I’M 30 AND MY SON IS 20
NYC teacher 'adopts' college student
Most New Yorkers would feel lucky to find a dollar on the subway. But Matthew Greene found something better: a son.
Greene, a 30-year-old teacher who lives in Harlem, first met Mohammed Ndiaye, 20, in 2011 at the local church where Matthew was a youth minister. “He was a nice guy, very genuine,” the younger man told The Post. And Ndiaye, then 14 years old, really needed a pal like that: “I grew up in the foster system, and it was rough for me,” he said. “My life was a series of unfortunate events.”
His dad left “before he could walk,” and his mom, who struggles with mental illness, relinquished Ndiaye into foster care when he was 7.
Things grew worse in 2013, when Ndiaye moved to a new foster home. “It was the coldest winter of my life,” he said. “I had to steal food to survive.” He was overwhelmed and struggling — but instead of reaching out, he isolated himself.
“I was worried about him,” said Greene, who recalled his multiple calls to Ndiaye going unreturned. The two didn’t speak again until January 2015, when a typical morning commute turned miraculous.
Greene, en route to his job running an after-school theater program, hopped on a downtown 2 train at 135th Street — and did a double take. There, sitting across from him, was Ndiaye. The young man was on his way to school in Soho and looking worse for wear, thanks to 13 stitches under his left eye.
Greene greeted him and said, “Gimme a call if you need anything.” By the time he got off the train, he had a voice mail from the teen, asking if they could meet up.
The next day, over burgers at Harlem Shake, Ndiaye opened up. After leaving a foster home in 2011, he’d been moved to a new placement that was “not a good situation.”
The gash under his eye was from an “altercation” in the house: Someone had smashed a glass bowl into his face. The cupboards were bare, and his belongings — down to his underwear — were repeatedly stolen. He was also sick with bad allergies, so Greene bought Ndiaye some medicine at CVS. That small act of kindness touched the teen, and the two continued their lunch meetings. Greene tried to help him with the fundamentals: food and a sympathetic ear. Still, he worried it wasn’t enough. A few months into their rekindled mentorship, Greene received a call from Ndiaye: He’d been hospitalized with a concussion. (Ndiaye declined to discuss the incident.) “I was the responsible adult he called,” Greene said.“That was a big shift.” While fielding calls from doctors and the teen’s caseworker, he had a crazy idea: Why not just become Ndiaye’s foster parent himself?
“It was insane,” he admitted. “But I couldn’t think of anything else.”
For the most part, Greene’s friends and family were “surprised and shocked.” One co-worker flat-out told him he was nuts. Then his own father said, “That’s definitely crazy, but life is about doing the right crazy things.” Tentatively, Greene pitched the idea to Ndaiye.
The teen’s first reaction was a hard no. “That’s a lot for someone to take on. I didn’t want to put that on him,” recalled Ndiaye, who had bounced around more than a dozen foster homes. But over their next few lunches, they discussed hypotheticals, and he started to come around.
Greene broached the topic with the foster agency, which also thought he was “crazy.”
“They’d never seen a situation like this,” he said. (Late-teen adoptions, like Emma Thompson’s informal adoption of a 16-yearold former Rwandan child soldier in 2003, are rare. Adult adoptions are so unusual that the National Council for Adoption doesn’t track the numbers.) But Greene persisted, and in 2016 he became Ndiaye’s legal foster parent.
They admit to some growing pains. Ndiaye moved into Greene’s apartment and initially found the stability so unsettling that he “tried to create problems.” Greene, for his part, says dating is “tricky” now: “Guys I meet react in lots of different ways,” he said. Some get “weird.” The bright side, he said, is that his situation is “a pretty effective litmus test” for weeding out unworthy men.
So what’s it like for a 30-year-old dude to have a 20-year-old son? Well, it helps not to think of it as a traditional father-son relationship, the guys agreed. “I’d say our relationship is somewhere on the brother-uncle spectrum,” Ndiaye said.
Last year, about nine months after the guardianship became official, the two took an emotional journey to Senegal, where Ndiaye’s birth father was from, through the travel company Passion Passport. There, Ndiaye met his relatives for the first time. Although he said it was “really melancholy and heavy,” he’s glad he went. “It’s important to know where you come from.”
Now, one year into their new family life, the guys have established a good rhythm. Ndiaye is majoring in media studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and the two are traveling to Sacramento, Calif., for Christmas, where the young man will meet Greene’s family for the first time.
“This experience has expanded my understanding of what a family can be,” Greene added. “We’re letting go of labels. Who your family is — it’s the people close to you.”
It was insane. i But I couldn’t think of anything g else. Matthew Greene on the decision to become a foster father to an in-need foster youth