“A child is formed from the genes …”
“I know,” she interrupts, “not blue jeans but some tiny, tiny things.”
“Yes, exactly, from the genes of a man and a woman. Since I did not have a husband, I had to use someone else’s genes to make you. There was a catalogue, and I got to choose your donor from that catalogue.”
“Like choosing vegetable seeds from a catalogue?”
“Yes,” I say, excited by her analogy. “And I chose a musician with red hair, although I didn’t know at the time that it was curly.”
“Will I be a musician too?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
With that, she stops asking, and I return to reading her book. But after she lies asleep, I ask myself what burden I have laid on her by not giving her a real father. While I can tell myself that she is better off by not having some kinds of fathers, I know it is still a burden, and I cannot lift it from her.
I wonder how she thinks of Patty and Doug. She knows they are not her parents, but still they cared for her. I can’t answer this question. And now it has become infinitely more complicated by Patty’s suing me to become Dawn’s mother, or other mother. It is more than I can comprehend. It would be even more terrible if Dawn were to find out about the lawsuit. Who could possibly explain that to her? I shudder. My anger at Patty now consumes the gratitude I had for her taking in Dawn while I was down. I wonder if she is doing this just to see if she can make me break down again, so she can take Dawn back. That will never happen; I am determined.
Finally, Wednesday arrives and I am in Analee’s office. She is infuriatingly calm, which only agitates me further. She tries explaining to me the law on parentage, but it gets hopelessly tangled. Even she cannot explain it well. Finally, I just butt in.
“Just tell me if she can win.”
“It’s possible.” For a long moment, she says nothing further. “It’s possible she just wants the ability to share time with Dawn. It’s possible she wants to have Dawn come back to live with her most of the time. We don’t yet know. Part of the question is whether you can live with the prolonged uncertainty of this lawsuit; it can be long, expensive, painful and unpredictable.”
I want to throw things at her from the top of her desk, like the State Bar Award or her glass candy jar. The vision of jelly beans raining over her desk tempts me. But I sit on my hands, chewing the inside of my gums until I taste blood, while Analee draws what she calls a decision tree.
As a tree, it is both upside down and entirely lopsided, with one short, blunt limb on one side and a labyrinth of limbs and branches on the other. While Analee is painstakingly drawing it, explaining it with maddening slowness, I drift into a fantasy of moving to Canada with Dawn, living in a cabin in the North woods and writing children’s books from there. The cabin would be tiny but look out on endless forest through square windows. Dawn’s room would be sunny, mine pale blue. Too soon, I realize I’d miss Megan and Jenny and their children, and I could be located through my agent, and probably deported.
Analee looks at me expectantly, holding the decision tree before me so that I can read it.
“Tell me about the short limb,” I blurt. It is labeled mediation.
Analee explains that Patty and I could meet with a trained mediator to see if we can agree on a human solution rather than a legal solution. If we agree, the lawsuit will go away. If we don’t, the mediation will die a silent death and the lawsuit will go forward (into that labyrinth of limbs on the opposite side of her tree). Mediation would be entirely confidential. The mediator she has in mind has worked successfully with many bitter parents.
“But Patty’s not Dawn’s parent!” Even before these words are out of my mouth, I can see Analee trying to choke back her words and substitute “family members.”
“Your agreeing to participate in mediation doesn’t mean you admit Patty is a parent.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Keep an open mind that allowing Dawn to see Patty and her cousins again might be good for her -- and even for you.”
Matt Shipley, the mediator, gazes at me with protruding, mournful eyes, whose lower lids droop slightly, creating half-moons underneath that I can easily imagine welling with sympathetic tears, their arc mirrored by pale but subtly active eyebrows that move separately from each other and ask their own questions as they flicker. He sips tea from a mug next to the upright chair where he sits cross-legged, but his eyes never leave mine as I tell him the history of Dawn’s conception, birth and life so far. He does not interrupt or ask me any questions.
Patty sits in a chair across from me. Dr. Shipley has us sit facing each other, him at my left and her across from me. His eyes hold mine, and I do not even glance at her until he finishes listening to my history. When he turns his eyes to Patty to hear from her, I sense the same lock of eyes between them. I watch and listen as they speak. Her own rendition of Dawn’s life is similar to mine at the beginning, but she lays it on thick about how deeply Dawn has become “part of her family.” At the third or fourth time she uses that phrase, he asks her his first question.
“When you say ‘part of your family,’ does that family include Karen?”
Patty shifts in her seat, smoothing her skirt underneath her, as she tries to shift her narrative accordingly. “I mean part of our nuclear family – Doug, Sandra, Ian and me – but of course Karen is my sister and part of my larger family.” Her slight smile betrays her satisfaction at dodging his bullet.
Dr. Shipley falls silent again, until Patty finishes her story. Then he asks each of us separately – Patty first – whether she thinks it is good for the family – “I mean your whole family, not just your nuclear family” – for Patty and me to be alienated from each other, and for Dawn not to see both of us. Instead of saying the obvious – “of course not” – Patty rambles on about how I can’t be trusted with Dawn’s safety, how I focus on my own needs rather than Dawn’s, how my ‘avant-garde lifestyle’ is more important to me than Dawn’s welfare, and how she can’t be certain I won’t fall into another depression.
He follows her on each of those trails, the depression first, getting her to acknowledge that she could seek a new guardianship if I were ever to sink into a ‘deep, clinical depression’ again. About my lifestyle being more important than Dawn’s welfare, she latches onto Dawn’s hair, of all things.
“Dawn has very, very curly hair, and it hurts her when I comb it. Sometimes she would cry and beg me not to comb it. Finally, I asked her whether she would like to have smooth hair so that it wouldn’t hurt when I comb it, and she said yes. She was excited about the prospect of getting her hair ‘smoothed,’ as she said. After I had her hair straightened, it didn’t hurt her to comb it and she liked her new look. But when Karen first saw it, she lost her temper and made Dawn feel ugly and scared.”
“Did you ever talk to Karen about how much it hurt Dawn to comb her hair and whether it would be good to straighten it?”
“No, by that time we weren’t talking to each other, so I just did it, so that Dawn wouldn’t have to cry every time Karen combed her hair.”
“But what about months earlier, while Dawn was living with you and Karen was visiting each weekend?”
Patty admits she had not thought of it then.
Dr. Shipley turns his riveting gaze to me. I want to yell: did you ever think of using a soft brush? But I wait for his question, which is “did you like Dawn’s new look with straight hair?”
“No, I hated it, and Patty knew I would. That’s why she did it. I am very, very sorry I got so angry that evening, because Dawn was afraid and she did think I thought she looked bad. I lost my temper and I shouldn’t have. I’ve talked this through with Dawn since then.”
“Does Dawn cry when you comb her hair?”
“No, I use a soft brush. If I used a comb, her hair would get all tangled, and I imagine she
would cry. But Patty never asked.”
This time he does not ask a question; he makes an observation. “So it strikes me that this was one issue that might have been resolved if you two could have talked it over.” Patty and I each nod.
“And isn’t it likely that there will be other issues that may come up in Dawn’s childhood where one of you has an idea or a solution that might be useful to the other?”
I leap in first.
“Sure, but she can’t force her solution on my child. Just as I couldn’t force mine on her children.”
“Might you two agree on that as a general proposition?” I nod. Patty began, “yes, but….”
Dr. Shipley acknowledges that we have other issues but that our first session has come to an end. Would we be willing to come back? To my surprise, we each say yes immediately.
I sail home with the euphoric notion that Dr. Shipley will end this nightmare. I phone Jenny, who has Dawn with her, to offer to cook dinner, and on the way I buy chicken and corn to grill, and a bunch of flowers for Jenny. When I burst into her kitchen with the grocery bag, she hustles the children out of the room to hear my report.
“This is going to work!” I hug her as I try not to yell my news.
Jenny wants details before she will share in my jubilation. Even after I tell her what happened, she is cautious, which irritates me. I want company for my misplaced optimism, and she won’t go there with me. But she helps create a festive dinner for the kids and us. Her son Jonas challenges the rest of us with how many ears of corn we can eat, and I cut Dawn’s in half so that she can claim two.
The next morning, when I call Analee to report to her, I am more subdued, reporting just that it had gone well and that we will meet again in two days. She surprises me with her own excitement, telling me I could create my own solution through mediation and ‘cut her out of a big fee’ (that she knew she could trust me with this joke pleases me too).
But as I mentally prepare for the next session, I wonder what Patty must be thinking. Clearly Dr. Shipley is leading us toward trying to normalize our family again, but I struggle to find a period of time of happy normalcy after Dawn was born. In her first year, we were all close and happy, and I drew heavily on Patty’s help and knowledge. By the beginning of her second year I had collapsed and she took over. After that, I saw Dawn only on weekends and holidays, and she was in charge. She would probably say that she had always been in charge of Dawn until I took her to court to end the guardianship. It occurs to me that Patty really feels she was losing her own child, and that I was the one who had started the legal battle. She would always have the claim of her ‘special attachment’ to Dawn due to biology and this period of time that I was truly down. But couldn’t she see that I am now able to parent on my own? I certainly have no insight into how to approach her, but I hope that Dr. Shipley will.
He begins our second session by observing that we had left off agreeing that it would be good to ‘restart’ communication with each other over Dawn’s needs. I jump in prematurely and tell him I had tried to do that when Dawn and then others in Patty’s family had had strep throat, but that I had been rebuffed.
The mournful eyes roll toward me with a pale rebuke.
“I know you each likely have stories of how you have failed in the past, but we’re trying to create a template for your future with this child you both care for deeply.”
I feel hushed and put in my place, but then he tries to draw me out.
“Do you have any suggestions, Karen, about how you might create a new future?”
“I don’t think that Patty’s and my just talking to each other – other than here – is going to ‘restart’ our family, but I do have a suggestion.” I glance at Patty’s skeptical face, then away before it can shut me down. “What if Patty and Ian and Dawn and I create a sort of play date together, a picnic in the park or something?” I can feel deflation in my voice tone as I end the question, as if I too doubt this would work.
Dr. Shipley asks why I didn’t include Patty’s other child, and I tell him as tactfully as I can that Sandra is a bit older than Ian and Dawn and tends to look down on them a little. He glances at Patty, who actually nods, with a hint of a smile.
“A picnic in the park with Ian and Dawn might be a good start. They have a special closeness to each other.”
My heart begins to pound. “How about the park in Sacramento along the American River? There’s a wading beach there.”
“That park is unsafe. It’s a Mexican gangland.”
“Wherever you like.” I try to keep it positive, and when she suggests the little park closest to her home in Roseville I agree.
Dr. Shipley tries to help us structure this event, recognizing that the last time the children had seen each other was when I picked up Dawn and we had that big fight.
“Dawn really loves her cousin Ian,” I burble stupidly.
“Cousin?” Patty puts on the brakes.
“Do the children know the difference between cousins and siblings?” Even Dr. Shipley has wandered into the labyrinth.
“Dawn knows that Patty is Sandra and Ian’s mother and that I am her mother. She knows that Patty is my sister. I assume Ian and Sandra know the same thing.”
“We’ve all become so much one family that I doubt the children are that binary. Surely Sandra and Ian see me as their mother, as they have known no other, but Dawn probably thinks of both of us as a mother to her, and Ian treats Dawn as his ‘one, true sister.’ His words, although he hasn’t said it in front of Sandra.”
“I am Dawn’s mother, and she is quite clear about that, regardless of whatever you might have told her.” My tone is acidic.
“I’ve never told her that I’m her genetic mother, if that’s what you’re driving at, but she surely knows who has taken care of her as a mother for almost two years.”
We are both practically snarling.
“Well, you got quickly to the heart of it, haven’t you?” Dr. Shipley injects. “Can you create this picnic without having to get to who is Dawn’s mother or whether you both are?”
“If we are going to have this picnic, it has to be with the ground rule that I make the decisions about Dawn and you make them about Ian. I’m not going to have you tell Dawn – or me – what is safe or not.”
“Well, there you have it, don’t you?” Patty says as if she has just revealed my weakest rib.
“Can you create a venue where safety isn’t likely to become a flash point between you two?”
I tell him that Patty had chosen just such a place. “Everything in her neighborhood is safe.”
“Folks, you put me at a fork here: should I just help you with the logistics of this picnic, or should we go down the road of your different conceptions of safety and precise relationships?”
Why is he turning it over to us? Isn’t he supposed to help us?
“I think we need to go down the path of what is or isn’t safe and who gets to decide for Dawn.” Patty says these words, but I agree with her and nod. We both look to Dr. Shipley, who seems to have much preferred just to plan the picnic.
“This goes deep,” I begin. “I don’t know how to convince Patty that I’m ready to parent Dawn on my own. It’s what led me finally to end the guardianship, when she wouldn’t agree to Dawn’s coming back to live with me.”
“Has Patty seen Dawn since the guardianship ended?” I think he knows the answer but is just opening the line of questions. “Would you be willing to let Dawn visit with Patty, or with Patty and Ian, without you there?”
“Yes, but what happened to the picnic? And how would I know that she would return Dawn, when I had so much trouble before?”
“I hear the two of you verging on non-starters over ground rules for the picnic. As for a return time, we could have a written agreement if you like.”
“I will bring Dawn to Patty’s home
in Roseville for a visit and pick her up the next day. How’s that?” Now, both Dr. Shipley and I look at Patty.
“I’ll even pack her hairbrush,” slithers out of my mouth.
Patty has the good sense not to reply to my last comment. We agree to the upcoming Saturday morning to Sunday morning. We agree that I will not go into Patty’s home unless she invites me in, and that she will have Dawn ready at the door, with no provocations, on Sunday morning. We also agree to another mediation session in a week.
The visit itself was uneventful. Jenny told me I needed to be the Model Citizen, and I played my role well. Until the ride home.
I ask Dawn if she had a good weekend, and she answers enthusiastically.
“It was great! Daddy Too taught me to throw a football with Ian, and …”
“Who?”
“Daddy Too – Uncle Doug. It was a little football, and he showed me how to hold it when I throw.”
“What about Aunt Patty?”
“She and Sandra baked a pecan pie.”
“That sounds delicious,” I say, though my words must sound like poison. She hasn’t told me what she calls Patty, and I know I shouldn’t ask.
But I do in the next mediation session, and I hear more than I can take. Patty has just finished answering Dr. Shipley’s question about how the visit went. She is obviously pleased and tries not to gloat. Dr. Shipley turns to me with the same question, and I blurt to Patty, “since when is Doug Daddy Two? And who is Daddy One?”
She pauses, looks down, and replies in a voice you would use in telling your child the family dog has died.
“It’s Daddy ‘T-o-o,’ not ‘Two.’ Ian started it. I’m sorry, Karen, but you missed out on a whole period of Dawn’s life, when she was learning to talk. She started to call Doug Daddy, and Sandra objected, saying ‘he’s my daddy.’ Ian came to Dawn’s defense, saying ‘he’s her daddy too,’ and Dawn started saying Daddy Too and Mommy Too. That’s what she calls us.”
I try not to crumble. I can’t even look into Dr. Shipley’s eyes.
Raising Dawn Page 12