Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  “You don’t need to worry,” Mrs. Wong said quietly. “See? She’s already chosen you to be her mother.” I knelt beside my little girl and put my arm around her. She didn’t pull away.

  In the bedroom, Dr. Wong and John were consulting. The doctor suggested that John take the railing off the crib and lower it as much as possible. “That railing is in the way of her getting to her high chair, the one place in the house where she feels safe. And she probably slept much closer to the ground in the orphanage. You can put a mattress beside the crib, so if she rolls out, she won’t get hurt.” John fetched a mattress off a twin bed in the guest room, and then the men came to the kitchen. Lin had fallen asleep against my shoulder.

  “She’s asleep,” Dr. Wong said. “Why don’t you put her in the crib?”

  I started to protest, that she would only wake up screaming, but he was the doctor, so I obeyed. I laid her in the crib, and sure enough she sat right up, but this time she looked around, took in the new set-up and, without a sound, lay back down. She was still asleep when the Wongs left. She didn’t sleep more than an hour that afternoon, and she didn’t sleep through every night for several weeks, but it was the beginning of a new, much better time for us all.

  Besides food, which she could never get enough of, Lin loved two things: a tiny rubber dog and John Boy. She wouldn’t talk to Big John or me in Cantonese or English, but we could hear her talking to her baby brother in the bedroom. “Say, ‘ball,’” she’d order. And at six months, John said “ball.” And, certainly partly thanks to Lin’s coaching, he was talking in complex sentences before he was two. In the hall there was a full-length mirror and Lin would take the dog to the mirror and have a whispered conversation. I was never sure in what language, but she and the dog were obviously chatting with their mirrored selves.

  Changing John Boy’s diapers was always a hilarious affair. I would tickle his tummy and he would shriek with laughter. Lin would stand by looking at this scene with what seemed to me a disapproving stare. But one day when I was changing her diapers she took my hand and put it on her tummy, so I tickled her. My reward was her first smile.

  We took the children to Winchester to meet my parents in February. We felt by then that Lin was comfortable enough in her new home to risk a trip away from it. As far as Lin and Mother were concerned, it was love at first sight.

  Lin talking to the mirror.

  By this time Lin was not only sleeping at night, she might even take a nap. She was upstairs asleep when one of my mother’s friends arrived carrying a Raggedy Ann doll she had made to give to our little new daughter. The friend was so proud of her handiwork, she wanted to rush upstairs and wake up Lin to give it to her. She was almost at the bottom stair before I stopped her.

  The doll, like all Raggedy Anns, had bright orange wool hair, black button eyes, a red triangle of a nose, a sewn-on grin, but, unlike any I had ever seen, this doll was at least four feet tall. If your mother had read you stories about Raggedy Ann and Andy from the time you were a tot, you’d be thrilled to have a Raggedy Ann of your very own with a secret candy heart sewn inside. You might even like one more suitable to cuddling you than vice versa. But I was sure poor Lin would be terrified. I was afraid the sight of a stranger bearing a huge, even stranger doll would annul all the progress Lin had made.

  As I was trying to suggest that we go cautiously, Lin appeared at the top of the stairs and looked down at us. The woman held out the doll.

  “Baby!” Lin exclaimed, and came straight down the stairs to claim her new treasure, which was bigger than she was. Baby, she was never to know any other name, stayed with us until she was loved into literal rags.

  And as for my unhappy father-in-law, before much time had passed, he’d forgotten all about his dire predictions. Lin had become his favorite of our children.

  John Jr. was no longer John Boy when I realized the neighborhood children thought it was hilarious that I called my tiny son “Jumbo.” It was the Southern accent that did it. I didn’t want him going through life having people making fun of what his mother called him, so long before his second birthday he was simply “John,” and, of course, the confusion of having two people by the same name in one family ensued. And, yes, I do remember his first complex English sentence, spoken when he was twenty-one months old. We were passing the public tennis courts in Silver Spring when he said: “When I get to be a big man, I play tennis ball like my daddy.”

  We moved to Maryland when David was well on the way, but we had to live for several months in an apartment in Silver Spring before the house we were buying in Takoma Park was vacated. So six days before David’s actual birth, we moved into the house we would live in for the next thirteen years. The obstetrical practice recommended by my Princeton doctor worked out of George Washington University Hospital in downtown DC. I had nightmares of trying to get to the hospital through Washington rush hour traffic, but David conveniently decided to be born on Sunday morning. We went through nearly empty streets to the hospital, checked in, and David was born at eight a.m. It happened so quickly, the doctor almost didn’t get there in time.

  John welcomed his new son, and then went back and preached the Sunday sermon that he had written about the Prodigal Son. It was entitled “The Father’s Two Sons.” He thought that was a delightful coincidence. I only hoped that neither of our boys would turn out like the Biblical pair—the one a wastrel and the other a self-righteous prig.

  Before long people began to remark how much our two boys looked alike and Lin began asking for a sister that looked like her. We had always planned to adopt a second child, but we now had three children and a mortgage and a very modest salary to support us all. The cost of adopting from overseas again would be beyond our means. We went to the local Lutheran Social Service that we were told was the best agency in the area and asked if they ever had an Asian or part Asian child available for adoption. They hadn’t had such a child for years, they said, but they had just been asked to handle the adoption of American Indian children. Would we be interested? In the pictures the social worker showed us, there were many children who could pass Lin’s test, so we agreed. Could we just wait, I asked, until David was at least two before we got a new baby? Even then we went from childless to the parents of four in four years and six weeks.

  We were matched in the late spring of 1968 with a baby who was half Apache and half Kiowa. Her birthday was February 22, so her foster parents who had taken her home that day called her “Georgie” in honor of our first president. There was no way a daughter of mine was going through life with that name. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to name her. We had thought we could wait to name her after we actually saw her, but a day before she was due to arrive, we were told that the state of Arizona was demanding a name to put on her amended birth certificate. We had decided on Mary, a family name on both sides, and the name of my closest friend from early days. We thought briefly of Mary Helen or even Helen Mary, which would combine my mother’s name with that of my younger sister. John decided he preferred Mary Katherine, but Lin had kept her Chinese name. Wouldn’t it mean something to Mary to have either an Apache or Kiowan middle name?

  A member of our church in Takoma Park worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I called Ken up and asked him if anyone in his office could help us. The problem was we had to send the name to Arizona by the end of the afternoon and it was already mid-morning.

  About two hours later, we had a call from Ken. “Do you have pencil and paper handy?” he asked. When I did, he began to spell a name. It seemed to go on forever.

  “Ken,” I said weakly, “could we have something a little shorter?”

  “Listen,” he said sternly. “I called Will Rogers Jr. in Oklahoma and he sent a runner to the reservation to the old woman who gives names, and this is the name she sent back. I think you’d better keep it.”

  I showed the name to John. “Maybe we’d b
etter drop the Katherine,” I said.

  He looked stricken. “But I’ve always wanted a little girl named Mary Katherine,” he said. I doubted that, but we didn’t have time to argue. We sent the name: Mary Katherine Nah-he-sah-pe-che-a Paterson. The name means: “Young Apache Lady.” And we were right. She loved having that name. I asked Mary when she got married which of her many names she was going to drop, and she said, “None of them.” So she is our five-name daughter, though she usually resorts to initials for the three middle names.

  We went to the recently opened Dulles Airport to meet our new daughter. Two-year-old David and four-year-old John were racing back and forth across the giant, empty concourse that the airport was in those days. Lin was very still, and John Sr. and I were, as we had been when waiting for her, our nervous selves. At last the social worker came through the gate carrying a very large five-month-old.

  “Can I hold her,” asked tiny five-year-old Lin.

  The baby was about as large as she was, but how could I say no? I told her to sit down and I would put her new sister on her lap.

  Lin put her arms around Mary and gave a beatific smile. “She’s got the same color hair, and the same color eyes, and the same color ears as me,” she said.

  Meeting Mary at the airport 1968. Social worker who brought her from Arizona on left.

  Christmas 1970

  Motherhood

  (Less than Ideal)

  People who don’t know me are prone to ask how I did it all—preacher’s wife, four children, three dozen or so books, uncounted talks—how did I keep a proper balance? Balance? What balance? I feel as though I’ve teeter-tottered through the last fifty years, threatening to tip over at any time. I would never have made it without a supportive husband, forgiving children, understanding friends, and the grace of God. (And, as my grandmother used to say, “I speak reverently.”) A few less than shining examples follow.

  We had four small children and not much money, so buying new clothes was out of the question. I bought one new dress for Lin before she arrived. It was pale gray with beautiful smocking. Other than shoes and underwear I think that dress was the only brand-new item of that quality that I bought any of our children before the 1978 Newbery. What new clothes they had prior to that my mother insisted on buying. After the Newbery, royalty statement arrival day meant that each child could buy something brand-new for him- or herself that hadn’t been previously worn by someone else.

  From such humble sartorial beginnings, legends seem to arise. For example, my sons as young adults would insist to their friends that in elementary school we were too poor to buy them winter boots, so they wore plastic bread wrappers on snowy days. This is not true. There were bread bags involved, but they went on over street shoes, so that the winter boots that needed to last for more than one season could be slid on more easily. I promise you there were always boots covering the plastic bags, and if a boot had sprung a leak, the plastic helped keep the small foot dry.

  This legend will never die because one summer day at our Lake George house my husband put plastic bags over his shoes and trousers so that he could protect them from flying grass while he wielded the weed-whacker. When one of our sons’ college-aged friends happened to drive up to ask about the boys he caught John in this protective outfit. “You know,” he later told the boys, “I never used to believe that story about the bread bags, but now . . .”

  The faint line going up my sons’ foreheads is another story. They will tell you that it is a Paterson genetic defect carried on the Y chromosome. “See,” they’ll say, “neither of our sisters has this line.” The truth is much uglier. We had inherited from some now forgotten source a one-piece snowsuit that was fine in every respect but one. It had a very balky zipper and I had two very wiggly sons. Getting each leg into the proper legging pant was hard enough, but zipping from crotch to chin was nearly impossible. So it was that one horrible day I zipped eighteen-month-old John’s forehead. I was devastated. My beautiful child would be scarred both physically and psychically for the rest of his life. We both got over the trauma, but exactly two years later—you guessed it—wrestling the same suit onto my second equally wiggly son, it happened again. As I said, I have forgiving children.

  There were times, of course, when I had to forgive them—like the Christmas when David was an infant and Lin and John got up long before dawn and tore the wrappings off all the packages under the tree. I spent most of Christmas Day trying to put scraps of holiday paper together and figure out what scrap might have been around which relative’s present. In the end I gave up and sent thank-you notes that read something like: Thank you for the (a) mittens (b) toy car (c) book (d) puzzle [choose one] that you gave to (1) Lin (2) John Jr. (3) David [check one].

  Or there was the late afternoon when I thought the four of them were in the den watching Mr. Rogers on TV while I made supper, only to find that the older three had given their new baby sister war paint in varied colors with Magic Markers. I was appalled, but trying to follow the latest advice on child discipline, I didn’t yell. I just said firmly: “Babies are not for coloring!” “Oh, yes,” said four-year-old John, “I forgot. Jesus already colored her.”

  Actually, the three older children adored their new baby sister. The first Christmas after she came they asked for Indian costumes “so she’ll feel at home.”

  I felt a bit stupid buying those cheesy outfits, but hardly anything they got in those years pleased them more. Mary was not, at the time, available for comment.

  When, however, Mary could comment, she was very quotable. When she was three and the older children were all in school, her six cousins from Connecticut came for a visit. We were a popular visiting site for friends and relatives in those days, living, as we did, one block from the District of Columbia. The cousins took after their father. He was a dairy farmer, well over six feet and of Swedish ancestry, and all the cousins were tall young Swedes of boundless energy. The family wanted to spend one whole day exploring the zoo and kindly took Mary along.

  When they returned rosy-cheeked and full of excitement, they brought with them a wilted little three-year-old.

  “Are you tired, Mary?” I asked.

  She raised her weary gaze to me. “My socks are tired,” she said. “And my shoes won’t even walk.” To this day whenever in our family we want to express complete exhaustion, we employ Mary’s eloquent description of her socks.

  And speaking of shoes, there remains a mystery concerning them. Our very scrupulous pediatrician said that David should have orthopedic shoes to correct what she diagnosed as bow-leggedness. Trying to be at least as conscientious as the pediatrician, I took David (with, of course, three other children in tow) to the shoe store quite some distance away that sold such objects. The shoes were brown leather tie-ons, very ugly and very pricey. I swallowed and paid the bill so my little boy would not go through life afflicted, not dreaming that within a few weeks he would have managed to lose one of the hated shoes. Since he had no other shoes to wear to kindergarten, this meant another several hours taking four children to the distant shop to purchase another equally ugly and expensive pair, as the store was not in the business of selling single shoes. This scenario was repeated several times. Each time only one shoe was missing, but both shoes had to be replaced. The last time it happened was exactly one day after the new shoes had been purchased. When the five of us dragged ourselves into the store, the manager was amazed. “How in the world did you lose your shoe this time?” he asked David.

  “I lost it dancing at a gerbil party,” said David.

  I didn’t explain to the manager that Lin at nine was top sergeant of her little army of siblings whom she would order to perform various maneuvers. The gerbils needed entertaining, so Lin put a record on the phonograph and told the younger three to dance for the little caged creatures.

  It was the end of buying special shoes for David, as just about that
time I happened on an article that stated that most professional athletes were bow-legged. I had no such ambition for David but I figured bowed legs could not be a significant handicap. I did think when we cleared out the house on Albany Avenue to move to Norfolk, we would surely find the hidden trove of lost shoes, but we never did.

  David was a preschool dropout, and I didn’t even try to make him stick it out. The problem was his imaginary life, and I could never discourage another person’s imaginary life, now could I? At three he would wake up every morning with a new persona. The one I remember best was “the forest ranger who stands in the tower watching out for forest fires.” It was not sufficient to say “Good morning, Mr. Forest Ranger.” If you wanted to greet him or get his attention, you had to say: “Oh, Mr. Forest-Ranger-who-stands-in-the-tower-watching-out-for-forest fires!” If you abbreviated it, or, heaven help us, addressed him simply as “David,” you would get no response. This was complicated by the fact that the persona with the lengthy appellation attached changed daily. Mothers who are suckers for imaginative three-year-olds would play along, but harried nursery school teachers would send the offender to the time-out space. It seemed wiser to just skip the rest of preschool and let him play out all his fantasies with his adoring baby sister than to spend two years in time-out. I decided there would be plenty of years ahead when school attendance would be mandatory, why not delay what I accurately guessed might be a struggle to keep him in school?

  The children’s loving father was, to be honest, home for meals, but otherwise mostly keeping a pastor’s long hours seven days a week. This didn’t relieve him of anxiety about what was actually happening on the home front with his darling four while he was busy comforting the sick and dying elsewhere. He would walk into the house at suppertime, take one look, and ask what I had been doing all day. I would manage to declare weakly that I had kept his beloved children alive and well even if the house generally looked as though it had been invaded by a barbarian horde. Yes, I was trying to be a writer even back then, but I only wrote in those snatches of time when every child was safely in bed, or later, at school. Knowing my own powers of concentration, I knew that if I tried to write when I should be on duty as a parent, the house might well burn down while I was rearranging an awkward sentence. (Just one example: In a high school classroom my friend Barbara Thompson planned aloud a surprise party for me when I was sitting a few feet away reading. She knew I wouldn’t hear a word. I didn’t and was totally surprised.)