Childless

I raised an adopted son from the age of seven, and a nephew from the age of eleven, and I have a stepdaughter whom I had no hand in raising but with whom I have much in common, but I have no biological children that I am aware of.

 

I guess I am legitimately old because, while I used to enjoy children, I find them to be mostly annoying these days.

 

I was living in California, and working for a paper company, earning more money that I needed to live on, at least for a twenty year-old with no real vices. A couple of doors down from me was a woman, also from Michigan, who had three kids. We would say hi to one another if we met on the way in or out of our apartments, and had had breakfast a couple of times, but we didn't otherwise know one another well, except that I had taken her two sons to an Angels game once.

Early one summer, she asked if I could take care of her youngest son for a week or two because she had to go back to Michigan for something. Her older son and daughter would be staying with friends. I said yes, and he did. After a couple of weeks, she called to say that she would be away longer than she thought. That stretched into seven months and, by then, her older son was staying with me too, because the family he was staying with couldn't keep him indefinitely.

By the time she came back, summer had gone, and her sons had started back to school. I had bought them everything that they needed for school. She came back with a boyfriend, who was a very large man. Of course, her kids went back to live with her, except for her daughter who, for some reason, remained at her friend's house.

Of course, I would come across the kids often, and they'd come over to play my Atari. Her younger son was telling me some pretty awful things about the boyfriend but I wasn't sure, at first, whether they were as bad as he said, or whether he simply wanted to come back to live with me. Then I came home from work one day to find him standing outside their apartment door in diapers, with a sign around his neck that read, I AM A BABY.

I still didn't know what to do. I wasn't even twenty yet, I was single, and not related to them in any way. My hair was down to the middle of my back, and I wasn't thinking of being a father to anyone. I did make an appointment to see an attorney, in order to find out what options there were, short of simply calling the police, which could have been as likely to make things worse as better.

The first lawyer I spoke to was one who had his name on the door. He began by telling me that custody was out of the question, given everything that I already knew. I told him that I understood that but that I couldn't just walk away, and would pay to have someone represent him in whatever might bring about a better outcome. He made an appointment for me to meet with one of the junior members of the firm.

I had been in touch with the boy's sister, leaving names out of this intentionally, who was seventeen by then. She came with me to see the attorney, since he had suggested it when I had mentioned her during a telephone conversation. She had been in the apartment when some of these things were going on since, while she no longer lived with her mother, she visited often.

One of the first things the lawyer asked me was whether I would consider custody.

"Do you think it's possible?"

"I don't see why not. If he's going to live with a stranger, it may as well be with someone he knows."

I agreed, and we signed the papers. To my surprise, he suggested that I find a place to live in another nearby city, and that I take him. He would handle everything with the police, and he assured me that there would be no kidnapping charges. This didn't happen during the same meeting, and he had probably run a background check on me during the interim, although he didn't mention it. He said that the only way that a judge would find that I had standing in a custody case was if he was living with me. It helped that I also had paperwork that his mother had signed when she had left him with me, which did not specify an end date.

Within a few days, I had found another place and he moved out with me. At my lawyer's suggestion, I used a post office box in my previous city, and did not change my address through my employer. Then there was the problem of enrolling him in a new school. I wrote to the Michigan Department of Statistics, sent them $7 for a copy of his birth certificate, and they mailed it to my post office box. I didn't even have to pretend to be anyone who I wasn't. Some things were so much easier in those days.

He was in school, and I changed my shifts so that I was working while he was in school, and home when he was at home, all but a couple of hours. Nothing else happened for a few months. Then I received a call, at work, from the police department in the city where his mother lived. They asked me if the boy was living with me. I told them, as instructed, that I would need to speak to my attorney first.

I did and when they called back, I told them that on the advice of my attorney, I wasn't going to tell them where he was. You can believe that was uncomfortable but I gave them my attorney's name and number and he apparently handled it.

He also made the calls to child protective services. They were opposed to my having custody, but did remove her other son, who did not want to live with me, from the home, and were seeking to sever the mother's custody, in favor of a foster home. Meanwhile, my lawyer made arrangements for me to attend the classes necessary to become a foster parent.

These classes were particularly frustrating because different people would conduct them, and each of of them would tell me that a single male was not eligible to become a foster parent. I would call my attorney, and they'd be nice to me the next time I came in, and I was licensed as a foster parent.

Meanwhile, my attorney was trying to get us into court for a custody hearing. Eight times, a hearing was scheduled. Family court cases were all scheduled for 7:30 in the morning, although any specific hearing might not take place until 4:00 p.m. My lawyer and I would sit in the lunchroom of the courthouse all day and I'm thinking, at $60 an hour, this isn't going to be cheap. The first seven times, hearings were scheduled but we were not allowed in, as the judge ruled that I did not have standing.

His mother had a pro bono attorney, who seemed to be a different person each time. The eighth time, when we arrived at 7:30 in the morning, my lawyer said that we would be in this time, and we were later that day. He had gone to law school with the assistant district attorney, and he was there as well, on my side.

When we got into court, I learned that, by that time, his mother had given up trying to retain custody of her children herself but wanted to ensure that her son would not be placed with me. Of course, she was angry with me.

Someone from child protective services took the stand and recommended foster home placement, but not with me, given the enmity between myself and the boy's mother. They did recommend that I have visiting privileges, however, with the possibility of placing him with me at some later date.

Although he had spoken to my (later to be) son for only a few minutes just that morning, the assistant district attorney sounded as if he had done a detailed study of the situation, and felt that I would be the best placement for him.

I got on the stand and my attorney asked me a bunch of questions designed to make me look good. Then his mother's attorney, for some reason, asked me a bunch of questions that seemed designed to make me look good. When he returned to the table, his client said something to him that I couldn't hear. He said something back that I couldn't hear, and she knocked his clipboard off the table and stormed out of the room, slamming the door.

The judge said, "I think we've heard enough."

He severed the mother's rights to her children. By then, my attorney had tracked down his father, who hadn't been in touch with his children since they were babies, and he had signed off his rights to the children. The judge ruled that he be placed with me as a foster child, under the supervision of child protective services, for one year, at which time I could petition the court for adoption. Which is what we did.

Although they had protested my being a foster parent, once I had the license, they were calling me all the time to take in children for short-term placement, mostly of kids whose parents might have been arrested or killed. Although I wasn't told the circumstances, the kids usually spoke of it. These were generally weekend placements, and they would move them somewhere else on Monday or Tuesday, although one was with me for nearly a year. I had, by then, moved to a duplex, where the other renter was also a foster parent, so we watched out for one another. Although I could usually choose the shift I wanted, there were times when I had to work while my son was home, and she'd watch out for him, and vice versa.

When I received the bill from my attorney, it was several pages long, and included research as well as every telephone call that he had made. After nearly every charge he had noted, "No Charge." For the entire thing, he billed me only for the forty-five minutes that we were actually in family court, and for one other meeting that we had with some of the people from child protective services. Eight days, he had spent the whole day in the courthouse cafeteria with me, and he didn't charge me for any of this. He did do some other work while he was there, but he was there the whole time because no one would ever know when their hearing would be called.