A mother's love

My adopted son, already the father of three, faces a future of dead-end jobs and near poverty. What do I owe him and my unexpected, fragile grandchildren?

By Sallie Tisdale

Read more: Sallie Tisdale, Poverty, Parenting, Adoption, Life

Nov. 29, 2006 | It started six years ago, when my eldest son met Corina. He was 23, and living on the disability payments he receives because of profound deafness. She was just 21, with a 4-year-old daughter. They lived in subsidized housing while Corina took a few community college classes and collected welfare. Within a few months, Rafael had moved into the apartment in a small city in Oregon, an hour's drive from our home in Portland. A few months later, they announced happily that Corina was pregnant.

Austin was born. Corina dropped out of school.

A year later, Taylor was born. They borrowed $500 from us to pay the deposit, and moved into a duplex. Rafael somehow managed to get a loan for a car. They found seasonal jobs, went back to unemployment, signed up for classes, dropped out of classes. They spent their days with the babies, in the directionless leisure of poverty.

Ups, and downs. Rafael got a job, a real job, stocking the soup shelves in a big-box grocery discount store. They moved again, into a house. Corina worked part-time at a deli; they took different shifts, shared childcare, stayed sober, kept the house clean. Then Kaylee was born, and they moved again.

There was never enough money for all the things they wanted to buy. They started charging things -- clothes, televisions, bicycles. The car was repossessed. They dodged creditors; the phone was disconnected.

And in what seemed an almost inevitable way, things got physical. She threw all his clothes out the window; he slept in the car. He packed and left for a few days. When he knocked her down and kicked her, she called me and I told her to call the police. Rafael was arrested and thrown into a draconian probation agreement that prevented him from having any contact with Corina for more than a year. During that long year, she fell in love with Tyson, a mutual friend who has two small children of his own.

When Rafael was finally allowed to return, he found Tyson living there, with Corina and the children. Tyson and Corina broke up last week, though, and both the living arrangements and the partnerships are in flux. Corina is pregnant again, by Tyson.

With Austin, the first baby, I began to practice the delicate task of helping out and minding my own business at the same time. I struggled as well with guilt -- that somehow I had failed as his parent, that he could do no better than this. We adopted him from Guatemala when he was 9 years old, after a painfully deprived childhood. He had no education until then, and I had hoped that he would learn to love school, and take as much as he could. I had imagined that I could heal some of his wounds. But the difficult early years, the loss of his family, the long years without attachment or security, were much stronger influences than we could be in the long run. In a way that I can witness but not control, he feels much more at home in the drifting world of the lower class than in the settled middle class where we live. He feels a biting sense of entitlement still; the belief that he is owed something, that he should not have to work so hard for his life anymore, eats away at him. He resents any implication that he is responsible for his problems.

But I could vividly see his and Corina's bleak future of small apartments, dead-end jobs, no education, and never enough money. I knew they needed more help than I wanted to give. I told myself they were young, that people make mistakes, that we are all entitled to at least a second chance. But I saw as well their total dependence on outside help -- not only help from family, but on public assistance of several kinds. They seemed not only unable to support themselves, but unable or unwilling to do much about it.

The task of children is differentiation, and that means difference -- different values, different goals. The struggle of a child is partly the struggle to be seen as something other than a child, until it becomes true. The struggle of a parent is that we never stop feeling like a parent, and a little responsible for their behavior. These are complex and textured relationships; we want them to grow, we want them to stay, and they want the same impossible things.

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