Everything Gru Taught Me About Adoption (Despicable Me, 2010)

I am going to explain in simple terms what it is to adopt a child. From one day to the next you are a parent. That's how brutal it is. You don't have 9 months to mentally prepare yourself for this huge change that will affect your life, it's not something that you have planned and that will happen on a fixed date... just one day the judge calls you and says “you are a dad; go to the orphanage with this paper and take this child that is already yours”.

My wife and I got married in 1995 and, to this day, we love each other madly. Since we are very different, we complement each other wonderfully. She is very uninhibited, I am very shy. My wife is very emotional, I am more cold and rational. When problems have arisen we have hugged each other tightly and put our best face on bad weather. All storms pass; the only thing that matters is staying together.

So, as it happens to all people, we faced steadfastly all the challenges that life threw at us: months without a job, illnesses, the death of our parents... Cancer. One day my wife started to feel sick, we went to the hospital and tests revealed that she had Ovarian Cancer. A huge tumor behind her uterus, clinging to one of her ovaries and attaching to the other. It was discovered in time, but a total hysterectomy had to be done. My wife had just turned 29.

That's how our plans to have children went down the drain. If you have never had Cancer (or if you don't know of a family member or friend who has had Cancer), I'll tell you what the process is like. They take out the tumor, give you a treatment (in this case, chemotherapy), you start having monthly tests to see if there are any cancer cells left floating around in your system. Since my wife's tumor was borderline - it was in the process of turning into something definitely cancerous - the chemo was preventive.

After chemo follows a five-year period of monitoring. Every six months, blood tests and scans. All good, all clean, the results were very good.

When the oncologist discharged him - “you are cancer free; but now you have to be tested once a year for the rest of your life” - we were in the best financial moment of our lives. Great job, very good salary. So the theme was “why don't we campaign to adopt a child?”.

It is possible that in other countries adoption is a quick procedure but, in Argentina in the 2000s, it was a huge amount of bureaucracy and paperwork. We put together dozens of folders with medical reports, income reports; reports from social workers about what we were like, our families and what kind of house we lived in; we even had to do psychological tests. It was the kind of reports that a judge usually asks for before granting the adoption of a child. We sent each folder to every family court in every province that exists in Argentina. In the meantime, we started going to groups of parents who adopted, we met blended families, we played with many children... and we found that all the stories were different. From people who spent months making controlled visits to orphanages to get acquainted with the children who had already been assigned to them (and who one day were going to go with them to their new home), to people who were surprised to find that the judge had granted them the adoption of not one, not two... but three siblings (!), even though in their application they had only asked to adopt one child.

But, in such cases, how can you say no? In Argentina, it can take years to adopt, and when the judge calls you, it is like winning the lottery. Either you accept what the judge offers you, or you say no and continue participating... and maybe the next opportunity will come your way in 3 or 5 years.

When we went to the courthouse in our city - I live in San Nicolás de los Arroyos, a beautiful city of 80,000 inhabitants in the north of the Province of Buenos Aires - our folder was registered at 314th place. “And how many children does the judge usually give up for adoption per year?” we asked. The answer left us frozen: two. Three at the most.

Of course being ranked 314th didn't mean that, at the rate the judge was approving adoptions, we were going to have our chance 100 years from now. Every year there were a lot of dropouts. People who, after being on the waiting list for 10 years, got fed up, decided to accept that they were going to be alone for the rest of their lives and didn't go to renew their files. Or married couples who got the adoption but in a different province. So, the following year, we had moved up to 250th place. Then to 190th place. And after 9 years, we were in 13th place.

And why is all this so slow? Because in Argentina not all children in orphanages are legally available for adoption. There are many very poor families who use the orphanages as foster homes to feed and educate them, while they remove them and take care of the children on weekends. Or there are families with serious legal problems - drugs, criminal records, parents in prison - with whom the judge cannot remove their parental rights and the state takes care of the children. For a child to be available for adoption, the judge must be sure that the child has no living relative or, if there is one, that the relative refuses to take care of the child (or is not financially or physically able to support the child). Each case is different and, as in Argentina everything is procedures and paperwork, judges take years to make their decisions. There are cases of children who have reached the legal age of majority - 18 years old - while they have been waiting for years for the judge to deign to assign them a family to adopt them.

So... that's how we were. In 2012 I was 44 years old, my wife 41. One day the court called - every year they did it as a routine, just to confirm whether we were still in the race or withdrawing the folder - and I was about to have “the talk” with my wife, to tell her that we were resigned to accept that we were never going to adopt anyone. We knew a lot of couples who were never able to have children - by choice, for medical reasons, whatever - so we weren't going to be too bad. Even after 17 years we got along like sweethearts: we walked hand in hand down the street, kissed each other every time we went out, enjoyed watching TV together, worked together from home (via internet) all day long. Zero problems living together, an amazing marriage, a case in a million. Few people got along as well as we did after 17 years of marriage and after going through everything we went through.

But the talk was aborted when the court officer informed us that this time we had won the lottery. The next day we were to go to the city of San Pedro, 90 kilometers away, to meet a girl who was available… a girl like I always wanted! On top of that, in my town we are catholics and we are devoted to our local virgin, the Virgen del Rosario de San Nicolás... and the girl's name was Maria del Rosario.

It was a miracle. That little girl was born for us.

So we set out, went to San Pedro on a Tuesday and met her. She was a 4 year old little monster. She talked like a parrot. She looked like she was 10 years old because of the enormous amount of vocabulary she had. Beautiful, nice... arrogant. Rebellious. With a self-confidence that intimidated you. When we met, we were more afraid than she was. She came up to us, took us by the hand, asked us “Are you going to be my parents?". We said yes. “Ah. Ok”... and she ran off to play with other kids. The simplicity of children's reasoning.

Wednesday we went to the courthouse. We told him we loved the girl. “Ok. Take this paper and go on Thursday to San Pedro. With this authorization you can pick her up.”

We were frozen. On Monday we were two, by Friday we were going to be three. We were going to be a family! But it still felt like an atomic bomb had dropped on us. I was paralyzed with fear. My mind was making 200 million plans. We had to make room in a hurry. We had to set up a bedroom. We had to run about 20 pieces of furniture. We had to get a mattress. Children's clothes. Medications. A lot of changes in less than 48 hours. So on Thursday we went, picked her up and by evening she was sleeping next to our bed while we were setting up her bedroom. As often happens with children who leave the orphanage - the only place they knew their whole lives - she started having night terrors. Nightmares. Crying spells. Waking up soaked in urine. We decided that one of us would stay on duty while the other slept. When we moved her into her bedroom, we bought a couple of laptops to work on at night in the dark by her bedside.

As we adjusted to the new situation, I soon began to torture myself with other kinds of questions. I was 44 years old. 44 years old. At that age many people already had grandchildren, not children. When I started taking her to kindergarten, they would ask me if I was the grandfather. I would mentally insult them while flashing a fake smile. I was already bald, had dentures and a pot belly. I wasn't Brad Pitt made dad...but I was closer to being Gru. All I lacked was a long scarf around my neck.

Since my little girl had to be entertained - at least it was the only way to keep her quiet, because it was like having a radio on 24 hours a day; she gave her opinion on everything, laughed by herself, made whims, and argued with every order you gave her -, we rented children's movies by the ton. And that's how one day we ended up watching Despicable Me.

Wow. Gru was... me. Moody. Antisocial. In the film Gru adopts three orphan girls to use as Trojan Horses to infiltrate the home of his nemesis, a younger villain plagued with far more ambitious plans for world domination. In other words, adoption was a means to an end. But things start to happen to Gru with these girls. Me, the shyest guy in the world - the kind who turns red with embarrassment every time he has to speak in public in front of 10 people - started singing with my little princess. It didn't matter if I was out of tune like a dog. I let them braid my hair - even if I had 5 hairs on my head - and put on my make-up and paint my nails. When the girls began to soften the selfish heart of the pathetic villain, I began to cry.

Because what very few people know is that, if you have a young child, you have the perfect excuse to become a child again. To read children's books. To watch cartoons. To dance, dress up and run around in the squares. To go down a slide or ride a merry-go-round. To play with toys. You are allowed to make a fool of yourself in order to get a smile out of that beautiful face that looks at you and admires you.

So I was there, in my daughter's bedroom, sitting in a chair... and since I had no storybooks, I would make up ridiculous stories for her. Princes who flew and shot lightning out of their eyes while fighting the Balrog. Elves who destroyed spaceships with their arrows. Supervillains who stole birthday cakes from misbehaving children. I had official license to be an inveterate liar - Gru had taught me that; after all his stories were about when he stole a nuclear bomb, sent a missile to the moon or built a giant laser beam... things he did do in real life! -. And my little girl would look at me and laugh. And while her bed was a regular pine bed - not a hollow atomic bomb attached to the wall! - I felt like Gru. Big nose, paunchy, bald, thin legs. Sometimes I would speak with Gru's Russian accent and my baby would cheer me on. And one day I bought her a wool hat in the shape of Kitty the cat, and my little girl looked like Edith. Well, she had a little bit of the three Despicable Me girls: hair standing on end, wore glasses, loved candy, made cute little eyes when she was going to ask you for something (or tell you a giant lie!).

Today my girl is 15 years old and she is a beast, 1.70 m (5'10”) tall, strong as a bull, capable of carrying a 12 liter water can in each of her hands. Beautiful, giant... arrogant as she has always been all her life. But make her a joke and she laughs as if she were 4 years old. She loves hot dogs. She can watch something as brutal as Terrifier and, after five minutes, start singing along to the songs from Aladdin (Ohh, the beautiful contradictions of adolescence!). Like me, she never killed her inner child. And I hope he never does, because life is too hard to be a person beaten down by the bitterness of life. You must keep your inner child alive, especially for when you have children of your own. Pass on to them your joie de vivre. Get down to their level, play with them, have fun with them. All my fears of being an old dad dissipated when I saw Gru laughing like a kid playing with his new daughters. Because, at the end of the day, those are the things that really matter in life: every time we laugh, we get a little younger. And when we laugh with our loved ones, then we are the happiest people in the world.

OTHER ARTICLES THIS MONTH:

• Everything Gru Taught Me About Adoption (Despicable Me, 2010) (My Animated Hero)
• Hunter Schafer: talent without labels (Gen Z Icons)