Chapter 1 — Everyone Warned Me

Everyone warned me not to adopt him.

He was sixteen years old and had already been through ten different placements across the state of Ohio.

Ten families who had taken him in and then, for one reason or another, eventually given him back, the way you return something that turned out not to fit.

Ten living rooms.

Ten sets of house rules to learn.

Ten times being the new child at a strange dinner table, and ten times packing a bag again.

I have thought a great deal, since, about what ten goodbyes do to a child.

An adult can absorb a goodbye; we have context for it, other relationships to fall back on, a self that exists independent of any one home.

A child does not.

A child is built out of the place he lives and the people who keep him, and when you take those away and give him new ones, and then take those away too, over and over, you are not simply moving him.

You are disassembling and reassembling him, again and again, until he stops letting himself fully exist in any version, because existing has only ever led to being taken apart.

People looked at his file — and it was a thick file, the kind that makes caseworkers sigh before they open it — and they saw a troubled teenager who would bring nothing but chaos into a quiet home.

They told me so plainly.

A boy that age, with that history, they said, was a risk a woman alone did not need to take.

He would act out.

He would break things.

He would break my heart, and then he would leave anyway, because that was all he knew how to do.