Can You Love Someone Else’s Older Child? You Bet!

The summer after his sophomore year of high school, my son, Dan, asked if his best friend, Ed, could live with us for a year. I thought he was kidding. I had already been feeling like a day laborer in a vast testosterone field who had neglected to slather on the sunscreen. Cultivating three boys, two of whom were teenagers, had burned me to a crisp.

Dan wasn’t kidding. Ed’s family, through no fault of their own, had been uprooted and forced to move halfway across the country for employment. The school district in Ed’s new neighborhood was sorely lacking in advanced programming for students with Ed’s supercharged brain, so, through Dan, Ed asked us to do him a favor.  He asked us to consider making room for him in our home for a year and, by the way, in order for him to to attend the public school where he had spent the last six years of his life, we would also have to consider becoming  his legal guardians.

Dan prepared a most eloquent plea. He needn’t have bothered. Before he was halfway through his histrionic presentation, Harold responded with “The more, the merrier!”  I was a bit more circumspect. To me, more is merrier when you’re talking about cloning George Clooney, but more is not merrier when you’re talking about adding another teenage boy to a house already infested with them.  I wondered if Harold would have been so accommodating if he had been asked to welcome another case of PMS into a home where three daughters were already on the same cycle.

Plus, Harold wasn’t the one who was going to have to deal with seven additional pairs of boxers to wash each week and one more “Ewwww, I’m not going to eat that,” each day, and five thousand more spontaneous wrestling matches to referee each minute. My higher self and my inner slug duked it out for a few days and it has been my good fortune ever since that the slug was vanquished.  On a warm and pleasant late August morning we welcomed a cool and morose beanpole into our home and our lives. We had thrown an old mattress into a shed in the backyard and we led him there,  joking that this was to be his room. The Cuban Missile Crisis got more laughs. It was clear Ed hadn’t come to us because he was itching to leave his family. He came because he was serious about his education and he was going to have some serious adjustments to make. Shame on us for going for the yuks.

My role in Ed’s life was murky. I most certainly wasn’t his mother.  He had a mother who loved and cared for him. She loved him so much, in fact, that she let him spend his junior year in a place far away from her where he could flourish. I wasn’t a stepmother either, or an adoptive mother or a foster mother or a foreign exchange mother.  There are no parenting books out there about how to be whatever it is that I was to Ed.  I was on my own with the whole thing.

Ron Huxley, family therapist explains that is very challenging to discipline someone else’s child because you are disciplining without attachment which is the emotional bond that occurs between a parent and child from the moment of birth or soon thereafter.  “From a discipline perspective, attachment allows parents to cope with the challenges and difficulties of parenting.”   He also says that “discipline without love tends to be authoritarian and cold.”   The facts were that a.) I had no early attachment to Ed, and b.) Teenage boys sometimes need to be disciplined.  If this couldn’t occur without love, then I resolved to love him.

I cooked for him. I did his laundry. I helped him rent a tux for the prom. I (once) helped him with homework. And I (once) grounded him. I attended his parent meetings at school. I parented the only way I knew how…all in.  Surprisingly, the rewards were the same I received from my biological children. Sometimes they were better.  Ed felt appreciative rather than entitled.  Ed ate everything I cooked without complaint.  In very short order, love stopped being a resolution and became instead, inevitable. 

Ed is caring and funny and astoundingly smart and part of our family now and forever.  He is in the family portrait that hangs over the mantel. When people ask me who he is, I just say, “Ed!” as if they should know.  These days we have his beautiful wife, Christyna and their precious little boy, Connor, to love as well. I have fallen in love with someone else’s child and I’ve learned that with regard to love, more is definitely merrier.

My friends who adopted children tell me they bonded at first sight. I know this is true because I watched it happen. Their children are no less loved than biological ones. But these children were adopted as babies, at their peak of cuteness.  A boy chomping at the bit to get the hell out of high school and out from under authority is probably the least loveable creature on God’s earth, even if that boy is your own.  Yet we bonded with Ed in a profound way. We truly believe Ed is the one who did us the favor all those years ago.  His presence in our family has made all our lives richer.

I’ve recently spent some time on adoption websites, reading personal accounts by parents who adopted older children. Our absorption of Ed into our lives in no way resembles the  stories these parents tell of bonding with children who had been neglected or abused or tossed from one foster home to the other. The Blind Side made adopting a teenager look so easy. It is not easy. These children are often suspicious at first, then angry and confused. Sometimes they act out in highly inappropriate ways. But,  judging from first person testimony, the rewards of loving them often outweigh the challenges of raising them.  God bless stepparents, adoptive parents and foster parents willing to love older children who are not their own. 

Photo by marafleischer