The Dysfunction of Food

chicken nuggets: january 21 

We are at a McDonalds in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

By we, I mean me, my husband, David and I. We’re waiting for our foster children’s biological parents, Chrissy and Jay.

This McDonalds is dismal. Meth-Donalds, I call it secretly, because later in the evening, it’s often filled with tweekers shooting up in the bathroom or sliding through their heroin highs and lows over coffee. Or maybe it feels dismal-as-fuck because what we are doing is dismal-as-fuck. We are stuffed into a tiny booth, David and me on one side, jammed up together, the seat across from us dead-empty. The table is sticky. There are french fry bits all over the seat. 

And Chrissy is late. 

Chrissy is always late. And not by a little. Not like 5 minutes or something. She is 45 minutes late to everything. But I get why she is late this time. This is not going to be fun. This is the thing she has been running from. The thing she feeds with heroine, morphine, oxy and fentanyl. Whatever she can get her hands on. 

We are a half-hour into the wait, and David is sipping a coffee. I have a Diet Coke. Jay finally lumbers in. He is white, but his skin is a deep caramel, because of how much time he spends outdoors under the intense desert sun. He is tall, broad-shouldered, with dopey blue eyes. Our one-year-old, Desi, his biological daughter, has his eyes. The same color, the same shape that makes her, and him, look a little like sloths. 

We wait for Chrissy to come. 

Jay makes some excuses. But we all know why she isn’t here. 

We buy coffees for Jay and for Chrissy, when she comes. We chit-chat. How are you? How is work? Jay is one of the costumed characters hustling tourists on the Strip. Or he sets up on Downtown’s frenetic Fremont Street and makes palm roses and crucifixes, which he sells to tourists. He shows us photos of himself dressed as The Hulk or Captain American or whatever and adds a few mounds of sugar to his coffee. 

Jay tells us he is living in a pay-by-the-week hotel nearby. I know this place. On TripAdvisor, they call it “Roachland” because it’s overrun with roaches, bed bugs and the occasional scorpion. Reviewers are writing “Run! Before the roaches get you!” He lives with a few other people in a one-bedroom there. A sort of commune for panhandlers. When someone leaves – and they always do – he will bring Chrissy in, so she can live in Roachland, too. 

Although Desi was born into foster care, Raffi, her five-year-old older brother, was born into Roachland. 

He was born into dingy pay-by-the-week apartments, and moving all the time, and dirty clothes, and passed-out parents, the police showing up, and eating Happy Meals for dinner. McDonalds means family to him. It is etched into his bones and sinews and neural pathways, more a part of him than noodles with butter or Kraft Mac and cheese.

Although most of the research out there shows that rich people eat just as much fast food as poor people, my personal experience as a foster parent, is that people living deeply in the margins, drug-addicted with highly-unstable lives, depend a lot on fast food to get from one day to the next. McDonalds is a big part of that.  

This is especially true for kids bounced around in foster care. For them, McDonalds is consistency and permanence – the burger will always taste the same, the nuggets, the fries, they will never change. And wherever you go, whatever family takes you in this time, no matter how many times you move, the Play Place rocks the same colors, the same netting, the same slides and tunnels. The same smell. The same place to take off your shoes and push them into the little shoe holder that is the same in every franchise. 

As foster parents, our first move after picking up new kids is to hang out at McDonald’s before anything else. They know this place. It’s a neutral place to size us up, meet the other kids in the home, run around and laugh for a bit. To say we spend a good deal of time in McDonalds is probably an under-statement.

We are McDonald’s Lifers. 

For the homeless, addicted and the hardest-struggling in our communities, McDonalds offers such luxuries as Wi-Fi, cheap food, bathrooms, outlets for phone charging, and a lenient staff who often allow people to hang out in booths, sipping coffee. This is why the bathrooms of this particular Boulder Highway McDonalds can be filled with people shooting up, or cleaning up in the sinks. This McDonalds serves it’s community, an area of weeklies and homeless camps, addicts looking for buys, and prostitutes picking up dudes at Lowes or truck drivers passing by. 

McDonalds, I think, is a lens for seeing, really seeing, a neighborhood. 

Chrissy finally shows up. I take a sip of my Diet Coke. I have my own deep and ugly love for diet soda. 

She stays outside. I see her, but she doesn’t come in. She stalks the sidewalk. She smokes and stalks. An older guy drops his chicken nuggets in the doorway. No-one picks them up. The door bangs open, in and out. Chrissy doesn’t notice, her eyes are on the sidewalk.

The nugs are there, on the floor, the whole time we are there. This food is both important and disposable. A necessary dysfunction. 

Chrissy’s fingers tremble a little as she holds the cig to her lips. She is palpably nervous. Jay goes out to her. Brings her the coffee. They stay outside, talking and stalking.

She drops her butt on the ground  and comes in.

We are here to negotiate the open adoption of our foster children, Raffi and Desi. Both share Chrissy as a mom, and Jay is Desi’s biological father. Jay met Chrissy when she was five months pregnant with Raffi and, to his credit, cared for him as if he were his own flesh and blood. 

That care, unfortunately, was not adequate. 

Raffi was found at the intersection of 15th and Fremont Streets, a sketchy block of abandoned, ramshackle hotels, from Vegas’ mid-century heyday, and shitty weekly apartments. He was alone, three-years-old, walking the family dog in the wee hours of the morning, in one of the most dangerous sections of the city.  Chrissy and Jay were passed out. 

Raffi was taken into foster care and never left. Desi was birthed on a scorching sidewalk in August, somewhere on Bonanza, outside a convenience store. Another bleak and aching part of town. Chrissy was too hopped up on black tar heroin to notice the contractions. Desi, in the first days of her life, did a step-down methadone program to ween her off opioids. Chrissy, according to a friend, drank through both pregnancies, mostly vodka.

Chrissy starts to cry as she sits down. Jay grabs her leg. I grab her hand. I don’t have any words to describe this moment, knowing she is giving her children to us. But it is not a gift. She would take them back to Roachland in a minute. 

In a few months, the courts will most likely terminate her rights. We know it. She knows it, too. Chrissy has not worked her program. She screams at caseworkers, hangs up when the Department of Family Services calls, lets her druggie friends get on the phone and yell at her social worker. She refuses to tell DFS where she lives or let them come out for a home visit, because she is almost always homeless or on the edge of it. She misses about half her scheduled visits with the kids. She is the definition of non-compliant. 

She is digesting the idea that there is no more fight or recourse. I can see it dawning on her, as we sit across the table, holding onto her, holding her together. 

We talk for a bit about the kids, and I show her a video of the baby trying to say the word “pumpkin” which comes out “pom-pom.” It is so adorable, we all have to laugh, and it pops the boil of the moment, and gives us space to breathe.

Then to business. 

Chrissy asks for every holiday with the kids.  She wants us to give them overnights. They want us to drop the kids for Christmas dinners and birthdays. Chrissy cries when she finds out we won’t be co-parenting, making decisions together, sharing the children. 

She is going to lose her kids. It’s really going to happen this time. 

She is gasping for air. 

Jay squeezes her knee some more. He is wiping his eyes. I hold her hands, as if that will catch her from back sliding off the cliff of her own despair. The door bangs open and shut. A couple teenagers are leaving now. They do not notice us. They fly right by the nugs on the floor. They don’t notice that, right in front of them, someone’s world is completely caving in. It’s like this huge thing is happening, the world is rocking, back and forth in an ocean of roiling saddness, and it is unremarkable to the world. 

“I just want Raffi and Desi to be happy,” Jay says, all of a sudden. 

We all turn to him. It is part-selflessness, part-love, but also experience. He has lost a child before. He has barely been a father to his 16-year-old daughter. Chrissy cannot catch her breath. She isn’t ready to let them go. And my mother-heart gets it. 

But my mother-heart also hurts for Raffi and Desi. Because she wrecked Raffi, and the damages he’ll carry because of her, will be with him his whole life. It will be a miracle if he can get out from under it. 

When Raffi was taken into foster care at age three, he spoke just seven words. He could barely understand simple directions, as if those synapses and neurons hadn’t yet formed in his brain. In our house, at age four and a half, he didn’t know the simplest things, like what a vacation was (he thought we were moving) and had never been to a birthday party, so he didn’t understand the order of events – play, pizza, singing, cake, presents, etc. or why one kid gets gifts and the others don’t. 

He was sickly pale, his muscles flabby from too much sitting around and eating junk food, and he was so constipated, and hadn’t pooped in so long, that he was in constant discomfort, afraid to go to the bathroom for fear of the pain. 

And he was hungry a lot in those formative years, so he hoarded food. He had anxiety around how much food was left. And when and how he could get it. Is there enough? Enough food, enough love? It is always the question for him.

Sometimes now, when he asks for food, I offer him a hug, my kind words. He always takes them. They are inextricable from each other. 

This is not uncommon for kids who have been hungry. Their developing brains are wired to know that even the most basic forms of safety (being fed) do not exist, or exist minimally or inconsistently. Their hunger means that the world is an insecure place. They are not safe. They can’t trust they will be cared for. While food itself is not love, the act of feeding IS love. Babies who are loved are also fed. Babies who are fed are also loved. That is how the brain processes food and why food and love are often connected in our stories and memories.

And hunger derides attachment. Hunger means you love me (when there is food) and then don’t love me (when there is no food) and now, you do, and whoops, you don’t. And it goes on like that until kids like Raffi are messed with to the point of not being able to connect to the world or the people in it.

As a result of the hunger and neglect cocktail, Raffi couldn’t make eye contact. He said “No” to everything, even things that brought him pleasure, like riding his bike or seeing other kids. And yet when he was with other kids, he couldn’t engage them in any meaningful way, except to hit and kick them. He had no empathy or sense that anyone, but him, existed. He was diagnosed with RAD (Reactive attachment disorder) when he was three, the thing that babies in third-world orphanages get when they are left in cribs too long alone and fail to connect with people and the world. He was in five foster families before us, all of them returned him to the emergency shelter.  He waged war on everyone who tried to love him. 

Chrissy wrecked this boy. And I can’t forget that. I’m holding anger and empathy together in my body while we do this negotiation. 

I love her, as she brought these children into the world, into my world. They and she are inextricably connected. To love them is to love her. But I also have rage, pure, unadulterated fucking in-your-face rage, at her, for the neglect of our children’s spirits and bodies. For all the things she did and didn’t do to them and for them. For all the baggage they have to carry into their futures, their relationships, all that crazy brokenness that is so hard to fix, because of what Chrissy and Jay did and didn’t do, in the most critical stages of their kids’ development as humans. 

It’s complicated. I’m complicated. I love her. I feel her loss, the gravity of what she is losing at this table in this McDonalds. And I want to punch her in the face. 

I hold all of that in me. Love and rage. 

I muster all of my directness and tell her what we are prepared to give and not give – they can visit the kids, when the kids want to visit, and only when the kids want them. As long as it is good for them. As long as they are not hurt. We will send videos and pictures. I always do, several times a week. I will always stay obsessively in contact with her. 

Chrissy and Jay listen and absorb. They stop crying. There is banter now. Some much needed lightness. A mention of Desi and how she is the spitting image of Jay. We smile, all together, just thinking of her. No matter what, we have this one ginormous thing together – we all love the hell out of those kids.

This makes us family, whether we like it or not. 

We agree to proceed. (Even though we will have the papers drawn up, she will refuse to sign them.)

We hug. I tell Chrissy to text me later if she needs to talk. 

David and I leave the booth. I refill my Diet Coke on the way out. There is no one around the soda machine now. The place is an empty cave. 

We step over the disposable, seemingly-indestructible nugs. 

Chrissy and Jay stand outside and smoke.

It takes me days to shake off their sadness. 

I cannot pass a McDonalds without feeling it. There are McDonalds everywhere in Vegas. I feel the sadness many times a day.

cheeseburger, plain: march 13

“Raffi hurt my feelings today,” Chrissy yells to me. 

Raffi runs under her arm and throws himself on my leg. 

We are doing visits at the Department of Family Services now, because Chrissy brought her abusive, meth-head boyfriend, James, to a McDonalds visit and he started a fist-fight while she was holding Desi in her arms. Chrissy and Jay can no longer meet at McDonalds, which bums out Raffi in a huge way. 

And the visits are harder now. Court dates are looming. She is closer to losing them for good every day, and it’s showing. 

Chrissy is a ghost. Disappearing, really. 

She is gaunt and frail. She has mystery illnesses. Her face is pulling in on itself from the intense street drugs she’s ingesting, even though she tells me all the time she isn’t. Her eczema flares and her skin is dotted with scars and abrasions. She skin-picks obsessively. She colors her hair all kinds of wacky colors, bright pinks, neon blues, devil reds as she begins to deteriorate physically, as if she’s trying to distract the world from what is happening to her. 

In one of Raffi’s favorite photos of her, Chrissy’s hair is a hot red. She is smiling. Underneath her fingers. Neglect, poverty and a whole lotta meth, have taken most of her teeth. They are black nubs. She doesn’t like to smile. 

And the visits with Raffi and Desi, when Chrissy and Jay show up, are nightmares for all of them. Chrissy is sad and cries a lot. Raffi tries to comfort her, but he tires of being forced to take care of his weepy mother, and runs off to play. This makes Chrissy morose. Then angry. She demands that he hug her, love her, take care of her. This grows old fast and he devolves into anger, pushes her away, says things he doesn’t mean. He tells her she is no longer his mom. That I am his mom. 

This is so complicated, and fucking un-explainable to a five-year-old and so above his pay-grade, he needs to hit things after every visit. When we leave, he will explode, scream, kick the seat of the car, punch himself in the head, over and over. 

 “He is a bad boy,” Chrissy shouts at raffi, as the visit ends and I come out to meet them. She hands me the baby, who has her arms out. 

“Chrissy was so hurt,” Jay chimes in from behind, always on her side. 

“She was crying in there today.”

“Raffi said I’m not his mom,” Chrissy whines to me, like I’m her parent. 

I hug her. 

“I’m sorry. I know that hurts you,” I say. 

“You are his mom.”

A caseworker is walking over to check on what’s happening. Chrissy pulls herself together and holds her hand out to him, makes the ASL sign for I love you. Their special good-bye. He does it quickly. They touch hands. And he sprints away toward the door.

In the parking lot, Raffi is slamming his head into the seat in front of him and when this isn’t enough, he kicks and flails at it.

I suggest McDonalds. His body pauses. He listens. 

I make a deal. Drive-thru only. Because the other kids are home and probably super-hungry. He agrees, letting me know he’d rather hit the Play Place. He needs to run the tunnels and the tubes and shake out some of his anger. But we have other kids who have needs too, and they are waiting for me to make fish tacos, little grilled parcels of cod in warm, corn tortillas with pickled red cabbage, slices of jalapenos, squirts of lime and thick gobs of crema. 

He isn’t there yet, with fish, but he is getting more adventurous, trying more dinners. Soon, he will not be a fast food boy-only anymore. But today he needs the comfort. He needs to know some things are always the same – our love and those cheeseburgers.

He gets a Happy Meal and a small, bubbly 7-Up. 

He chows down the last of his cheeseburger. Plain, no ketchup, mustard or pickles. He hates all condiments. It’s a bun and meat and cheese-only world. I see in the rearview how pent-up and aggressive he is feeling. He needs to go-at something. I text David. 

Bad visit. 

When we get home, I grill the fish outside and put out all the things for the tacos on the butcher block in the kitchen. Our older girls, Lucy and Edie, eat. The baby stuffs fish in her mouth. David grabs a taco to-go and he and Raffi head off on their bikes. 

David takes him riding through the tiny back streets of downtown Vegas, riding out all the rage and confusion, until the desert sky turns purple, pink and orange, and the lights of the Strat and the Strip block out the stars, and glitz-out our neighborhood with neon. Raffi comes home exhausted and sweaty, calm and bonded to David. 

He is so wiped out, he sleeps. 

quarter pounder with cheese: april 5

Chrissy and Jay do not show up to court. 

She cannot face losing her kids. She blows it off. The court has no choice but to terminate their parental rights. 

I am sure she is falling down a long, black hole. 

I pick up the phone, find Chrissy’s number and, not knowing what to say, I text:

Hi. How are you?

She texts me back from a number I don’t recognize.

Hey Kim, this is my state phone. I can only cry and call. I can’t get video/picture mail on here.

Can you talk?

I drop Edie at gymnastics. I’m sitting in our 11-seat Yukon in the parking lot at McDonalds. I have a quarter pounder and a large Diet Coke. I roll the windows down, let the cool desert air waft in,  unwrap, settle in. I feel the comfort. Somehow being outside of McDonalds means I’m not really there, which is why car eating is such a powerful secret to have.

I take a bite of burger, let that soft bun and warm chemical-cheese slide down. This McDonalds is in a more affluent part of town, and I swear the burgers are better.  It’s so awful, really, this burger. I’ll feel shitty later. But I need to put something in my mouth, and this is just fine. I take a drag of Diet Coke and slump into the seat. I tap her number into the phone and wait. 

She is plummeting. I hear it in the very first notes of her hello. 

I take another bite. It helps, but the second bite is not nearly as good as the first, and I am now chasing the dragon.  

I hear the deep animal howl of a mom who has lost her children. I know that any time I am happy I get to adopt these kids, and I am, a lot, I am trampling on her, winning because she is losing. 

I am taking her children. 

I am all too aware of this every fucking minute. I take another bite. I’m not even tasting it anymore. I’m shame-eating. 

She tells me she loves me. 

 “I love you too,” I say, swallowing. 

“I know you love them and take care of them,” she adds. 

“I promise you will be a part of their lives,” I say.  

“This doesn’t change our relationship.,” I say. 

“You and I. The courts can’t change us. You will be in their lives, Chrissy”

There is silence. 

“…I could use this time to get myself together,” she says, tentatively, as if she is asking me if I think she should. 

“Yes,” I say.

 “And the healthier you are, Chrissy, the more you will get to be in their lives.”

And I mean it. But even as I say it, I don’t know. Can she climb out of the long, deep, mole-hole of transience and mental illness? A lifetime of fucked-upness that started when she was molested by an uncle, and then taken advantage of by older man after older man, before she quit school in 9thgrade, and then turning deep into drugs to ride out the pain? 

I have given up on her. I hate myself for that. I take another shame bite, a large one that encompasses the rest of the quarter pound of meat, bun and cheese. I wonder silently why I didn’t order fries. Fries would be good. I hop out, throw the wrapper and the bag in the garbage can. Evidence gone. I can’t shake her sadness. I cannot eat it away. 

I resist the urge to go back through the drive-thru and order a large fry. Instead, I get in the car and head back to gymnastics to watch Edie train. 

No one has any idea what I’ve eaten in the car. Or what pain the mother of my children is in. 

They are both invisible. 

diet coke: april 8

“Chrissy is dead.”

It’s Jay. He is hysterical. 

“We were watching movies,” he tells me. 

I’m pacing in the street barefoot, scared to be in the house in case the kids see my face and demand to know what’s happening.

“We, um…James and I…thought she fell asleep…I tried to wake her up….” he can barely get the words out. 

James. Her abusive ex-boyfriend. The one who beat her up. Threw her around the room. Broke a nightstand with her back. 

“…But blood came out of her mouth.” 

He is sobbing now. 

“I gave her CPR, but at the hospital she was brain dead. They let her go….”

“Tell me the truth,” I say in my most serious voice. 

“Was she doing drugs? Drugs she wasn’t supposed to be doing?”

I know the answer.

“Yes.” 

What kind?

“Morphine….I told her not to take those anymore. I told her.”

He is crying again. Hard.

“The end for her was losing the kids,” he says. 

“Are you saying she did this on purpose?” I ask. 

I’m defensive. Jesus. Is this on me? 

“No, No I don’t think it was on purp…” he says, but his voice is tentative. He doesn’t know for sure. 

“I told her she can have a relationship with the kids, Jay!” 

I’m screaming at him now.  In the street. Pacing. 

“I told her that last night,” I say it again because I think if I keep saying it, he and I will believe it. 

“I told her she could see the kids. Didn’t she know that?”

“Yes”…he whispers. “I don’t know…

He cries some more.

I look in the window and see the kids in the house with David. He is at the stove, spooning salmon rice from a Donabe onto plates for the kids and their friends. They are clamoring around the butcher block, talking over one another. Laughing. Arguing. It is lovely to watch them. Like I’m watching a TV commercial. Other people, not mine. I have to get myself together before I go back inside. I happen to have the Jeep keys in my pocket. I hop in. Roar off. 

I hit the McDonalds drive-thru. This time because I have nowhere to go. I don’t know what to do with myself. I get a large Diet Coke. I roll slowly by the Play Place. Kids are running around. Parents are drinking coffee. Eating fries. 

It hits me – my kids will never go to McDonalds to visit their mom again. And yet every McDonalds will remind them of her. 

McDonalds. Where they, and we, will remember the dead. 

McDonalds is a memorial. A grave. A mausoleum. A church. A holder of my children’s memories. It is the physical manifestation of their dead mother. It is possibly the most important place in the world to them. 

That night, and on many nights to come, after everyone sleeps, I take to the fridge. I have a habit of moving into the fridge when things get hard. Not like standing in front of it, and grabbing a pork and cabbage roll, or something, but actually living in the fridge. Taking up residence. 

I eat the egg roll, some flecks of salmon leftover from the rice, and move on to a stone bowl of Thai noodles with vegetables that I had forgotten was there. I use my fingers on the oily, salty noodles, until I realize a fork will get me more bang for the buck and go at it that way. I’m hurting and powering down noodles. Twining them into balls on my fork. Shoving them in my mouth. I put ice in a tumbler and pour straight tequila. It’s not a double. It’s a triple or quintuple or whatever. I don’t care. I want to be numb. I am going for black-out drunk. Or falling asleep drunk. Or feel nothing, ever, drunk. 

I know full-well this is not healthy. This is not what functional people do. 

I have my own addiction issues. 

I am more like Chrissy than I like to admit. 

David wakes and finds me there, living in the fridge. Refilling my glass over and over. He puts his arms around my waist and leads me back to bed. He holds me in the dark while I sob. 

I miss her for Raffi. For Desi. 

I miss her. 

For me.  

happy meal: september 30

“Desi and I will have to get a new family if you and Mommy and Lucy and Edie die,” he says to David. 

David is packing to go on a business trip. Raffi is worried he might not come back. I’m putting food in a cooler to bring to the park. 

  “We won’t die for a long, long time,” David tells him.  

I make a joke about how I’m going to drive him bat-shit crazy well into his adulthood. 

“You will always be with us. We will always love you,” David says and hugs him hard. 

We say this a lot. But he knows that people die. He knows caseworkers come in the night and take you. He knows you can live your young life in an emergency shelter with shift workers as guardians. That families will drop you off at shelters, days before Christmas, because when you are too much to handle. You can be given back. 

He knows love has limits. 

We send David off. Lucy and Edie are out with friends. It’s just Raffi, Desi and I. I’ve got bottles of chilled water, berries, pear slices, little rolls of pink ham, slices of cheese, thick slabs of naan, a tub of hummus and cashews for munching. 

It’s nice. But Raffi wants to go to McDonalds. 

“I used to see Mommy Chrissy there,” he reminds me. 

I smile. 

We put the food in the back of the Yukon. I know we aren’t going to eat it. 

He, nor I, have been to a fast food place for awhile. He eats cheese and meats now. And nuts and berries. He tries new foods. Salmon, the gateway fish, has led to trying other kinds. He is proud when he tries something and finds out he loves it, like cacio e pepe, or a very rare and crunchy on the outside, lightly salted and peppered, steak. Once he ate a bite of steak with arugula and we all started high-fiving him like he won the Super Bowl. He loves baked potatoes with butter and chives. He loves roast chicken, especially when he can dip it in the pan fats and sloppily stuff it into his mouth, gravy running down his chin. He ate asparagus once, and even though he made a crazy-ugly face, I picked him up and twirled him around. 

I have followed his lead. I stay away from the drive thru. I eat what I want them to eat. We are closing our license, adopting Raffi and Desi. Our house is full. I don’t have to be in McDonalds now. It is no longer the food that provides consistency and love for them. 

But there is room for exceptions. 

I drive to McDonalds, the one by our house with the Play Place. I order him a Happy Meal with a cheeseburger plain. He is thrilled. I order Desi a large fries and a juice. He asks for a Fanta. Then he runs off and disappears into the big tunnel, so that I only hear the distorted yelling and squealing of kids behind plastic tubing. 

I bring the food to the play area and let Desi toddle around. He comes over and slides into the seat near me. Desi climbs into the booster seat. He lays the food out in front of him and makes sure everything is neat and arranged just so, and that his cheeseburger is indeed plain. He checks each side of the burger and looks relieved. He takes a long slurp of Fanta. 

“Mama,” he says.

“Yes, baby.”

“We used to come here and visit Mommy,” he tells me. 

He wants to talk about her. This is his memorial service. 

“Yes, we did,” I say, looking around at the kids playing and the bright, sun-kissed colors. From where I sit, with my soon-to-be-official youngest son and daughter.

“It was fun to be with her, wasn’t it?” 

“Yes,” he says, mouth full. 

“What do you remember?” I ask. 

He tells me a long story, and I see he is making up details from the room, filling in all his blanks. 

“It’s okay if you don’t remember everything about her,” I say, reaching out and touching his hand. 

“You have so much of your mom in you. She is a part of you.”

Desi sees another toddler playing with his toy. She climbs out of the booster and runs off. 

 “I didn’t grow in her tummy,” he tells me.

“Yes, you did,” I say.

“No, I didn’t.” He takes another big bite of cheeseburger, plain. 

“I’m from foster care.”

“No, baby,” I say, and I reach across the table to stroke his long, wild, surfer curls. 

“You don’t remember, but when you were very little you came from Chrissy’s tummy.”

“No, Mommy.” 

He is so sure. 

“I grew in foster care.”

And then he takes another bite, and cracks open the toy. It’s cheap and plastic and satisfying as fuck. 

He makes the ASL sign for I love you. I make it too. We touch fingers. Chrissy is with us. And then, he’s gone. Running toward the play structure, laughing. 

I let him go. I take a long drag on my Diet Coke. 

He has the last word on his own life.