wednesday's child

monday's child is fair of face,
tuesday's child is full of grace,
wednesday's child is full of woe,
thursday's child has far to go.
friday's child is loving and giving,
saturday's child works hard for a living,
but the child born on the sabbath day,
is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

channel 4 has this feature on the wednesday news called, cleverly, "wednesday's child". you know, the child full of woe. it's the strangest thing i've ever seen. every week the news crew goes out and spends a few minutes with a child who is familyless. a child "in the system". a child waiting to be taken to a real home. now, the way childless families and familyless children get together has changed all sorts of ways over time, but few things are as heartwrenching as seeing a seven year old boy painting while the adults around him are asking him questions on camera, trying to make him seem appealing enough to take home. like a new puppy from the pound. look at those dimples, they squeal.

in my mind i see people fighting each other, shoving and knocking people down, just trying to get at the child i saw today. he is smart and funny. he is incredibly verbal. he wants to be a cop so he can help people. who wouldn't want him? but when you look at the website you see all these other children who are wednesday's children. full of woe. descriptive terms include "lovely" and "articulate" and "well-behaved". more than half the children listed in the nyc area mention wanting to be a chef when they grow up. i have no idea why that figures so prominently but it does. the children listed include a set of three siblings- twin fifteen year old boys and their thirteen year old sister. a ten year old boy who is "mentally retarded". a fifteen year old boy whose past is described as "chaotic". there are seventeen year old children looking for families. nineteen year olds. twenty one year old children. many sets of siblings. an incredible amount of pairs of brothers in their late teens. most are over the age of ten. most are children with brown skin.

so what happens when they are featured on this show? when the seventeen year old girl is featured? or the twenty year old boy who is still in high school? what happens when the set of four siblings, aged 11 to 15 are on the show? the cynic in my brain says nothing happens. nobody calls and nobody visits the website to print out a form and get themselves one (or a few) of those children. these are stale children already screwed up by someone else. why would they be free if they weren't a disaster?

and the truth is the older children are harder to place. even for free (yes, i know. they're not really free). but this is how we got max. guthrie is store-bought but we got max because we saw a picture of him on a website for stale dogs. old dogs. dogs with problems. and although- or maybe because- he was old and fat and full of pancakes we fell for him. because that, really, is how we see our best selves. isn't it? a need presents itself and we don't know who we are until we fill that need. until we exist for someone else. and max looked exactly like these children. he'd been sent back once for biting a baby and once for crying all night. he'd been returned like a broken toy or a shirt that didn't fit. but we figured no amount of someone else's stupidity could match our own wonderfulness.

and we were right. max has given us a chance to be people we didn't even know we were. so i guess that's why they put these phenomenal children on tv like this. like commercials complete with the occasional "buy one get one free" offer. with "fixer-upper" stamped across a few. people who want new babies aren't going to get a child off the tv news. but nobody really knows who they might get to be until they see some wacky kid sitting down in front of a camera on the evening news, fat and old and full of pancakes, without a clue how to make himself appealing to parents he has no idea how to get. that's how strange things happen. someone sits in front of the tv eating chips and sees that kid being familyless and says that one without even realizing it until the words are out there.