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.