Baby’s First Steps

“I've had a baby!" my mother exclaimed happily, following the judge's adoption pronouncement on Friday, February 6, 2009 that formally made me her daughter.

“A baby?” I thought, casting a quizzical look over her shoulder at the judge. Obviously, Mom was a little overwrought with emotion—I was 36 years old, far from babyhood.

But then I got to thinking: what, exactly, does it mean to be someone’s baby?

My entire youth was spent in the care of strangers or in foster care, so no one ever claimed me as their baby — except, perhaps, my biological father and mother, who both were gone before I knew it.

To say that I was “neglected” would be a euphemistic understatement. I have a distinct childhood memory of walking, shoeless and alone, with my brother through the streets of Tulsa, Okla. We were just toddlers at the time. The memory of shoelessness is especially poignant, because I recall cutting my foot deeply and requiring stitches. That is the only real care I can remember receiving as a young child. In fact, my brother and I mostly were left to our own devices. When he started kindergarten, I convinced him to take me to school as his “show and tell” because I missed him when he was away. (Amazingly, the teacher allowed me to remain in the classroom with him for the rest of the day.) Shortly after that incident, my father realized he could no longer hide our neglect and placed us in a group home. When I arrived there, my stomach was distended from malnutrition; a few years later, all of my teeth had to be removed because they were black and rotted.

From that day forward, I remained in foster care until I “placed out” at 18-years-old. “Placed-out” is the term they use for foster children who are never adopted and age-out of the foster care system.

I'm going to fast-forward a few decades because I can't possibly describe my life in foster care in any meaningful way in a short essay. Despite a lack of stability as a child, I grew-up into a successful software developer. Indeed, in terms of foster care “graduates”, I’m considered astronomically successful: college educated and gainfully employed — a feat in a country in which a quarter of foster care kids end-up homeless, and a little more than half (56%) are unable to find a job, as adults.

But outward success often obscures inner truth. And mine is that I'm still as emotionally under-developed as a child. Many of my close friends perhaps wonder whether I am some sort of idiot savant: I can program computers, play numerous musical instruments, run marathons, and communicate eloquently, but literally self-destruct when faced with emotional challenges and changes to my routine. (Imagine Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man.)

I'm sure some people would tell me to “get over it”. Perhaps by “it” they mean the anger, frustration and depression many former foster children experience. Throughout the years, I have attempted to do just that, first by applying myself to academics and then to a career. I also reconstructed my past to include only the happy memories and took-up long-distance running. And yet, despite all of my efforts, there remained a part of “it” I never could “get over”.

Just recently, I stumbled onto the possible reason why: I never was anybody’s baby.

As it turns out, that’s crucially important to a person’s development, according to psychiatrist Erik Erikson, who articulated the Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development back in 1956 to explain each developmental milestone a person must master so as not to experience problems in the future. Reading about these stages helped me to define “it”. Had I been someone’s loved and wanted child, I would have learned how to trust as an infant; gained a healthy level of autonomy, without shame and guilt, as a toddler; discovered how to positively respond to the world's challenges, taking on responsibilities, gaining new skills, and feeling purposeful by preschool; understood how to socialize with my peers without feeling inferior by elementary school; figured out who I was and where I fit into society by high school; and, finally, I would have internalized how to love and be intimate as a young adult.

To be honest, I never made it past Stage 1, as evidenced by the fact that I never trusted anyone enough to tell them I was a foster child. In fact, it took becoming an Adoption Coalition of Texas Guest Speaker for me to verbalize that fact.

Then, last year, I came to a realization that smashed my carefully constructed world to a million pieces:

I deserved a Forever Family.

At age 36 I recognized that I needed to be someone’s child in order to be a whole and emotionally complete person.

Fortunately, the universe heard my cry and last February I was adopted by my family: Kate, William, Michael, Brittany, Chloe and Gary Held. When my mom proclaimed “I've had a baby” in that courtroom, she was right: I had just been born emotionally for the first time. I finally get to know what it is to be somebody’s baby.

Sometimes it frightens me to think about all of the lessons I have yet to learn, not least of which are the emotional lessons and changes to my routine. But unlike those shoeless days in Tulsa, I now have the assurance that I am somebody's baby — albeit one in the skin of a 36-year-old woman. I finally have my forever family, who will be there to hold my hand and to love me each and every step of the way.

And for the first time in my life, they have me too.