Neither mom nor dad

We referred to ourselves as his abba and eemah, but Lumpy never called us anything while he lived with us.

As with just about all his other developmental milestones, Lumpy was late learning to speak. Actively neglected to the point that the state put him in foster care, he arrived at our house with a limited vocabulary. Aside from “tickle-tickle-tickle” and “gootchie-gootchie-goo,” the only noise Lumpy knew to make was an indistinct but excited “Eee!” as he ran headlong the downstairs of our house.

Foster care is supposed to be a temporary arrangement, and a child who’s been pulled out of their birth family is already living with trauma that will be compounded when the state begins to extract them from their foster homes too. Adding confusion over who their parents are, is just making it worse. That only makes sense.

But we had a child of our own, and we didn’t want to sow confusion in her fields by being aunt and uncle to someone she already was relating to as a brother. So we raided Hebrew and found words we could use that wouldn’t cause any trouble.

“Go sit with eemah.”

“Give abba your hand to cross the street.”

Weeks went by. Months followed. By the time summer arrived, Lumpy had started to figure out speech. He caught me sneaking a few Wheat Thins, held out his hand, and clear as the sunlight coming through the window, asked, “Some?”

It wasn’t snack time, but I was so thrilled, I not only handed the crackers over but also called everyone I could think of to share the good news.

Summer ended. Fall came. On October 15, a driver from the state showed up in a car. I knelt on the sidewalk beneath a leaden sky and gave Lumpy a hug.

“Abba loves you,” I told him. “We all do. Don’t ever forget.”

The days and weeks crawled slowly past. In January, I called Lumpy’s birth father. We’d heard through the grapevine that his mother had left town with a new boyfriend, leaving behind her husband and the children she’d wanted back so badly. Being a single parent can be rough, and we wanted to offer our help, if he wanted to accept it.

He did.

The first night Lumpy came to visit, I was in the kitchen making dinner when he arrived. He saw me, and his face lit up with the light of a thousand exploding suns. He stretched his arms out in recognition and ran toward me like he did when he first arrived in our house. This time he wasn’t shouting “Eee!”

This time he shouted “Daddy!”

It was my wife who saved the day. She played it down, and rightly told Craig that his son had called me that only because he always heard our daughter calling me that.

I never could have said that. I was too busy flying.