By Patty Bamford
I had my daughter, Evelyn, at age thirty-six. I blinked and I was forty. My chances of having a second child were slim, given my age and my partner’s refusal. I wanted Evelyn to have a sibling, but I began to accept that she’d be an only child. When she was four, however, my partner, Alin, and I unexpectedly became foster parents to two-year-old Jaxon, son of Alin’s brother, Dylan. Jaxon’s mom had just died from an overdose of fentanyl. I had barely known her.
Jaxon had already been in foster care with my mother-in-law since age one. After his mom’s death, we took him in. He didn’t ask for his mom because he didn’t seem to remember her. He ate nothing but cantaloupe and downed bottles of milk in twenty seconds flat. Weepy and clingy, Jaxon responded to my rocking him by nestling into my arms. Almost immediately, he called me Mama, which I loved but didn’t encourage because I thought it would offend his dad. We began to see Dylan regularly; he was showing up for all his supervised visits with Jaxon, passing all his drug tests, and eventually was cleared to get his son back.
I watched as Dylan hastily gathered Jaxon’s clothes and toys from our house and drove away to their new apartment. I admired Dylan for regaining his health and reuniting with Jaxon, but I also felt a sad, tight knot in my stomach as I waved goodbye through the window of what had been Jaxon’s bedroom just moments before. I frowned at the empty space. Months passed without seeing either of them. I wondered if Dylan was being a responsible parent, and when I learned he had a new girlfriend, I feared she would become more of a mother figure to Jaxon than I was.
At four o’clock in the morning on the Wednesday after Memorial Day, Alin woke me to say that his brother Dylan was dead. Fentanyl overdose. Four-year-old Jaxon moved back in with us the same day. That night, Jaxon and Evelyn sat cross legged on the floor while my mother-in-law, Alin, and I faced them from the couch. Alin did the talking.
He said something to the effect of, Jaxon, your dad died last night in the hospital. His body stopped working and he won’t be coming back, but he loved you so much. I don’t recall the exact words here, but my memory of Jaxon’s reaction is clear.
“No!” he yelled and slapped his hands to his face to cover it. Then he peeked out the side to look at Evelyn who was stunned and confused. Long minutes passed in stillness, until both kids climbed onto the couch and the five of us hugged and cried. Quietly, Jaxon left the room and I heard him ask Alexa to play “It’s Raining Tacos,” his favorite song at the time. We found him in the kitchen, shifting to the music with heavy, sad movements. Following his lead, we joined in and I wondered if this was strange or even inappropriate, but there was really nothing else to do in that moment.
In the days and weeks after, Jaxon’s main question was “Why won’t my dad come back?” I repeated that his body had stopped working, and that he can no longer walk or eat like we can. Another frequent question was, “Why did my dad die?” I replied that he had a disease; that he was sick and didn’t know it. During those weeks, we did our best to keep routines: school, daycare, work, and self-care. For me, that included some yoga. I remember going to a class and telling the yoga teacher, whom I’d known for years, what had happened. I added that I had always wanted another child, but not this way. The teacher pulled at his beard and chuckled.
“You see, that’s the thing,” he said. “When we ask for what we want, we must be very specific.”
I think I nodded, but I was unsettled by what I had admitted out loud and by the teacher’s response. I felt guilty. I remembered the times I had told myself that I could take better care of Jaxon. Then when a sanctimonious colleague of mine learned about the situation, she nodded knowingly and told me, “Blessings work in mysterious ways.” This, too, was distressing to hear. I again felt guilt, as well as an enormous sense of responsibility. That’s when the permanence of the situation sank in.
It’s been two and a half years since Jaxon joined our family. For most of that time, we have been in a global pandemic. We officially adopted him, and he alternates between calling me Titi and Mama, and my partner, Uncle Alin and Dad. Although Jaxon has no recollection of his mother, we have occasional contact with his mother’s siblings. He holds on to memories of his father and used to retell them at least once a week, such as the time they got a flat tire or the Halloween when his dad dressed as Pikachu. Stories like these seem to be slipping away, but we work with a family bereavement center which focuses on keeping memories alive. We’ve attempted some individual therapy for him, too.
In many ways, Jaxon is making progress. For one thing, he’s slowly grappling with his fear of water. When he first lived with us when he was two, he barely stepped foot in the tub without shrieking in terror. Now at age six, he goes chest deep in lakes, oceans, and has begun to tackle swimming pools, too. Sometimes I even hear him singing in the shower and he enjoys drawing hearts and smiley faces in the fog of the glass shower door. There are also so many challenges, like his infuriating defiance and ongoing bathroom issues. The latter taxes my patience like nothing else. Several times he has said he hates me and twice that he wants to kill me, but every night he says, “I love you,” and insists on at least three bedtime hugs.
In June, when I picked him up from school on the last day of kindergarten, he was proudly holding a helium balloon of an owl perched upon the word “Graduate.” We drove home and as soon as he hopped out of the car into our driveway, he released the balloon. I scolded him for letting it go, but he explained he was sending it to heaven to tell his dad that he had graduated from kindergarten. The notion of heaven in the sky had been introduced to Jaxon by his mom’s side of the family. I don’t hold this belief myself; in fact, I don’t know what I believe, and I’m finally able to shrug freely about that. In that moment with the graduating owl balloon, however, it was so painfully beautiful to hear his reason for sending it skyward. I held his hand, and we watched the balloon float up and grow small.
Jaxon continues to have a profound curiosity and desire to make sense of things. Often when it’s just the two of us driving in the car, I’m floored by his questions like, “When I die, will I see my dad, or God, or will it all be black?” I try to answer as honestly as I can. Recently he also inquired about the exact time and location of the end of the world and, unsatisfied with my vague response, he kept rephrasing the question, hoping for more clarity.
What is clear is that Jaxon is now an integral part of our family. I give him love and remind myself to be firm. Someone once told me that a good parent is a loving brick wall and I try to enact this metaphor with both my kids. When I start projecting into the future about the rebellion and experimentation of their teen years, or about Jaxon’s proclivity toward addiction, I stop. I can no longer allow myself the kind of existential questions that Jaxon has. I just don’t know and that’s enough. I try to stay in the day and show up for the kid with love, even when he says he wants to kill me. I don’t know if all of this is a mysterious blessing that I asked for, as those presumptuous hippies suggested. I do know that Jaxon’s birth parents had a disease that rendered them unable to be here. I think they’d be proud of the person he’s becoming, one day at a time.