Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  “That’s all something to look forward to,” I said, my original fears rising in me, the worry that my daughter would be the product of her abandonment and unable to love me.

  “Just be prepared that most of these kids…They’re not on what would be considered a normal trajectory. They’re not going to hit age-related milestones. Not after being in an orphanage for a year or more.”

  Trajectory. Milestones. It seemed that there was an entire glossary of adoption words.

  “Okay,” I said solemnly, sipping at my wine.

  “If your daughter has behaviors, she’ll outgrow them,” Amy said with a wave of her hand. “Other kids have behaviors that are more severe. Some kids bang their heads against the floor, pull clumps of hair out of their head. We had friends who went to get their baby and she was what they call a ‘self-soother.’ She had taken to gnawing on her hand. When my friends got there, she had a two-inch open wound below her thumb and habitually shoved it into her mouth.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked. Suddenly, all I could taste of my Chardonnay was the plastic cup.

  “Oh, nothing,” Amy said casually. “She’s fine now. Most of these babies are fine after a while.”

  “Did you guys run into any of these problems?” I asked, a bit tentatively, not sure that I really wanted to know the answer.

  “Well, sure,” Amy said. “But Angela bonded with us relatively quickly. And really, that’s the most important thing. But there were a few years where we really worried that she had OCD. She didn’t like water in her eyes, so I would put goggles on her while I washed her hair. She didn’t like a cold glass of milk because of the condensation. Canned fruit was too slippery. Tortilla chips were too rough.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, she’s great. She still likes things ‘just so,’ but certainly not to the point where she can’t cope on a daily basis. She eats chips and fruit cups all the time. But she’s not completely without quirks. The other day she went around the house to every Oriental rug and straightened the fringes into perfect lines.”

  “At least she’s helping out around the house,” I joked.

  “Right, right!” Amy said. “The good news is that many of these kids—post-institutionalized kids—do outgrow most of their behavior.”

  Post-institutionalized. Another word to add to my adoption glossary.

  “Okay!” I said. “You’ve now officially scared the living daylights out of me.”

  Amy placed her hand on my arm. “You might not know it now,” she said, “but going into this with some knowledge is the way to go. No one told me any of this stuff and I felt completely helpless. All I wanted was some instruction, something I could work with—a handbook, a manual for how to raise my daughter.”

  “As long as the love is there,” I said.

  “The love is there,” she said. “For sure, the love is there. But be patient, that’s all I can say.”

  When we arrived in Beijing, seventeen hours and many time zones later, we were greeted by Max, our translator/tour guide/adoption liaison/all-around source for everything and anything we might need. Max was a dervish, constantly texting or talking on his cell or shuffling through the papers clamped under his arm. He was tiny—couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds, counting his black leather jacket—but still tossed around giant suitcases like they were nothing. Once our group’s luggage had been corralled, he gathered our papers, shuffled us through customs, and then loaded us onto a bus bound for the Jade Garden Hotel, where we would stay for two days before flying south to Sam’s province. We watched in wonder as smoke plumed from factories, bike riders jockeyed for position alongside cars, elderly women walked daintily down the road under colorful umbrellas.

  In the lobby, Max gathered our group. “Two days in Beijing!” he said. “Go sightseeing,” Max urged us. “So much to see! Take a ride on a rickshaw; tour Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City.” We nodded and asked questions about transportation and places to eat, but it was obvious that each of us was feigning interest. We were here to get our daughters and the thought of sightseeing for two days stoked our impatience and jittery anticipation. We’d do it, because these were the standard travel arrangements for foreign adopters, but I doubted that any of us planned to enjoy it too much.

  Then Max collected our cash donations for the orphanage so that he could put them in the hotel safe. I was happy to hand over the thick stack of bills and unstrap the money belt from under my shirt, padding as thick as Kevlar.

  The next day we boarded a bus and headed to the Great Wall.

  “Ready to do some climbing,” Tim said enthusiastically. It was a chilly December day, and we were padded in Gore-Tex jackets, hats and gloves, but I was still cold, holding my cup of tea up to my mouth, letting the steam billow around my lips.

  “How far?” I wanted to know. The wall seemed to wind on endlessly, like a Chinese dragon slithering into eternity.

  “As far as we can go!” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me to an entrance.

  We quickly found out that the steps weren’t so much steps as they were gigantic stone slabs, as high as our knees. Each step required significant leg lifting. After about fifty lunge-type steps, I was winded, hot, and tearing off my hat and gloves. But each time I looked up and out at the lush green mountain ranges and around at the giant crimson flags flapping defiantly against the wind, I felt more energized and alive.

  By the time we made it to the first watchtower, I was feeling invincible, the adrenaline pumping through me. We stopped for a break, leaning against the impressive wall, our cheeks shining red from the cold and exertion.

  “We’re in China!” I hollered, as though it had finally just hit me.

  “This is too cool,” Tim said.

  “I’ve got to call Claire,” I said, pulling out the international cell phone that I had rented for the trip, dialing her number. It was the middle of the night, still yesterday in the States, when she answered, groggy with sleep.

  “We’re on the Great Wall of China!” I said.

  “Where’s my new niece?” Claire asked through a yawn.

  “Still waiting,” I said. “We don’t get her ‘til Monday. But I’ll bet she’s excited. She probably has her suitcase packed, next to her crib.”

  “They’re probably having a going-away party for her.”

  “Definitely,” I said. “Balloons, cake, and ice cream.”

  “An engraved Mont Blanc pen.”

  “A gift card to Starbucks.”

  “Don’t forget to leave a forwarding address for her,” Claire said, still laughing. “A long-lost relative might come looking for her someday.”

  Oh yeah, I thought. Relatives. Of course, I’d thought a lot about Sam’s birth mother, even occasionally about her birth father. But my mind had never wandered to think about the fact that I was adopting a baby who had her own history, a history that went back thousands of years: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents, all the way through the decades of time. I was adopting a child whose history would be severed, cleanly and irrevocably. I was adopting a baby who would never be able to ask a sister or mother or aunt, “Doesn’t high blood pressure run in our family? Didn’t Aunt Mae have respiratory issues? Didn’t Grandma Wu die of heart disease?” An entire society of babies who would always wonder, From whom did I get my silly sense of humor, my athletic ability, my proclivity for writing, my affinity for art? An entire society of babies who were given a “do-over,” whether they wanted one or not.

  After we descended the steps of the Wall, Tim and I wandered around the village. We ducked into one shop, an art studio of sorts, where a man was painting scrolls in calligraphy. With his exacting yet delicate flourish, he wrote Sam’s Chinese name for us—Xu, Long Ling. Then we asked him to make a banner for Maura, too. I then asked him how to say “cousins” in Chinese. In his limited English, he explained that the relationships between people were very important in Chinese culture. That there wasn�
�t just one word for cousin, that it depended on whether that person was from the mother’s side or the father’s side, whether that person was a male or female. In the end, we deciphered that Maura would be Sam’s biaojie, but Sam would be Maura’s biaomei.

  On the way back to town, Max had the bus stop at a pearl factory. Many such places were simply tourist traps for eager new parents, but I still bought a variety of pendants and bracelets for Sam and myself; Claire and Maura; Delia and Claire’s mother-in-law, Martha; as well as for Sondra at the restaurant.

  That night, Tim and I, along with Amy and Tom DePalma, ate a late dinner and then lingered for hours in the soft sofas of the hotel lobby, talking easily about the adult aspects of our lives: our jobs, our families. Angela had fallen asleep draped across her mother and while Amy and I talked, my new friend brushed the hair from her daughter’s face, a gentle assurance that she was there. I was still on the outside of motherhood looking in—at a future that had drawn so near it was now only a day away—and yet I still could not accept, or let myself believe, that soon I would be in Amy’s position, fingering the silky hair of my beloved daughter. A lifetime of letdowns had left me wary, afraid of wanting those things I coveted most.

  The next day, Max corralled us back onto the bus and off we went to the Forbidden City, a museum, a park. After a morning of walking, listening, looking at monuments, and reading plaques, the bus returned us to the hotel. Two hours later, we boarded our next plane and traveled south to Sam’s province. Max had trained our group well. We now knew to follow behind him like obedient ducklings, with our paperwork in our backpacks and our passports and visas in their designated pouches, securely dangling inside our shirts. Now pros, we boarded the plane, flew a short two hours in the direction of our daughters, disembarked, and got settled in our new hotel rooms.

  When a number of the families congregated for dinner, Tim spoke for the two of us when he said that we’d take a rain check.

  In the hotel elevator, I asked Tim why he didn’t want to go to dinner.

  “I do want to go to dinner,” Tim said, reaching for my hand. “Let’s venture out on our own.”

  “Venture out?” I asked. “On our own? Where?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s wander. Like we used to wander around Europe.”

  “Well, okay,” I said tentatively, feeling as if caution had already replaced my sense of adventure as becoming a mother rounded the corner toward me.

  We left the hotel with a stack of cards in our pockets. Max had told us always to carry cards bearing the name and address of the hotel so that if we got into trouble, we could hand the card to a cab driver. We ambled our way down narrow streets that led us to outdoor markets; one entire street was given over to jade vendors who spotlighted their jewels in canopied stalls. We turned down another alley and saw what was for sale: whole goats hanging from hooks, turtles in every size, eels, fish, bins of scorpions. Above us, electrical wires crisscrossed in magnificent tangles.

  Outside of the marketplace, we passed a little restaurant, and the smells pouring from the door beckoned us: garlic, chili, aromatic spices. We ducked in. The cook behind the counter, a jolly man with a nearly toothless smile, waved us in. We approached him, saw his giant steaming woks, his hatchet and knives on the board in front of him, a variety of ingredients. The cook gestured to us, pointed to the wok. Tim nodded yes. The cook fanned himself, making a wide-eyed face. We guessed he was asking us if we liked it hot. Tim nodded yes, then put his own hands around his neck and shook his head no, as if to indicate hot, but don’t kill us. I sat at a little table by the window. Tim paid and returned with four beers.

  “Four?” I asked.

  “I think we’re going to need them,” he said. “I saw the chilies.”

  In seconds, the woks sizzled and bellowed steam. A minute later, Tim and I had two bowls in front of us, noodles drenched in an oily red broth, the seeds from the chilies floating on top. The fragrance that wafted from each was aromatic, complex. We took a bite. It was the hottest mouthful of food I’d ever tried. Instantly, I started to perspire over my eyes, feel the sting in my ears, the scorch on my lips. I gulped beer, fanned my face, waiting for the pain to subside, and then went back for more. The combination of the bite of the noodles against the smoothness of the broth against the spike of the spice was addictive. It was a masochistic sensation, like warming your frozen hands a minute too long in front of a roaring fire. We swallowed back a swig of beer, dug back into the noodles, wiped our brows, ate some more.

  “This is too good,” I said.

  “I don’t know what the hell is in this, but yeah, it’s really good,” Tim said.

  “I feel like it used to be,” I said. “Just us, traveling.”

  “We had fun,” Tim said.

  “Have I ruined our life these past five years, obsessing over having a baby?”

  “Do you think that I’ll say yes?” Tim asked with a smile, and took another bite. “And live to tell about it?”

  I took Tim’s hands, looked him in the eyes. “I’m sorry, Tim. I’m really sorry.”

  “This feels right, doesn’t it?” Tim asked. “Being here in China, getting a baby. It’s us. It suits us.”

  “I really can’t wait to see her. I can’t wait for her to be ours. It’s really happening. We’re getting Sam tomorrow!”

  Tim and I polished off our bowls of noodles, four beers, and asked the cook to make us more. Though we were stuffed and our heads dizzy with alcohol, it seemed that we both wanted to prolong this tender moment, memorialize in stone the wanderlust feeling of our youth, the fairytale romance that had defined the beginning of our relationship years earlier in the hills of Lyon. This was our send-off into the next chapter of our life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning, Tim and I woke early, showered and dressed, and went down to the restaurant buffet for coffee and a bite to eat. My appetite was nil and my stomach was roiling and my head was thumping from the night before, but Tim’s ironclad stomach was ready for more. His chef senses were too curious to let even one eating opportunity pass by, even on a nerve-racking day like today when we would be getting Sam. He piled steamed and glutinous buns, a rice and meat mixture, and some soft egg custard onto his plate. The thought of eating any of it at this moment made me nearly sick.

  After breakfast for Tim, and multiple cups of coffee for me, we returned to our room and waited. We knew the babies were in the hotel. Tim had already seen Tom and Amy getting off the elevator with their new baby, one of ten who were transported by bus from the orphanage, three hours away.

  We sat nervously on the edge of our bed, tapping our feet and bouncing our knees. We checked the batteries in the camera and video recorder. I double-checked the gift bags. It was customary for the adoptive parents to bear gifts for the orphanage director and her people. A few knickknacks from the nation’s capitol to accompany the sizable cash donations we had handed over to Max.

  As each minute passed, waves of acid splashed in my stomach. While Tim picked at a leftover muffin, I gnawed on a pack of Rolaids.

  “When’s Max going to call?” I asked.

  “Soon,” Tim said. “It’s just a matter of waiting our turn.”

  “I’ve been waiting for my turn for five years,” I said.

  “He’ll call,” Tim assured me.

  Finally, the trill of the phone stood us both up straight.

  Tim answered, then hung up after a short conversation and nodded at me. “They’re ready for us.”

  My hand and Tim’s were gripped together in a tight-knuckled mass as we walked the hall to Room 304.

  “Oh my God,” I kept repeating, squeezing Tim’s hand, my heart hammering in my chest.

  “I know, right?” he said, giddy, looking more boyish than ever.

  Max opened the door. There was a baby in the arms of a young woman, and an older woman standing near the desk in the corner of the room. Sam, her caregiver, and the orphanage director, I presumed.
Sam looked at us, then back at her caregiver, then clutched defiantly to the woman’s necklace. Sunlight haloed her shaved head. She had petite features, and though she was bundled like every other baby in thick layers, it was evident that she was tiny. The other babies we’d seen were stout, sturdy little firecrackers; Sam looked as if she were a different breed, something delicate, something to be worshipped. When she pursed her lips, the dimple deepened in her cheek, the dimple that I had been staring at for the last month, my screensaver and salvation.

  Clutched in her left hand was a torn piece of satin, like the soft top of a baby blanket that had been ripped off. Was it from the orphanage or from her mother? If so, did it carry her scent?

  “Sam,” I whispered, lurching in her direction, my arms reaching for her, tears pouring down my face. The caregiver placed her in my shaky arms, and the enormity of her being there, after such a long wait, left me breathless. Once, when I was a child, Claire had pelted me with a volleyball, hitting me square in the chest. There were a few brief moments when I literally couldn’t breathe, the heaviness. “I thought you were ready,” Claire had said. That was how it was now. I thought I was ready, but the panic surging through me was making me think twice. A metallic taste pooled in my mouth. I looked around for Tim, but he was talking to the orphanage director in the corner.

  “Hey, little girl,” I said, stroking the apples of her cheeks, trying for Claire’s cool confidence, trying to find that perfect fit in the nook of my arm, thinking that if I acted comfortable, I would be comfortable. But Sam shook her fists at me and lurched for her caregiver, as unhappy as a child could be. I dangled my necklace in front of her like bait, but Sam wasn’t biting. She wanted what she knew, and that something wasn’t me. I suddenly felt like an imposter, like I was taking something—someone—who wasn’t mine.

  We were once told that the babies were matched up with their adoptive families thanks to the divine wisdom of the “matching ladies.” These old women supposedly sat in a room, read prospective parents’ applications, and then matched them with the just right baby. This was probably more myth than reality. The matches were most likely generated by computer as part of the bureaucratic behemoth Chinese adoption had become. But I liked the idea of the matching ladies. There was some comfort in the notion that a group of sage old ladies with the experience of many lifetimes had had a hand in the selection of my daughter.