“But he meant well. . .” “She had good intentions. . .” We speak these words and cast them like necessary nets over good intentions gone bad. Truth’s corrosive elements often tarnish even the best intentions, leaving them brassy, stripped of any luster and left, bare-boned, to face the storms that ensue.

Coincidentally, I have read three books in the past months that all deal with adoptions. All three books are based on the true accounts of adoptees. In each book, there have been adoption workers with good intentions (mostly) that have gone tragically wrong. In The Orphan Keeper (Camron Wright) and A Long Way Home (Saroo Brierley), children are taken into Indian orphanages and placed with adoptive couples in America and Australia respectively.

And these would be beautiful stories if these children were truly orphans who needed new homes. In The Orphan Keeper, seven-year old Chellamuthu is literally kidnapped by middlemen who sell him to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. From there, he is placed in an adoptive home in Colorado, thousands of miles away from his grieving family. In A Long Way Home, the memoir turned feature film (Lion), five-year old Saroo becomes accidentally separated from his mother and home, trapped on a train, left to fend for himself in the busy train station and then the streets of Calcutta until he ends up in an adoption agency.  There, workers post his picture throughout the city and in local media, desperately seeking his family. When weeks go by and no one claims him, they place him with an adoptive couple in Australia.

In spite of abject poverty, both boys loved their lives with parents, siblings, and extended families. Both grieved their losses as they began new lives in new countries. And the adoption agencies? They had good intentions: under the auspices of “orphan status”, they sought to ensure that these forsaken children–children whose lives would surely be filled with struggle, want, and loss if they remained in their current families–would have better, safer, more promising lives.

Though these boys flourished in their adoptive homes, they never forgot their birth families and Indian homes. As adults, both Chellamuthu (later Taj) and Saroo search for and ultimately find their birth families. Years of anguish and searching brought them across the world to their Indian homes.

From India to Tennessee, Before We Were Yours, is a novel based on the actual accounts of Georgia Tann, countless adoptees, and the Tennessee Children’s Home.  Miss Tann packaged, sold, and delivered adoption to desperate parents with empty cradles. She made adoption respectable, personal, and convenient (albeit costly–very costly). Serving the likes of Joan Crawford, Pearl Buck, Lana Turner, June Allyson and Dick Howell, and working alongside Eleanor Roosevelt in her advocacy for child welfare, Miss Tann revolutionized adoption, instituting “viewing parties” during which prospective parents could shop from a pool of available children, advertising with slogans like “Want a real, live Christmas present?” and promoting her children as blank slates ready to become anyone and anything you wanted them to be.

Over 30 years (1924-1950) Tann placed an estimated 5,000 orphans for adoption. Good intentions? It certainly appeared so. The reality of Georgia Tann’s work, however, is another story, a dark storm that left thousands of victims in its wake. A black marketeer, Tann stole children from their parents. Using a network of employees–including politicians, mobsters, police, attorneys–she claimed the struggling poor as business opportunities. She took babies straight from delivery, convincing their mothers that they were stillborn or had died during childbirth; she canvassed poor neighborhoods and literally stole children off their porches or from their backyards; she sent workers to relief offices to “listen in” on pleas for help and then used this information to convince parents that they could “temporarily release custody of their children until they could get back on their feet”; she sent workers to the banks of the Mississippi to snatch the children of “river gypsies” who traveled up and down the river on houseboats; she altered the birth certificates of adopted children, erasing any legitimate birth rights they had; and she covered up–and dismissed–the deaths of countless children under her care who died from dysentery, malnutrition, and other diseases. Miss Tann operated the first and most notorious black market for children our country has ever known.

Georgia Tann lived well, basking in the limelight of Hollywood stars, prominent citizens and politicians. What a wonderful service she was providing to orphans who had no prospects, no homes, and no love! What a visionary she was in transforming adoption into an acceptable and respectable practice! What a woman! Indeed. Under the slick veneer of good intentions, Tann’s motives were wholly self-serving.

When the scandalous practices of Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home were revealed in 1950, 30 years of unspeakable malpractice came to an end. In those decades, birth parents grieved the children they lost, and in many cases, the children for whom they had desperately searched. In those years, siblings were separated and sent to far corners of the country, most never to be reunited. And in those terrible years, she sold children to adoptive parents who never would have passed any reputable adoption home study today. One of her customers told his adopted child, “I want you to know I paid $500 for you, and I could have gotten a good hunting dog for a lot less.”

And what of the good intentions of adoptive parents who spread cloaks of secrecy over their homes, believing they were protecting their adopted children from the painful truth of their origins? Well-intentioned as these mothers and fathers may have been, when some revealed the truth to their children years later, they often found their children’s love and trust in ash heaps at their feet.

After the Tennessee Children’s Home scandal ultimately broke but before Tann could be indicted and convicted, she died of uterine cancer. And it wasn’t until the 1990s that adoption records from the Tennessee Children’s Home were finally unsealed. Tragically, less than 10% of Georgia Tann’s children were ever reunited with their birth families, though many searched relentlessly throughout their lives.

Still, through the Tennessee Children’s home, many children found new homes and filled the empty cradles and hearts of formerly childless mothers and fathers. Some found happiness in spite of the fact they were ripped from their birth families; some were so young that they never knew any parents but their adoptive parents. And through Tann’s efforts, adoption, which had been dismissed as a reputable option for childless parents, gained newfound popularity and respectability.

So what of good intentions gone wrong? Are they means that justify some benefits, happier endings for some (in spite of pain and unhappier endings for many)? Or should we heed the advice of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) who claimed, “Hell is full of good intentions or desires”?

I think back on many of my good intentions. Some never came to fruition (Houston, we have a failed launch); some went horribly awry (Houston, we have lost control); and some–blessedly–hit their intended mark, delivering a payload of justice and mercy and blanketing the target with truth and love (Houston, mission successful).

It pains me to think of many intentions I birthed, believing them to be philanthropic and even sacrificial, when, in truth, they were self-serving aims coated with the thinnest veneer that could be regarded as anything close to “good”.

English novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley wrote:  “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.” If so, there’s a whole lot of paving, walling, roofing and furnishing that results from our collective good intentions.

As I look back historically on my life and the lives of so many others, I do believe that many good intentions are fueled by a passionate and authentic commitment to truth and goodness. At least truth and goodness as it lives in the souls of those who intend to act magnanimously. And at least truth and goodness as it lives at a particular time in the lives of those souls.

Time often unmasks our good intentions, though. Holding painful remnants of words and deeds, we lift them up and cry, “But I meant well. I did not intend for this to happen. . .” And in some cases, we sincerely did not. We could not overcome the challenges in our paths, could not rally enough support, could not find enough folks who would accept our efforts to help, could not persevere in our work. So even our genuinely good intentions may fail to help others–at best–or hurt them–at worst. In other cases, we failed to examine our motives, our claims on truth and goodness, and our very hearts, thrusting our good intentions like heat-seeking missiles into the lives of others, whether they needed them or not.

As I consider the state of our country today, I concede that much of the conflict we see and hear about daily is the painful consequence of someone’s or some group’s good intentions. And herein lies the ethical and intellectual dilemma: when there are conflicting good intentions that are born from–at least in part–passionate claims for truth and justice, whose intentions are right? Whose intentions are more justifiable? And if one individual’s, one group’s intentions are more right, more justifiable, what of the other’s? Should they receive a personal and social “smack down” which seeks to obliterate any genuine claim to their aims and views?

We love a good enemy. Particularly when we can take the moral high-ground. When a person or group becomes our enemy, we can summarily reject anything they say or do. Haughtily, we can argue, “You did or said ______, and look how that turned out!” We can bask in the wake of their good intentions gone bad.

But lest we bask too much or too long, perhaps we should remember that intentions are often purer than their ultimate consequences. They may also be complex. There may be–as in the cases of The Lincoln Home for Homeless Children and The Tennessee Children’s Home-some good in intentions that are largely wrong. Certainly, this doesn’t mean that we should overlook or condone the pain and injustice that results from intentions like Georgia Tann’s.

But it should make us pause, I think. It should turn us inward to search our own history of good intentions gone bad. In the end, it should make us own a universal propensity to serve ourselves–even as we may be legitimately serving others. For when we own this truth, we will be one step closer to understanding our enemies, one step closer to understanding those whom we seek to serve and, most importantly, one giant step forward to understanding ourselves.

..she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn’t know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. 

–Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the months prior to my retirement from a 40 year educational career, I found myself standing around the gate, expecting things. Like Zora Neale Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, I didn’t know exactly what things I should expect. Still, the undeniable mantel of expectation hung from my shoulders like a cape. Tied around my neck, it trailed behind me as I navigated the obligatory retirement paperwork and filed a lifetime of work into manila folders. It was a constant reminder that when school bells no longer ruled my days, then I would fly, my cape of expectations billowing happily in the breeze.

What to expect after you retire your alarm clock and teacher clothes? What to expect after you no longer drink lounge coffee or spend your lunch hours doing cafeteria duty? What to expect when no one expects much of anything from you? Hmmm.  .  .

Perhaps it is our nature to expect the next phase (of whatever) to be better, grander, more noble than the last. The urgency that propels us forward is a compulsion that is hard to deny. So today sucked, tomorrow will suck less. So this job is simply a job, your next position will be a career extraordinaire. So you settled for this relationship, this place, this idea, you will not settle in the future.

Americans are largely a “pull- yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-go-west-young-person” sort. Expectation courses through our veins, the giddy lifeblood of the hopeful. We leave sod homes on dry, desolate prairies for gold mining camps and the promise of prosperity. On factory lines, we toil and dream, toil and dream, our heads bent to the task before us, but our souls fixed on a life beyond. In classrooms, we stomach busy work–the miserable fodder of some “professionals”–as we imagine the pathway to significance.

But what if one buoyed by years of expectation finds herself first treading water and then sinking? For expectation is not only a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future but a belief that someone will or should achieve something. It was this belief, like the lead weight we had to retrieve from the bottom of the deep end during lifeguard training, that began to pull me under. It was this belief–that I should achieve something–that pinned me to the pool floor. And it was this belief that left me breathless to break the water’s surface where some kind soul would throw me a lifeline.

Expectation at the beginning of a life is so much sunnier than at the end of a life. In youth, much seems possible, even probable. For a number of years, I genuinely expected that I would join the Ice Capades as a professional skater. Never mind the fact that I had only skated (badly) on Kearney Lake a few times in my entire life. I could easily brush this detail away, for the vision of sequinned splendor on the ice was blindingly hopeful. Young expectation accepts delayed gratification as a necessary rite of passage. When I grow up, I will . . .  Although there may be occasional frustration in this delay, more often there is comfort in the promise of something that will surely happen at sometime.

But expectation that occurs as a life is winding down–let’s say at retirement–is clothed in apprehension. Whereas earlier expectation is a stout stem that will produce a certain bloom, later expectation is a gossamer filament in a lifetime web. It is tenuous, dubious, slight and suspect. Passing time dictates no promise of delay, no prolonged rite of passage. Time is literally ticking.

In her short story, “Yours,” American author, Mary Robison, writes:

He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

After an evening of pumpkin carving, Clark has just told his wife, Allison, ʺYour jack‐o‐lanterns are much, much better than mine.ʺ His cancer-ridden wife will die that night, a few weeks earlier than expected, and he yearns to make her believe that she has lived a good life, that she has missed nothing. As tragic as her impending death is, the “awful, plaguing thing” of his life–to “own only a little talent”–is just as tragic. At least to him. He is painfully aware of the fact that he has “expected too much, most of the time, and liked [himself] too little.”

Herein lies the blessing and the curse of being “a little special”: for some, the expectation of achieving something, of becoming something more special comes with a healthy dose of self-doubt. Perhaps even self-loathing. You find yourself expecting that the little bit of talent you have will burgeon into the achievement you have imagined. Even in the direst moments of self-doubt, you whisper: “Maybe. Someday.” But then self-doubt rolls in, a returning storm that blackens the maybes and blows the somedays into another, rosier country. Then you look into the mirror and accuse: “Who do you think you are?”

I recall a 20/20 episode that featured five octogenarians. These men and women were growing and changing, becoming better selves as they played in symphony orchestras, trained for marathons, or taught university courses. In short, they were nothing short of amazing individuals. Here were achievers who were not only meeting but surpassing expectations. As the television segment ended, I remember thinking, “Is it too late for me to take up the cello?”

And then there is the issue of what to achieve. Some of these octogenarians were continuing pursuits and talents they had cultivated their entire lives; others were taking up entirely new ventures. Although I have nothing but admiration for 86-year-olds who train for the Boston Marathon, I’m quite confident that I will not be taking to the ice for future Ice Capade performances. So, realistically, what achievement should I expect?

In looking back over years of work–both parenting and teaching–I admit that my days were filled with doing. And certainly in all this doing, there were achievements: building a family, making a home, growing into a good teacher, deepening my faith, and forging countless relationships with great people. I realize that many would look at me as one who had achieved much. And all of this made my post-retirement standing around the gate, expecting things surprising, at best, and ungrateful, at worst. Why expect more?

And why not just be? Isn’t that a natural and kind progression: doing that ultimately leads to being? Being is undervalued, understated, and underappreciated. When I think of those people with whom I feel most at home, they are those who have perfected the act of being. Just being in the moment, content to listen, to comfort with their sheer presence, and to convince you that there is no one else they’d rather be with and no place else they’d rather be. Ironically, being may be the greatest achievement of a life well-lived.

So maybe standing around the gate isn’t such a bad thing. Standing without expecting, that is. For if, like Hurston’s Janie, I can stand at the gate knowing that world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether, then this is more than enough.