Cries for Lullabies

 

I never saw myself as a 58-year old man preparing to go to court to gain custody of my fostered grandchild. Let me explain myself. Hi, I'm Julius Kemper but all my friends call me Jerry.  I'm a born and raised, proud Bostonian with a tick for engineering.  Listen, I know I'm a nerd as if my grey bifocals and navy blue suspenders on my light brown striped shirt don't give it away.  I'm practically a whiter, balder, and shorter Steven Urkle. Enough of me, now let’s get into my life. About three years back, my wife Martha and I were living in Arlington, with our children off and onto better things. We had been happily married for over 25 years, and in none of those years has the thought of taking off this metal band off of my finger crossed my mind.  We had three kids; Matt who was 28, the oldest, and the burliest of the three.  He was the classic older brother, you know, looking out for Emma, his sister, and constantly putting Lucas in a headlock.  Always blasting “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane”, and hey, don't get me wrong, the Eagles have a special place in my heart, but when it’s all you hear for 18 years on blast, Glenn Frey has got to “Take it Easy”. Next, there was Emma who is 26 now, and who was your edgy girl with a bit of a ‘tude, but like always, she adored to shop.  She was our little princess until high school hit her and BAM, the mood swings, the door-slamming, and the hormones were out of control, but in the end, she got it together.  She is a beautiful little girl, with straight dirty blonde hair, brown eyes with long lustrous lashes.  She was a combo of both the boys.   She had a zest for sports, and a natural athletic ability, but also a very unique connection with music.  She always had a special liking to Lucas, who was three years younger than her, 23, and who was “the athletic one”.  He knew anything and everything to know about NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL.  All the knowledge to know about Shaquille O'Neal was one thing, but so was his crazy talent to play basketball.  When he didn't make varsity his sophomore year in high school, he quit, and there we had another musician in the family.  Matt and Emma are both living in California, living the dream, both with a huge passion for music.  Emma is a waitress by day and a cellist by night while Matt is a barista by day but when the sun sets, he whips out his guitar. Lucas is a soon to be graduate of Berklee college of music, and that couldn't make me feel any older.  Another musician in the family, “yay”, (oy vey). Can't blame a kid for dreaming.  

After plenty of time, Martha and I had somewhat adjusted to the thought of being empty-nesters, but the grin placed on our face didn't quite resonate with the loneliness inside of us.  We felt empty, and we needed that void to be filled.  Our problem was quickly taken about by a fifteen-year-old girl by the name of Riley.  In 2015, Martha and I went to a Boston shelter and decided to see what it was like.  How the kids were, how old they were, the trouble they were in.  We presumed we would just help out at a shelter when we weren't at work, and we would donate money.  One thing we were not expecting was fostering a homeless child, but that is exactly what we did.  We hopped in our red, rusty, and broken 1987 chevy pick up truck and headed over to Cambridge, to Heading Home Inc, a homeless shelter.  

We walked in and immediately she stood out to us. We could tell that she had a rough upbringing with her once green cargo coat, now brown and spotty with dirt, her ratty brown hair and puffy, red, sad eyes told us a story.  We approached her, with the intention to just hang and talk to her for like three minutes, not three years.  Martha and I step up and look down.  We didn't see a person looking rather sad, covered head to toe in dirt and grime, and wearing worn out clothes. We didn't see a person with her hands tied around her legs and her head facing upward. We didn't even notice the dirty skin, but we could feel the battered and bruised heart.  We saw the fear, loneliness, pain, the agony in those emerald green marbles that were shedding one tear at a time.  Slowly one by one they would fall into a little puddle right in between this person’s feet.   

“Hey, hun, do you want a snickerdoodle?” What the fuck is wrong with you Martha, asking a girl if she wants fucking cookies? Honey honey honey. Martha asked this girl in a very sincere way, it was just so random.

“ I’m sorry about that.  Hi, I'm Jerry, and she’s Martha, what's your name sweetheart?” I reached out my hand for a handshake, and she grasped my hand with very little strength.  An immediate rush of cold flowed through my system.  Her hands felt like she had just dunked them into an ice bath. She responded by saying her name was Riley, in her broken, whispered voice. She continued to tell us that she was living on the streets, she wasn't really cared for by her drug-addicted mother.  Not surrounded by food, or love, but surrounded by needles, lighters, and white powder.  No child should be able to call Stonehurst Street their home, and a pile of trash their neighbor.  Martha and I were heartbroken and decided to do something about it.  We took the courageous decision of fostering Riley and making her part of the Kemper clan. 

We nurtured Riley, fed her and provided her with shelter and education and the thought of adoption was a serious consideration of me and Marthas. Since Riley had grown up with no rules, and no guidance, she became obese when she was exposed to food. She was hard to raise, far from a walk in the park.  For example, it would be Tuesday, a school day, and she would throw a tantrum because she didn't want to go, and when she did go, which was quite rare, more than half of her classes would be skipped.  She was on the verge of not graduating because she had missed so much school, but she had the goal of graduating somehow and moving to Florida.  We didn't know why, or how, and when we figured out, the reasoning of it all,  everything was put to shit.  A few months into living with her, she dropped a huge bomb on Martha and me.  Riley had been hiding the fact that she was 6 months pregnant.  She claimed she didn't know she was, and neither did we.  I guess all the food we fed her wasn't making her THAT big.  Frazzled and confused we reconsidered everything.
“We can't just throw her back on the streets,” I whispered to Martha as we were getting washed up for bed.  Martha quickly responded.  I could tell she was a little angry but felt bad about it.  She put her pen inside her sudoku book, shut it, took off her thin-rimmed circular glasses, and faced me.
“But we can't afford to raise a baby, and I don't want to be 75 by the time the little fucker goes to college.” I one-hundred-percent agreed with her, but we had to do the right thing.  After nights of endless discussions, chaos, screaming, throwing of books, and tears, we decided to help Riley raise this child. This split me and Martha apart and a day without fighting came once in a blue moon. We had no clue what we were getting ourselves into.  Did Riley even know who the father of the child was?  

We stayed by Riley's side through it all.  Through the mornings full of sickness, weird cravings for pickles and ice cream, to the day of June when it all went down.  Two waters were broken that day, Rileys, and the tears in my eyes when baby boy Ben came into life.  A day full of pain, counting time between contractions, panic, running around Mass General Hospital, and screaming for a doctor had come to an end, and something so beautiful came out of it.  Riley didn't have a name for this baby boy, so I came up with the far-from-unique, but nevertheless cute as hell name of Benny, or Ben. 

Just like you always do when you have a baby, my wife and I went on maternity leave, you could say.  We skipped work during the first few months of Ben’s life to help Riley get the hang of nurturing him and not dropping him on his head.  We taught her how to hold the baby, providing support to his head and holding his bum.  We taught how to lightly burp him and how to feed him.  When we felt as though she could take care of Ben on her own, my wife and I returned to our jobs, with excused absences here and there.  We both work at MIT, me as an engineering professor, and Martha as well, a rocket scientist, or astrophysicist.  I have no clue where all of our children's music interest came from, don't ask. 

Anyways, yes, we went back to work but when we came home from MIT, day after day, we would arrive to a house reeking with a stench of baby shit as soon as we unlocked the door. Not only was Riley an unfit mother but she thought that she was a good one, and that opened up a whole other can of worms. At this point she was 17, Ben was about 2 years old, and she was planning to finish high school and move to Florida, with Ben.  Apparently before her and her mother moved to Massachusetts they lived in Florida.  The mother had wanted to leave the family and thought she could give Riley a better life, but when she came here, day after day, calls from places where she had interviewed called her with bad news.  She was jobless and homeless.  She fell into a deep depression and used all their money for food, and drugs.  From there everything was spiraling downward for 15 years.  So basically,  Riley thought she was a good mom because she never had a good influence,  and she doesn't have anything to compare to.  Since she got neglected and taken care of terribly, anything was a step up.  But, the baby would still be lying down in his own shit, and have tears streaming down his face in starvation.  Martha and I knew she was not a good mom, granted she had nothing to learn from.  She was starved and started doing hard drugs at a very young age.  For all, we knew she was a heroin addict while Ben was in the womb. 

Riley was so persistent in bringing Ben with her to Florida, but Martha and I could not let her move with Ben alone.   Many nights of sleeping on the couch, and nights full of screams and tears filled up the 5 months between the reveal, and now, 2018, a crisis.  We are now filing for custody of Ben and Riley.  Riley would be out of our hair anyway, because of college.  This was and is still continuing to split our household apart but we have got to take care of this little baby boy that we practically raised. A little ridiculous ain't it? The fact that I am a 58-year-old man suing to raise a baby that isn't even in my blood.