An unexpected life lesson from Garfield the cat

“You guys are such good people.”

This response is what I typically hear when I reveal that my husband and I adopted our teenage son from foster care. I know I’m not supposed to accept that praise; in our pre-adoption training class, the instructors disabused us of any kind of savior mentality. There are plenty of ways to “help kids” without being their parent, they told us. Usually I deflect the “good people” compliment by simply saying, “We’re lucky to have him.” But if I’m being honest, with those approving voices in my ear, it’s been hard not to carry at least some sense that I am doing a good thing. That I am good.

Jayden arrived at our home on his 13th birthday. He has a great smile, an infectious laugh, and a naturally generous and compassionate heart. He likes to prank my husband by putting googly eyes on his computer screen, and together we make up whimsical songs about our cats. At bedtime, he hugs us and says, “I love you.” I love him, too; and now the official documents affirm what I have known since the day he stepped out of his social worker’s car and into our lives: He is my kid.

Jayden and I like to do something rebellious when my husband is out of town: order fast food. So, on a Tuesday in July, we stopped at McDonald’s before heading into AMC Theaters to see “The Garfield Movie.” Neither of us is great at deception, so of course we got caught with our smuggled fare: the teenager selling popcorn saw Jayden’s soda in his hand, and glimpsed the greasy bag in my capacious purse. But he waved us along, and we hurried to our seats feeling both sheepish and triumphant.

I didn’t especially care about the face-stuffing antics of a highly commercialized cat. But with Jayden guffawing beside me, elbow-deep in a bag of McNuggets, I found myself mildly entertained. Until Garfield’s long-lost dad appeared. I wasn’t aware that anyone had been asking about Garfield’s feline parentage, or that this particular movie aimed to settle the question. So when — in the opening flashback — the dad said, “I’ll be right back,” and left kitten Garfield alone in an alley with his innocent cartoon eyes blinking in the rain, all I could think was, Oh no.

That same adoption class had spent a lot of time on birth families, and how we could help our future child navigate these complex relationships. Biological parents, grandparents, siblings —our child would maintain a connection to them, whether through state-mandated visits, yearly letters and photographs, or simply through the painful knowledge of someone no longer present in their life. No matter how beautiful an adoption may be on the surface, there is always that undercurrent of loss.

At the time, I’d thought I understood.

Once Jayden arrived, we navigated his situation as delicately and sensitively as we could, but I found that, with a real, breathing, feeling child in front of us, it was harder to find empathy for his birth parents. I would think of what he went through, all the instability and upheaval that ultimately led him to us, and the gentle, optimistic person he is today, and I would feel angry. “You missed out on this amazing kid,” I wanted to tell them.

I’ll spare you a play-by-play of the strangely convoluted plot of the movie, beyond the fact that Garfield is reunited with his dad, and the two of them are conscripted into a heist that involves stealing 1,675 quarts of milk. (We were in it for the ride, not the plot development.) Eventually, though, Garfield’s dad gets the chance to tell his version of the story.

Silently sweating, I glanced at Jayden beside me, wondering: did this mean anything to him?

No matter how beautiful an adoption may be on the surface, there is always that undercurrent of loss.

Another flashback shows us that when Garfield’s dad finally makes it back to that rainy alley, he sees Garfield through the window of an Italian restaurant, charming a kind stranger — Jon Arbuckle — at his table. Dad smiles and searches the trash, finding a small anchovy and placing it on a garbage can lid as a plate. He skirts through traffic to the restaurant, then hangs back behind a mailbox as Garfield comes out. Then he watches, as Jon gives Garfield a full tray of lasagna. The dad looks down at his garbage can lid with a single anchovy. My eyes filled with tears.

Garfield’s dad watches from behind the mailbox as Jon looks into Garfield’s eyes and decides to keep him. The two of them disappear down the sidewalk.

That’s who we are, I realized. We are the family who had everything to give and no hardships to hold us back. We have a warm, glowing life behind a pane of window glass. My husband and I aren’t “lucky.” We’re the beneficiaries of other people’s pain.

At this moment, Jayden leaned over to whisper to me. My heart caught in my throat. Was he upset? Was he seeing his own story?

“Why didn’t the dad go after him?” he asked, puzzled. It pierced my heart to think what he really meant.

Sacrifice? Shame? Abject poverty? I saw all of those in Garfield’s dad’s story — and more so, I saw the complexity of the situation I had judged. Ultimately, I had the same question Jayden did: Why? But how could I explain that to him now, in a movie theater, at a whisper? There is more to Jayden’s birth parents’ lives than I will ever know, just as there is more to our lives than the glowing image people may see through the window.

I swallowed. Steadied my voice. “I don’t know,” I replied, and I leaned in to watch the rest of the movie with my kid.

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