SAFE

An adoption becomes a nightmare for a California couple.

“As a gay man…I never had a pregnancy scare force me to ponder important questions like: Am I ready to be a parent?” So writes Daley early on, noting that he and his husband, Jason, shared the desire to become parents to one or more of the roughly 120,000 children awaiting adoption at any given moment. Many find foster homes due to an appallingly common scenario whereby a biological parent neglects or abuses a child, often as a result of addiction. As part of a new wave of same-sex parents involved in the adoption of children, Daley and Jason have found themselves to be pioneers of a sort. “We wouldn’t be the first men to raise children without a mom,” writes the author, “but the gravity of what that might mean for a child had never crossed my mind.” As it turns out, the adoptees had fewer qualms, and soon they were calling Daley “dad.” Enter a regime in which child protection and child welfare are wobbly and easily conflated categories, where the primacy of keeping biological families together trumps potential danger to children, and where competent social workers leave in droves, burned out, while bureaucratic drones set the rules. In a complex series of negotiations and legal back and forth, Daley and Jason lost their would-be adoptees: “I had envisioned a future in which we would always be in their lives, but Ethan and Logan were sent back to a home not yet ready for them and there was nothing more I could do to protect them.” It took more endangerment to the children and more wrangling before the couple found much more than they had bargained for.

A strong indictment of a failed child welfare system, but with an unexpectedly happy ending that speaks to the power of love.