Chapter 6 - Teaching a Boy to Be Seven
I'd known parenting would be hard. I just hadn't known exactly how, and that gap turned out to be enormous.
I learned Danny needed a heads-up before any change. You couldn't just tell him it was time to go. You had to tell him ten minutes out, then five, then two.
Adeline worked everything out through drawing. Paper and colored pencils became as essential in that house as milk.
Melody tested every rule like she was running a lab study.
Emmy needed to be held more than the others. If you sat still long enough, she'd climb up on you and fall asleep.
And Elijah needed something harder to give. He needed permission to be seven.
He heard Melody cry and his feet hit the floor before his eyes were open. He tried to run Danny's mornings. He translated Emmy's hand signals before I even had a shot at figuring them out. He'd spent too long believing his family only stayed together because he held it there.
I never told him to stop helping. I just kept showing him the line between helping and being responsible.
Over and over: "They're my job now."
The first bunch of times, he didn't buy it. Eventually he started to.
Paige came every Saturday. She cooked. She read to Emmy. She folded paper cranes with Adeline. She wrestled with Danny in the yard. And sometimes she just sat out back with Elijah talking about nothing at all, which might've been the most important thing she did.
About six weeks in, I called her after the house finally went quiet.
"How are you really doing?" she asked.
"Tired."
"But?"
"Good tired."
She laughed. "Welcome to parenthood."
The agency kept coming every two weeks. Marlene came. Other caseworkers came. They interviewed me. They interviewed the kids one at a time. They walked the house. They wrote reports.
I braced for those reports to be careful. Instead they just kept coming back good.
One afternoon Marlene stood by my front door after a visit.
"I've been doing emergency placements for thirty years," she said. "I've watched a lot of people start with good intentions they couldn't hold onto."
"What makes this one different?"
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"You knew from day one that you didn't know everything."
I thought about that for a long time.
