When my husband and I decide to open ourselves to one more child, one whom we imagine will be our third and final child, we get back on the foster-to-adopt waiting list. We have already adopted two children out of foster care, but we think that a third will make our family complete. Some days, I feel greedy, as if I already have enough love, and I don’t deserve more. Other days, when it feels there is never enough time of my own, I grow impatient and wonder how I could possibly want another child. But in the end, I don’t want to live with regrets, always wondering about that empty space, and I feel I have more love to give. It’s also selfish. The experience of bonding and becoming a family to our first two children has been so wondrous and ecstatic, I want to experience it all one more time.

We enter in fully understanding that we might have to say goodbye if the child ends up reunifying with their birth family. It’s happened before—two babies we were placed with did not stay. But we also know that if reunification is not possible, we will end up becoming home to the tiny human with whom we have already been sharing our lives, and as human animals, the process requires that we envision ourselves as family in the meantime. In other words, we must pretend to be a family. But the pretending must feel real. In other words, what most people consider pretend, must actually become real, because all children need real love, not fake love, not babysitter love, nanny love, or social worker/system/state/paid employee love, but actual, real, in-your-nostrils, 4:30-in-the-morning love, cleaning-up-child- puke-when-you-are-sick-with-the-flu love. The hundreds-of-phone-calls kind of love necessary to procure psychotherapy/speech therapy/occupational therapy/inner ear surgery/kidney ultrasound/hormone testing/FASD evaluation/ behavioral therapy/special education assessment/meetings with the principal because your child is being racially profiled at school. The enduring love required to weather years of the fits and tantrums that come of early childhood trauma and are a child’s way of grieving. Children need what we mean when we say “family.” The kind of love that blooms in your whole body, where your child becomes the best child in the world. It must be unbreakable and forever, even if the child does not stay.

And when the baby’s auntie comes to pick her up, you must say goodbye as if it is forever. Her auntie and uncle might be grateful, though you don’t deserve their gratitude, i.e., you shouldn’t become a foster parent if you want to be loved and appreciated, so if gratitude doesn’t come, or a willingness to stay in touch doesn’t come, you can’t stay angry about that. You’ve got to suck it up. It’s not that you are a robot. Let yourself feel it all. What I’m saying is, you are peripheral. You provide a service, and then it’s done, though it never felt like service to you.

You must live inside a logic puzzle. This child is loved beyond imagination by the first parents who gave them life, but it also may be true that this child needs a permanent home away from those first parents. In that way, you are second best, but you are also the best because you are the person on the other end of the phone at that existential moment when the social worker asks if you would like to accept this light-filled being into your home, the one with the whole expanse of universe inside her cells and who is destined for greatness.

*

But our third try doesn’t work out. And when we say goodbye to the baby who ended up staying only six weeks, I don’t know if I’m sad because I’m letting go of this particular child, or letting go of the dream of a third child, or both.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then, shards of glass in my palms. When I pull out the glass, they bleed. This is sadness, I think.

I drop things. A jar of molasses. A folder of student papers, which lands by

the curb in a cloudy puddle. I hit my head when I bend to reach for something in a basket. I hit my face on a cupboard door. It leaves a cut on my nose that I don’t notice until my son asks why my face is bleeding.

My hands are cold. The air seems odd. I can’t tie tiny laces. The coffee tastes different. My body is drowning in the sheets. I write notes to people I love. Apologies, usually. I am sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I’ll try harder. The screams come at the wrong time. My daughter stiffens and turns away from me. I feel her delicate ribs contract. Even though I am full, I am grabbing things and shoving them in. The heart muscle flirts with the throat.

I have lost babies to miscarriage. To air, to my body, to uncertainties. Now I lose babies as a foster parent who hopes to adopt. In my dreams, my friends pity me. They castigate my choices, look at me with reproach. I think about all the things I might never do while they float away with their magnificent plans.

*

I’m listening to the radio and driving to work on a familiar road when it comes. The gunshot wound surgeon is explaining the worst part of his job, which is, of course, talking to the families after the loss, and then I feel as if it may never stop. The sadness is a soft eternal place inside me.

Later, a student comes by to meet with me. He’s missed weeks of class. He can barely speak. His eyes meet mine. You know what’s been going on with guns, he says, meaning, I think, the most recent mass shooting, which happened near where we live. It’s that, he says. It’s his brother. I see it coming for him too. Is your brother okay? I say.

The names and dates and totals, I can’t keep track anymore. Which tragedy is which and so on. Mass shooting, police killing, hate crime, child in a cage, we are in it. My husband and I are white, and both of our children are Black, and events that used to be tragic and horrifying have taken on extra unbearable weight.

Another student, who is white, male, big, and a baseball player, has been cheating in my class. When I confront him, his eyes begin to leak. He calls me ma’am. He is so polite. He tells me he doesn’t have a place to live. Friends he thought were friends aren’t. When the tears come, he can’t stop. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to be polite. It’s okay to cry. He says he’s staying on a couch, but the owner of that couch is a former friend and he doesn’t think he is welcome to stay much longer. He is not someone I expected to be without a home and crying in my office. Now I see his grief more clearly.

Saying goodbye to this most recent baby is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I think. But I know that’s not true. What is the hardest thing I’ve ever done? It’s not this, I tell myself. Are you crying, mama, my daughter asks. No, I say, not right now. But I might cry again. It’s okay if we feel sad. It’s a sad world we’re living in, I say.

In this state, I think I know what other people are thinking, which makes me sadder. How they’re judging me, how I should just move past this, as if it’s not real loss because she was never my baby to begin with. They are right about that last part, and when I found out she wouldn’t be staying, I immediately didn’t want her anymore. The loss feels like an abyss breaking open inside me. I gasp. Someday I might disappear, just rise up into the air, twirl around, and then poof.

*

My desire to have a third child is linked to the reality that the two children I have already adopted out of foster care came to me because the world suffers. Because there is tragedy and injustice. My husband and I chose foster-adoption because it seemed like an ethical choice, that is, we are parenting children who truly needed homes. There is no profit motive, no one profiteering from someone’s desperation. And yet, it’s also true that I serve as a wannabe-mother inside a system that is fundamentally racist. A system that is unjust, in which poverty is real, in which generational trauma is also real, in which overt and unconscious bias operate freely, a system that colonization and capitalism

created. And in that system, I am yet another white person adopting a Black child. Though I have never seen myself as a savior.

It’s also true that these children need homes now. They cannot wait for racism to be eradicated, for a healthcare system that provides mental health care and addiction treatment to all, a world in which poor children of color, particularly Black children, are not disproportionately removed from their homes, or one in which poor people of color do not get trapped in oppressive systems of policing and incarceration. The children who are in the system right now as I write this cannot wait. My children could not wait.

And so I am a white foster and adoptive parent who thinks and feels. I am a person, a human being who came to this from my own grief and loss. I provide a home, I fall in love. The children become a part of me. I dream of the future, which is necessary for falling in love, but I also try to imagine their future without me in it, to keep that possibility alive, which is also necessary.

*

Another student wants to know the reason for her low grade on an assignment. When I tell her that the paper isn’t long enough, and the ideas need development, she is frustrated because she has to write more words.

It’s a windy day and the rain has come. At first, I think her eyes are watering because we are sitting outside. When I ask if she’s okay, it comes. Because of the not-enough-words problem it comes, but it’s obviously bigger than that too. She keeps apologizing for the crying, and it gets worse. I say, it’s okay, it’s okay. No need to be sorry, I say. I’m sorry, she says, over and over. I just need to breathe, she says. I touch her arm.

Before the crying, we had been discussing why her paper had made me angry. One of her arguments is about what it’s like to be poor and Black and brown in America and is gravely misinformed. She is not poor or Black or brown, and her argument reveals that she has not tried to understand the world outside her own experience. She has been hasty in her judgments and plucked evidence to fit a prior assessment. But amidst the misinformation, I had found some interesting questions, and I had told her so. I had offered concrete suggestions for improvement. I asked questions and tried to focus more on logic than emotion because I wanted her to open up to learning. I thought that if I stayed calm, she might have space to acknowledge her own discomfort and that might inspire her to re-examine her assumptions. That is, I hoped my staying calm might lead her to change her thinking. But maybe I should have told her that her paper made me angry.

Still, when she cries, I feel responsible, as if my suppressed anger caused her tears. I keep telling her to breathe. It’s okay, I say. I think of my own first year of college away from home. Even though I was happy to get away, sometimes I couldn’t stop either.

*

Weirdly, in the midst of the heaviness, it’s the days I manage to spend time writing, to get away or go for a swim, those are days I yell at my children. Stop! I yell, after I have told my son to stop playing with an opened tin can but he

continues on, the lid’s stark edges near his soft fingers. He is at the sink with the water on, and he has a plan. Put it down, I yell. Just stop! I shouldn’t have to ask ten times!

He falls to the floor, crying, as if I have hurt him more than the can. Why are you crying? Because I asked you to stop doing something you wanted to do? I’m trying to keep you safe! I am still yelling. I know why he is crying, but I want him to say it. This is cruelty, I think, but I keep on.

He’s at an age now where he will remember things. What will he remember? Will he remember this rage of mine? Will it seem unpredictable? Will he remember his own sadness? This moment, or the next when I tell him I was wrong to yell, and it is okay for him to be mad at me? Do you feel mad? I say. Will he remember that I asked him that? Will he remember the babies who have come and gone, and his own sadness, and how he wished they’d stayed? How often does he think of his own first mother, and our adopting him? Does he wish he were with her when I am yelling?

Later, when I am alone with me again, the me that makes me write this with water coming in under the door, I think about how there are always more emergencies, more traumas, more grief. The garage in which I am working is situated too low to the ground, so the water comes in when it rains. My husband has a plan to fix it someday when we have more time and money, but for now, I write madly without stopping, side-eyeing the water.

*

In these grieving days, I find myself daydreaming of beauty and fame. Specifically, at this moment, I want to be Amy Adams. I want to believe I am some version of her, or could be if I put in some effort. I admire her long hair, her body, her wit, poise and good humor. I wish I were drinking vodka from a water bottle and traipsing around the woods like her, flipping my hair around, being simultaneously envied and hated.

Instead of that, I am eating and drinking in bed with the TV on. Given the choice of the fantasy or this grief that will never end, I would take the fantasy, even if it meant someone were trying to poison me.

I read a book about motherhood that captures the melancholy and joy of it without being sentimental. I am writing a book about motherhood, and I want to order the words like this, I think, I want my book to sound like this. But it’s also, probably, that I want this writer’s life. I want things to work out. Not without pain, I’m not asking that, just that things come to me without quite so much effort. I feel like I deserve that much. This writer has a baby and then her loving mother comes to stay, providing comfort and help. That’s what I want. To lie in bed, looking at a baby that I know is mine, that I will get to keep, my loved ones surrounding me, all of us full of quiet certainty that we are family.

Some of my old friends used to wonder why I was sad. They kept urging me to be happy, despite the loss, because they thought gain negates loss. I have lost children, and I have gained children. I have lost extended family members and gained new ones. I have lost dreams and gained new ones, and all I can say

is that loss pits the soul, like craters on the surface of the moon. I once peered at the moon through a powerful telescope on a frigid January night to see these spaces, and the stark black and white beauty of it surprised me. Surprise!

A foster care friend of mine says that we are in the same situation as any parent, but most parents are not forced to think about loss every minute of every day. The reality that your child may be taken away through illness, death, injury, or other trauma at any moment is real for every parent, but we don’t often think about that. Living with this uncertainty would be immobilizing. Being a foster parent who wants to adopt, my friend says, makes you very, very aware that these days are precious, that today may be your last one, that you never know the outcome, and so you must enjoy each moment for what it is. How the baby smells, the particular weight of her, her full-face smile, the special kink of her hair, which is different on the back of her head than it is in front, the way he has learned to open his mouth and place it on your cheek or neck or armpit or chest in the approximation of a kiss, and the way that always makes you laugh, even on days when it feels there will never be anything to laugh about ever again.

Kate Martin Rowe’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, fugue, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, Hotel Amerika, Zyzzyva, VOLT, the Denver Quarterly, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. She teaches writing at Glendale Community College and lives in northeast Los Angeles. She is currently at work on a book of essays about infertility, foster care, and transracial adoption.

SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS & LOGO CREATED BY KELCEY PARKER ERVICK

HMS is an arts & culture nonprofit (Hypertext Magazine & Studio) with two programs: HMS empowers adults by teaching creative writing techniques; HMS’ independent press amplifies emerging and established writers’ work by giving their words a visible home. Buy a lit journal (or two) in our online store and consider donating. Every dollar helps us publish emerging and established voices.