Microstory 261: Perspective Thirty-Six

This is an experimental Perspectives microstory. The introduction can be found in Microstory 225. More to follow.

I was adopted, but this didn’t happen when I was a cute little baby, or just a twinkle in my father’s eye. No, I come from death and destruction. Well, perhaps that’s a bit overdramatic, but I certainly wasn’t born into royalty. My birth parents were lazy drug addicts. And I’m not even talking about hard drugs like cocaine or meth. They just smoked pot, but a lot of it, and they never weren’t high. Our next door neighbor’s son was, fortunately, often there to look out for me. He stole formula when I was an infant, and squirreled away food from his own house as I grew up. His family wasn’t the richest of people either, so it’s not like there was plenty to go around. When his parents found out, he expected them to be angry for helping me. Instead, they were angry that he had let it go on this long without contacting the authorities. They had their own problems to deal with, so the fact that my life was even more messed up than theirs was something they simply did not have time to notice. Social services came in and removed me from the unsafe home. My parents didn’t even fight it, and I’ve not heard from them since. I remained in the foster system for only a few weeks; a miracle, really. Older children are rarely, if ever, adopted before reaching the age of majority. Like I said, people usually pick adorable babies, or they just hire a surrogate. I ended up lucky enough to be matched up with a loving forever family of two parents and a brother who spends his time helping outcasts at the rec center. Despite this, I developed fairly radical views on the foster system. Some say that pro-life terminology needs to be transformed into anti-choice so that people truly understand that pro-choice doesn’t mean pro-death, and that the key to change is awareness. But I don’t feel like that’s enough. The real problem is that people are having too many babies. And too many of these children are essentially left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, when a couple wants to raise a child but are biologically incapable of it, they so often choose surrogacy. That angers me a hell of a lot more than it does others. What we need to be doing is taking care of the humans that already exist. I’m not saying we should start some kind of population control program that limits families to some arbitrary number, but we should make surrogacy legally difficult. And we should encourage adoption above it. If we can get a handle on this, then we can go back to those medical options, but until then, I say we try to make things better for the current populace.