“What did you talk about for all of that time?” I asked.
John turned the car engine over and guided us back onto the road. “Fruit,” he said.
This is what marriage to John is like, I told Sophia. I did not tell her about the period in our early courtship when, afraid of disapproving looks from strangers, particularly black strangers, I was reluctant to hold John’s hand in public. I didn’t tell her because I hardly think about that time anymore. And when I do, well, after fifteen years of laundry, child care, key retrievals, and egg-boiling debates, those days seem like episodes from another life.
10.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” my mother asked me a few months before the wedding. John and I were in Nashville taking care of last-minute plans. I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark room in which my mother spent most of her time in the last few years of her life. She turned on her side to face me. My mother’s marriage had not been happy for a long time. She had endured many years of disappointment and isolation. Even though my father took good care of her as her health declined, the heft of all of those lonely years had worn her down.
“I think so,” I said. I had planned the wedding she wanted for me, or so I thought. We were quiet. I waited for her to say more; perhaps she was waiting for the same. I had been waiting for a long time, storing up the joy I knew I would feel on the day that she finally got up from her bed and smiled at the world again, maybe on the day of my wedding. But as I took her hand, my chest sagged with the understanding that I could not save her, not with a wedding, not with a son-in-law interesting enough to tell stories about, not with anything.
My mother passed away on a Christmas Eve morning. She was only seventy years old. It was early when I received a call from my brother informing me of her death. I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the phone, and touched John’s arm.
“Mom died,” I whispered.
In a single motion, John swung his body out of the bed and encircled me with his arm. On the way to the airport the highway was barren and dark—as dark as the night that held my grandmother as she fled from predatory white men, as dark as the stretch of the Atlantic Ocean that carried John and me to Sapelo. We held hands and drove in silence, both of us staring at the road ahead. This is marriage, I thought, or at least my marriage. It is not the stories of forbidden desire that thrilled me as a girl, or even magical rides through clouds and on dark waters. It is John’s right hand in mine, and his left one sure and steady on the wheel.
Mother on Earth
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.
—Psalms 127: 3–5
1. Selfish
I assumed I would conceive naturally when John and I decided to start a family. I didn’t. We turned to fertility drugs with ambivalence. Reports of the mood swings the drugs sometimes caused worried me. I had only gotten through one round when I broke a wooden dish-drying rack over John’s head. I don’t remember what he said, but I’m sure it was something I would have otherwise considered innocuous. Instead a growling, uncontrollable rage emerged from nowhere and then overcame me like an emotional tsunami. We decided the drugs weren’t for us.
Even if the drugs had taken, there would have been the aftermath of pregnancy to contend with. Having struggled with depression for as long as I can remember, I believed I would be a good candidate for postpartum depression. That will be me, I thought, whenever someone told me a story about a woman suffering from postpartum depression, so severe in one case that long-term care in a treatment facility was necessary. A mother of a teenager told me that she felt she had yet to return to her pre-pregnancy self. I wasn’t sure that pregnancy would be worth it.
When I heard about couples that had invested tens of thousands of dollars in the struggle to conceive, I wondered if pregnancy would be worth it, literally. I wanted to spend my money on other things. I didn’t say this out loud; it seemed like sacrilege. Sometimes I wondered if I was too selfish to get pregnant. Often I wondered if my infertility was some kind of holy judgment on my marriage or me. Always I wondered if other women wondered these things, or if there was something unnatural about my thoughts in particular. During all those months of wondering, I never once considered adoption, until I did.
I had gone along with fertility treatments for the same reason I went along other non-decisions I have made in my life, like having an enormous wedding: because people whom I loved wanted it for me. I thought I was supposed to want it, just like I was supposed to want to get pregnant by any means. Yet I cried genuine tears when, month after month, I was unable to conceive. I felt like a failure.
My friend Lisa, a scholar of the Bible, sat with me once as I confessed that another fertility treatment had failed to take. “This is your pain,” she said. “You must bear witness.”
Lisa was sitting across the room, but her words gripped me physically. I stopped crying. I was erect, alert, and full of purpose. From that moment, I paid attention to the more important presence in my insides: not the drugs but the little door in my heart that had always been closed to them. Behind that door was my truest self, and she didn’t want to conceive that badly.
Not long ago, I read an interview with a famous actress who adopted two children. When the subject of pregnancy came up, the actress said something like “It didn’t interest me.” It wasn’t that pregnancy didn’t interest me at all; it just didn’t interest me enough.
Adoption, however, came naturally. One day I woke up and I knew. It hit me like a revelation. We were going to adopt, I told John, and then Lisa. We were going to adopt from Ethiopia. There is a notable Ethiopian-born population in Vermont, and a substantial number of them are adopted children. But to me the decision felt less practical than magical. I’m the kind of person who typically questions her instincts. In this case, I did not.
Sometimes people assume that my husband and I adopted for altruistic purposes. In truth, we adopted for the same reason that people pursue natural birth: because it was what we wanted. And for me, like any woman determined to conceive, like anyone who really wants anything, the question of money paled in comparison to my desire.
As it turns out, I am selfish. Adopting my daughters is the most self-centered thing I have ever done. It is the one decision I have made in my life that represents who I truly am, the only choice that aligns most squarely with my deepest and most fundamental belief about life on Earth: that we are here to see one another through this journey. We are here to keep our brothers. Our sisters, too.
* * *
—
Once we decided to adopt, signs seemed to spring up everywhere. I sat in a waiting room and opened a magazine to an article written by a woman who had adopted as a last resort and then conceived a second child naturally. Her greatest fear about adoption, she wrote, had been that she would not be able to bond with her child as intensely and authentically as a natural mother, that the bond between herself and her daughter would be, at best, only an approximation of that natural bond, or, at worst, simply counterfeit.
She discovered that they were different, her relationships with each of her two children, but the most fundamental difference between being the mother of an adopted child and being the mother of a biological child, she said, was that she was able to take public pleasure in the beauty of the child she had adopted. When strangers said of her adopted child, “What a beautiful baby!” she could respond without hesitation, “Yes, she is, isn’t she?” But when strangers exclaimed over her biological child, she fumbled for a response. To agree, she explained, felt like vanity.
I hold her story in my heart.
2. Miracle
I was on the phone waiting for a picture I had forwarded to my friend Iris to open on her computer screen. I knew the picture intimately. It featured two brown babies with enormous eyes. One of them was in tears; the other one looked like sh
e was trying not to laugh. Both of them were wearing crocheted yellow caps that made me think of Esther Williams.
Before we heard about the girls, John and I had never considered the possibility of twins. As the JPEG opened slowly on Iris’s screen, she and I discussed this unexpected factor and all of the challenges it would present. When the JPEG finally opened, Iris went quiet. Then she said, “Oh, you’re fucked.”
We were, indeed, happily fucked. There was no turning back. The question shifted from How? to When? What we assumed would be a straight line from us to the babies in the picture turned out to have close shaves and hair-raising detours. At one point, it looked like the adoption would fall through. John and I were in Ethiopia at the time. A government official told us to prepare ourselves for the worst. That night John and I held each other and sobbed. I was more terrified that night than I have ever been in my life; the anguish seemed to have no bottom to it. I thought of the babies in the picture, the perfect roundness of their eyes, the delicate curve of their feet, their dark, miniature hands. They will have no memory of me, I thought, but I will remember them forever. The next morning we soberly considered other options, like going for another round of drugs. Later I joked that I might be the only woman on Earth to pursue pregnancy because I couldn’t adopt.
We hardly slept for the next seven days, keeping our phones close and checking our email almost hourly. Suddenly, the same official emailed to say that she had decided to approve the adoption. She didn’t explain and we didn’t ask why. I am still baffled and awed by the sudden turnaround that changed our lives forever. I routinely tell my daughters that they are my miracles, gifts from Providence itself, to which they respond with exasperation, “Mommy, stop.”
After a twenty-four-hour journey, we met John’s mother, sister, and her two children at the airport in Boston. They burst into tears as the four of us deplaned. John drove us back to Burlington in the middle of a snowstorm. He was so exhausted that twice he pulled over to do jumping jacks in the snow in order to stay awake. He had no choice: when I took the wheel I nearly ran us off the highway.
The girls sat silent and staring in the back, looking like tiny Michelin Men in identical padded snowsuits. Eventually they fell asleep. When we finally arrived, and put them on our bed, they lay flat as boards. Suddenly, their eyes flew open. They looked at us and then peered around their fur-lined hoods and looked at each other. A feeling of peace seemed to settle between them. It lasted for a second. Then, as if on cue, they commenced to wail in unison until they passed out.
3. Counterfeit
During those dizzying early months, two good friends became pregnant in quick succession. I agreed to host their baby showers. No, I offered. Actually, I insisted. I consulted friends and the Internet for baby shower protocol, shopped for the right decorations, ordered cute cakes, all the while asking myself, What are you trying to prove?
At one of the showers, every single guest seemed to be pregnant, too. A woman I hardly knew put a newborn in my arms. Overwhelmed by feelings I didn’t understand, I handed the baby back and went into another room to cry in private. What had my daughters looked like at that age? I tried to imagine their one-year-old faces pasted onto newborn bodies and cried some more. I would never know. I hated feeling so vulnerable, but even more than that, I hated that those feelings of vulnerability could be so easily triggered by a stranger. The fact that I had no control over those feelings frustrated me. I cried out of frustration, but also out of shame. I was ashamed of the secret envy I felt as I stood and chatted with women whose stomachs were as big as beach balls. I’ve heard adoptive mothers say that they wish that they had originated their children. I know that if I had given birth to my daughters they would be wholly different people, and I like them just the way they are. Still, when I stand next to pregnant women, my stomach sometimes feels concave and hollow.
I no longer cry at baby showers, but the feeling of vulnerability, the experience of sudden exposure and, sometimes, the same shameful, secret envy of women who have successfully conceived compose a quiet, even current in my life as an adoptive mother. These feelings exist in the private chambers of my heart. In the very same chambers throbs the electric joy I experience as the mother of my daughters.
I never know how to respond when those negative feelings are triggered. Once a friend and I stood naked from the waist up as we changed clothes to go to an exercise class. “Look at those breasts that never nursed,” she said wistfully. She meant it as a compliment. I was on the phone with the same woman a few weeks later and confided to her my worries about some problems one of my daughters was having in science class. “Well, they’re not genetically yours, so at least you know it’s not your fault,” she said. Later, she explained that she had meant the comment to reassure me.
Both times I was caught completely by surprise, stunned by how quickly ordinary activities—changing clothes, an idle conversation with a friend—transformed into emotional landmines. I believe she meant no harm, but the effect of her comments was to remind me that I was not a biological mother. I don’t need reminders. Even more disturbing was the fact that her comments revealed that she, herself, was constantly, even vigilantly, aware of the fact that I was not a biological mother. Her reminders touched my own quiet fear that my bond with my daughters might be missing something vital; that my maternity is an illusion and a lie.
I have found that another constant in my life as an adoptive mother is that other people often project onto me their essential feelings and beliefs about the mother-child bond. While we were in the process of adopting, one friend wondered aloud if true bonds were even possible between mothers and children who were not biologically related. This same friend confesses that there is little about her own daughter that she finds familiar. Still, to her, to many people, the biological relation—blood—is supreme.
Several years ago, I told my daughters that I had made contact with their biological cousin.
“We already know all of our cousins,” Isabella said.
“But this cousin is related to you by blood,” I explained.
“ ‘By blood,’ ” Giulia wondered. “What’s that?”
Before I became a mother, I believed in the primacy of blood. Once I even said to one of my closest friends, who had decided to use a surrogate, that I was relieved she had chosen that route instead of adoption, because using a surrogate meant that her children would be “really” hers. Today I am embarrassed and amazed, not only that I said those words, but even more that I actually believed them.
For me, adoption has been a journey from ignorance to enlightenment. What I understand now is that the difference between pregnancy and motherhood is something like the difference between having an enormous wedding and being married. But I’m not sure I would have found this out otherwise. In Their Eyes Were Watching God the main character shares with her best friend a few things she has found out about life over the years. “It’s uh known fact, Phoeby, you got tuh go there tuh know there,” she says. “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves,” she continues. “They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”
4. Romance
When I was a child I dreamed of being adopted, not only because the dynamics in my family sometimes mystified me, but also because the adoption stories that I knew about sounded so romantic. I grew up in a community in which adoptions were kept hidden from children but whispered about among adults. Blood connections were revealed deliberately, at momentous junctures, like eighteenth birthdays, or recklessly, through overheard conversations. Adoption sounded to me like something out of a Charles Dickens novel, but in reality, these revelations created wounds that never healed. Happy families were perceived suddenly as fraudulent. Lives were thrown off track and personal histories reevaluated. “No wonder he always…” “So that’s why she never…” That was forty years ago. Older relatives
who are products of that era used to suggest that I keep the girls’ identities as adoptees a secret from them. But they did not suggest what I should tell the girls instead. In order to keep such a secret, I would have needed an alternate narrative just as elaborate as the true story, considering the fact that my daughters’ father is white.
Even though the adoption stories around me when I was growing up were shrouded in secrecy and pity, I knew of many people in the Deep South who raised children to whom they did not give birth. In fact, my grandmother was not ready to be a mother when my mother was born, so she entrusted my mother to her parents and siblings. My mother remembered her grandparents as upright, religious people who policed her posture and ate bacon with a knife and a fork. She adored them and described her years with her extended family as some of the happiest of her life. My mother called her grandmother “Mama” and her mother “Mother.” To me, this said something about the different quality of intimacy she felt for each of her mothers. When I floated this theory by my mother, she considered it briefly, but she died before we got a chance to discuss it again.
When she was six, my daughter Isabella went through a phase during which she tried to figure out what to call me. For a while, she settled on stepmother. I felt tender amusement as I witnessed her trying to make sense of the nature of our relationship in her own mind. So far, it is only Isabella who has puzzled over what to call our bond. Not coincidentally, when I deny her something that she wants, Isabella is the one to sometimes fling the barb that perhaps all adoptive mothers fear: “You’re not my real mother!” In one such instance I replied, “I am your mother on Earth. And you still can’t wear your pajamas to school.”
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