Keep an Eye on Left Field

I’m out on a very pleasant Sunday afternoon bike ride with my husband when he turns to me and says, “My sister has two kids for us to adopt.”

“What?!”

That’s my reaction, but my mind is already racing.

My sister-in-law is godmother to the children of a young woman across the street. The details of the arrangement have never been spelled out to us, but the children are often at her house and my husband tells me that they are now officially in her care. It’s not entirely clear what that means, if she’s taken the responsibility for their care upon herself, or if the children have been removed from their mother and placed officially with my sister-in-law. I’ve heard no talk of classes and home studies, so there’s a gap in the logic that I can’t fill. I could call my sister-in-law to answer all my questions, but that’s not the sort of relationship we have and my husband’s family are not the type to talk about personal matters.

So, he throws me this zinger from somewhere out of left field and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with it. I start asking questions. “Is she serious?” “Have the children been officially and permanently removed from their mother’s custody?” “Does she know we’ve even been discussing adoption as a possibility?” The answers are all a bit vague, but they’re all leaning towards the affirmative.

My legs are turning over, propelling my bike, but my mind is whirring like a washing machine spin cycle, trying to process all this information. Actually, what it’s doing is digging through the sketchy information I have and coming up with all the reasons why this is an almost gift-like opportunity for us.

1. We know the children. I’ve spent some time around the little girl and she likes me.

2. The transition would be easier for them because of the connection with my sister-in-law. Parental visits and former foster parent visits could all be easily combined with family visits. It would be a comfortable environment for the children to deal with an uncomfortable situation.

3. We know the parents’ history already. It’s not pretty—alcoholism, a meth addiction, a charge of armed robbery—but better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

4. The little boy’s name is one of my family names. If that’s not a sign of destiny, I don’t know what is!

There seems to be about a thousand other reasons why this has to be some kind of divine providence. I step around it lightly with my husband, because the last he heard, we were in the bleachers, watching the action, and still deciding whether adoption was something we wanted to pursue.

“We should talk about it,” I say.

I have a restless night’s sleep. I dream about the children. I dream they come to our house and are opening drawers, familiarizing themselves with their new home. I am in the bath, covered in bubbles, so I don’t realize the little girl has wandered off alone until she is brought back to my door by a group of complete strangers.

I wake up in the morning, tired, but with my head back on straight, or a least straighter. We live in a two-bedroom house, big enough for two young children, but not for very long. My sister-in-law can’t simply sign the children over to us; she couldn’t sign a car into our possession without going through a government agency, so she couldn’t just hand over the children. We aren’t licensed to be foster parents; our homestudy isn’t even started and our house is like a minefield for an adult, let alone a small child. Only this morning, I tripped over wires to the Internet router and smashed my shin on the pedal of Jose’s bike. Who am I kidding?

I think about my dream, too. I’m relaxing in the tub while a child in my care is out wandering the streets and being brought home by strangers. Is my negligence a signal that I’m not ready to take on the challenge of raising someone else’s child? Or is it a subconscious acknowledgement that, despite my ticking clock, I’m not really ready to give up my simple, easy life to be a mother. Add this to the long list of things for which I have no answers.