How Winter Began by Joy Castro

Author:Joy Castro [Castro, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 Fiction / Short Stories (single Author)
ISBN: 9780803284791
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2015-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Pottery Barn and the Foster Child

My husband and I are hardly the types to take in children for the money, much less keep them in cages and do vile things to them. I know what foster parents can be; I read the papers. But we didn’t need the money, and we weren’t closet sadists. We just wanted a child.

We’re not the types, either, to jet off to Russia or China or Guatemala, when all the fertility options fail to work, like more and more couples do, including several of our acquaintances. The women seem the most proprietary—especially those single middle-aged professional women with their little girls from China—and all of them think everyone’s so fascinated with their saga of getting the child in Siberia or Viet Nam or wherever: how they got sick over there from the water, or how they scrutinized the videotapes from the orphanage for signs of delayed development, or how the baby wouldn’t stop crying the whole plane ride home but it was so, so worth it.

Accessory babies, I call them. Not to my friends’ faces, of course. All those little black-haired, shiny-eyed girls and towhead boys being toted about like one more luxury object, just a grand legitimizing excuse for parading around the Eddie Bauer strollers with wheelbrakes and a one-pedal release, the titanium Jeep strollers, the aubergine Bugaboo Frog strollers, the Vuitton diaper bags, the pink and orange Oilily baby cardigans, the dear little Clayeux rompers, the BabyBjörn carriers strapped around the mother’s unaltered figure. Charming: the parents’ comfortable means and open minds perpetually on display, the private pain of their infertility transformed to a public performance of their wealth and international brotherhood.

I wouldn’t call myself opinionated, but others have. Prickly, critical, rigorous, judgmental. A bitch—which is okay. It fits. I like to win, and I like to be right. The law was an easy choice for me.

Though rare, there exist adoptive parents who try. They move to neighborhoods full of their child’s ethnic group, where they themselves become suddenly minorities. They choose open adoptions and remain in touch, even bringing the mother to visit; they take family vacations in the child’s home country each year. They learn the child’s home language and speak it, however imperfectly, so that original music doesn’t wither in him.

But I was forty-two. I wanted to have a child, not overhaul my life, however virtuously. And I couldn’t subject a brown child to a lifetime of stares and curiosity, of being a perpetual minority of one, an exotic display. I couldn’t let myself imagine, as our friends did, that our mere love could compensate for the daily experience of questions in everyone’s eyes. The habits of mind formed in childhood (I knew) were hard to break, so our child’s legacy would be a lifetime of unease. And I wouldn’t be able to counter that. I’m not a warm person. In those moments, my husband and I would be just two white middle-class, middle-aged lawyers, skeptically questioning for details,

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