By Jose Cardenas

Never in my wildest dreams did I think one day I’d walk into a courtroom to fight for custody of a six-year-old boy whose little toes I’d caressed to sleep since he was a baby, but who is not my son.

The boy came into my life when he was a six-week-old baby, after my wife met his mother in our old neighborhood and volunteered to watch him so his single mother could work. I was deployed, so I held the little boy with dancing eyes and warm fleshy skin when I came home on leave.

We had him at our house so constantly that our affection for him grew like he was a part of our family. But as we were growing to love this little kid, I worried about getting too attached.

Then, in February 2023, the boy took a loaded gun to school while in his mother’s care, and the dark cloud that hovered over me began to descend.

Only a couple weeks before this, concerned that he was being left alone for extended periods of time, my wife had filed for emergency custody. I felt conflicted. I wanted to keep him safe, but had empathy for his mother and feared that going to court would lead to not seeing him again.

My deepest soul-searching, however, came from trying to sort out what my place in the life of this little boy without a father figure should have been.

I’d made his almond milk bottles and changed his diapers. He’d napped on my chest and crawled from room to room trying to be next to me.

But I was terrified that love without blood ties would not be enough in court.

Helping his mother care for the baby was a gesture of friendship, not a transactional act. We never asked for money, nor were we paid. Rather, we gave the mother financial support on occasion and co-signed for a car. I wanted to make sure the boy was safe.

When I returned from deployment, the boy was with us most days. When I changed his diapers, he raised his legs and studied my face with his darting eyes. He chuckled when I covered my nose and said, “Your butt stinks.”

I saw him take his first steps. One morning, as he crawled across the dining room, he stood up on his wobbly legs and stumbled to the doggy gate. This was also the first time I heard him say, “Dadda, Dadda, Dadda.” He reached up with his arms asking me to lift him over the gate.

Hearing him call me “dadda” gave me pause. But I reluctantly picked him up. We tried to correct him, but when I told him to call me by my first name, Jose, he stared at me and said, “Ohey.” In time, telling him to not call me Dad felt cruel.

As he got older, he seemed conflicted, too. “My utter mommy that’s at work,’” he would say, “said to me you’re not my dad.”

Once, he also said something that made me sad. “My mommy told me at home I don’t have a dad.”

I was never sure about taking his mother to court. After she got served, we had to wait two weeks for the court hearing to find out if we’d ever see him again.

Even though I grew up in different homes when I was around the boy’s age, I don’t consider myself to have had much trauma in my life. So as the pain from the uncertainty of whether we would see him again filled our lives, I figured this was what it felt like to mourn.

I worried I’d seen him for the last time the previous evening when I walked him to the front door. I’d never verbally expressed to him my affection. Now I wished I had told him, “However things turn out, boy, this will always be your home.”

I hardly talked those first few days. I was angry, sad, afraid, stressed from having to deploy again.

The emotional trauma intensified later that week.

A friend called my wife saying that a first grader at the boy’s school was caught with a gun in his backpack.

The following day, as I got home from work, I heard my wife shriek, “No, God!” “It was him!”

The boy’s mother was in the news as the parent of the child with the gun.

The apartment where he lived was not fancy, but it wasn’t bad, from pictures I had seen of him inside. It was near the beach and across the street from a park.

But whenever I went with my wife to pick him up, I wished better for the boy than the vacant apartments with rusted door knobs and broken blinds.

I didn’t want “my” boy to be poor.

The image of him alone in that apartment in the mornings after his mother went to work, waiting for her to FaceTime him to get on the bus saddened me. It saddened me to think of him going into the apartment and locking the door after school. Especially during the short days of winter with daylight disappearing while he was still alone.

I imagined him at school, terrified, tugging at his t-shirt collar, trying to explain to the police where he got the gun. Maybe the little boy longed to have left the gun where he found it, so after school he would be allowed to go to that lonely home.

The first day after he took the gun, I woke up in a daze, wondering where he was. We had assumed he went into foster care.

At our house, he’d jump out of bed and run downstairs to the breakfast nook. He’d ask for his All Berries Captain Crunch. What did he do when he opened his eyes in his new strange environment? Did he think about us and wonder why we hadn’t come to get him yet? 

During the first hearing, the judge ruled that the boy would stay with my wife until trial, eight months later. However, the boy’s father and paternal grandmother, who had not been in the boy’s life for years, showed up to ask for custody too.

Seeing the boy walk through our door again was a dream. He was subdued, his mop of hair disheveled.

“I went to another place for kids,” was how he explained where he had been.

I helped my wife bathe him and walked his blue hospital pants and blouse right into the garbage.

I took him to the movies and the park, set up a trampoline, got him soccer and footballs and aired the tires on his bike. He learned to ride his hoverboard.

He was asleep in the backseat of my wife’s truck when she took me to the airport before dawn. I briefly watched him dream, then kissed him good-bye on the forehead.

By the time the trial arrived, we had come to realize the overwhelming importance the law places on biological ties.

We were not the boy’s flesh and blood. How regretful that we naively put ourselves on this path. Our love wasn’t enough to keep in contact with the boy whose only stable environment had been our home. Our care of the boy while his father and paternal grandmother were not even in the picture was not enough.

Now, remnants of his life in our house break my heart. His Spiderman lawn chair is still in the living room with his Pikachu doll and Jeffy puppet sitting in it.

The kitchen is quiet without his sporadic “Hungry! Thirsty!” calls that he made when he took breaks from games.

I closed the door to his bedroom. Looking at the stuffed animals on his bed, the Yoda posters on the wall, his toy cars and footballs on a shelf and the Polaroid camera I got him the last time he was here hurts too much.

I didn’t really think that would be the last time.

That weekend, he got in the sprinklers in the front yard, looked for nails with his metal detector in the back and jumped on his trampoline.

When I walked him to his front door the next evening, we gave him a hug.

He put his arms around us, too.

“We love you, boy,” I said as I tousled his head. “You will always be our little boy.”

As I shut the door, I peered through the front door glass. I watched the boy I first held as a baby walk across the yard and disappear into his future without us.

Jose Cardenas is a service member and former journalist who lives in Virginia with his wife, Melody, and daughter, Rylee. He was fortunate as a child and adolescent to have community members in his small California town who put a roof over his head and cared for him like a son.

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