Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 72: The Review

Transcript

My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 72: The Review · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

0:00
My playful wife. He's earned the right to stop
0:05
checking whether we can be made to send him away.
0:08
She was quiet a moment, and then the fear showed,
0:11
just for a second, under the certainty. It frightens
0:15
me, starting it. There was a review some months
0:21
in, an official one, the kind a system holds
0:23
at intervals to assess how a placement is going,
0:26
and we went to it the way you go to any examination
0:28
of a thing you cannot bear to have judged badly,
0:31
braced, and overprepared, and faintly sick. It
0:34
was held in a plain municipal room with a social
0:36
worker we knew and another official we did not.
0:40
and a file on the table that was Kabir's life
0:42
rendered into paragraphs, and it had about it
0:45
the particular strangeness I had first felt during
0:48
the assessment, all those months before, the
0:51
strangeness of submitting to the formal evaluation
0:54
of strangers a love you have been living inside,
0:57
of having people who see your family for 90 minutes
1:00
pronounce, officially, on a thing you know from
1:03
10, thousand hours that they will never have.
1:06
I had made an uneasy peace with this part of
1:09
it, the perpetual oversight, the way fostering
1:12
means your family is never quite only yours,
1:15
is always also a case, a file, a thing the state
1:18
retains an interest in and a right to inspect.
1:22
It is the price of the arrangement and a fair
1:24
one. A child given into the care of strangers
1:27
must be checked on, and the checking that felt
1:30
like intrusion was also the checking that would
1:32
have protected Kabir from worse strangers than
1:35
us. But there is a particular tiredness in being
1:38
permanently provisional, in loving a child under
1:41
inspection, in knowing that the most private
1:44
and total relationship of your late life is also
1:47
a folder in a municipal cabinet. I had not realized,
1:51
until the word was offered, how much I longed
1:54
to be done with being assessed, to have our family
1:57
become simply, finally, nobody's business but
2:01
our own. But it went well. That was the first
2:05
surprise of the meeting, that the verdict was
2:07
good, that the careful, watchful professionals
2:09
had read the same signs we had and read them
2:12
as we did, the eating, the unclenching, the school
2:15
being survived, the storm weathered and held.
2:18
The placement, they said, was succeeding. And
2:22
then the social worker, the kind one, set down
2:25
her pen and said the thing that turned the whole
2:28
room over, the thing we had not let ourselves
2:31
expect. Have the two of you thought, she said,
2:37
gently, in the careful way of someone who knows
2:40
the size of what she is opening, about making
2:43
this permanent? About adoption? And the room
2:48
went very quiet, and I discovered, in the silence
2:52
after the word, exactly how hard Celonie and
2:55
I had both been working, without ever discussing
2:58
it, to not want this. Because the wanting flooded
3:02
in the instant the door was opened, vast and
3:05
immediate and frightening, and I understood from
3:08
the force of it how much pressure we had each
3:10
been holding back, how carefully we had each
3:13
been refusing to let ourselves hope for the one
3:16
thing we most wanted, on the grounds that it
3:18
was not yet ours to want, that he was still,
3:21
in law, a foster child. The state's and not ours.
3:26
And that to want him permanently was to expose
3:29
ourselves to a loss we had no defense against.
3:32
The word adoption was the lifting of a lid we
3:35
had both been sitting on with our whole weight.
3:38
And underneath it was the enormous, undignified,
3:41
naked want we had not even confessed to each
3:44
other. Yes. God, yes. Let him be ours. Let it
3:50
be forever and on paper and real. But the want,
3:56
the moment it surfaced, dragged its terror up
3:59
with it because that is how it works with a hope
4:02
you have been suppressing for a reason. The reason
4:05
was loss. to begin an adoption is to begin another
4:09
long process another corridor of forms and assessments
4:13
and waiting another stretch of months in which
4:16
a thing could still go wrong in which some unforeseen
4:20
complication or some change in the boy's distant
4:22
circumstances or some turn of the careful machinery
4:26
could still take him from us and we had only
4:28
just barely, recovered from the foster carer's
4:32
terror of the transition, the months of loving
4:35
a child we might still lose. To pursue adoption
4:38
was to volunteer for that terror again, knowingly,
4:42
at a higher pitch, with even more to lose now
4:45
that he was even more ours. I felt the old fear
4:48
rise as fast as the want had. the two of them
4:51
braided together the way they always are, that
4:54
the surest way to lose a thing is to let yourself
4:57
fully want it, that we had been safer in our
5:00
careful unwanting, that opening this door opened
5:03
it also to the grief on the other side of a no.
5:06
This is the tax that hope levies, and there is
5:09
no avoiding it, that you cannot want a thing
5:11
fully without exposing yourself fully to its
5:14
loss, that the size of the possible grief is
5:17
always exactly the size of the want. We had protected
5:21
ourselves all those careful months by keeping
5:25
the want small, by holding Kabir at the slight
5:28
remove of the provisional, by not quite letting
5:31
him all the way and pass the place where losing
5:33
him would be survivable. The adoption asked us
5:37
to give that up, to want him with the whole undefended
5:40
heart, and therefore to make a no. If a no came,
5:44
unsurvivable. There is no safe way to love a
5:48
child. The provisional love had been a kind of
5:51
insurance, and the adoption was the cancelling
5:53
of the policy, the decision to stand fully in
5:56
the open and let the want be as large and as
5:59
unguarded as the child deserved. And then there
6:05
was the deeper, stranger reckoning, the one that
6:09
took me the rest of the week to work through,
6:11
because it seemed at first to contradict everything
6:13
I had concluded only months before about the
6:16
name. Because I had decided, when Kabir would
6:20
not call us Papa, that the label was not the
6:23
thing, that the word was beside the point, that
6:26
the bond was wholly real without any official
6:29
mark on it. He was already ours. I had written
6:32
it down. The last house, the bricked up door,
6:36
the thing more real than any word. And so part
6:40
of me asked, that week, if all that is true,
6:44
why does the adoption matter? If he is already
6:47
ours in every way that counts, why does it matter
6:50
whether a court agrees? Is the legal permanence
6:54
not just another label, another jar sticker on
6:57
a jam already made, another word we do not need
7:00
because we have the thing? And I worked my way,
7:04
slowly, to the answer, which is that it is different,
7:07
and the difference is the whole point, and the
7:09
difference is Kabir. For us, the adults, the
7:13
paper would indeed change nothing. We already
7:16
know he is ours, and a court's agreement would
7:19
only ratify a thing we have lived as true for
7:22
months. But Kabir is not us. Kabir is a child
7:26
whose entire wound is impermanence, whose specific
7:29
injury is precisely that homes turn out not to
7:32
be permanent, that the people who keep you can
7:35
stop. For such a child, the legal permanence
7:38
is not a mere label on the jam. It is part of
7:41
the actual jam. part of the real safety, and
7:45
not just its description, because a foster placement
7:47
can, in fact, in law, still be ended, and Kabir
7:52
knows this, knows it better than we do, because
7:54
he has lived the ending of placements. And a
7:57
child who knows in his bones that his home is
7:59
legally endiable cannot fully rest in it no matter
8:03
how we love him. The adoption would not change
8:06
what he is to us. It would change what the law
8:09
could do to him. And for a child whose wound
8:12
is exactly the law's power to move him, that
8:15
is not a label. That is the bricked up door made
8:18
real in the one language that can actually enforce
8:20
it. We did not need the paper. He did. And his
8:25
need was the only one that mattered. I sat with
8:28
how cleanly that resolved the apparent contradiction
8:31
and was grateful for it, because I do not like
8:35
to be wrong in the notebooks and prefer to find
8:37
that an old truth and a new one can be reconciled.
8:41
The label is not the jam. Still true for the
8:45
secure. The label is part of the jam. Also true
8:48
for the wounded. The two are not in conflict.
8:52
They simply apply to different people, and the
8:54
whole of the wisdom is in knowing which person
8:57
you are dealing with. With Saloni, I do not need
9:00
the word. Our bond is secure, and the paper would
9:04
only describe it. With Kabir, the word is structural
9:08
because his security is precisely the thing in
9:11
question, the very thing the paper would help
9:13
build. The same document, a formality for one
9:17
relationship and a foundation stone for another.
9:21
It depends entirely on whether the one receiving
9:23
it has ever been taught that the thing could
9:25
be taken away. Saloni, when we talked it through
9:31
at home, had arrived at the same place by a shorter
9:35
road the way she does. Of course we do it, she
9:40
said, as though it were obvious, which to her
9:43
it was. Not for us. We don't need it. I've known
9:47
he's mine since the photograph. We do it for
9:50
him because there's a difference to a kid who's
9:53
been moved between people who love you and people
9:56
who legally can't be made to give you back, and
9:59
he's old enough and hurt enough to know exactly
10:01
what that difference is. He's been counting on
10:04
the back door staying shut because we promised.
10:08
Adoption is the difference between us promising
10:10
and the law promising. He needs the law to promise,
10:14
too. He's earned the right to stop checking whether
10:17
we can be made to send him away. She was quiet
10:20
a moment, and then the fear showed, just for
10:24
a second, under the certainty. It frightens me,
10:27
starting it. Another whole process where they
10:30
could still say no, where we could still lose
10:33
him. But you don't refuse a child permanence
10:36
because you're scared of the paperwork between
10:38
here and there. We've done a long yes before.
10:42
We'll do another one. And there it was, decided.
10:47
The way the largest things get decided between
10:49
two awake people, quietly, at home, in plain
10:53
words, with the fear named and overruled by the
10:57
love. I have noticed that this is the actual
11:00
mechanism of courage, in a marriage and probably
11:03
everywhere. Not the absence of fear, but its
11:07
naming and its overruling, out loud, by something
11:11
you have decided matters more. Saloni was afraid.
11:15
She said so, and then she set the fear down beside
11:18
the love and saw plainly that the love was larger
11:22
and acted from the larger thing. That is all
11:25
courage ever is. The brave are not unafraid.
11:30
They are people who have looked directly at their
11:32
fear, called it by its name, agreed that it is
11:36
real, and then done the frightening thing anyway,
11:39
because something on the other side of the fear
11:41
was worth more than safety. We were frightened
11:44
of the second long yes. We were going to do it
11:47
frightened. That, I have learned, is the only
11:51
way anything worth doing ever actually gets done.
11:57
There remained the question of Kabir himself,
12:00
which troubled me, because he is seven, and the
12:03
thing we were deciding was the most important
12:05
fact of his life, and it did not seem right to
12:08
decide it entirely over his head. A seven -year
12:13
-old cannot navigate an adoption. He cannot weigh
12:16
it or consent to it in any legal way. The decision
12:20
is, necessarily, the adult's. And yet it is his
12:24
life, his permanence, his name on the document,
12:27
and I did not want to do to him the thing that
12:29
had been done to him his whole life, which was
12:32
to have adults decide his fate in rooms he was
12:34
not in. We would have to find a way, I understood,
12:38
to bring him into it, to tell him, to ask him
12:41
in whatever way a child can be asked, not because
12:44
his answer would be legally decisive, but because
12:46
he had a right to be a person in the story of
12:49
his own life rather than only its object. How
12:52
you tell a child who has been moved from house
12:54
to house that you want to make him yours forever,
12:56
in a way that does not terrify him or pressure
12:59
him or land as one more adult need pressed onto
13:03
his small shoulders. I did not yet know, but
13:06
I knew we could not simply do it to him in his
13:09
absence. He had been done to enough. This, of
13:12
all things, he had to be part of. The irony was
13:15
not lost on me, that the adoption, the act meant
13:19
to give him permanence, would itself have to
13:22
be done with the same sidelong care as everything
13:25
else, lest the very gift wound him. You cannot
13:28
simply tell a moved child you intend to keep
13:31
him forever and expect joy. The word forever
13:35
has been broken in his mouth too many times to
13:38
be trusted, and a large declaration of permanent
13:41
love can land on such a child as a threat, a
13:44
pressure, a thing too big and too frightening
13:48
to be received. We would have to give him his
13:50
own permanence the way we had given him everything
13:53
else. Carefully, sideways, in doses he could
13:57
absorb, in language nearer the metro than the
14:00
heart, letting him come to it at his own speed.
14:03
Even the gift of forever, with this child, had
14:07
to be handed over gently enough that he could
14:10
bear to take it. I wrote it that night in the
14:15
sixth notebook, the adoption not begun but decided
14:19
upon, a long new corridor opening ahead. That
14:24
I had been right about the name, and was now
14:26
learning the limit of being right, because the
14:28
label is indeed not the jam, and yet there are
14:31
cases where the label is part of the jam, where
14:34
the official word is not a mere description of
14:37
a safety, but a load -bearing piece of it, and
14:40
that the deciding factor is who needs it. For
14:43
the secure, the paper is nothing, the bond is
14:46
everything, the document only ratifies. But for
14:50
the wounded, For the child whose injury is precisely
14:53
impermanence, the legal permanence is not a sticker
14:56
on the jar, but a wall of the house, structural,
14:59
necessary, part of the actual safety the child
15:02
requires in order to rest. We did not need to
15:06
adopt Kabir to know he was ours. We needed to
15:09
adopt Kabir because he needed the law itself,
15:12
and not only our love, to tell him he could stop
15:15
being afraid. The paper would change nothing
15:18
for us and everything for him. And that asymmetry
15:22
is the whole reason to sign it. You do not make
15:25
a thing permanent for the sake of the people
15:27
who already feel it forever. You make it permanent
15:30
for the sake of the one who has been taught,
15:32
in his body, that nothing is. And there is, I
15:36
think, no more exact definition of what it means
15:39
to take responsibility for another person than
15:42
that. To provide for them, at cost to yourself,
15:46
the specific safety their specific wound requires.
15:49
even when you yourself would not need it, even
15:52
when it asks of you a fear or a labor you could
15:55
have avoided. Anyone can give a person what is
15:58
easy to give. The measure of real care is whether
16:02
you will give them the harder, particular thing
16:04
their history has made them need, the thing calibrated
16:07
not to your comfort, but to their injury. Kabir
16:10
needed the law to promise. Providing that promise
16:14
would cost us months of fear and process. We
16:18
were going to provide it anyway because that
16:20
is what it means to be someone's fully, to take
16:23
on, as your own, the work of healing the exact
16:26
place where they were broken. Then the working
16:32
line, the sixth notebook open, a long yes about
16:36
to begin again, a boy asleep who did not yet
16:39
know we meant to keep him in the eyes of the
16:41
law as we already kept him in everything else.
16:46
The label is not the thing, except when the one
16:49
who needs it is wounded in exactly the place
16:51
the label protects. For the secure, the official
16:55
permanence is a formality. The love was already
16:59
whole without it, and the paper only writes down
17:02
what was already true. But for the one whose
17:05
injury is impermanence itself, the moved child,
17:08
the abandoned one, The person taught in their
17:11
bones that nothing lasts. The legal forever is
17:14
not a description of safety, but a piece of it,
17:16
structural, load -bearing, part of the actual
17:19
wall. So do not refuse to make a thing official
17:23
on the grounds that the love does not need the
17:25
paper. The love may not need it. The wounded
17:29
one may need it more than anything. Ask not whether
17:32
the bond requires the document, but whether the
17:35
person does. And if they have been taught that
17:37
homes can end, Give them the one promise even
17:40
the world is forced to keep. Sign the paper.
17:43
Not for your sake. For theirs. I capped the pen
17:48
and sat with a size of what we had set in motion.
17:51
The second long yes. The one that would end.
17:55
If the machinery was kind. With a court declaring
17:58
in the flat language of law the thing we had
18:00
known since a photograph in a file. That this
18:03
boy was ours and we were his and no one. Not
18:07
the state. Not his history, not the back door
18:10
he still half -watched, could ever again be made
18:13
to part us. It was months away. It could still
18:16
go wrong. There was another corridor of forms
18:19
and waiting to walk, and the old terror walked
18:23
beside us in it. But we had decided. We would
18:26
make him permanent, not because we needed it,
18:29
but because he did, and there is no better reason
18:32
to do a hard thing than that someone you love
18:34
needs it, and you are the ones who can. The boy
18:37
slept down the hall, still checking some nights
18:40
that the door was shut. We were going to get
18:42
the law to shut it, finally, in a language even
18:46
his fear would have to believe. To be continued
19:01
That was episode 72 of My Playful Wife. If this
19:07
story is staying with you, the next episode is
19:10
already waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss
19:13
it. The complete book is on Amazon and early
19:16
episodes plus bonus chapters are on my Patreon.
19:20
Links are in the description. Thank you for listening.