Blue Nights

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.

Patti Smith sang her a lullaby that she had written for her own son.

In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age

All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural. They are programmed, by the unique circumstances of their introduction into the family structure, to see abandonment as their role, their fate, the destiny that will overtake them unless they outrun it.

New neurologists remain the last true believers in the power of wishful thinking.

I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.

Dreaming in other words that I had failed.

Been given a baby and failed to keep her safe.

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the “blessing” aspect.