Crushing All Hope: Trying to Be a Foster Parent for Manitoba Child and Family Services

By Barry Pomeroy

Telling the other side of the adoption and fostering process in Manitoba perhaps inevitably ends up questioning the failures of the government child care system. In this study, I itemize the difficulties dealing with the foster care system that ultimately led to my unsuccessful attempt to become a Manitoba foster parent.
Like the impoverished child in the candy store window, both systemic and personal barriers prevented me from becoming a parent. Although I began this journey innocently enough by applying for both adoption services and foster parenthood, I was soon confronted by a deep-seated prejudice against single men as fathers, a strange subtle ignorance masquerading as professionalism, and ultimately what I interpreted to be a profound conservatism and institutional mendacity.
This book ended up being unusually well documented, for I thought I would be writing about a developing bond between a parent and a child. Instead, I ended up with a five-year record of governmental bungling and CFS’ transparent attempts to undermine my efforts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781990314469

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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When I first thought about going through the CFS system to become a parent, either through adoption or fostering, I kept track of my emails. I recorded every part of the procedure, and when it became apparent I was being toyed with, I recorded every promise made and broken, and took notes about every meeting. I had always planned to write a book about the experience. I thought that depending on how the years went, that book would be either inspiring and affirming of parenthood or profoundly depressing if I was never allowed to care for a child. When I began to notice that I was being lied to and my paperwork deliberately misplaced, I also wanted my reporting to be accurate. I didn’t want to guess at what someone said, especially if I was making serious allegations of incompetence or mendacity.

The origin of this story is more difficult to trace than merely those records, however. Although this particular struggle began relatively recently, my difficulties with Child and Family Services in Manitoba likely originates much earlier. Long before my birth there were issues in my biological family which led to me being placed in foster care at eight months old. There I was moved a few times, treated well or poorly depending on the circumstance and my reader’s expectations, and largely had to take responsibility for making my own way in the world.

One of the products of my background was a firm sense of the difficulties of parenthood. I always felt that a prospective parent needed to be fully aware of the twenty-five year commitment if they took on the responsibility of a child, and I knew I wasn’t ready when I was younger. In my university years I lived on less than ten thousand a year, and every time an ex-girlfriend had a pregnancy-scare, I shared that terror. I always believed that a father must be responsible for a child, and such concerns made me obsessively careful about birth control. Whether the baby is brought to term becomes, rightfully, the woman’s decision, but if a man is to have any part in the decision, he has to exercise his caution early.

That paranoia about birth control finally led me to get a vasectomy when I was thirty-one, for by that point I felt I was mature enough to make such a momentous decision. Even then, there were those who suggested I was foolish or short-sighted. Michele, my girlfriend at the time, wanted to know, What if I want to have a child someday? That gave me pause for a year. Our relationship was only four months old, and I didn’t want to give her the impression that I didn’t care about her opinion, especially after I had asked for it. I waited a year until we were both more secure in the relationship, and broached the topic again. She replied with the same refrain, but this time I was ready with a quote of my own: My body, my choice.

The slogan was popular enough when discussing women’s rights to their own bodies, but I felt just as strongly about my own bodily autonomy. I asked her input, but I would never dream to tell her what she could do with her body, and I expected the same respect in return. Accordingly, I booked an appointment with an urologist recommended by my general practitioner. Once the doctor asked me a few questions—such as my marital status, whether I had children or not—he refused to perform the operation. I was too young, according to him. Since I wasn’t married and didn’t have children, I would regret the decision.

That was the first time that outside forces with power over me were deciding to make a decision that should have been mine, but considering that years later I would try to foster through Manitoba Child and Family Services, it wouldn’t be the last.

He may have been correct. Maybe some people would regret the decision, but I was outraged. I couldn’t help but feel that he was stripping my right to make that choice from me. I didn’t come to him for advice about my lifestyle. I told him that whether I got a vasectomy wasn’t his choice to make. I’m not sure who you think you are, I said. You’re a glorified technician. I tell you where to cut and you cut. I’m not asking for your approval.

After that interaction I returned to my general practitioner and demanded a doctor with actual credentials they were proud to hang on the wall. She sent me to a colleague, who was mostly concerned that I was aware of the implications of the procedure. He told me how long the body would produce sperm after the operation and about the chances of re-canalization. He also mentioned the effectiveness rate of a reversal if I happened to change my mind. Once we’d covered the basics, and I still wanted to go ahead, he did a brief examination and booked an appointment.

After that simple procedure, I didn’t need to worry about birth control. Although the operation didn’t change my life in any significant way, I was treated to commentary from my friends. Denis, no doubt operating out of a sense that men’s vitality was located in their crotch, facetiously asked if I were going to become fat and lazy like a sterilized dog. Ibrahim told me that I shouldn’t go through with it because, If it’s not broken, then don’t fix it. I told him as far as I was concerned it was broken, and therefore needed fixing.

Once that door had been slammed on my testicles, as it were, I said that I would adopt or foster when asked by those who worried about how I would become a parent. I didn’t want to be a parent immediately, I definitely didn’t want to become a father because I wasn’t paying attention to birth control and had an accident, but I still believed that it was a decision which demanded planning. That was the only way to be respectful to the child and to best prepare myself for a responsibility which I perhaps took too seriously.

The responses to my wish to adopt were also derided. Dennis said he would never adopt because you don’t know what you’re going to get. I agreed, but I wondered how you know what you will get when a child is gestating in the womb. It seems to me that biological birth is even more of a crap shoot, and he was lucky his girls had the opportunity to turn out to be fantastic women.

Steve’s girlfriend Pat, upon hearing I had a vasectomy, said that she would never date a man who couldn’t have a child. Annoyed, I asked her to consider the same statement if it had been made by a man. I told her I felt the same way, I would never date a barren woman. She tried to backpedal, but once her prejudice was thrown back in her face as if a sexist man held such a view there was little she could say.

I remember telling a few Indian and Pakistani students about my decision, and their response was intense curiosity. They’d never considered the fact that they needn’t have the same life as everyone around them, and they wondered how I’d escaped with my hide intact. They were trapped in a different system, and I felt like our conversation led to a chance for real learning.

I can’t remember who spoke against adoption by warning me that the child might grow up and not love me. I remember telling them that such an eventuality is always a risk. Like the genetic lottery that Dennis was afraid of, there are no guarantees to parenthood. You have to go into the business thinking about what you can do for the child and not what the child can do for you.

To support my decision, I frequently brought up my environmental argument about not having my own children. I said we should care for those children who are already with us who need parents. Upon hearing that, Griselda told me I was being selfish. The exact mechanism of that selfishness—in that I was sacrificing my own desire for a child so that the world might have one less person destroying the environment and an orphaned child might have a home—was difficult to discern, and her subsequent statements on the topic didn’t clarify matters.

A colleague at University of Manitoba not only disagreed with my political views, but we were in the middle of a relatively intimate conversation when Jila threw down her last card. Although we were both single, we had been discussing the possibility of having children someday. Since we had no other plans, we were talking about adoption. She mentioned how she wanted to take care of a child, and how she yearned to be a mother. I sympathized, for I’d often felt the same way. I’d like to be a dad someday too, I began. I’ve always thought about adopting or fostering.

Oh, like you would be a good father, she scoffed.

I stopped, at first unsure I’d heard correctly. What?

I just mean . . . I don’t think you would . . . I mean, you wouldn’t want a kid to interrupt your life.

I knew what she meant. She had dropped the subtlety for once and was telling me exactly what she thought. If she’d made another comment about my work, I might have taken it less to heart, since she was tenured and easily made three times my wages. But my skills as a father were scarcely her area of expertise and her claim just sounded like nastiness.

I was told by others that I would regret the decision, that women would not want to date me if they knew I wouldn’t or couldn’t have a biological child, and that the path I was on would not necessarily lead to happiness. The last point I have to agree with. Once anyone steps off the common path the untrammeled way ahead offers few certainties. They cannot predict from the lives around them how theirs will be, but decisions we make must consider more than our own happiness. As well, there is no guarantee that the main road will lead to joy any more than a side route will not eventually circle back and rejoin the carefully maintained highway that nearly everyone else is on.

My path ran parallel to that road most of the time, and the matter of children came up more than once. With the people I dated we normally discussed adoption, although one of my ex-girlfriends already had a child and had been a surrogate mother, which meant she had an informed appreciation of my position. As I got older, the possibility of parenthood seemed to grow more remote. I was busy with graduate school, my girlfriends had careers they were preoccupied with, and we never felt like it was the right time. Sometime in the future, we said to ourselves. When all of this settles, then we’ll consider adopting.

Some of the reasons for this delay were selfish. I knew that my ability to travel would be curtailed if I were to take parenting seriously, and for all those who pointed to young parents backpacking with children, I knew my income would never allow that. My itinerant lifestyle, again tied to penury, also meant I gave up apartments in the spring and rented anew in the fall. I would need to be more stable if I were bringing up a child. There was never enough money and never enough time, until suddenly there was.

The Long Germination of the Idea

One of the reasons I’d always been blasé about the possibility of adopting a child was because I naïvely thought it would easy once I decided that’s what I wanted to do. Others had no such concerns, as they became pregnant by accident or deliberately, and suddenly had the family that their background had promised them. The alternative to replication is adoption of some kind. I always presumed that would be open to me just as much as it would be to others, although to be fair I knew little enough about the procedure or how I would be viewed by those making the decision.

I had personal reasons for making such a choice, for my own childhood as a foster child lent me a sympathy for the plight of abandoned children. Although that didn’t serve me well when it came to dealing with officials, I felt like it gave me an insight into the situation of kids in analogous circumstances as well as a wish to take care of them.

As well, in a world of over eight billion people, many of them starving and abused children, in environmental terms, I think we should take care of the kids we have before we produce our own. I refuse to believe that there is anything special about my own genes, or anyone else’s for that matter. All children are precious and I am not so tied to the narcissistic idea that I have to see my own features duplicated in miniature on another that I would recommend ignoring kids in need.

When my ex-girlfriends and I had discussed adoption, it never seemed to be at the right time, or in some cases, the right relationship. Most recently, Jackie and I had started the discussion. When we broke up just before—and likely because—I was about to turn fifty years old, I realized that like most things in my life, if I really wanted a child I would have to attempt it on my own. I considered the idea for a few months and then began to take about more seriously what I’d casually contemplated for years.

Although Jila had hinted at such judgements when she said I wouldn’t make a good father, I never knew how difficult trying to adopt would be for someone like me. Perhaps if I’d known that so many roadblocks would be thrown in my way, I would have changed my dream of parenthood. I presumed that when I wanted a child it would simply be a matter of filling out the forms and pleasing those in authority enough that they would allow it to happen. In fact, that was the initial procedure, although it wasn’t nearly as facile as I’d pretended.

Some would have sought out a mother with children right away, and thus accomplished both the relationship and a family around the table at the same time, but that had always seemed to me to be a mercenary start to a relationship. As well, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get back into a relationship right away, given how the last one had ended. I knew that the clock was running out on parenthood, since I could scarcely be running around after a child in my sixties, so I decided to begin the procedure that I’d always dismissed because it wasn’t the right time.

Adoption turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined. Most alternatives—such as overseas adoption through an agency—were prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Domestic adoptions could also eat up more than a decade, and the overworked and, some would say, careless government agencies might still show up empty-handed. The foster-to-adopt program was offered by many provinces—but not Manitoba at the time, at least officially. It was also a lengthy procedure and depended on the biological parent’s compliance, which is not always the easiest to acquire. Nonetheless, I knew little about the procedures, so I thought I would begin by asking my friends whether they thought I would be successful when trying to adopt a child.

My first step on this long and ultimately fruitless road was to talk to Tanya, who worked in the school system and specialized in inclusion. She knew many parents and even many adoptive parents. Therefore, in the late August of 2015, I asked her how I, a single, fifty-year-old renter, who was contract-employed by the university, would compare to other adoptive parents. I had always been under the impression that most of what would make the process difficult for me would be my circumstances. I could offer a child love, a stable home, regular school hours, and everything he or she might need, but I presumed that the agencies were filled by conservative people who might not view my life the same way.

Tanya said she thought the requirements had broadened to consider non-traditional families and even singles. She is normally an optimistic person, but she suggested I start the process as soon as possible, given my age. At least, she said, I should talk to someone in the adoption field and see what they think of my chances. Talking to her was my first tentative step on the road of attempting to turn my wish to be a parent into reality.

In some ways, that conversation opened the floodgates. I talked to another friend in Fredericton just before I left and then even chatted about it with a woman in the long line for security at the Fredericton airport. Once I was on the plane, I mentioned it to the older woman I was sitting beside, and she was also very positive about what I wanted to do.

Back in Winnipeg, I went out to dinner with Samidha and told her what I was thinking about and she suggested I adopt her. That way she could have quicker and cheaper access to medical school as an international student. I told her I could only adopt children so far as I know, and she might have missed her opportunity. Colleen also said I should adopt her, but I was still fixated on adopting a child so I had to turn down her comic rejoinder as well. Their more facetious answers didn’t prove to be very helpful, and I started to look into official agencies.

Tasks Most Difficult

W. B. Yeats claimed in his poem The Phases of the Moon that the person born after the full moon is the world’s servant, and as it serves, / Choosing whatever task’s most difficult / Among tasks not impossible, it takes / Upon the body and upon the soul / The coarseness of the drudge. In the poem, such a person throws their life below the wheels of the charging society, and in that way is dependent on their opinion as well as crushed by it.

I’ve often thought that I’d always been careful to choose tasks that weren’t impossible, although some were difficult. Most of that difficulty did not come from the task itself, however, but rather resulted from the societal forces which declare and declaim, which judged some unfit and others exemplary, using an obscure criteria which seemed to be more related to class than actual value. My various projects fit under two broad categories: my hard work and the opinion of others. The more individual exercises depended on my endurance, intelligence, and the natural strictures of materials and the physical world.

Those early projects were limited by the materials I had available, as well as my own penury. I had lots of time, and seemingly enough inventiveness, that carving from stone, building a blast furnace for my metallurgical experiments, constructing the cabins of my youth, and traveling in my region were possible. I pulled rocks from the creek to carve before I learned that many thrown-away sports trophies have marble bases, and when I visited the west coast I found marble in mountain streams. Therefore, I could carve to my heart’s content with none to gainsay me. After I’d melted lead as well as aluminum and brass, I built a few structures that partially melted the metals I could find readily available. I was in a rural area so no one prevented me from burning wood and hydrocarbons. In fact, most of the time no one was even aware of what I was doing.

The cabins I built as a child were like the raft and artificial island I made in a local pond. I would locate castoff wood and straighten a few nails to make nearly any structure I wished. I was only limited by my own lack of knowledge, such as the cabin I built when I was nine or so that had no roof because I didn’t know how to build one. Likewise, I tried to hollow a rotten white spruce that had dropped in a storm and made good progress towards the outrigger canoe I wanted, although I didn’t know that South Sea islanders sit on top of their canoes and put their feet inside. I abandoned my canoe because it wasn’t wide enough for me to sit inside. I really wanted a canoe at that time, but couldn’t foresee a time when I would be able to afford one. Later cabins were better formed, and one of them—my sister’s Holly’s favourite—was the two-story fence-rail structure I built when I was eleven. In an odd kind of affirmation, local kids and even some adults broke into it and took my belongings, but I’d proved building it was possible.

When I wanted to travel, the only vehicle I could afford was at first a bicycle and then a motorcycle. I couldn’t go very far in the beginning, but many summers I would bicycle all night and only return at dawn. When I had a motorcycle I traveled as far as Ottawa before the bike threw the timing chain and I couldn’t afford to fix it.

As these examples indicate, the main limitations on my projects were financial and material. As well, at this time I was dependent on others for a place to live, and my stability was directly connected to their idle whims. Oddly, however, when I began to assume more control over my own life, such as when I went to university, my projects started to be subject to the opinions of others just as much as my own labour and wit.

My work had always been easier to accomplish if I wasn’t waiting for the approval of those in power. They always had much to say and little to add, and seemed to take a sadistic delight in vetoing some of my attempts.

Whether I received a degree was partially dependent on my own hard work, as well as overcoming my lack of socialization, but the principal ingredient was the opinion of my professors. I needed to be found worthy by those gatekeepers. One professor told me I didn’t belong in university, that I wasn’t university material, and others, employing the same tactic as teachers and social workers, tried to assure me of my ill fit. Regardless of their statements, for me, university was also an opportunity to reinvent myself, and I set about that willingly. I worked reasonably hard at my classes, much harder at my socialization, and soon similar-minded professors knew I didn’t belong but found it much harder to identify my exact faults. They didn’t know where my camouflage began and I ended.

Working alone, I might not have been able to master a task like a specialist, but, undisturbed, I could at least make an attempt. Working independently, I only needed to worry about what I could accomplish given my skill set, as well as what the physics of the world would allow, such as building a boat, a cabin, and authoring books on a variety of subjects. Tasks which were at least partially dependent on others, such as my graduate degrees, meant I had to work harder to make up for the upper-class opinions of those who naturally found themselves standing in my way. Applications for funding went astray, sometimes my grades didn’t reflect the quality of my work, and I was passed over for funding and later in life, promotions.

Such judgements became more evident when I was confronted by the selection process for Canadian Crossroads International (CCI)—a cross-cultural organization that used Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) money to focus on cross-cultural understanding. My friend Lou knew people who were involved in CCI, and it was a simple matter to begin the lengthy procedure which would allow me to volunteer overseas. The first hurdle was their highly questionable selection process, however. There were three animateurs at the first meeting, somewhere outside Halifax in Nova Scotia, but Sandy was particularly memorable because she was very controlling and manipulative. I had met her before at a music festival when I was going through a break-up. That wasn’t a pleasant time, and although I didn’t remember meeting Sandy or speaking to her, she had her own ideas about me from that point onward.

Like the others, I was suspicious that the weekend of fun and icebreakers were part of the judging process. One of the exercises came right after they told us we were already accepted into the program. They were no longer judging our suitability, Sandy told us. Everyone present was going overseas and we should just enjoy ourselves.

Perhaps she thought we were being too wooden, or that she was not getting to the heart of each person’s unfitness. In any event, the evening before the session ended, we were encouraged to take large pieces of paper and draw a road map of where we had been, our traumas and history, and our hopes and fears for the future. Each person dutifully got their coloured pencils and set to.

I was immediately suspicious because the exercise sounded like a great way to get to the heart of something people would be reluctant to say if they felt they were being judged. I drew a picture of a face, and then wrote some of the lines of a poem I was writing that went on to become the book-length poem in dialogue called Multiple Personality Disorder. When we were encouraged to tell the rest about our timeline, mine revealed little about my personality, except perhaps that I was interested in writing and was a terrible sketch artist. Other people talked about abuses they had suffered, their insecurities, breakups, medical issues, and a host of more mundane issues. I watched Sandy, but she gave no sign that any of that concerned her.

After all of the prospective travellers went home, the animateurs sat down to decide who passed muster. Tim told me that he was uncomfortable lying to the volunteers, and that he felt they deserved more respect than that, but Sandy had shouted him down and achieved the result she wanted. They sent letters to all who attended, telling them that the weekend was a success and informing them of whether or not they had been accepted into the program. Lou told me that Sandy’s misgivings about me and the two other candidates from Fredericton had led to discussion in the meeting.

My two peers were aloof, and the committee felt that Sandy might be right about them, but they differed when Sandy pushed for rejecting me from the program entirely, although she was vague about her reasons. Her dislike at the festival could hardly be used as proof, so she suggested that I also didn’t fit in with their demographic. The other animateurs disagreed. Sandy said I was tricking the system, and that she didn’t like me, but that didn’t prove convincing enough—luckily for my trip—for them to agree that I should be excluded.

The lies from the previous meeting caused some discussion amongst the volunteers when we met again. No one was prepared to raise the matter when we were so close to leaving on our trip, however. I was more annoyed than most, for I despise being lied to and I felt it was so unfair to trick such a vulnerable group under circumstances in which they felt safe. Later, we were asked to tell the group our greatest fears about going overseas. Of course, people were much more circumspect; they remembered what had happened the last time they had been asked to divulge their fears. I said, I’m concerned that Crossroads has lied to us. That bomb dropped solidly into the now-silent room.

What do you mean? an animateur asked me while Sandy glowered in the background.

We were told at our last meeting, months ago, that we were no longer being judged, just before an exercise in which we were asked to divulge our greatest hopes and fears.

Sandy adjourned the meeting immediately by calling everyone to go into the other room, but a few curious people—even ushered along as they were—asked me about it and I told them what I knew. Sandy requested a meeting with me and the other animateurs where she claimed that I was sabotaging the weekend. I was told not to mention that they had lied and that Lou had no business uncovering the falsehood. She took no responsibility for her actions, and although the other animateurs looked uncomfortable with their complicity, she seemed proud of what she’d accomplished.

More than a few others approached me for information, but we knew we were powerless unless we wanted to lose our chance for a trip. Tim privately agreed that Sandy’s behaviour was unethical, and said he’d spoken against it, but that it was done and we must move on.

After that weekend session was over, Sandy sent an irate letter to me, cc’d to my friend, as well as head office, in an attempt to discredit me and have me thrown out of the program. Sandy was known in Toronto, however. They were disturbed by the questionable practices by the local group and in the following year reviewed some of their practices. The people at head office knew my name when I arrived, but luckily they made no mention of my involvement or their interest in my local group.

If my membership in the program had been scuppered by Sandy, it wouldn’t have been a career ending problem, but when I was working on my Master’s degree I began to worry more about the impact of unethical people in power. The thesis itself was easy enough. I merely had to do the work that I’d been trained for. But I was concerned that the oral presentation and defense might prove to be my undoing. Those on my committee might judge me unworthy because of the way I dressed, talked, or presented my ideas.

I tried to circumvent that by attending at least a dozen other defenses. Some were in other departments, but I attended every one in English. In some of them I even made my presence obvious by making a comment or asking a question. I did that at Wanda’s creative writing defense. Wanda was a talented writer, and her thesis was meant to be a creative project, but I knew that she would be both entitled and lazy at her defence. The course we’d shared showed that she was weak academically, but she was also aware the faculty liked her. She could have gibbered anything and they would have passed her.

Wanda began her defence by sipping from her disposable coffee cup as she explained that her mother had reminded her to prepare something for the following day, but she’d been too lazy. Because she had no presentation, she asked if she could merely read part of her thesis. Her committee eagerly agreed, their eyes shining with appreciation. Once Wanda was done, she sat back to watch the show. The committee’s first few questions quickly unearthed that Wanda not only couldn’t explain the structural choices for her novel but also didn’t care to investigate the question. She said, I just knew when it felt right, you know. That’s when they began to compare amongst themselves what they liked about her project. Wanda waited until they were done, and they awarded her the degree.

I worried about my defence, for I’d been used as a pawn in a directed reading defence and that some members of the department had certain ways of thinking about me. I studied how defences worked. If they offered to fail me, I planned to publically remind them that I’d seen Wanda’s woefully inadequate performance. I would bid them remember that before I appealed.

As though they had sensed that I would be paranoid about being held back in my career, the defence went fairly well. I wasn’t interrupted during my presentation, and the questions were germane to the work I’d done on the thesis.

Once the more formal examination questions were over and there was time for whimsy, one of my committee members—I think it was Robert Moore—mentioned the inflammatory title I’d chosen for my Master’s thesis: A Mad Trapper’s Examination of Reader Response and Reception Theory. He said that it implied grammatically that I was the Mad Trapper, and he asked me to explain why I’d chosen that title. Without being overly combative, I told him that I fancied that my eruption into the academic world was similar to the Mad Trapper’s problems with northern society.

I was both writing about the iconoclastic and enigmatic man who’d eluded the police for nearly two months at minus sixty degrees, and writing about myself. Rather than appreciate the conceit, Moore merely said that my thesis wasn’t such a radical re-visioning of an academic field as I might think. I wasn’t arguing that my work disrupted the academy, however, but rather that my presence in the university setting was unusual given my background. Rather than alienate him, I kept my mouth shut and they awarded me with the degree.

During my Master’s that disconnect between their expectations and my abilities was profound enough that I never received funding despite having top grades, but when I went to University of Manitoba for my PhD I was able to better deal with the middle classes. Both degrees involved projects which meant I was subject to the opinions of others, but I couldn’t just force my way through by dint of hard work. My committee’s happiness was just as important than my performance in my courses and