The Older Child Adoption and Permanency Movement logo – Adopt Older Kids and Youth: A-OKAY.

It’s really kind of strange. When our own children were babies – and at 14 months apart, they were babies at the same time – we were positively terrified by them. Or maybe by our own perceived responsibilities FOR them. We spent many a long night just watching them sleep, deciding what we would and wouldn’t do in relation to the way our parents raised us, sowing the seeds for all new mistakes we invented along the way.

We didn’t have much furniture, being in the Navy and having to move every few months. So when hubby was at nuke school (that came between A-school and sub-school) in Bainbridge and we were living in falling-down WW-II housing blocks in Aberdeen, we put a mattress in the middle of the living room floor, pillows against the walls against which we could sit.

Daughter, our eldest, was just new to walking and didn’t mind having to crawl on soft living room floor one bit. Son wasn’t yet a year old, crawling and rolling was his main means of locomotion. I recall days and weeks spent doing nothing (apart from the usual cooking, dishes and laundry) but rolling around on that mattress with them laughing as hard as they could. Or just watching them wrestle with each other. They were so beautiful! So new, so promising. So much our responsibility!

Our neighbor downstairs was on welfare. Had four children – all girls – and one on the way, her occasional live-in honey (and father to all, far as I could tell) was a truck driver, “home” only now and then. We often heard them fighting when he was around, and her yelling at the girls when he wasn’t. They ranged in age from 2 to 6. Blonde haired, blue-eyed, they looked amazingly alike.

That neighbor apparently wasn’t as worried about the future of her offspring as we were. One day I opened the door to go to the laundromat and found all four of them sitting at the top of the stairs looking hungry. It wasn’t 7 a.m. yet.

All kids look hungry when they’re at your door or in your kitchen, any time of day and all the way through high school. I already knew this from raising my own little brother and sisters, there being 5 children in my own family. They usually lack proper boots and coats and hats in bad weather too. Wise to that game, I knew it wasn’t a sign of abuse. Just kids being incorrigible.

So I invited the girls in, fed them cheap cereal and applesauce, then dropped them off at the building stoop as I headed down the block with mine in the double stroller with laundry baskets stacked atop the sunshade.

Naturally enough, they appeared on my doorstep regularly from then on. Even after the new baby was born, Mom apparently locked them out early and didn’t open the door until late. I didn’t have the balls at the time to complain, so that little apartment with the mattress on the living room floor was home for nearly 6 months to six children. I’m sure the complex neighbors thought they all belonged to me. I didn’t mind all that much.

Soon hubby was transferred to Philadelphia in transit, then on to New London for sub school, I went with the children to stay with his parents in Oklahoma, then with my Dad in Kentucky when hubby went on his first Polaris patrol. Never saw or heard from those pretty little girls again, have no idea if they all grew up and if they did, how they turned out.

But I’d bet you a fin that if you knew one or more of them today, and asked them about their “difficult childhood,” they’d say they remember the lady upstairs with the babies, who had a mattress on the living room floor instead of a rug, and enjoyed nothing more than playing with them all day long. And who made really mean PBJs and oatmeal.

After the Navy years, as our kids grew up, there were of course many more strays. Sometimes our kids would bring them home, sometimes they’d just find their own way to our home. It was always crowded, I always cooked for a crowd, and it was a very rare evening hubby and I ever got to spend alone. Ended up actually adopting three teens of a friend who died, I consider the rest adopted as well even though we never went to court. Their children count among my grands too, and still the house is usually overflowing and I still cook for crowds.

We thought that when ours grew up (finally!) they’d leave home and start their own lives, I’d be able to actually wear some of those sexy nighties hubby gives me for Christmas and birthday every year, but which I never get to wear. It never worked out that way, though. I’ve got a wonderful collection of soft, silky, frilly little nothings that still have the tags attached, some of them 15 or 20 years old! I am pretty sure I wouldn’t look so good in them anymore even if I did get the chance to wear ‘em.

And you know what? I don’t believe I’ve missed a darned thing! Once you start looking at your life from this end of it, and start weighing the pros and cons of what dreams you had that never came true versus what nightmares you had that did come true, wearing sexy little nothings doesn’t seem to count for a whole lot. If in the end a life is valued for how it touches on and affects other people’s lives over the course of the journey, then I must be very rich even though it’s sometimes a struggle just to put food on the table. And that’s worth more than that red silk teddy with the Belgian lace… which I’ll probably leave to one of my beautiful daughters – tags still attached – when it’s a certifiable antique. They’d love to have it!

Taking a bit of a break from All Baby, All The Time, thought I’d do a little strolling through human history to see what there is to see about the institution of marriage. I’ve been wondering why some people want to cling to exclusive cultural frames at a time when about half of traditional marriages end in divorce and the benefits of marriage are being denied to whole segments of the population altogether. Maybe understanding something of the history and traditions associated with the institution could help our society to figure out what marriage is in the modern world and who may claim the right to *be* married.

I was inspired to go looking by an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz in the New York Times entitled Taking Marriage Private [Nov. 26]. She begins the article with a question, and a historical observation:

WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

Now, marriage seems an odd institution if you look at it dispassionately. Almost as if it became an issue only when humans invented a patriarchal type of society where men claimed the power to make all relevant decisions about everything, probably testosterone talking (not to mention sheer size). I mean, everybody always knows who the mother of a particular baby is – who would dream of questioning who gets her stuff when she dies?

Deal is, confidence of paternity isn’t such a ‘Duh’. Unless that baby looks so much like Elmo that only Elmo could be his father, there’s no real way to know – before the advent of modern blood and DNA testing, that is. So various cultures all over the world developed all sorts of odd rules, regulations and customs related to marriage and responsibilities in private households and private families. Some were quite weird by modern estimation.

When Christianity took over the church (which was the state) decided it had the power to decide who was married and who was not. Suddenly the parents didn’t matter anymore – their approval was not required. Oddly enough, for much of the 1600 years of church rule, the priest didn’t count either! Any male-female couple could claim to be married so long as they both agreed that they’d exchanged vows of some sort.

In 1215, nearly a thousand years after taking over, the church defined a “licit” marriage as one where the exchanging of vows happened in the church in front of witnesses. This made their children “legitimate,” as if any child could be considered an “illegitimate” person, which is total hooey. Still, people who didn’t get married in a church had the same rights – their children were legitimate, the wife could inherit, and prohibitions against divorce applied to them too.

States didn’t get involved until the 1600s, mostly by requiring that marriages be registered by the government. It started out as a way to prevent couples whose parents disapproved of the match from getting married, but there was no way for states to stop couples from eloping regardless of what the parents thought. States also had to recognize cohabitation as “common law” marriage for the legal rights inherent.

In the US the government got particularly ambitious to regulate citizen’s rights to marry whom they chose during the last part of the 19th century and this unbridled power-grab continued through the 20th century (and now the 21st century). in the 1920s there were 38 states that prohibited interracial or intercultural marriages. 18 states prohibited remarriage after divorce. Most of these laws were stricken in the latter part of the 20th century, even as the government began relying more and more on the legal marriage license to mete out resources to couples and decide who is a dependent of whom and who could access official records deemed “private” (like medical records).

In some cultures people were not allowed to be married (by whatever definition the culture provided on the rights and responsibilities end) until they’d proven themselves fertile. In other words, the woman had to be pregnant. Pregnancy has traditionally been a good excuse for marriage, and it’s the one my husband and I used back in 1969 when we eloped. Our parents were dead set against the match, so we just showed my belly to a judge and he waived requirements for parental consent.

That was the last of the “good old days” way of doing things, apparently. In this first decade of the 21st century a full 40% of children are born to unmarried people. Half of marriages end in divorce, spreading dependency, responsibilities and rights over several households. Nearly half of fathers never provide any support for any of their children through women they don’t live with. And it’s not strange at all anymore for couples to divorce because one or the other of them decides s/he is gay. Which means that lots of children have two fathers or two mothers in at least one of their homes.

In fact, things on the marriage front are so weird lately that I think the government would do best to just get out of the business of deciding who “deserves” basic human rights or contractual rights. Why should they care who partners up to buy a house or start a business (or family)? Shouldn’t the testimony of the people involved, their families, friends and neighbors carry more weight with family and probate courts than a piece of paper? Shouldn’t people who can establish by basic means (mailing address, joint bank account, home ownership, etc.) their working partnership be eligible for rights of survivorship and dependency? Does it matter what sex they are, or even whether they have sex? Why?

Marriage as a rite and a party and a way of life isn’t going to go away any time soon. But no one else – and no institution of government or religion – can make a marriage. That’s up to the people who make the commitment to each other and any children they have (together or between them). Your religion may not approve of two men falling in love, or two women falling in love. So what? Why should that dictate what rights those lovers are entitled to as citizens of their town, state and nation, any more than it should matter that one of them is black and one is white?

I personally think it’s well past time for the religious to pay more attention to their own marriages. They might not be so prone to divorce if they did that. They wouldn’t have time to worry about their neighbors’ love lives if they paid more attention to their own. If and when religious people become perfect exemplars of marital bliss, they might have something pertinent to say about what makes people happy together for a lifetime. Until that happens, they should just butt out of everybody else’s business!

[/rant]

Links:

Taking Marriage Private

Wedding Traditions and Customs around the World

International Wedding Customs… Different Strokes for Different Folks

Discovering Wedding Customs and Traditions of the Past