Why do we waste time being remorseful over events we can no longer alter? I assume I’m not alone in this seemingly useless reverie. Or, maybe the behavior of remorse isn’t inconsequential. Maybe remorse has some evolutionary efficacy. Perhaps we improve as a future human “product” if we experience an appropriate level of psychical pain (remorse) for specific past events. Is it remorseful to look back on a specific event with dissatisfaction for the way it went? Fantasizing about a do-over? But, short of a do-over being willing to settle for just knowing things turned out okay? After all, here we are.
I think there’s a huge difference between looking back on the totality of one’s life with remorse, or looking back on a specific event or phase and being still dissatisfied with how it unfolded. Perhaps its sophomoric of me but I do believe if all the players are still alive the event is not necessarily over…maybe it’s just on pause, and the next unfolding is yet to happen, or about to happen, and may bring some sort of closure. I have experienced an ongoing episode of remorse for such an event. I don’t spend every waking hour obsessing about it, but its never far out of mind or out of memory:
Baby-Wayne lived with us for about 2-years, maybe a bit more, in the early 1970’s. He was a so-called foster-child, our first of two. My memory has misplaced the specific dates now, but I know he came to us while we were renting the little duplex in University Place, just after our return to the West from Chicago. Wayne’s mother, whose last name I can’t recall, was already in prison across the Narrows Bridge at the Purdy Detention Center for Women. Her conviction and imprisonment was a consequence of her persistence in writing checks against accounts which were not her own, or which were her own but with insufficient funds to cover the expense. She did this when she was drinking according to the story, but at some point “society” got tired of her antics and tried to get her attention with prison time, since the presence of her newborn had done little to alter her behavior. Wayne came to us when he was 9-months old, just before he started walking.
Part of our foster-deal was that we had committed to regularly taking Wayne across the bridge and through the security check-points to visit his Mom while we, Jennifer, Kim, and I, waited nearby in a comfortable public area. I think the foster-agency was hoping to keep “Mom” emotionally attached to the fact that she had a child. The bonding intent and outcome seemed entirely lost on Wayne throughout his stay with us, though we would speaking often of Mommy, in particular on our way over and back from Purdy.
The Purdy facility was about as unprisonlike as it could be and still be secure. Wayne’s mom had her own space which could be locked from the inside, and upon which she could impose reasonable stylistic touches, pictures, furnishings, and the like. As I remember we visited inside her room once, and I came away with the perception that she, a convicted felon and prisoner, was living better than most sailors in the 7th Fleet of the U.S. Navy…a life I had led earlier for four years…including the fact that she wore her own civilian clothes as opposed to an orange-jumpsuit provided by the State.
Our visits and constant reminders of “Mom” made little or no obvious impression on Wayne. Soon after starting to talk, he began to call Jennifer Mommy and me Dadda. During his visits to his Mom he responded to her as he would have to any benevolent adult. He was a friendly, stable kid who didn’t demonstrate much anxiety about anything, ever. We weren’t trying to forge a bond in competition with his Mom, but how do you detach from a child whom you live with 24/7? Wayne walked on his own for the first time with us. He went to church and played with other kids, the children of our friends. He began conversing easily and regularly, particularly with Kim, during his time with us. To me, we “felt” like a family of four. Kim was maybe two years older than Wayne and seemed to consider him her brother, though Kim was precocious enough to know he had a different mother, and possibly she even remembered when and how he had come to us, but she seemed to accept his presence without question or jealousy.
Wayne was still with us when we moved to the new “rent to own” house on 44th St. West. He was by now meeting all the age-appropriate developmental milestones of language, socialization, mobility. He was just “one of the kids.” Speaking only for me, I studiously avoided looking forward to accept that the day would come when he might leave with his mom. I wasn’t exactly delusional. I just pushed the possibility into the future as a possibility, sometime. He was one of us, providing his fair share of childhood inconvenience, and often humorous kid stuff. For instance, one cold day as I was doing school-work, and “sort of” baby-sitting Kim and Wayne were playing outside I saw Wayne walk by the patio sliding door munching on some frozen something. I yelled to Kim, “What is Wayne eating?” Kim walked over to him, leaned down to look, then straightened back up and as she continued playing yelled, “Dog poop!” Another time I intervened barely in time as Kim successfully coaxed Wayne into riding his tricycle off the picnic table onto the concrete patio, “C’mon Wayne! I’ll catch you!” I got to the table just as the front-wheel started to drop. My point is we were a family in all respects, including the older child seemingly trying to injure or kill the younger.
There was a social worker involved, who could visit at will. I don’t remember her being heavy-handed or ever questioning our level of care for Wayne, or our motives, or our financial expenditures. Yes there was a monthly check for his care, and “No” it did not cover the expense of Wayne’s growing needs for food, clothing, sundries, and the fuel for the round-trip to see Wayne’s mother on Sunday afternoons. But, looking back the whole effort was “currency” for our Souls.
These were the times when even nominal Christians (and pretenders like me) tried to do good in the world…it may have been a “seventies thing.” Evangelicals had yet to swallow the manifest destiny expansion of doctrine to include material prosperity and entitlement. Some of us were truly trying to keep alive the rumor of Angels…even while our own “hearts” were awash in doubt…I wasn’t alone in this regard. I can’t speak for Jennifer, but I was a doubtful “Christian-in-name-only” who had yet to “come out” boldly with my doubt. I accepted the possibility that belief, Faith, might have its useful social consequences, and that our family might function as one of those positives, but any idea of some future reward by an Imaginary Omni-Friend was long gone, and had been for quite awhile. “And the three men I admire most,The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, They caught the last train for the coast” but, for me their departure had occurred long before the music died. (Apologies to Don McLean).
I don’t recall if the social worker called or came by the house to give us the news that Wayne’s mom would soon be released from prison, and into supervised community living. She, Wayne, and her male “friend” would be moving to some unnamed community in Eastern Washington State. We would not know where Wayne was to be living, or how he would be getting along…not immediately, and not ever. We would not have contact with his mom, or she with us. We would not know if his mom ever reoffended and Wayne came up for adoption…(I secretly hoped for this…yes, I was that petty)…I fantasized that his mother would fail so that I could have what I wanted…of course, my desires were all couched in these imaginings only as it might benefit Wayne. But, the weeks and months after Wayne left would roll along, as they do, and there would be no reunions, no birthday pictures, no Christmas presents sent. There would be no closure for us, and for him, no knowledge that he had been a fully emotional member of our family…he would likely never know that three other people loved him as though he had been their own.
We respected the rules of complete separation. Though, I had read the name of Wayne’s grandfather in a news article written after Wayne’s mom was convicted…Wayne’s grandparents lived nearby, actually less than 3 miles away, in Chambers Creek, I did not reach out. I could have broken the rules after Wayne left, and tried to get Grandpa to talk about recent events, where Wayne was, how they were doing…but I didn’t. And, for that matter, “grandfather” (and grandma) never reached out to us during that two years when Wayne lived with us. Maybe everyone in their family had burned all the emotional bridges by then as adults sometimes do…the father was in law-enforcement as I remember from the news article of Mom’s conviction. Having a criminal daughter may have been a bridge too far for him. But, who knows? In any case, I never attempted to work around the “rules.” My respect for the rules at that time occurred without the benefit of 50-years of remorse.
My enduring last image of Wayne is of his little face bathed in sunlight looking out at me through a rear-car window, his mouth wide open, eyes tightly closed in muted screams as two strangers, one of them being his bio-mom, drove him away strapped in the newly fastened car seat which I had just helped install. I don’t remember ever feeling more crushed than I was at that moment, or more guilty. The parting was emotionally even more poignant than any death of another which I’ve experienced to date. It should have been enough for me that Jennifer and I had tried to do something to improve the world, but, you know what? It wasn’t enough and it never will be…I needed to know that Wayne was okay, and even now I’d like to know how it went, how it’s gone…and, regardless how its gone, does he know that his “family” loved him and has thought about him often starting then, and for the 50 years since?
I still carry the hope, though only faintly now, to see an email or listen to a voicemail from an unknown number, and when I listen to it maybe I’ll hear the words, “Hello my name is Wayne…I don’t know if you remember me…are you the Karns family that I lived with for awhile in the early ‘70’s?”
