The Martian Child

Toward the end of the meeting, the caseworker remarked, "Ohand one more thing. Dennis thinks he's a Martian." "I beg your pardon?" I wasn't certain I had heard her correctly. I had papers scattered all over the meeting room tablethick piles of stapled incident reports, manilafoldered psychiatric evaluations, Xeroxed clinical diagnoses, scribbled caseworker histories, typed abuse reports, bound trial transcripts, and my own crabbed notes as well: Hyperactivity. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Emotional Abuse. Physical Abuse. Conners Rating Scale. Apgars. I had no idea there was so much to know about children. For a moment, I was actually looking for the folder labeledMartian. "He thinks he's a Martian," Ms. Bright repeated. She was a small woman, very proper and polite. "He told his group home parents that he's not like the other childrenhe's from Marsso he shouldn't be expected to act like an Earthling all the time." "Well, that's okay," I said, a little too quickly. "some of my best friends are Martians. He'll fit right in. As long as he doesn't bring home any giant alien slugs from outer space." By the narrow expressions on their faces, I could tell that the caseworkers weren't amused. For a moment, my heart sank. Maybe I'd said the wrong thing. Maybe I was being too glib with my answers. The hardest thing about adoption is thatyou have to ask someone to trust you with a child. That means that you have to be willing to let them scrutinize your entire life, everything: your financial standing, your medical history, your home and your belongings, your upbringing, your personality, your motivations, your arrest record, your IQeven your sex life. It means thateveryselfesteem issue you have ever had will come bubbling right to the surface like last night's beans in this morning's bathtub. And that meanswhatever you're most insecure about, that's what the whole adoption process will feel like it's focused on. The big surprise for me was discovering that what I thought would be the biggest hurdle was not. Any concerns I might have had about sexual orientation disappeared at a conveniently timed set of seminars on legal issues, held by the Gay-Lesbian Community Center in Hollywood. Two female lawyers, very thorough in their presentations, addressed adoption and custody issues. "Just tell the truth," they said. "If you lie about who you are, the caseworkers will find outand then they're going to wonder why you're lying, and what else you might be lying about. And you won't be approved. "It has taken many years and a lot of hard work by a lot of people to educate caseworkers and judges. There are now six thousand adoptions a year by gay people, mostly in major urban areas. If you are committed and qualified in every other respect, you have the same opportunity as anyone else." And that was all I'd needed to know. After that, it wasn't an issue. Nowhat unnerved me the most was that terrible, familiar feeling of beingsecondbest, of not being good enough to play with the big kids, or get the job, or win the award, or whatever was at stake. So even though the point of this interview was simply to see if Dennis and I would be a good match, I felt as if I was being judged again. What if I wasn't good enough this time either? I tried again. I began slowly. "Y'Gerrold, David is the author of 'The Martian Child', published 2007 under ISBN 9780765359766 and ISBN 0765359766.