Or, how one guy’s bright idea turned into two living, breathing (and very cute) mouths to feed. This section describes how I came to actually meet my kids—and gives two short introductions to allow you to meet them, also.

The Visits

As you may recall, the binder where I found my kids was the one for my local county. This was great news, because it meant less of a physical transition for them. Or so I thought.

What I found out, after my worker (Heather) connected with theirs (Amy), was that they actually lived in a little town about four hours away from my town. Even though the boys were wards of my county, Amy had, a couple of years earlier, found the best placement with Ms. Reed, a grandmotherly type who was doing foster care in a tiny—like, one main street tiny—town way down in the valley. So much for best-laid plans.

For the first visit, in early December, Heather and I made the four-hour drive together through the most boring landscape ever. Think post-apocalyptic brown hills, and throw in some nasty cow smell for spice. The visit itself was scheduled for an hour, which meant we were looking at an eight–to–one driving time–to–visit time ratio. Amy, who was also based in our town, made the drive separately—same scenery. Which means you had three adults, driving a total of sixteen hours, for this one-hour look at the kids.

But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is: For your first visit, there’s no commitment on anybody’s part—you’re just meeting. Because of this, the kids were not supposed to know who I was. Heather and I were going to be there as “Amy’s friends.”

What actually happened was this: That morning, before we arrived, the foster mom told the boys, “Your new dad is coming today.” I should have known something was up—from the minute I got there, a supposed stranger, the boys seemed awfully happy to see me. In retrospect, I suppose this is better than them knowing who I was and being awfully unhappy to see me. I guess I owe Ms. Reed a belated thanks, even if she went outside the lines.

Anyway: On the appointed day, we showed up at the house. It was “rural California ordinary”: two-car garage, manicured lawn, big open combo living/dining room with the most humongous TV I’ve ever seen (which, apparently, was on 24/7), three bedrooms off a hall to the right. The youngsters who lived there, however, were anything but ordinary. Two bundles of crazy-cute energy. One small, slim-featured, darker, gregarious. The other fairer, larger, broader, holding a little more in reserve.

The six of us sat in the dining room and chatted a bit. Then the boys and I went outside and played some wall dodgeball and Nerf football in the cul-de-sac next to the house. They cheated at both games blatantly and often—shades of things to come. I asked them questions about the important stuff: favorite TV shows, favorite sports and games, favorite foods, etc. They answered easily and pleasantly, with Mr. Gregarious mostly running the show. I learned the famous “Jellyfish Jelly Sandwich” song from Spongebob Squarepants—clearly, these guys were into high art. (They were also, later, into opening the car windows when I was driving and shouting out the windows, “Hey, man! You’ve got to try this sandwich!/It’s no ordinary sandwich!/It’s the tastiest sandwich in the sea.”)

After our appointed hour, Heather and I drove home. So far, so good. No red flags.

The second trip, I went down by myself for the weekend—the drive–to–visit time ratio was getting better here. I stayed in a funky B and B about twenty minutes away from their town, with the idea that we would spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons together, getting them home in time for dinner. I remember two outings: one to an airplane museum, where we saw, you know, airplane stuff, and one to the movies. I think it was an animated Disney film called Treasure Planet, but all I really remember is that Mark got a headache and we had to leave about halfway through. Maybe a slightly pale pink flag? Did being around me make him sick?

I guess not, because we scheduled our next round of visits to coincide with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Fortunately, the driving gods clearly decided I had done enough. Ms. Reed had an adult daughter who lived less than forty-five minutes from me. Ms. Reed and the boys were going to stay with the daughter for about two weeks over the holidays. On December 23, Heather called me to see if the boys could come by that afternoon and stay through the 26th—basically, instant family Christmas. Which was fine, except at that point, I didn’t have anywhere for them to sleep. This resulted in my dear friend Aunt Leigh and I having a frantic, curse-filled IKEA bunk-bed-building speed-date. Who knew Swedes were so evil?

On this initial in-our-house visit, we had our first taste of family magic. Being a single dude cottage-dweller for many years prior, I didn’t really do Christmas. I hadn’t bought a tree in . . . well, maybe ever. I didn’t have any decorations or lights, not even a stocking. On December 24 (after a good night’s sleep in their new bed), the boys and I made the trek out to get some basics. The store where we bought the ornaments, tinsel, and other goodies had one tree left on the lot. They gave it to us for free.

Not a bad start.

I have a picture from that visit of the boys standing on my bed, waving—their heads not even touching the ceiling. (Our bedrooms have extremely low ceilings.) Given how enormous they are now, that picture, which has a permanent home on my fridge, is pretty much guaranteed to bring me as close to tears as my cold fish self gets. So much yet to come . . .

Anyway, I brought the kids back to the foster mom on December 26, and we repeated the cycle the next week: The boys came up just before New Year’s and stayed with me through the holiday, and I drove them back to Ms. Reed a day or two later. This visit was apparently a bit less magical—no free trees, and my only clear memory is sending them to bed by 9:00 on New Year’s Eve, because they were being such buttheads. As with most so-called crises through our time together, a few days later I couldn’t even tell you what the problem was. It couldn’t have been too bad, though, because ten days later, they were . . . 

Moving In

January 11, 2003, is and probably always will be the most important day of my life.

(Sorry, future husband—our first date or anniversary will have to settle for a tie.)

That was the day the kids stopped coming to see me for visits, and came to stay with me for good.

Being smart, I realized that moving two lives would require something larger than my Camry. With that in mind, I borrowed Marge and Cindy’s (Max’s moms) minivan for the move. I also borrowed Max to come with me. It seemed appropriate that I ended up driving the van of two of my parenting heroes, with the kid who pointed me firmly on the path to fatherhood, to pick up my kids.

Max and I made the four-hour trek (still boring) without incident. Our time at the house was minimal: A quick visit with the foster mother, packing the van with the boys’ very little bit of stuff—suitcases with clothes, some books, stuffed animals—and climbing in. Within an hour, we were heading back to home and the start of our new life.

I would love to hear from other fost-adopt parents what they experienced when they picked up their kids for that final transition. I don’t know what I expected. Tears? Screams? Clutching to the door frame, refusing to leave?

What I got instead were two kids, pleasant as could be, sitting in the back of this strange car with this strange man (plus a teenager who was really a stranger), as if we were longtime friends going out on a Sunday drive (ignoring the fact that it wasn’t Sunday). It was so . . . undramatic? normal? . . . that I can’t even say much about the conversation, although I’m sure there were some jellyfish-jelly-sandwich-out-the-window  moments.

The only snippet I remember clearly is this:

Me: You know, I have a new name now.

Boys: What is it?

Me: It’s Daddy. I’m not Joe anymore.

That took about three days to sink in. During that time, if one or the other kid asked a question or made a comment to Joe, I would reply with, “Who is this Joe person? I know you’re talking to somebody, but I don’t know who that is.”

Like I say, three days.

I was—and, unbelievably, still am—fortunate. I mean, really, really fortunate. We had our honeymoon as expected, but what no one expected was that on some very real levels, the honeymoon has never ended. The reasons are as different as the kids themselves.

For Daveon, who turned seven the week before I picked him up, there was—and continues to be—such an amazing, intense feeling of gratitude that finally, really, after so many false starts, here was home. And this guy who is (after a handful of others) calling himself Daddy is going to be the one that sticks—the one I never have to leave. Over the years, we actually had to work against this deep gratitude somewhat— to help Daveon feel OK to get mad at me, speak his mind, let me know what isn’t working. Trust me, it’s very weird to encourage your kid to yell at you once in a while. But that fundamental gratitude survives, and it has been a true gift in our relationship.

Mark, on the other hand, let his cheerful self-centeredness—accompanied by his charming air-headedness—set the tone. From day one, it never really occurred to him that anything unusual was going on. He used to live in one place; now he lived in another. This guy was Dad, and as long as there was food on the table and not too much yelling, life was good. Again, that basic stance has carried through to the present day.

I think it says a lot that over the first few months, the biggest behavioral “issue” we faced was training my seven-year-old to let me know when he was hungry, rather than just going to the refrigerator or cabinet and grabbing things at will. This training had less to do with food itself than with what I will call, for lack of a catchier term, my “philosophy of structure.” More on that later. But first, let me introduce you to the stars of our show.

Daveon

Asking a parent to describe his or her kids in a few hundred words is like reading the Cliffs Notes to Shakespeare. It can work, but you lose a lot in the translation. Nonetheless, since they are the raison d’ être of this book, I will attempt to give a snapshot of each kid. Hopefully I can convey at least a bit of the kids’ truly colorful natures, however muted they might come across.

We start with Daveon.

Several years ago, I once told Daveon he was my prince. He looked at me as though I had called him my warthog.* But I meant it. Lots of kids go through adversity, and lots of them rise above to become leaders, creators, and inspirers.

(*For the record, I’ve never called anyone a warthog.)

But only Daveon is Daveon.

When the boys and I met in December 2002, Daveon was a month shy of his seventh birthday. He had been placed with Ms. Reed about two years prior—it was, at the time, his seventh home. (You read that correctly: seven homes in less than seven years.) County records for foster kids are notoriously sketchy (prospective fost-adopt parents, take note), and Daveon’s were no exception. They contained almost no information about why he had to move so often, other than to state that there were problems with the placement. In this phrasing, “placement” is code for “supposed caretakers.”

Here is an example: At one of Daveon’s placements, the foster father took Daveon with him to the gym. Daveon—we’ll assume he was in the childcare room, not on the weight floor—was being fussy, so the father brought him home. And left him there. Alone. Daveon wandered outside through the garage, and locked himself out.

He was three years old at the time.

Daveon has always been small for his age—his birth mother stands four feet nine. He is a runner, dancer, DJ, saxophonist, and rapper. He may also be in the running for world’s greatest Harry Potter fan, having read all the books, watched all the DVDs (in addition to movies four through eight in theaters), and listened to all the stories on CD— most of them twice. For years he played Little League, and baseball was his sport. He was, by his own admission,* a mediocre player at best, and when everyone got older and the stakes were higher, he decided it just wasn’t fun anymore. So he quit—in the middle of a season, in the middle of a game.

(*Full disclosure: Daveon only made this admission when he got a little older. In his early years he fashioned himself a Little League All-Star, which would make him the only All-Star in history who went through an entire season without a hit.)

This changed somewhat over the years, but for most of our time together, Daveon’s most notable trait was that he tried. Tried hard. Very, very hard. Often too hard. He wanted good grades, lots of friends, people to like him. He—for reasons that are pretty easy to understand— hated when anyone was mad at him. When younger, he would run to the corner of the classroom and cry if a teacher reprimanded him. And by reprimand, I mean, gently asked him to stay in the line instead of wandering the other direction down the hallway. Ironically—or maybe not—while for many parents the goal is continually to encourage their kids to be more responsible, self-disciplined, and goal-focused, for Daveon it has been in many ways the opposite: trying to get him to relax, to understand it’s OK to mess up, to believe that there’s someone (really, a lot of someones) here who will carry the load. All anyone asks is that he do his best. But not necessarily his trying very hard best.

Other things changed over the years, generally for the better. When Daveon moved in, he had a slew of food and environmental allergies. Now he has none. (He claims one to peanuts, although I’m pretty sure that’s just code for “I don’t like them.”) Though still small, adolescence helped him catch up from tiny to low normal. When we scuffled in later years—you know, once every other year—it was about dumb teenage stuff that was appropriate for his age and stage. Which, I guess, is a healthy sign. His behavior was that of a normal teenager.

(Another thing that changed has been his ability to accurately hear song lyrics. For a kid who liked to sing loudly and often—if tunelessly—there was nothing better than to listen to him shout along with Chic [“Aaaah, freak out! Shake shake, shake shake!”] or Donna Summer [“I need some hot sauce baby this evening! Hot sauce baby tonight!”]. Personally, I consider this change a loss.)

Daveon has, as you might guess, had a number of challenges over the years, many based on negative self-image and self-directed anger. He is the classic example of a kid who figured it was his fault he got moved around so much, so there must be something wrong with him. I will write more about this later—for now, suffice it to say he sometimes expressed his negative feelings in ways that ended up harming him and making his path even more challenging.

But through it all, Daveon has always been a kid willing to listen, to accept responsibility, to work at change. That’s where the prince bit comes in. There have been times when we’ve needed a break from one another for the sake of everyone’s sanity, but I’ve never been more impressed by anyone tackling—and, fingers crossed, overcoming—their demons as I have by my little big man Daveon.

Mark

Part two of my perhaps-misguided attempt to describe each of my kids in less than 1,000 words. Luckily, I only have two kids.

To get the obvious out of the way: Mark is a figure skater. This statement covers about seventy-five percent of his reality. For many years, he faithfully went to the downtown ice rink in our city, every day, for two or more hours after school. On Mondays and Fridays, he also went for two hours before school. And for good measure, he tacked on three hours on Saturdays.

Over a three-year period, Mark advanced six skating levels (out of eight). The technical skating term for this is “wow.” It would be like completing six school grades in two years. In 2013, he came within three spots of competing for the national title for his level. After a disappointing finish in 2014, he actually made nationals at the Novice level (that’s level six) in 2015. (For the curious, I will cover Mark’s skating life in excruciating detail later in the book.)

Mark lives in a world of what I like to call cheerful self-centeredness, coupled with a healthy dose of obliviousness. Whatever scars he has from his early experiences—and I know they’re there—they don’t seem to cut very deep. Until a few years ago, in fact, he thought that Ms. Reed was his birth mother. Never mind that she was his fourth placement. He says he can’t remember the first three. I believe him.

In many ways, Mark and his brother could not be more different. He is a big, strapping kid—at fifteen, he hit my height, and he wears a larger shoe than me—and he lives much more in his body than in his head. For many years, he played the violin and was (and probably still is) addicted to game, reality, and cooking shows (plus, more recently: zombies)—very highbrow stuff, indeed. I used to say he would spend all of his free time in front of the television if I didn’t make him get up once in a while. The joke was on me when his high school began requiring all students to have iPads—a sin for which I will never forgive them. On the one hand, Mark spent proportionately less time watching TV and proportionately more in his room with his Wi-Fi-connected tablet. Exclusively doing homework, I’m sure.

One way Mark and Daveon are definitely alike is that they share an absolute terror of being in trouble. Neither boy can remember anything happening to them in their past in terms of abuse, and the records don’t contain anything specific. But it’s clear that, whether as the result of specific incidents or just the accumulated effects of trauma moving homes so often, “doing something wrong” is a scary place to be avoided at all costs. For Mark, this first revealed itself one weekend morning when I went to wake him up, and couldn’t find him. He was five and had been in the house a few months only, and all my alarms went off. Where was he? What if he wandered off? What if he was too scared about this new living situation and ran away?

I’ll never know what prompted me to look under the bed. (Yes, I do. Magic.) But there he was, still asleep on the floor (carpeted, fortunately—we sleep downstairs, it was winter, and those floors are cold). I asked him what happened, and he told me he wet the bed. I was curious why he didn’t just come get me, and then one of those inspired-parent moments hit.

Me: You used to get in trouble for wetting the bed, didn’t you?

Big nod.

Me: Did you get spanked? Another nod.

So hiding—and potentially freezing—was a better alternative than whatever being in trouble might bring. As he grew older, Mark continued to exhibit more subtle, age-appropriate displays of this aversion. Think lying, blaming, denying—the whole Family Circus gang of ghosts. (Three points if you get that reference.)

Another way this anxiety used to reveal itself was Mark’s obsessive need to know exactly what was expected, what was coming up, what would be happening, and when—a total clampdown on the unknown. One of his recurring questions was, “After we’re done [whatever we are doing], what are we going to do next?” Never mind the fact that the thing we were doing was going to take three hours, and we were only five minutes in. For example, asking “What are we doing after dinner?” when our butts had barely made it into the seats. Inquiring minds needed to know.

This habit lightened up quite a bit as Mark got older, maybe (hopefully) as a result of understanding that we can kind of go with the flow and make things up as we go along, and nothing bad is going to happen.

Or maybe he just got tired of my sarcastic answers, which usually involved some variation on, “After this, we’re cleaning all the rooms in the house. With toothbrushes.”

Mark can be kind of monotone and withdrawn in new situations, especially around adults. But put him in an environment where he feels safe and happy, and he completely lights up. His passion and focus are remarkable to see, and however big he gets, he will always be my lovely little boy.

Next Chapter: Alike