Laying It All Out There

Chapter Two: Nothing and Everything-3

By the end of the tirade, I had been yelling without taking a breath and needed to suck in air. The flat silence that followed thickened and then remorse jumped on my back. “Mitch—”

“My mother’s here. I’ll call you back.”

“Mitch?”

“I’ll call later.” He hung up.

*

When the phone rang, I was doing my Sunday night, post-60 Minutes getting-ready-for-bed routine. Mitch had taken both babies to San Lucas Children’s. It was their first trip out of his house: two babies, a diaper bag, bottles, a folder full of foster parent and Medicaid documents, and Mitch’s mom had to fit in his car with two newly installed baby seats. He’d had both of the kids examined and they were both good, healthy mostly. Fernando One was eleven months old but had not eaten solid food yet, just formula. He needed to be ‘introduced’ to baby food so he would not be so hungry all the time. Fernando Two had some very unusual diaper rash, the doctor said. I didn’t believe the welt was a rash but didn’t say anything; even Mitch sounded tentative as he explained it. Anyway, the doctor gave him a cream to put on it. Also, Fernando Two had newborn jaundice, so the doctor gave Mitch a pamphlet on home treatment and proper sunlight exposure.

The giddiness was gone from Mitch’s voice, replaced by a massive wave of exhaustion. There was some stuff about accessing state and city services he needed to know, so he asked to speak to my dad.

While Dad was on the phone, I caught my mom up on what Mitch had said. Mom had begun her career as a nurse. Back then, working women were teachers or nurses, and with my father in the military, nursing meant that she could get a job wherever they were transferred. However, once we were stationed in San Antonio, my mom went into hospital administration in the Medical Center. She told me what to tell Mitch about jaundice, that it was common in newborns, and she gave pointers on how to treat it.

I started listening to Dad wrapping up with Mitch. “That social worker should be up on charges,” Dad said. “She should never have just left two infants on you like that; it’s ridiculous. It’s too much for one person to handle. She has to know that. You need to call her in the morning and give them back.” Dad handed me the phone.

“Hey, Mitch.”

There was a deep silence, then, “Hey, it’s been a long day. So. I’m gonna get some sleep while I can. I gotta call the University in the morning and take the day off. I don’t know how long I’ll have the boys, so I gotta look into arranging child care like right away. Your dad was telling me what kind of places to stay away from. The state will pay a certain amount but not enough for anything top-notch, or even middle-notch. I don’t know; just have to call around I guess. Mom just drove home; she slept on the couch last night.”

“You okay?”

“Just really tired. Going to bed now. Night.”

“Night.”

The foster care classes teach foster parents that the kids they care for will be taken away and that it will happen over and over: Foster parents are the holding station that’s needed until the children’s parents get their lives sorted out. The only reason I hadn’t told Mitch to give the boys back was because I knew he wouldn’t. The moment I had walked in and saw the boys and saw him, I knew he was lost; they’d sliced inside him like an arrowhead. If they were taken away, it would destroy him.

Monday, after work, I swung by. The infant, Fernando Two, was lying in diapers in a shaft of sunlight in the living room near a pyramid of unsorted baby clothes that stood four feet high surrounded by a lake of toys; Crockett State’s faculty, admin, and staff had answered the bugle call. Methodically, Fernando One inspected his baby toy bounty, glancing at me, unfazed.

Mitch lost twenty pounds the first year. For the first few months, he had too much already booked on his work schedule to suddenly cut back, so our Friday nights of going to art shows serving trendy amuse-bouche and three flavors of vodka, turned into Friday afternoons of Mitch picking the boys up from daycare, and Friday nights of Mitch going to art openings while his mother and I babysat, until he was able to leave the show early so I could drive home. Mitch’s mother simply moved into his house; she was there for six months, checking on her own house with the pristine white furnishings on the weekends.

*

Late in the semester, Mitch had to oversee a set up at the museum on Crockett’s downtown campus. I was still working at Bexar Colleges’ downtown campus at the time, so after my last class for the day, we had a late lunch, and then I rode with him to pick up the boys. The best daycare he could find was miles away, halfway up Nyla Drive. After copious research, he had chosen it because it was clean, had no red flags against its reputation, and, posted on the wall of the toddlers’ room, it had a clear schedule for taking the toddlers outside to play several times a day.

All the parking spaces at the daycare were angled, as though parents needed to make a quick get-away. Inside, every person who worked there had visible tattoos. Andre, the manager behind the front desk, wore a sleeveless muscle shirt over his sculpted torso. Mitch greeted staff members by name, made friendly conversation, and asked questions about the progress of their ongoing personal pursuits. His million-dollar art donor schmoozing skills had been smoothly grafted onto the minimum wage daycare worker set. He had an agenda: he wanted Fernando Two to have the best crib location in the six-months and under room. Mitch had worked out that there were more diaper changes for the baby immediately to the left of the room’s door. He’d looked at the bottle feeding and diaper change chart that the six-months and under team member had to keep and had noticed a pattern.

As we headed back out, Mitch declined my offer to carry Fernando One or Fernando Two and scooped the boys up, sliding them into their carriers. It was easier for him to stick to his system. By then, he could carry both boys, the diaper bag, and car keys; if he stuck to routine, nothing got lost.

Initially, Mitch felt sorry for the boys’ mother. She’d had a grim life; her father had abandoned the family when she was small, her mother died of heart disease when she was thirteen, and she’d been passed around from one relative to another until she ran away at sixteen and ended up homeless. Drugs, a***e, p**********n and pregnancies followed. But by the second year of fostering the boys, Mitch felt less sorry; their mother kept missing court dates and missing the social worker’s supervised visits with her boys. She had walked out of rehab twice then left the state.

After months of second, third, and fourth chances by the court, his tone about the boys’ mother started sounding vaguely adversarial, and he had already changed the boys’ names. The older boy was now Lewin and the baby was Archie, and Mitch moved to adopt. That cost money. The boys’ biological father had to be tracked down so he could sign away his parental rights, which, once he was located in Michigan, he immediately did. The boys had had a year of doctor visits to ensure that they had not been affected by their mother’s d**g use, and miraculously they were both perfectly healthy. When the doctor gave them the all-clear, Mitch could not leave the office because he was crying so hard with relief. The doctor just watched quietly till Mitch was done.

San Antonio does not have enough Jews to fill up the daycare at the Hebrew Community Center, so most of kids there are non-Jewish locals whose parents recognize great amenities and, just like Mitch, do their research. Mitch’s mom pulled her Jew-card and managed to get the boys into the HCC after nine months, jumping the queue in the eighteen-month waiting list. And Mitch realized, now that he was raising kids, he had to think ahead, to soccer and swim lessons. He needed to be part of ‘the community’ and to do that, he had to establish a sufficient Jew cred reserve of his own. The process could have been awkward: The last time he had been to temple was years ago, and the antique old lady next to him said she knew he was just mouthing the words. His Hebrew was that bad, and he was not in any position to respond: she had the whole survived-the-h*******t thing on her side, so he just sat there while she scolded.

Over lunch at the Korean place that always ran the AC too cold, Mitch told me how sharply it had hurt when my dad told him to give the boys back. After Mitch’s dad died, Mitch had switched to asking my dad for advice in the same way he had once talked to his own father. But a year after getting the boys, when Mitch was regaining some of the weight he’d lost, he understood why my dad had said it. The first year with the boys had been the toughest of Mitch’s life.

When the boys were two, the adoption was approved. Texas was about to eliminate its tax benefits for adoptions, and there were only a few days left to get before a judge. If he missed the deadline, it would cost thousands more to adopt Lewin and Archie. So, on December 31st, my parents and I sat next to Mitch’s mom in the old Bexar County Courthouse while the judge swore in Mitch and the social worker, Leah, asking them questions and filling out papers.

The judge wore heavy black robes and the lawyers, a tall man at Mitch’s table and a slender woman in spike heels at a table for the State, were dressed in stylish black clothes. Leah, not yet middle-aged, had a permanent hunch in her shoulders, wore orthopedic shoes like a nurse on a trauma ward and tugged on the rumpled jacket she saved for court days. The indigenous art Mitch had collected from around the world had come down off his walls and gone into storage. He had ditched the house downtown and moved into a gated neighborhood closer to Crockett’s main campus to cut down on driving time. Pictures of the boys covered the new living room. I looked across the courtroom at Leah as she watched the judge stamp and countersign the adoption papers. He smiled at Mitch, announcing, “You are now the parent of Lewin and Archie Teller,” and the courtroom broke into applause as Mitch hugged the boys who were sitting on his lawyer’s table, hugged his mom, me, my parents, and even his lawyer.

Leah smiled, her social worker calculations paying off: two for one. Mitch hugged her too. We invited her to join us for cake at Luby’s Cafeteria, where we were all headed, but a holiday weekend was about to hit and she had to get back to work before the shelters filled up.