Tough Questions

It seems to me that children age in strange surges that defy the space-time continuum.  The girls grow and mature, for the most part, without my notice nor my permission, until something startles me into realizing that time lurches by in great heaves.  The things that usually trigger this periodic realization usually revolve around the girls’ physical sizes.  Sometimes I’ll look down at Mo’s feet and it dawns on me that they are rapidly approaching the same size as Amy’s.  I’ll look at a picture from two years ago and see Shay’s stubby little toddler legs, and my breath will catch in my chest, because I know those legs won’t ever look like that again, that she is older and growing and that entropy is more than an obscure thermodynamic property, that it governs the arrow of time, and indeed, our relationship with our own children.

And at time, the clues of their unyielding maturation reside not in their physical appearance, but in their questions. 

They used to ask such simple questions.  Questions that a six or seven or even eight year old would ask.  Things easy to answer in short, safe responses. 

But now, as the universe continues to slip into a more and more disordered state, their experiences have led them to put more and more complex thoughts together.  They are at the age where the ordered world of childhood is beginning to slip into the far more complex, far more disordered world of adolescence, which we know itself one day slips into the even murkier and more random realm of adulthood.  And as they try to reconcile these worlds, they look to Amy and me for guidance in trying to ease their transition. 

Which means, their questions are getting hard to answer.

 “Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Shay is staring down at some alien piece of pink plastic she has pinched between her thumb and forefinger, rolling it around, eyeing it with intensity, this broken bit of some toy long since gone and forgotten, likely banished with the dust bunnies lying beneath beds or behind dressers.

“Sure.  Is it about that thing you have there?”

She looks up, her dark eyes searching my face, wondering why I’m so damn dumb.

“Uh, no, I don’t even know what this is.  I found it outside.”

“Okay, awesome.  That means I’ll step on it in bare feet later and cuss up a storm.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I sigh, gently taking from her the jagged piece of foot destruction and putting it in my pocket.  “What do you want to ask me?”

“Well…do you believe that God made all the people in the world?”

“Uh…sure…I suppose…do you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.  That’s good then.”

“But…”

“But…what?”

“So if God made all the people, does he make murderers?  And if he makes murderers, does he know they are going to be murderers?  And if he does, then why?  And if he doesn’t, that means he really doesn’t know everything, at least not in the future, which means he can’t see the future, but if he can see the future, then he already knows what a murderer is going to do, and he knows what I’m going to do, then does he already know I’m a good or bad person because he can see the future, and…”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa!  How long have you been thinking about this stuff?”

She shrugged, pulled at her shirttail, sniffed back a rattling wad of snot.  “A while a guess.”

“Man.  Shay, those are some questions I don’t even know how to begin to answer.  I’m not an expert on Calvinism and predestination.  You just have to be the best you can.  That’s all anyone can be.  Okay?”

She stared at me for a minute, a look of consternation spreading across her brow.  “But…what’s the answer?”

Uh-oh. 

She knows.

She knows that I don’t know everything.

I cannot bullshit her anymore.  She’s not asking the regular “what ifs” that every kid asks.  She’s starting to ask real questions and expects real answers.

Damn.  I thought I had a few years before all that started.

“I know that people have been debating those questions for a long, long time.  And I know that people have fought each other because of them.  I guess what I’m saying… is that Sunday school classes are up and running again.  Maybe you should ask one of the teachers at our church.  They’re the experts on that kind of thing.”

“Oh.  Okay.”

As I watch her shuffle out the room and into the hallway, I realize that I need to be more careful.  Not just with questions, but with a lot of things I say. 

My God.  I could actually screw them up if I’m not careful.  They don’t know my sarcasm yet.  They don’t know that most of the time I’m joking or just talking out of my ass about stuff.  What if I give them a complex about something?  What if they yearn for an answer to some existential question that might define how they view the world around them and impact every personal relationship they have, and when they come to me I give my usual glib, off-the-cuff response?

Dad, why don’t chickens fly?

Because God is dead.  Now go do your homework.

Of course I wouldn’t ever be that bad, but still.  What if I say something about how I’m getting fatter and it’s harder to lose weight up here in my late thirties?  I’ve said as much, and Mo looked at me and said, “Oh, Dad, you’re perfect, don’t worry about it.”

Now, instead of getting all misty and hugging her, I say, “Yeah, well, the seams of my pants are worrying about it.  So are my man-boobs.  They’re starting to jiggle around when I don’t want them to. ”

See?

They don’t get that I’m joking (well, kind of joking) and am just not thinking about what I’m saying.  I sure as hell don’t want them to have poor body images, grabbing and pinching at every perceived spot of imperfect flesh and wishing it away.  It’s a shitty way to go through life.

Now, I could just flat out lie to her about random stuff like my dad did when he didn’t know an answer.  I’m pretty sure it was his favorite thing in the world to do.   Those of you who know me well are aware of the Pierre Frontage story (“Frontage” pronounced with a long “o” and a soft “g” like a French name).  One fine day in the mid 1980’s, after hours of driving along some remote Kansas highway, I pointed to a sign that read “frontage road” and asked my dear old father what it was.

“That’s a sign that marks the path of the famous early explorer Pierre Frontage,” he explained sagely.  “You always see them along the highways because Pierre Frontage found all the best ways across America, and when the roads were built, they just went right next to his path because he already had it all mapped out.”

Made sense.

I believed that shit until high school. 

Dad swears he never said that, that I must have heard it from somewhere else.  I beg to differ.  Regardless, it was a pretty good story, one that he cannot deny sounds exactly like something that would have come out of his mouth.  I know for sure I asked him what the definition of “dire” was.

“Dire.  Means, like, fast, emergency.”

“Oh," I said, momentarily satisfied.

“Dire.  Like in…dire-rhea?”

“Sure.  I guess.  But then what does ‘rhea’ mean?”

Dad, with a shrug, said simply, “poop.”

Fast emergency poop. 

Made sense.

There are other questions they have not asked yet that I know are coming soon.  Horrifyingly uncomfortable questions about their ever-growing bodies…and about boys.

The other day Shay came home with her school pictures.  They were amazing.  She looked so grown up and pretty and yada yada yada gushing father garbage.  Anyway, as she began to pull them out, she stopped, looked me dead in the eye and said, “Dad, now, a friend of mine, a boy, not a boyfriend, a friend that is a boy [the reason for her adamancy was undoubtedly due to me constantly reminding them they are far too young to worry about boyfriends and that stuff] asked me for a picture so I gave him one.”

“That’s okay.  I always traded school pics with people in my class.  Did he give you one?”

She then returned the biggest, sheepish grin I’d ever seen from her.  “Yeeeeeees,” she said with rising pitch.  She then pulled out a huge picture of a chubby blonde-haired kid with funny round glasses set askew across his nose and a big goofy grin on his face. 

And I don’t mean it was the medium sized one or even the one that has two to a sheet.  It was the full sheet monster, the biggest one in the pack.  Like 8 ½” by 11”.  Huge. 

All I could do was laugh.

She snatched it back from me and shot me a nasty look.

“Shay,” I said.  “Seriously.  You’ve gotta give that back.  I’ll bet his mom will want that one.” 

Shay shook her head and said, “No, his mom is in jail.  He lives with his Dad.  He said his Dad won’t care if he gives it to me because someone else paid for the pictures, he doesn’t know who, but that his Dad doesn’t even know they are coming.”

I stopped laughing.

“His mom is in jail?”

“Yeah,” she said with a wave of her hand.  “I think drugs or something.  That’s why he’s my friend, because I was a foster kid too and he had to go to a foster home for a little while until his Dad came and got him.  Maybe that was who paid for the pictures.  Anyway, he said his foster parents weren’t very nice, and I said that mine were, and now they‘re my real Mom and Dad.  But that’s why he’s my best friend, because of all that.” 

I let her keep the damn picture and I didn’t laugh at it again. 

Although I do chuckle every time I see that kid grinning back at me from her dresser.

There is another question I am in no hurry to answer, but I know is coming.  And if I don’t address it soon, it could lead to some serious embarrassment later.

I’m talking, of course, about Santa Claus.

Now, as a kid, I loved Christmas.  I still do, but I mean…I loved it.  Especially Santa Claus.  And I was in no hurry to know the truth about Saint Nick, even though most of my friends already knew and looked at me with growing unease and pity every time I mentioned him. 

This went on until Christmas of the fifth grade.

Dad was in no hurry to ruin Christmas for me, and knowing what I know now, I don’t blame him.  So he just never took an active role in informing me about it.  He figured that if I really wanted to know, I’d ask.  And he was right.  Some friend of mine would announce that there was no Santa at all, that everyone who believed in him was a moron, and I’d sadly shake my head and wonder why being correct and cool trumped the possibility of no longer receiving presents.  My belief just made good sense.  Why screw up a good thing?  Who was it hurting?

Well, that was before the day the first grade wrote letters to Santa, and we, the fifth grade, were to respond to them.  Mrs. Solomon announced what we were doing just before we were to go outside for afternoon recess.  I was horrified.

None of the other kids seemed to think how…wrong this was.  My ears started to ring as I grew angrier and angrier.  This was an affront to Christmas!  Who were we to steal the first grader’s letters, so nicely addressed to the North Pole, and impersonate Santa Claus?  Besides being wrong, I was pretty sure tampering with mail was a federal offence.  So as she passed the hand-decorated stuffed envelopes up and down the rows, I slowly raised my hand.

“Yes Matt?”

“Why don’t we send these to the real Santa Claus?”

The laughter was immediate.  Even from Mrs. Solomon.

“Oh, honey, if you still believe in Santa Claus, then someone’s been lying to you for a long, long time.”

And we held each other’s gaze for a few seconds, and she realized that she had just crushed me in front of everyone, some of whom were laughing, some of whom were just sitting there with their mouths open, others just beginning their assignments.  Mrs. Solomon got the class under control and later she apologized to me.  I played it off like it was all a big joke, that of course I didn’t still believe in Santa, that I was doing it to see what everyone would do, that kind of thing.

But she knew.

And I knew I was PISSED at my parents for not telling me sooner.

When I confronted Dad about it, he just said that he thought I was having a good time believing, so who was he to screw up my holiday?

But there are some things that cannot abide that passivity.  There are things that must be taught up front.

Mo will have to learn that there is no Santa after this Christmas.  She’s in the fourth grade, and I don’t want her to have the same horror story I have.  Besides, I think she already knows.

There are other subjects we are going to face that must be discussed with our girls, things that, despite our best efforts and desires, we cannot shield them from.

Some are kind of whimsical, like Santa.

Some are uncomfortable, like sex.

And some I will have absolutely no idea how to handle, because I don’t know how to navigate the intricacies myself.  Like all the things they’re hearing about in the news, from other kids, or by simply overhearing Amy and I talk to each other.  Like politics.

Like sexual assaults.

Like race relations.

They haven’t asked these questions directly yet, but…do I wait until they do?  Or do I help guide them through the impending loss of innocence?  Is that something for which I am even qualified? I used to hide behind a veil of buffoonery, make light of it.  But I can’t with these kids.  I know that I will have to sit them down and talk about so many things.  Because if I don’t, they may suffer a similarly traumatic revelation as I did that day in Mrs. Solomon’s class.  One that might affect her relationships with her friends, her school, her society.

One that might affect her relationship with me.    

I can think of no truer horror than one day Mo looking at me with betrayed eyes and saying, “My God Dad, what else haven’t you told me?”

But man, I am in no hurry to tell Mo there is no Santa Claus.

Well. 

I guess I’ll let her have just one more year.  And even though I hate it with everything I have, I’ll move that damn Elf on the Shelf a just a few more times, and know that soon the girls will move on to the more disordered world of adolescence. 

Because entropy happens.

Green Toenail Polish

The other day, I was standing barefoot in the driveway with a friend of mine.  He looked down at my squat, red toes and with a wry grin said, “Your nail polish is about chipped off.”

I glanced down at my toenails and saw he was correct.  My nails had grown and been cut three or four times since they had been painted lime green in mid-July, so only the top half of each nail remained splotched with fading color.

“Yeah.  Shit.  I keep forgetting Shay got after them during their adoption party when I was talking to my Dad.  She low-crawled up on me like some little Viet Cong and before I felt anything she already had three toes painted.  I told her to just finish up.  Dad laughed at me.  I think he saw her little sneak attack happening and just let it go.  Probably wanted to see what I’d do.  I think my Dad gets a big laugh out of the fact I have two little girls now.”

“Well…why didn’t you just put some remover on it or whatever if it embarrasses you?”

“I dunno,” I responded with a shrug.  “Just didn’t.”

The morning of July 15^th came upon us quickly.  It seemed the summer had only just started.  I was still in the throes of finishing my graduate thesis, and had been largely MIA since May.  We awoke that morning and it dawned on us that in a few hours, the girls would have new last names.  Amy’s mother and stepfather had driven down the day before to witness the hearing, and were already up playing with the kids.  We got out of bed, took showers, Amy put on a dress, I put on a suit, we got the girls dressed and their hair brushed, and off we went to the courthouse. 

Amy and I had been imagining this day for over a year.

It was finally here, the day we’d been waiting for, the day that would make us a “real” family.  As we walked up the concrete steps toward the stoic entrance of the Potter County Courthouse, Shay balked, causing me to nearly trip over her.  She was pulling at her lip.

“You okay?” I asked.

She just held her shoulders up around her ears and nodded.

“You nervous?”

She shrugged.

“Why are you nervous, babe?”

“Is this the same judge?” she asked.

“Same judge as what?”

“The same judge, that, well, you know…”

“He’s the same judge as we’ve always had.  He’s kind of cranky in court, but he’s nice.  And you especially don’t have to be afraid of him.  He won’t be cranky with you.  I’m sure this kind of thing is the best part of his job.”

“Yeah, but…”

“But, what?”

“What if he says ‘no?’”

“No?”

“What if he says, no, you can’t adopt us?”

“Oh, hon, he won’t.”

“But isn’t he the same man who said we couldn’t see our bio mom anymore?”

Ah-ha. 

“Yes, he is.  But this is different.”

“How?”

I didn’t really know what to say.  I mean, to her little kid brain, this guy just did stuff at his whim and pleasure. 

“I just do, Shay.  Now, don’t worry about it.  If he asks you a question, then be sure to answer him, okay?”

This was probably not the right thing to say, because she immediately froze.  “I don’t want to talk to him,” she moaned.  “He scares me.”

“Okay, that’s fine, I’m sure he gets that a lot,” I assured her.  “Just hold it together for me, okay?  This is a big deal!  A happy day!  Don’t you think so?”

“Yes…”

“Good.  Us too.  And we’ll go out to breakfast after this and get some pancakes.  Cool?”

“Oh, yes!  Very cool!”

Shay loves her pancakes.

“I’m not scared!” said Mo.

“Good, Mo!  Now, if he asks you a question, how do you address him?”

“Huh?!?”

“He’s a judge.  So you have to say ‘yes, your honor’ and ‘no, your honor.’  Can you do that?”

“Uh huh.”

“Great.”

And in we went.

Five minutes later, we were standing in front of a judge of whom all the CPS workers are terrified.  He has a reputation of being a little rough with people.  Shay wasn’t entirely off the mark for being nervous.  Not because he’d say “no,” but because he just doesn’t take any crap.  I can’t blame him, though.  Being a family court judge, I imagine people lie to him all day long, and as a result, he must put on a rather rough exterior.

The hearing was rapid fire.  Our attorney asked us some questions in front of the judge, we answered.  The judge looked at Mo, gave the faintest of faint smiles and said, “Do you want to be adopted by these people?”

Mo, smiling as broadly as anyone ever has in their life, said, “Yes, my honor.”

The judge blinked a few times, smiled just a little more, and noticed me shaking my head.  “She’s fine,” he said to me, realizing that despite my coaching her response had not quite gone the way I had hoped.  Then he turned to Shay, who had her face buried into my jacket and was holding me tightly around the thigh.  “How about you?” he asked.  “Do you want to be adopted?”

Shay would not answer.

He asked again.

Finally she just squeaked from somewhere between the folds of my scratchy, houndstooth coat.

“I think she’s a little nervous, your honor,” I said. 

This time he outright grinned.  “I get that sometimes,” he said.

He then made some official proclamation from a script, banged his gavel, and it was done.  The CPS worker and our case manager had both come to see the hearing.  One of them took a camera and snapped our picture there in front of the judge, Mo smiling, Shay hiding, Amy and I a little disoriented.

The manner in which most families are increased involves the wail of new lungs in a hospital bed, a mother sweating and exhausted, a father half-dead with nerves, and a splotchy newborn writhing in a cold new world.  

Our number was increased beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights of a somber courtroom, a gavel heralding the birth of another sort.  But a birth nonetheless.

The whole thing was over almost as soon as it began.  The moment for which we had been waiting was over so fast I never had any time to get nervous or anything.  It was just…done.  Dazed, the new Welch family went to eat pancakes.  The girls’ new grandparents footed the bill despite our protests. 

Then we had a big party.  We made tons of food, rented the requisite bounce house, drank beer and laughed a lot.  My brother came down with his kids and to stay with their new cousins.  One of my best friends from high school made the trip with his brood as well.   My parents surprised us by walking up the driveway halfway through the party.  They had said they weren’t going to be able to make it, as my sister was going to give birth to twins at any moment.  My mother had been sleeping with one leg out the front door, a plane ticket in one hand and a carry-on bag in the other, waiting for the news that Meghan had gone into labor.  But they made the trip anyway (Mom was, however, armed with the flight information out of Amarillo and Oklahoma City airports just in case). 

Amy cried when she saw them.  I didn’t because I’m a God-damned manly man.  I just had smoke in my eyes from the barbeque.

We fed fifty or so people.  Pulled pork, brisket, home brew, countless other side dishes.  It was around 6 pm when Shay assaulted my toenails with her new green nail polish.  A thoughtful friend of ours had brought it as a gift.  It was gone in thirty minutes, along with most of the rest of the colors in the package.  Half was spilled on the driveway, and has been slowly flaking away beneath the summer sun ever since.  The half-life of green nail polish is an eternity.

Someone during the party asked me how I felt that it was now “official.”  I responded that it was fantastic, that we had been waiting forever, that it was great to finally be a real family.  You know, the things I’m supposed to say.  But really…I didn’t have an answer. 

Nothing felt that different.

Of course there is the fact that they had been living with us for over a year, and that we had already considered them our real kids.  And we never really had any doubt past the first six months that they would eventually be our legal children.  We had been a real family for a while.  As such, the whole thing was, well, anticlimactic.  We had been looking forward to the hearing, the all-important Facebook announcement, visitors, the party, and all the other great things that come with happy news.  But just like the hearing, the party was over as soon as it had begun, and we were back to the same routine we had always had. 

Nothing had changed.

I think most people can relate to this kind of post-happy let down.  Whether it is a wedding, a new job, or a birth.  Once the decorations are taken down, the congratulations have died away, the honeymoon over, and the baby is a few months old, we just look around and think, “Well, shit, I guess that’s over.  Time for reality.”  Other people’s happy news eclipses your own in a few short weeks, and life goes on.  Like the day after New Year’s.  Back to work.

It was no different for us.  We just kept on keeping on, like always.  Amy kept going to work.  I kept writing my thesis, getting more and more gray hairs from the stress of it.  The house kept getting dirty, and we kept cleaning it up.  The neighborhood kids kept coming by and asking if Mo and Shay were home, and we kept sending the girls out into the hot afternoons to play while we enjoyed the hour or so of quiet or inviting the roaming horde into the house to play with the huge box of Lego’s or whatever.    

And my nail polish faded.

Since then, everything just fell into place. 

I finished my graduate thesis.

I found a job in town commensurate to my new degree.

We officially adopted the girls. 

That’s a lot of good stuff in a few months.

And that’s really why I haven’t written in a while. 

The other day, Amy asked when I was going to write another blog post.  I had admittedly neglected the blog, but since I’d been so busy sitting in front of a computer writing all summer, I figured it was justified.  But now that things are slowing down, it was time to get back at it.  I shrugged, said, “What would I write about?”

“A lot has happened!  There should be tons to write about.”

“Yeah, but…all I can think of are subjects that are either way too sappy, way too self-congratulatory, way too…I don’t know, boring.”

I mean, other than my close relatives and closer friends, who really wants to hear about how well things are going for us?  Maybe it’s just because I’m a cranky bastard, but hearing about how “blessed” someone is…well, frankly, it’s boring as shit. 

Now, this doesn’t apply to posting a happy announcement or something over the Facebook, because that gets a “Huh!  Oh, good for them!” and then the reader is allowed to move on.  But it would certainly make for a terrible blog post.  Me just gushing over our wonderful, magical, enchanted summer of hap-hap-happiness.

Amy said, “The kids have said funny stuff since then I’m sure.  I can think of a few things.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I can’t very well just gloss over the adoption.  That’s a pretty big deal.  I need to figure something out with that.”

So we took the kids and dogs on a walk around the block and thought about it for a while, but never really came up with any good ideas.   And then Amy saw how I still had not removed the fading toenail polish.  "You still have that green nail polish on your toes,” she giggled.

“Yeah,” I laughed.  “I sure do.”

The girls started school.  We went to their “Burger Bash,” which is held in the cafeteria the week before classes begin.  That’s when we find out and meet the kids’ new teachers, while being treated to hamburgers and chips.  Upon arriving at the school, Mo and Shay ran up to the school entrance and tried to find their names on the lists of teachers and respective classes posted upon the glass doors.  They couldn’t find them.

“Where am I?” Mo asked.  I scanned the lists, not locating their names either.  I ran through the lists three times, with no luck. 

Then Shay squeaked, “Here I am!” Her stubby little finger was poised beneath her name.  Her new name.

Shaniah Welch.

Out of habit, we had all been looking for their old last names.

“Oh!” said Mo.  “Welch!  That’s right.”  She promptly found her name beneath the teacher she had hoped she’d get.  She was ecstatic. 

Amy and I held the hands of our girls and entered the school, neither of us particularly hungry for burgers.  When they saw their friends, they scattered, as kids should.  Amy’s and my empty hands found each other, and we were satisfied. 

 

Not because everything had worked out the way we had ever imagined it.  I mean, for Christ's sake, if my future self had somehow time warped to my middle school bedroom, woke me up and said, "Hey, fat boy, you know that serious-as-shit girl who keeps loaning you pens and sits next to you in social studies?  Yeah, you're going to marry her one day (to be honest, this would not have been an awful epiphany, as I always thought Amy was "kinda cute").  And guess what?  You're going to adopt a couple of super cute black girls.  And it's going to be more awesome than you could imagine."  If this future self had said this, I'd probably laugh in his(my) face and gone back to sleep.  It would have been a happy prophecy, but I would have doubted its veracity.  Because it isn't what I ever imagined for myself in a million years.

 

But through all the ebbs and flows, that's what's most satisfying.  To not only make peace with who and what we are,  but to find the courage to know a good thing when we've got it.  To quit trying to force everything into some perfect little box and just LET GO. Shit never works out exactly the way we plan, but damn it, if we work hard enough, shit works out.  We just have to have the guts to realize it.  And let me tell you, having a little girl smile as she practices writing her new last name, your last name, in cursive...

 

I’ll leave with this funny little story.

The other day, while driving past the high school, we saw the football team practicing within their clay-ringed oval.  Shay stared as we drove past, and noted that some of the players had hair spilling out from beneath their helmets.  To be honest, I noticed it too.  This was not something that was acceptable when I was playing.

“Look Dad!  Look at that!” she said.

“What?” I responded.

“There’s a bunch of girls on that team!”

“No, honey, I don’t think there are girls out there,” I said dismissively.  Then I caught myself and said, “Not that there couldn’t be girls out there, but…well, I think those are boys with long hair.”

“No,” she said with conviction, “those were girls.  I saw several of them.”

“Several, huh?  That’s a good word.  When did you learn that word?”

Mo, who had been silently staring out the window for most of the ride, without removing her chin from the palm of her hand, nonchalantly remarked, “She’s said it several times.” 

Boom!

That’s how you own a pun.  Well done, young grasshoppah. 

Wants vs. Needs

A few nights ago, after her bath, I was sitting at the computer with Shay looking at potential summer hairstyles she might like.  Earlier, while Shay was in the bath, I had done the same with Mo.  All I had done was search for “African American hairstyles” on the web, and a whole slew of celebrity pictures popped up.  What I had been trying to do was look for Macy Gray, because Mo’s hair does the spiky thing naturally without, in Mo’s intractable words, “turning into a weirdo ‘fro.”  We realized this when Mo had been playing and running in the sprinklers all day.  She came in all out of breath, trying to relay some direly important piece of kid-world information, and all I could do was stare at her hair.

It looked AMAZING.  Or at least, might with the slightest bit of work.  I was just happy that we had seemed to find a hairstyle that her hair naturally wants to do anyway, and maybe it just needed a little help to make it look like it had been professionally done.

Well, when I showed her a picture of Macy Gray (who is beautiful, by the way), Mo’s face twisted all around in disgust.  “I’m NOT going to have that kind of hair!” she nearly spat.  “I want that lady’s hair!”

She pointed to a picture of Oprah. 

Oprah.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Oprah, or her hair, but just…I mean…if my parents one day pulled out a picture of Johnny Rotten and told me I’d look good with that haircut, I sure as shit wouldn’t have decided to instead go with Johnny Carson.

Anyway, once Mo had decided to get the hair of a 60 year old media icon billionaire, Shay came in and started looking over the pictures.

“Which one do you like, babe?” I asked.

She ran her little finger along the computer screen, occasionally stopping over a picture, then moving on.  Finally she just sighed and put her head on my shoulder.

“What’s the matter?  Can’t find one you like?”

“I don’t know I guess.  It doesn’t matter that much to me.”

“Well, you need a good hairdo for the summer don’t you?”

That’s when she looked me dead in the eye and said with the earnestness of a Buddhist monk:

“Dad, I don’t need a hair do, because all I need is food, and shelter, and love.  I want a summer hairdo, but I don’t need it.  Do you understand?”  Then she cupped my face with her little soft hands and turned my head to meet her gaze.  “Do you understand the difference between wants and needs?”

And her wide brown eyes darted across mine, searching to see if I understood her in this little childhood moment of clarity. 

I didn’t know whether to laugh or start crying at this.  I started to do both.  I cleared my throat and said, “Yes, honey, I understand the difference.  I think we have your needs covered then.  So…what do you want for a summer haircut?” 

She smiled, then pointed at a random picture of a girl with flat-ironed hair and said, “That one is fine.”

Later, after the girls were in bed, I told Amy about our little encounter.  She said, “Awww,” then, “they probably went over wants and needs in school today.”

“Yeah, probably.  Funny though.”

I think we all know the school-book answer of wants and needs.  We remind kids of the difference all the time, whenever they say that they “have” to have something, and we wearily tell them that no, they won’t die without that pair of jeans or whatever.  That’s a pretty standard encounter.  But I started to really ponder the difference.  Do we, as adults, actually understand it?

I remember talking to a friend of mine at the Air Force Academy.  We were talking, for some reason, about the worst thing we had ever said to our parents.

I told the story about how my mom, as was her custom, one day called me a “little sonofabitch.”  Well, on that day I had taken my crazy pills.  So I looked her dead in the eye and said,

“You’re right.”

Got a whuppin for that one.

My friend, despite my expectation of laughter, just kind of grunted and looked at the wall. 

This friend of mine was the product of his father and his father’s second wife.  His first wife had died in a car crash when the two were very young, before they had any children.  He then re-married and went on to have a couple of other kids.  But my friend told me that his father had never spoken much about his first wife or the accident that killed her.  Anyway, around the time my friend was ten, he had been pondering the way life works out.  He had had a very innocent concept of how the world worked, and that most things, when good comes of them, are happy things for which to be thankful. 

So one day he says to his dad, “Dad, I’m glad your first wife died in that car crash.”

His father just stopped whatever he was doing and slowly turned to his son, who stood there confident and somewhat proud of his deductive reasoning.

“What?  What did you just say to me?”

My friend saw the look in his father’s eyes, a look of utter shock and unfathomable pain, as if he had taken a bat and hit him over the head with it.  My friend’s confidence faltered.  “I…well, I just meant…that if that hadn’t happened, then…”

“I know what you meant.  And I love you.  But don’t ever say that to me again.”  His father then walked out of the room, and my friend thought he heard his dad suck in a few sobs as he closed the bedroom door behind him.

This was the story he relayed to us, and I still remember the look on my friend’s face as he told it.  That was his moment, that moment we all have, that pops into our memory out of nowhere to remind us of how cold and thoughtless we can be.  And even though we hate the memory and our guts tie in knots and our skin grows clammy as we recollect it, we hold it close so we will never, ever do something like that again.

The other morning Shay told Amy that she looked pregnant. 

Now, we’ve all been warned against saying this to a woman.  We’ve all heard the story of someone who knew someone who said this to a woman and the woman replied, “No, honey, I’m just fat.”  But for Amy, that isn’t much of a worry.  And it certainly wasn’t the reason Amy got a little upset.

“Mom, I said you look pregnant.  Are you?  Because I had a dream that you were pregnant, and…”

“Shay, quit saying that, okay?  You’re upsetting Mommy.”

Shay looked taken aback, started to sniffle, and said, “Okay.”

Later that morning, as I was driving the girls to school, I turned down the radio.  “Shay?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Do you know why Mommy doesn’t want to hear that she looks pregnant?”
“Because she doesn’t want to look fat!” answered Mo.

“No, that’s not the reason.  Girls, you know that Mommy and I haven’t been able to have any babies, right?  And you know that we tried for a long time but couldn’t.  You remember me telling you that, right?”

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Okay.  So when you tell Mommy she looks pregnant, she gets sad because it reminds her of that time.  So let’s not say it, okay?  You shouldn’t say it to any woman ever anyway.  You never know for sure and you might hurt their feelings.”

“Okay,” said Mo, who went back to looking at her book.

“But…” started Shay.

“What, honey?”

“But, did you want babies?”

“Yes.  We did very much.”

“But if you did have them, then…”

Silence.  At this point I knew where her little mind was taking her.  And I thought I knew what her dream the night before was really about.

“What’cha thinking, Shay?  You can say it.”

“Nothing,” she sighed.

“What was your dream about?  Did you dream that Mommy had a baby?”

“Yes.”

“And…then what?”

“Well, nothing I guess, but you guys were really happy, and then…”

“Then, what?”

“Then I woke up and I got scared.”

“Were you scared that we were going to have a baby and then not want you guys anymore?”

Silence.  Then, barely audible, “Kind of.”

I thought for a moment of what to say.  The fact is, if we would have had a baby, or two, or whatever, then no, we probably wouldn’t have become foster parents, and these girls would have been somewhere else.  But how in the hell do I convey that to a kid?  How in the hell do I tell this little girl that she wasn’t ever really in our plans?  How do I say that without sounding like we actually wanted someone else?

“Girls, I want you to listen to me very carefully.  Your mother and I love you very, very much…”

It started to sound lame.  It started to sound like lip service, and I didn’t know where I was really going to go with it.  So I changed course.

“Shay, do you remember the other day when you asked if I knew the difference between wants and needs?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.  Hmm.  Well, this is really what it means to grownups who have lived a while and have had a lot of things we loved go away, who have had a lot of things not go the way we thought they should, and have seen a lot of bad stuff happen.  When you get a little older and get more experience in life it’s just how it goes.  But we’ve also seen a lot of great things happen.  And we see how they can rise up out of the awfulness.  We see that things are beautiful in ways we never imagined, because as we get older we see new kinds of beauty that keep surprising us.  Grownups are full of wants.  All we do is want.  All the time.  But life can turn around and take those wants from you and smash them.”

I took a few breaths, trying to figure out where this was going to go.  “The trick that some grownups never learn,” I continued, “is to see the things we really need and grab them and hold them and love them.  Yes, we wanted babies.  We still do.  And it may one day happen, we don’t know.  But always remember this: we needed you.  You two are the beauty that rose up from the hurt.  And because of you, it’s brighter and more wonderful then we ever thought possible.”

I had to stop at that point, as I was choking myself up.  I thought of my friend and his story about his father, how the first wife had died, how awful that must have been, yet how from the dust of despair two children had risen and become his pride and joy.  I thought of how I had received an eye injury at the Air Force Academy as a junior and had been disqualified from pilot training, how destroyed I had been, but if that had not happened, my path would have been vastly different and I’d probably not be married to Amy.  I thought about three years ago, how terrible it had been with each new month, with each new disappointment, and the day the CPS worker had shown up with the girls, ratty and smelly and afraid, them needing us…

us needing them…

Then Mo said, “So God makes up for it?”

I snapped out of it.  “Well, that’s one way to put it.  I believe that.  But we can’t take a passive role in that giving.  Have you heard that saying, ‘when you’re in a hole and you ask God for help, he sends you a shovel?’ or something like that?”

“Noooo…”

“Well, you will.  And that’s another way of saying you have to be looking for beauty in the world where there doesn’t seem to be any.  And you have to have the strength to go for it.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes, and I almost turned the radio back up when Shay said,

“I hope maybe you guys can have what you want.  I hope you have a baby and then we can name her Juniper.”

I laughed. 

Juniper.

“Okay, Shay.  Juniper it shall be.”