With apologies to that best-selling author: Sometimes, the stuff really isn’t that small. As the training taught us, in many cases, the real issues with your adopted kids won’t show up until puberty. No sugar-coating here—this stuff happens. The good news is, you get through it, however many scratches and scars might result. The bad news is, there’s the it to get through. For the boys and me, these issues came at all times, in all shapes and sizes—including one that I directly contributed to myself. Here are those stories.

Pain

It’s fair to say that I fall into the category of people known as “pain-avoidant”—although “pain-terrified” might be more appropriate. So one of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a parent was how to somehow get comfortable with pain. I’m not talking about the everyday pain—stubbed toe, heartburn, heartbreak—that everyone, parent or not, deals with.

The pains that are specific to parenthood come in many forms. There is your own pain that comes when your kid—consciously or otherwise—rejects you, or defies you, or otherwise does the opposite of whatever would feel good for you in the moment. The pain you feel the first time you hear “I hate you!” or “You’re not my real dad!” And every other time you hear it, for that matter.

The pain I’m thinking about here is the pain that your kid experiences—the physical and emotional ailments that you can’t fix, but can only try to support and comfort them through. Of course, watching your kid in pain brings about your own secondary pain.

My kids certainly suffered their share of emotional blows, some of which I write about elsewhere. But the pain that I remember most now seems, well after the fact of course, a little bit funny. This was their predilection for major leg injuries. In terms of these injuries, there was clearly some weird sibling rivalry going on.

Consider:

Over the course of our first year together, there were two different occasions when one of the kids woke up in the middle of the night screaming with leg pain. A different kid per episode. Both episodes led to a trip to the emergency room. Both visits lasted all night, required X-rays, and turned up nothing. (Another version of our long history of “I don’t know” doctor visits.) To add that special je ne sais quoi to the mix, both (non)emergencies happened the night before a holiday: Daveon’s on New Year’s Eve (a really, really good time to be in the emergency room, BTW), and Mark’s the night before his/our birthday. I’ve already described the relationship for my kids between transition and anxiety—here we had something like a relationship between excitement and psychosomatic shingles.

Two of the other major injuries the boys incurred also involved their legs. During an outing in San Francisco, Mark was sliding down a very tall, covered aluminum slide, caught his foot on the wall near the bottom, and twisted his leg about 180 degrees. About a year later, during a Little League game, Daveon was sliding home, caught his cleat on the dirt, and twisted his leg about 180 degrees. Luckily, in neither case did the boys tear anything or cause any lasting damage, and they were both (literally) back on their feet after a few days. I wasn’t so lucky—the sight of one of my kids’ body parts getting mangled made my stomach twist about 180 degrees, and it took me a lot longer than a few days to recover.

For the record, the third major injury was when Mark fractured his wrist. This happened during an after-school dodge ball game, when the custodian (who I’m guessing was older than eleven) wanted to show off his strength by whaling the ball at a bunch of eleven-year-olds. Mission accomplished: The guy must be pretty strong, because the ball caught Mark on the wrist and splintered it (Mark’s wrist, not the ball). Unlike the leg mishaps, this one required a cast, which at least gave Mark the chance to get sympathetic signatures from his classmates—and, I assume, an apologetic one from the custodian. On the bright side, at least I didn’t see this one happen.

Manifestations

Q: What do you do when your kid tells you he’s been waking up with nightmares about dying, or the end of the world?

A:   .....................................................................................................

When I was a kid, I used to have panic attacks in church. The real deal: Heart racing, unable to breathe, fingers twitching, feeling like I was going to explode.* All of those repeated mentions of death and everlasting life completely fried my brain. On the one hand, I experienced images of decomposing in a box. I could feel myself suffocating, which probably isn’t something you worry about when you’re dead—but panic isn’t known for being rational. On the other hand, the thought of sort of hanging out in the clouds forever was equally terrifying—I mean, you just sort of go on and on.

(*If you’ve ever had even one mild panic attack, you have my complete sympathy. They’re the worst.)

It didn’t help that our church was dark, cavernous, and low-ceilinged. Apparently, the design theme was, “Jesus spent three days in a tomb, and during that time, he made a visit to hell. Let us re-create that experience for you every Sunday!”

True to our cold fish nature, my family wasn’t big on the whole express-your-feelings thing—especially when you were a boy, and especially when the feeling was terror. As a result, I pretty much dealt with the attacks as best I could on my own, hoping that the mass would hurry up and get over with before the next one hit, and reminding myself that pretty soon we would be out in the fresh air. In fact, the main reason I stopped going to church had nothing to do with belief, or lack thereof. It was all about the anxiety that any trip through those doors might trigger another episode.

So, when Mark was having his own experiences of terror, it struck a chord. Because the boys and I are big on the whole express-your-feelings thing, he let me know about his nightmares right away. If you ever want to feel helpless, try calming your eight-year-old down about death.

I gave him the usual set of coping techniques that might bring some immediate relief: deep breathing, redirecting thoughts to something more positive. I also reminded him that he should—please— come and get me if he was going through a panic episode—any time, day or night.

Beyond these practical tips, I took it upon myself to dive deeper into the why. Why would a kid who’s basically pretty cheerful and carefree be having these attacks?

My hunch is that these terrors were Mark’s manifestation of whatever fear, anxiety, or panic he felt from the disruptions and lack of stability he experienced early on in his life. Even though, on the surface, he seemed to pretty successfully roll with the punches (and I would call four homes by age four, not to mention physical and possibly sexual abuse, some pretty rough punches), clearly those punches were going to find a way to make themselves known. I basically tried to reinforce—and normalize—the experience that, “You got moved around a lot when you were really little. That is really, really scary for a baby and little kid.” My hope was that by doing so, we could slowly uncork the underlying issues and help abate the outward expressions.

Daveon shared his brother’s focus on morbidity, but from a completely different angle. While Mark had fear around dying, nuclear bombs, and the end of the world, Daveon was fixated on real-life disasters. Even before he actually started reading the paper, Daveon always seemed to find the article on page B17 about the train station bombing in Tehran or the twister that killed seven in Oklahoma. Which he would then comment on in gruesome detail: “Did you know they found a kid with one arm and one leg blown off?” And so on.

Daveon also fixated on his own personal disasters. For the first few years, you could pretty much bet that the first thing he would report when I picked him up from school was his latest bruise, scratch, or scrape, how he fell off his skateboard or crashed into a wall or tripped over a tree root while playing tag. I remember telling him that I looked forward to the day when he no longer thought that his injuries were the most interesting thing about him. Maybe not the most useful thing to say to a ten-year-old.

Here again, it helped to realize that both versions of disaster—personal and global—were manifestations of Daveon’s deep inner wounds. The goal became not to focus on the external symptoms—to stop telling him it was weird to pay so much attention to wildfires or scabs—but to do what I and we could to help heal the inner cause. As with Mark, the best thing I could think to do was to normalize how crappy his early years were. I let both kids know in no uncertain terms that being uprooted and not having a secure center is one of the worst things that can happen to a baby, and whatever fear, anger, sadness, and pain they feel about that is absolutely OK and normal. Even if that means being angry or resentful about our family situation—about not being raised by the woman who birthed them, instead ending up with this random guy in a strange house. Let it all out, kid. Let it out.

I like to think that this approach made some kind of difference. Mark stopped reporting panic attacks, and Daveon grew much more likely to talk about his running times or a new girl he met in school than how he twisted his ankle. It was nice to be able to focus on positive manifestations for a change.

Trayvon Martin

It may be presumptuous for a Caucasian gay man to claim to feel terrified and heartsick at the shooting of Trayvon Martin. But upon hearing the news that day in 2012, this is exactly how I felt.

The horrible truth is that there are many incidents of racial violence toward black males that I could use as starting points for this topic. But the specific case of Trayvon Martin—whose only crime was being a young black male wearing a hoodie, walking in a neighborhood where he had a home—has a particular resonance for me. Whatever the legalities of George Zimmerman using a gun to “stand his ground” if he felt his life was threatened, the simple truth is that he chose—against the direction of law enforcement, whom he contacted for support—to follow an African American male who had every right to be walking those neighborhood streets, however “thug” he might appear.

There’s nothing fair about what happened in Trayvon Martin’s shooting, just as many would argue that there’s nothing fair about growing up black in America.

At the same time, writing about a race-related topic like this makes me nervous. I have black sons, live in a black neighborhood, and count a number of black people among my closest friends. While all of this is true, I never want to come across as if I know anything— even a little—about the black experience. I don’t. But these incidents touch me deeply, and I feel an emotional imperative to try to frame and process them for and with my sons.

When Daveon was in the fourth grade, he used to complain that his teacher—who was not black—used to discipline him for talking. He protested that “everyone else was talking just as much” as he was, and she didn’t say anything to them.

We talked about what might be going on:

• Daveon actually was talking more than the other students, even though he thought he wasn’t.
• He was talking the same as the other students, but maybe his voice was louder than theirs,* so the teacher heard him and not the others.
• The teacher was—consciously or unconsciously—targeting him because he is black.

(*This issue has come up multiple times when either boy is the only African American in a room full of kids. When I worked in a group home with primarily African American kids, this was a common topic of dinnertime conversation—how their normal volume was louder than their nonblack (mostly white) teachers and peers.)

From there, we discussed how he might respond:

• Talk to the teacher. Explain that he felt he was being singled out unfairly, and see if they could work something out.
• Keep doing what he was doing, and accept the consequences.
• Try to be quieter than the other students in order to appear “equal.”

This specific conversation became a template for many others I’ve had with both Daveon and Mark about being young black men in America. In some people’s eyes, you’re not going to be seen as the same. You will be assumed to be a potential troublemaker, a threat. There is nothing fair, or right, or just about this—it just is.

So, if you feel like you are being treated unfairly, you can:

• Try to speak to the person in question to address the situation.
• Keep doing what you’re doing, based on the principle of “I’m not doing anything wrong, so there’s nothing I need to change,” and let the chips fall where they might.
• Try to act “better” than the people around you to be seen as equal.

If this sounds like putting a lot of work on the shoulders of those who are the recipients, rather than the causes, of the problem, I would say, “Yes, it is.” And then I would repeat: “There is nothing fair, or right, or just about this—it just is.”

None of these approaches is the right answer, but I wanted to arm my kids with all of them anyway—along with all of the standard tips about avoiding certain neighborhoods at certain times, not associating with people whose association can lead you into trouble, making smart choices if you are pursued by a stranger or stopped by the police, and so on. I wanted them to understand that they had some choice, some say, in how they responded to unjust profiling.

In a city where a black male is gunned down roughly once per week on average, I feel unbelievably grateful that my kids made it through to an age where they could move on to less statistically risky (if not any less discriminatory) places. It’s my hope that these strategies can in some way help to keep them safe. And I strongly encourage parents of nonwhite kids to take the time to talk through these realities with them. I think white parents especially—having no direct experience of systemic racism—can take an ostrich-head-in-sand approach that convinces itself that detaching from the problem will somehow make it go away. While well-intentioned, this kind of thinking can leave kids unprepared—which might only increase the possibility of them becoming the next victim in a racial horror story.

Papi

This section is a hard one to write, because it involves the biggest mistake I ever made with regard to my kids.

At least, I certainly hope I didn’t make a bigger one.

I met my ex about six months after the kids moved in. I had—and still do, though less often—met a fair number of guys over the years. In almost all cases, the verdict after the first date was: There’s no reason to bother with a second date. But something about this guy . . .

As it turned out, he felt the same way about me. After about two months, he asked if I ever thought about moving beyond casual status into something more. I had, so we did. So far, so . . . OK.

We were together about four months before we decided to take the next step: telling the kids. I came out to my kids pretty much the day they moved in, and they never had any problem with it. Their basic philosophy about Dad’s love life was and is, “So what?”

My ex and I decided that I should tell the kids alone, and we would figure out the next steps based on their reaction. I was driving the kids home from school—it was mid-January, I remember for no particular reason—and the conversation went something like this:

Me: OK you guys, you know [ex’s name], right?

Kids: Yeah.

Me: So, he and I have been hanging out for a while, and now we decided to be boyfriends. What do you think?

Daveon: Great! I always thought you should have a boyfriend.

Mark: OK. What’s for dinner?

I’m pretty sure Daveon made his response up on the spot—I have trouble picturing him lying in bed making lists of “my wishes for Dad.” On the other hand, I’m entirely sure that Mark’s reply was sincere.

The boys called my guy from the car and let him know I told them, and that it was great—or, in Mark’s case, that it was just a random piece of news between now and pork chops. So far, so . . . better.

And then came the mistake.

For the next two or three months after this announcement, the four of us spent most of our time together as a group—often with my ex’s handful of nieces and nephew, who were roughly my kids’ ages. At the end of that time, my ex told me that he wanted a parental role—a change in status with regard to the kids.

This would be a good place to mention that when we weren’t doing family things, my ex and I were usually fighting, threatening to break up, or actually breaking up. Without getting into too much detail, the bottom line is that we were a terrible match. You can take two perfectly fine people, put them together, and have disaster if they aren’t a fit. We were not a fit. You can see now why I’m such a stickler for fit.

So of course when he asked about this second-parent thing, I did what any in-over-his-head person in a troubled relationship (or maybe just what this particular in-over-his-head person in a troubled relationship) would do: I said yes.

The next task was to introduce the kids to the idea, and see how they responded. As before, he and I decided I should do this solo.

Me: So, you guys, what would you think about [name] becoming your other dad?

Daveon: That’s great! I’ve always wanted two dads!*

(*Probably not much higher on the sincerity scale than his first response.)

Mark: OK.*

(* We must have already eaten.)

And then:

Me: OK, so just like I went from Joe to Daddy, he would need a new name. Any suggestions?

Daveon: Hmmm. How about Edgar?

Believe it or not, Edgar didn’t take. Instead, we went with Papi, which my guy liked.

So Papi he was, until he wasn’t. After continuing the cycle of argue/ break up/make up/argue/repeat on endless loop for about two years, we finally called it quits. This was complicated by the fact that he had moved into our home about six months prior—as I mentioned, as mistakes go, I went in whole hog on this one. But we muddled through the breakup and the move-out as best we could. I left it up to him about how to continue his relationship with the kids. This continuation turned out to be sporadic, unpredictable, and ultimately nonexistent.

So I had to eat it, and tell the kids I made a mistake. I let “boyfriend” become “Papi” too quickly, and now that he had gradually disappeared from their lives, I wanted them to throw at me any anger, hurt, resentment, or grief they felt.

They, in their unshakable loyalty, did not.

Telling that news to two kids whose early life history focused on repeated abandonment by adults was one of the hardest moments of my parenting life.

You know how every relationship book ever tells you not to rush and to pay attention to the red flags? When you’re a single parent, you need to blow that up to poster size and hang it in every room in your house. It’s one thing to put your emotional health at risk. There’s no excuse for dragging anyone in your care into the pit as well.

I haven’t been with anyone since.

Harm

I think it’s safe to say that for most, if not all, parents, one of their worst fears is their child coming to harm. The situations and people who can cause harm to your child—whether accidentally or on purpose—are too numerous to count, let alone fully comprehend.

You do your best to prevent this—lectures, pointers, strategies— knowing that, despite your best efforts, the call might come one day that will tilt your world on its axis. But at least for me, nothing prepares you as a parent for the type of harm you didn’t see coming for your kids. I’m referring here to self-harm.

I’m uncomfortable, and unsure, about the level of detail to reveal in our family’s major self-harm experience. I believe that the full story is my son’s to tell. I will say that over a period of about two years—fortunately, on relatively rare occasions compared to many of his peers—my son chose to take out his sadness, negative self-feelings, and rage by attacking not the perpetrators, but the victim: himself. His own body.

In over ten years of parenting at that point, nothing came remotely close to the kick in the gut I experienced—daily, hourly, sometimes more often—during this period. It was most of the seven stages of grief—the ones before acceptance—coupled with terror, coupled with self-recrimination and guilt. It didn’t matter that the deep-seated causes of his pain happened, almost certainly, years before he first walked through my door. It didn’t matter that every parenting workshop, advice book, and mentor trumpeted the line “Good enough is good enough—you don’t need to be perfect” over and over.

All that mattered was that my little boy was a victim of repeated attacks. And that, out of deep buried pain and shame, the perpetrator was himself.

The reactions were, to me, astounding. His school—the one that trumpeted the line over and over to incoming parents, “Trust your kids to us during their time here. We will hold them.”—threatened to kick him out. (For what it’s worth, they did eventually kick him out, for an entirely unrelated reason.) The then-therapist told him, in front of me: “I’m not going to tell you not to do this. If you want to do it, go ahead.”

Even as I write this years later, my jaw clenches.

A few hundred serenity prayers later, I did reach a point where I finally told my son, “As your dad, I can’t see that loving you means just sitting here watching you hurt yourself and not trying to do anything about it. But if you tell me, ‘Dad, yes, the way to show you love me is to just let me do this, and not try to stop it or come up with alternatives or anything,’ then I promise I will.”

I think that conversation (maybe) helped. Something about giving him the power to define the loving action made him, I think, see that having a dad who sat back and did nothing might not feel so good after all.

In any case, that interaction seemed to mark the start of a turnaround. With the help of some very wonderful people and the good thoughts and prayers of many more, my son did get past that period. My own internal recovery took a while longer, but I was eventually able to move past constant-vigilance mode, looking for danger signs. If any of the wonderful people are reading this, I can’t thank you enough.

The experience of trying to find the authentic path to caring for my child also reinforced for me the importance of self-care. Current and future parents, lesson learned: When you are centered, and grounded, and calm, you can be present for your kids in a way that simply isn’t possible when life takes over. Engaging in self-care, whatever that looks like for you—nights out, vacations, naps, grown-up time, it doesn’t matter—not only helps you stay calm in the face of crisis. I firmly believe it may be one of the most effective ways of helping prevent crisis in the first place.

Your kids inherently love you, and you love them. Most kids are pretty good at loving themselves, however battered and bruised they might appear. Make sure that you make loving yourself part of the equation.

Next Chapter: Alice in Wonderland