The Ginger Child

On Family, Loss and Adoption

Patrick Flanery

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786497260
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786497253
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer couple's attempt to adopt a child. But would you take a ginger child? A social worker asks Patrick Flanery as he and his husband embark on their four-year odyssey of trying to adopt. This curious question comes to haunt the journey, which Flanery recounts with startling candour as he explores what it means to make a family as a queer couple, to be an outsider in a foreign country, to grapple with the inheritance of intergenerational loss, and to discover that the emotions we feel are sometimes as mysterious to ourselves as to others. Reviews For The Ginger Child:
'It is shocking, and consoling, in its honesty.' - Emma Brockes
'this is a book to be savoured' - Jackie Kay
'A rare, brilliant and essential exploration of adoption' - John D'Agata This uniquely powerful book moves deftly between heartbreaking memoir and illuminating meditation on parenting, adoption and queerness in contemporary culture, stopping along the way to consider recent science fiction film, camp horror television, fiction and visual art. At the end, which could also be the beginning of a new journey, Flanery asks whether we might all imagine ourselves as ginger children-fragile, sensitive, more easily hurt than we think possible, but with the hope that we are also survivors, with greater powers of resilience than we know.

INTRODUCTIONS

SUNDAY

In the dusk we drive from the airport through villages and towns, across stretches of farmland and industrial sites, following directions on our phones and trying to recall, in the dark, how the countryside looked in August, the way the road took us along rivers and towards the coast. I take a wrong turn and we miss the B&B, double back, find it on a quiet street in a village ten miles distant from the one where K— and T— live.

Our self-catering flat is in a farm’s converted outbuilding, with sliding glass doors that open onto a field white with sheep and surrounded by high hedgerows. Marla chose this place, she told us, because it will be cosy enough to bring O— here on the third day of the Introductions, the day before we are meant to fly back to London.

But the flat is ugly and soulless with warped laminate flooring and tatty upholstery, the air heavy with the odours of a thousand fried dinners and Indian takeaways, of manure and mildew and unaired rugs. Everything is damp and grimy.

Andrew and I decide we don’t have the energy to cook, but the nearest place open for dinner is half an hour away. We end up at a seaside restaurant where we pick at the food, as if our appetites have abandoned us.

How strange it is that we are here while the child we are meant to adopt is waiting only a short drive away. We could go there now, this instant, and see him. Why do we have to wait? Why do we have to follow social workers’ schedules? So much of this process has been dependent on us doing what we are told, being docile and passive. What if we weren’t? What if we said, enough of this, we’re going to do things our way from now on?

Of course we don’t. We were both raised to be good boys, to follow directions. This whole process has turned us back into children, taking away our sense of our own agency.

We eat. We pay. We drive back to the B&B.

We’re both nervous, although we try to hide it from each other. We want this to go well. We want, I realize, not to be disappointed or terrified when the boy meant to be our son looks into our eyes, or when we look into his.

MONDAY

After breakfast we go for a walk, trying to kill time until the hour appointed for our arrival, once O— has returned from nursery school. The sky is matte grey, the air close to freezing, and a northwest wind whipping off the sea makes it feel even colder.

We will have to keep coming back here so that O— can see his foster parents, and then, later, to visit his siblings and help him remember where he came from. While the countryside is beautiful, this village is not. Geographically and architecturally different though it is, it might just as easily stand in place of the small California towns where my parents grew up, from which they both escaped, or the dingy Oklahoma town where my grandmother was a girl, or the tiny farming community that my other grandmother fled to escape the Dust Bowl in the years of the Great Depression.

Perhaps, at some point in the future, O— will no longer want to return to this part of the world. And then he, and we, might be free of the past.

Like so many other consoling narratives, I recognize that this too is fantasy.

T— answers the door when I knock. He looks past me to the street, to Andrew, to our car. There’s the sound of thudding feet, and then all at once, like a jack-in-the-box, O— springs into the doorway.

At first, he doesn’t seem to know who we are.

Who’s that then? O—’s foster father asks him.

Two daddies, the boy says, grinning, puckish.

As he hugs us each in turn, I think, yes, this is right. The smell of floral fabric softener hits me again, as it did on our previous visit. I am eager for this to go well, for every moment in these first hours to be perfect.

Then joy comes rushing, watery, submerging most of the anxiety and frustration of the past months. Would it have felt the same if we had been able to do this six weeks ago? What if the ADM had said yes in September? What if we had not lived through two months of uncertainty? How might it all have been different?

Where’s my Romeo? K— calls out to O— as he runs to hug her.

The sound of that name is a blade that sinks deep in my chest. How could she call him Romeo? Has she read my story? Is it remotely possible?

I do not believe I might have written this child into existence, although the coincidence strains plausibility. What are the chances that O—’s nickname in the home of his foster parents should be the real name of the wild child character I invented a year earlier?

I try to set this to one side, not to make too much of it. Focus instead on what is before you, on K— hugging the little boy, wrapping him warmly in her arms. He has been loved, that is clear. He is loved. That is obvious, too.

Although the plan has been for us to be alone, there are other members of the family present, K— and T—’s adult daughter and her husband and their two toddlers. O—’s focus is as much with them as with us. The television is on, volume loud. This could have been my grandmother’s living room when I was a child, the television always playing, a baseball or football game or news filling the silence.

I suggest that I try to read O— a book we have brought him. We sit on the floor, Andrew next to me, and O— scrambles into my lap. I start to read, but after three pages O— loses interest. He’s up and playing with K—’s grandson.

Marla suggests we go for a walk, just us and T— and O—. Outside, on the front step, she apologizes about the presence of the other family members. That was not the plan, she says, not the way it was supposed to be.

Tell them to go away, I want to say. We need this to work on our terms. Too much has gone wrong already.

But even now, when it seems as though power might be shifting back in our direction, I swallow my words.

We head towards the centre of the village, O— holding our hands, walking between us as I imagined he might. Then he wants to get up on my shoulders, and we walk like that for a stretch, Andrew making me stop so he can take a picture.

You’re being a baby, T— says, you don’t get carried.

Let him be a baby, I want to say. Who has ever carried him like this? Why shouldn’t we carry him for as long as we can?

When O— gets down from my shoulders, he makes a dash ahead, running pell-mell towards an intersection. T— does not react.

Do we need to stop him? I ask.

He’ll stop, T— says.

In a village this small, where everyone knows him, where he seems to know his way to and from his foster parents’ house to any number of local landmarks, running away is not a serious matter.

But in London, I think, he cannot run away from us in London. In London, if he stepped off the kerb without looking, if he did not listen to our instructions, he could be dead in an instant.

We end up at a deserted playground. While T— stands watching, Andrew and I play with O—. Andrew is better at this than I am. I can chat and read to a child, but stepping into a world of pirates or dragons or warrior robots no longer comes as naturally as it once did. To perform like this requires a forgetting of the self that feels like a struggle.

As I watch Andrew playing with the boy, I feel myself turning into the person who polices limits, who worries about injury and transgression, while Andrew becomes the pirate or the astronaut or the dinosaur with such apparent ease that I begin to feel myself failing at this before we have even started. What if I can’t have fun? Or, what if I can’t have the kind of fun that this boy needs? I recall my mother telling me when I was a child how my father used to laugh, how much fun he was before I was born. What if I become the same? What if my own sense of fun, of being funny, evaporates the moment I become a parent? What would that mean for all of us?

A father and son arrive at the playground. The little boy is younger than O—, perhaps only two, three at most. O— runs over to the boy, takes him in his arms, and kisses him. The other boy goes rigid and looks as though he may burst into tears. We rush to apologize, cautioning O— that other people might not want to be kissed and hugged.

If he did this in our local London playground it would not go down well.

We take a different route back to the house, walking out of the village and around its perimeter through farmland and fields, with a view of the sea in the distance. Will O— miss the sea, I wonder?

T— is loosening up, telling stories about a bonfire that got out of control one year, a flood another year, all the cycles of rural seaside life. It’s like listening to my uncle, or other relatives I haven’t seen in years, slipping back into an older way of relating to people, one based on an exchange of stories rather than questions – a series of monologues instead of dialogues. One person tells a story for as long as it takes and then goes silent, waiting for the other person to reply with a different story, which may or may not speak to the first. Dialogue, when it actually happens, remains about the weather or food, about what is immediately to hand. It is focused on the tangible, the visible, the empirical.

O— starts asking us questions and we soon realize that he thinks he’s coming home with us today.

No, we say, only on Thursday. Today is Monday. Another three sleeps before we go.

And K— and T—?

No, K— and T— will stay here.

And my friends?

No, you’ll be going to a new school where you’ll make new friends.

His face crumples. His chin wrinkles. He starts to cry. We try to reassure him but all I can think is, if Marla sees this she’ll say that the Introductions need to last longer, and that is something I cannot bear. We have to keep things upbeat and make sure that he sees it all as a big adventure. The delays we have already experienced make the threat of any further delay unthinkable.

As we turn towards home, O— darts back in the opposite direction, running so fast I have to sprint to catch him and then he scrambles away from me, giggling and dashing into a thicket of trees. Testing us already, because we have disappointed him so many times, for so many months. Perhaps he needs to see whether we’re here to stay.

Eventually I catch him, pick him up, carry him back to where Andrew and T— are waiting, but he wriggles so wildly in my arms that I can’t hold him and he slips to the ground and darts away again. It takes almost an hour to get back to the house because he keeps running off (always away from the house), giggling, his eyes narrowing. I see the face of his mother superimposed on his, her features developing out of his own.

It is not an easy test to pass. At this first small hurdle I already find myself thinking, he is lovely when he is sweet, but what happens when the sweetness goes?

When we finally arrive back at the house, it is lunchtime. K— has made sandwiches.

I’ll feed you, she says, but you’ll not get whatever posh London food you’re used to.

Would it surprise her to know that my father grew up in acute poverty, often half-starving, moving between motel rooms and apartments above garages and short-term rentals before his family finally bought a house that was then lost to foreclosure, or that m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Mothers
• Birth
• Questions
• Terry
• Nuclear
• Genetics
• Surrogates
• Hugo
• Stages
• You
• Worry
• Hotel
• Queer
• Max
• Queered
• Citizen Ruth
• You
• Searching
• Annie
• You
• Envy
• Prometheus
• Envie
• Alien: Covenant
• Alpha Romeo Tango
• ‘Interior: Monkeyboy’
• Loss
• Sara and Catherine
• On Paper
• You
• Child Parent Child
• Hidden
• Matching
• Me
• Introductions
• After
• Ordinary
• You
• The Ginger Child
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes