Four castaways make a family

In adopting three foster children, Rene Denfeld makes a decision to love

from my own childhood mirror.

“I’ll call him Tony Baloney,” my daughter said, dancing around her new little brother. She was now 4 and a shot of pure joy.

We met in his foster home, where his experienced foster parents didn’t mince words. Tony had bounced from home to home. He had serious attachment issues, rage.

Back in our home, Tony pulled down the shower curtain, threw the dog dish at me, bit me, and trashed his room. I often found myself in our bathroom, shaking with anger and disappointment. It’s hard to love a child who doesn’t love you back. But I knew I couldn’t fail Tony.

I decided I would fake it until I made it. When he raged, I told him I loved him. I told him over and over. We saw a child psychiatrist who suggested floor time, a method where you sit with the child for hours on end playing games at his lead. It sounds simple, but it was transformative. Every morning, I woke to find Tony standing by my bed.

“Floor time, Mama? Floor time?” he would ask.

For all his fury, Tony never tried to hurt his sister. She followed any game he wanted to play and took his rages in stride. “He’s afraid we’re going to give him away,” she told me, solemnly.

Slowly, the rages abated until they stopped. One day, he looked up from playing with a truck on the floor, and his eyes were soft, no longer terror-filled.

“You brought me home,” he said. He returned to his truck and said in a quiet, firm voice, “I love you too.”

ACT OF COURAGE

Another six years passed before my caseworker said it again: “I think you would be just right for him.”

This boy, an infant, was a day apart in birthday to Tony, with a strangely similar birth name, but he was pure magic too: Markel Antoine. I looked at his picture a dozen times a day, saying my secret prayer: Please let him be mine.

The answer was yes. Out came the stroller, occupational therapy games and Rolodex of specialists.

His foster parents had been trained to care for medically fragile infants. They had propped him between pillows, and he sat there, his eyes lighting up at the sight of us. Luppi and Tony were now 9 and 7. They held Markel, delighted, in their laps.

I felt like such an old hand by now that I could handle anything. I had learnt to enjoy the process with these so-called difficult children, and it was rewarding to see the growth. Like his siblings, Markel soon flourished.

“Are they siblings?” people often asked when we were out and about, when they realised I had adopted.

“They are now,” I would answer.

“You must be brave,” they would say. I never knew how to respond to that. I never felt brave. Maybe the question assumes we need special courage to mother a child we have never met, but isn’t that true of all children? Even when pregnant, we don’t meet our child until he or she is born.

To be a parent is to step into a great unknown, a magical universe where we choose to love over and over. It is an act of courage no matter what.

“Didn’t you want your own?” people would ask.

“They are my own,” I would say, softly. By adopting from foster care, I became the mother I had needed and rewrote my own story. I got to have a childhood all over again, the right one, filled with cuddles and perseverance, safety and love. If there is such a thing as a cycle of abuse, I broke it over the wheel of my own desire.

It has been 20 years since I first adopted. Luppi, Tony and Markel are now thriving and well adjusted, working and going to school. If you met them, you wouldn’t guess their histories. But if they told you, that would be okay too because there is nothing shameful about their pasts, or mine.

My caseworker had said all those years ago that I would be just right for them. As it turned out, they were just right for me.