I adopted my best friend’s son after he abandoned him — years later, the boy invited him to a championship game and gave a speech that made me break down.
“I can’t do this, Rory. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
I said, “I’ll be there at seven. Go to sleep. I’ll be there at seven.”
Amari was four years old and asleep
Here’s what people don’t understand about how these things actually go.
There was no big noble decision. There was no moment where I stood up straight and said I will raise this boy.
What there was, was eleven days of me having him at my apartment while everybody assumed Grady would come back.
Then a caseworker named Rosalind, who was thirty years old and had eighty-one cases, sat in that apartment and explained to me what happens next, and asked me whether I was a relative, and I said no.
She said, “Are you willing to be considered?”
And I said yes, because the alternative was that a woman I had never met was going to put that kid in a car.
Certified as a foster placement in June 2012. Guardianship in December. Adoption finalized on the fourteenth of November, 2013, in a courtroom that took eleven minutes and had
a bowl of lollipops in it.
Amari was five. He wore a clip-on tie that he refused to take off for two days.
I want to be honest about the years, because the version where a single mechanic raises a boy and it’s all montage is an insult to everybody who has actually done it.
It was hard.
Money was the first thing. I made nineteen dollars an hour and childcare was a hundred and forty a week, and for two years I worked six days and my mother had him on Saturdays until she got sick in 2015.
