heart and soul of a dysfunctional family, and Adam and I have lived in plenty of those.

I stole it's line, "your nothings come," for a long-ago poem I wrote for my own dad, who was largely absent from my life, certainly from my childhood. He made up for it at the end when it was too late and he was dying, and I love him for that, but his inaccessbility when I was young and needed him is something it's taken me a lifetime to understand.

Ironic then, that the very same poem I wrote when I was 17 for the father who was never there should come back and haunt me so completely, desribing my new childrens' lack of affection for me and how unimportant it makes me feel.

Your nothings come back.
I call, I roar, I scream to you.
But you don't see me.
I'm invisible to you.
Transparent like water is,
I hope, I beg,
I whisper, please,
But only your nothings
Always your nothings
Come back.

Moms and dads who ever contemplate this journey, let me promise you something. You can prepare yourself for resistance. You can prepare yourself for difficulty. But unwantedness, indifference...those two things are the quintessential opposite of love, and they're very hard to swallow. How in the world do you ever prepare yourself for those?

Someday, I know, I will look back on these words and thank God we got past them.

But that doesn't help me today when I'm sad and I'm tired and I'm still here trying, and only their nothings, always their nothings, come back.