Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  I cradled Sam’s little body, a tableau of perfect beauty, staring into her almond-shaped eyes. “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m not so bad.” Sam looked at me, then at her caregiver, took an enormous breath, and began to squall like I had never heard a baby do before.

  My confidence plummeted. For a second, I wondered whether the infertility was a sign that maybe I wasn’t made for this.

  “Do you want to ask her caregiver any questions?” Max asked.

  “Yes,” I said, though I couldn’t think of one of the questions I had thought up days earlier.

  The caregiver told me that she was a good baby, smiled a lot, and ate all her meals.

  “She’s small,” I said. “The referral said that she was twenty-four pounds. This baby weighs much less. Is she okay?”

  “She’s strong baby,” the orphanage director piped in. “Weighs twenty-four, eats her meals.”

  “Anything else?” Max asked.

  “Did her parents leave her anything—a note?”

  The orphanage director read from the file that, when Sam was abandoned, she was left in a shopping bag, swaddled in one blanket, with thick newspapers tucked around her little body.

  “More questions?” Max asked.

  Will she love me? Will she leave me? Will she fill the hole in my heart? I wanted to ask, but instead I said, “She’s beautiful. Thank you.”

  Back in our room, we couldn’t take our eyes off Sam, our idealized baby personified in flesh. After wanting—waiting—for so long, my brain was struggling to process the reality of this moment.

  I held her on my lap, gingerly grazing my palm over her stubbly buzz cut, allowing my senses to take in that she was really here.

  “Sanitary reasons,” Tim said, pointing to Sam’s nearly shaved head. “She smells like Ajax.”

  “What could you be thinking of all this, peanut?”

  As if in answer, Sam began to cry. I suspected that she was wet. So, layer by layer, I gently undressed her. All of the Chinese babies were bundled like little Michelin men. By now, we had become used to it, seeing little ones bundled in multiple layers wherever we had gone. Sam’s outer layer was a quilted cotton smock with an apple pattern. It covered two wool sweaters, which covered a gray sweatshirt, and finally, a blue Pepsi T-shirt. The orphanage received a large number of donations, including clothing, from the West.

  “Feel this!” I held up Sam’s diaper. It must have weighed a pound. I filled the bathtub with warm water and lavender bubbles, so sure that a nice bath would soothe her after the long bus ride from the orphanage in the countryside. I had helped Claire bathe Maura a dozen times. I knew how much babies loved the water.

  “Maybe we should just hold her a while,” Tim suggested.

  “She’ll love it,” I insisted, but Sam recoiled, screaming and crying, as if she were being set into a pot of scalding water. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I cooed. I sponged her body and head with the sweet smells from home, but Sam didn’t relent until I removed her from the tub. While Tim bundled her in a soft hotel towel, and I got myself dried off, the sudden quiet startled my heart. In her father’s arms, she was finally contented.

  I stared at myself in the mirror: my mouth pressed too tightly together, my eyes held open too wide, my jaw clenched too firmly. When finally I made eye contact with myself and saw me—so scared and unsure—I knew that this was going to be hard. Taking care of Tim and myself, even those months helping Claire care for our dying mother, was nothing compared to what it was going to be like to take care of Sam, my new daughter who wanted to be anywhere but in my arms.

  I dressed her in the same type of footed pajamas that Maura wore when she was a baby. As I cradled her, I looked into her eyes, expecting to see the rich history of an ancient civilization, the look of a little baby who had endured twelve months without parents, yet was still hopeful. I wanted to see her soul, her personality, something that would reveal her nature to me, but instead, I saw just an endless flow of tears from a baby who was sad for reasons she didn’t understand. Her bottom lip jutted out and her cheeks shone red and her fists were balled like a prizefighter’s, as if to say, Who do you think you are?

  I now wondered if the matching ladies—or the computer—had made the right match. As I juggled Sam in my arms, trying to soothe her blistering tears, staring at her beguiling beauty, I knew that she wasn’t some pushover who could be coaxed easily into a smile, soothed with a lullaby, or captured with a new necklace. Thanks for the vote of confidence, I wanted to yell to those women, but I’m not really an Advanced Placement type of person! That would be my sister, Claire. Go ahead and give me an average child, one of those jolly, chubby-faced babies with an easy disposition! Somehow, I knew that Sam was rare, that in her exquisite beauty she would somehow come to resent my lack of it, that her temperament would be too much like my own.

  “Remember what Amy said,” Tim reminded me. “It takes time. Patience.”

  A few hours later, our group congregated in the conference room on the ground floor of the Holiday Inn. We were to meet with the notary, a Chinese official who would ask us questions and then stamp our paperwork, making the adoptions official. From there, papers would be filed and we would wait while Sam’s passport and visa were processed. As we walked into the conference room, the first thing I noticed was that all of the babies were still in their orphanage clothes. I found Amy and asked her what was up.

  “Oh,” she said, pulling back her mouth as if she felt badly for not warning me. “Bath time at the orphanage is dreadful,” she said. “A matter of logistics, it’s just too difficult to bathe so many babies in a cold-weather environment where heat is scarce. Cold air to hot water to cold air again.”

  “Oh,” I said mournfully, cringing at the wrongness of my decision to bathe Sam right away. How was it that Tim knew better? Where was my store of maternal instincts? Just then, my left ovary twinged, as if the smart-aleck, big mouth couldn’t keep from commenting on my incompetency as a mother so far.

  When it was our turn, the notary official, a stout man with a whiskery beard, asked us if we wanted to keep the baby we had been given.

  “Yes,” we said, “of course.”

  “Is there anything wrong with her that you want to report?” He had his pen poised over his clipboard like the guy at the rent-a-car place, jotting down any dings and dents.

  “No,” I said defensively, clutching Sam tighter, “She’s perfect.”

  That night, Tim and I tried for hours to get Sam to sleep. I walked the halls with her, bouncing her in my arms with a rhythmic jiggle-jiggle-pat-pat dance that I’d seen Claire do a hundred times. Tim sang to her in the rocker. We fed her bottles, spooned her congee, changed her diaper over and over again. We burped her, held her high up on our shoulders, low in our laps, bounced on our knees for horsey. But our new baby was full of panic and dread and uncertainty. Her only instinct was to cry, arch her back, writhe as if she were tethered in chains, and lurch for the exit. It was midnight before Sam finally issued her last battle cry, a whimper that fell flat in mid-roar.

  The hotel had devised a makeshift crib out of two upholstered armchairs facing each other, their front legs secured tightly together with rope. But from our bed where the three of us lay, the crib looked miles away. Exhausted, worn to the bone, Tim and I lay on either side of Sam, staring at our new daughter.

  “Should we put her in her crib?” Tim asked, the weariness dripping from his voice matching mine.

  “I can’t move,” I said. “And if we touch her, she might wake up.”

  “And then she’ll start crying again,” Tim said, finishing my thought.

  “This is really, really hard.” I thought back to over a year before, when Elle Reese interviewed us and wrote our home study. In that report, we had made a lifetime of promises: to love Sam, to educate her, to provide her with health care, food, clothing, and shelter. But absent, it seemed, from our discussions was the fact that this was going to be hard. That parenting was hard�
�I now knew, only hours after becoming a mother—was the starting point, the given. It was the white on the paper that held the promises and proclamations. If separated and weighed, it would undoubtedly be heavier than the words themselves.

  Parenting a baby who had been left and then found and then given again might be even harder.

  “But are you happy?” Tim asked. “Or is it too soon to tell?”

  “I’m happy,” I said. “I’m definitely happy. But one thing is for sure: she didn’t get the memo that we were coming.”

  “It’s only the first day,” he said, rubbing my back. “We’re just another bunch of strangers to her.”

  “Why did I think she would know us?” I asked, remembering the romantic union I’d imagined, where our lives blended into each other’s like the many rivers of her native homeland.

  “Starting now,” Tim said, “we’re all she’ll know.”

  “I wonder what she thinks about that?”

  “She probably thinks that we’re very strange looking.”

  I smiled, looked at Sam, the way her fists were still balled and a little line of anger was still pinched between her eyes.

  “You better call Claire,” Tim said. “The time is right. It should be morning there, now.”

  I rolled over and reached for the cell phone. Dialed.

  “Tell me everything,” Claire said eagerly, as if she had been pacing with her phone all morning.

  “I can’t,” I stammered. “Too tired to talk. Every bone in my body is tired. Even my jaw. But I just wanted to let you know that all is well, that Sam is adorable, but I’m pretty sure that she hates me.”

  “Do you remember when Maura was born?” she asked. “She was pretty hostile, if memory serves.”

  “Yeah,” I recalled. “She was mad.”

  “Anyway,” Claire said. “It’ll be good practice for when she’s a teenager.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning, at breakfast, we served Sam an endless bowl of congee, pieces of a steamed bun, and a soft egg.

  “She’s ravenous,” I said to Tim. “I can’t imagine why she’s so small.”

  “She won’t have to worry about food anymore,” Tim said.

  “You hear that, Sammy?” I said, tickling the bottom of her chin. “Mom and Dad will always give you lots of food. What do you think about the fact that both your parents are chefs?”

  She looked away, still refusing to make eye contact with either Tim or me, and rolled her hands in the high chair tray of food, enjoying the bounty. The food’s good, she seemed to say. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  Afterward, Tim and I buckled Sam into a stroller and ventured out. We pushed her through narrow streets lined with vendors selling everything from clay teapots to dried beans to rice, eels and frogs in buckets, a variety of insects. Intermittent smells of laundry and sewage and fried foods filled the air. Hanging laundry and hanging poultry dangled and bobbed above us. Sam was dressed in a snowsuit and wool cap, but even so, an elderly Chinese lady stopped and admonished us for not having Sam bundled in enough layers.

  “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am,” Tim said as the woman shook her finger at us and yelled and yelled. We promised to dress her more warmly and then walked away and burst into laughter. When we looked at Sam to see what she thought of all the commotion, she seemed to shrug as if to say, Yeah, the old ladies are like that here.

  In the afternoon, our group took our babies to the clinic for their physicals. The doctors weighed and measured them; looked in their eyes, ears, and throats; pulled on their limbs; tapped their knees for reflexes; and then unequivocally pronounced every single one of them “perfectly healthy.”

  “How much does Sam weigh now?” I asked, knowing that she was nothing near the twenty-four pounds they claimed her to be.

  “Six and a half kilograms,” the doctor said. “Fourteen pounds.”

  “Why do you think she is so small?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Some babies get fed more than others.”

  A shiver slid down my spine thinking of a bigger, more vocal baby taking Sam’s share, like a bully on the playground.

  “And, Doctor,” I asked, “what does this say?” I pointed to a string of numbers on Sam’s report.

  “How much she weighed when born,” he said.

  I tapped Tim’s arm, widened my eyes at him. “How much did she weigh?”

  “Almost two kilograms. Four pounds,” he said.

  “Four?” I looked at Tim and our eyes locked. Then I put my mouth on Sam’s forehead. Four pounds, less than a bag of flour. Four pounds, two days old, alone outside in the elements, crying for her mother. How could abandonment in this country be two things at once—the ultimate act of benevolence, yet so wrongheaded in its execution?

  A few days later, Max loaded us on the bus and we headed to Liu Rong Temple, the Temple of Six Banyan Trees, where Buddhist monks would bless the babies.

  We followed Max into the Temple of Tranquility and kneeled in front of three gigantic saffron Buddhas. Then a monk, a thoughtful-looking believer cloaked in a brown robe, started to chant and gently bang a little gong on the altar. Sam, who we had dressed in a traditional Chinese dress, a satiny thing we bought on the street, sat in front of me, transfixed by the monk. When I hoisted her onto my lap, she pulled away. Too close, woman.

  Once we returned home to the States, we would have Sam baptized. For my mother’s sake, because it had been important to her. For Tim’s parents, too. And because if any soul deserved to be infused with the grace of God, it was an orphan who had been left on her second day of life. For as much as I grumbled over God’s will and what I had had to endure in my life, it was hard not to believe in God on a day like today as I looked around and saw maybe one hundred Chinese baby girls being loved in excess by their new parents who wanted more than anything a child to cherish. We would give Sam the faith we grew up with, for the same reason we would feed, clothe, and educate her: because she was now a member of our family and what was ours, was hers. But as we were lulled by the monks’ soothing tones, I couldn’t help but think that international adoption alone was proof that many gods were working together to bring these babies home.

  After the blessing, Tim wanted to climb the seventeen-story flowering pagoda. Once he walked away, I carried Sam inside, changed her diaper, and fixed her a bottle, which she gulped and gulped, always hungry for more. Now that Sam was drinking an unlimited amount of fortified formula, her cheeks already seemed plumper. In no time, she would be gaining weight. When she was finished with her bottle, she wiggled to get out of my arms, so I set her in the stroller with her piece of satin blanket top and pushed her back outside. With the cool outside air and sun on her face, she fell fast asleep.

  Much of the literature on Chinese adoption referred to the “red thread,” an invisible string that connected an adoptive baby to adoptive mother, as if there were never any doubt that the two were meant to be together. Maybe, I thought. I definitely wanted more than anything to protect her from more hurt. But I couldn’t yet admit to feeling that our union was predestined. That that sense of fate hadn’t yet infiltrated me didn’t surprise me much. The spools of thread in my life were always snagged and tangled, never neatly wound. It would take some time to pick at the knotted ball, to loosen just the right one.

  Contrarily, it did make me think. If I hadn’t been so resistant to adoption, if the paperwork had been completed and submitted six months, a year, earlier, we would have been matched with a different baby. The thought of that alone made me reach for Sam, as if I knew that she was the one I was meant to get. Only two days into this, I couldn’t imagine a baby other than Sam.

  “Hmm,” I thought, happily satisfied with my epiphany. Maybe I did feel the sense of fate. A red thread as strong as rope.

  I looked at Sam, considered our future together. I thought of her when she was older, cooking with Tim and me in the kitchen, traveling overseas, and returning to China to visit her homeland. I sm
iled at the thought of Sam fifteen years from now, turquoise braces on her teeth. I lifted Sam from her stroller and held her in my lap. In just the last few days, I had learned that she slept soundly, that once she was five minutes into a nap, not even a marching band would rouse her. These were the times when I stole her affection. I nuzzled my face into her sweet-smelling neck, cupped her small hands in mine, and whispered to her: “I know you were given to me and you had no say in it, but I promise you, I’ll love you so much that someday you’ll choose me on your own.”

  I made a visor with my hand, looked up at the pagoda for Tim, snapped a photo with my phone. Then I snapped a photo of Sam, asleep in the crook of my arm, contented in her deep slumber. I pulled up Claire’s name and texted the photo of Sam to her. I slid the phone back into my coat pocket and then, just as quickly, pulled it out again. I pulled up the photo of Sam, and before I lost my nerve, I sent it to Larry, too.

  Then I looked around at the countless Caucasian couples from America and Europe tooling around with their new Chinese babies. I spotted Amy and Tom in the gift shop, little Angela holding tight to her mother’s blouse tail, new Maria in Amy’s arms.

  Then I saw a woman with her two grown daughters. Clearly, one of the daughters must have come to adopt a baby, and she brought her sister and mother with her. It made me wish that Claire were with us on this trip, though she never would have left Maura for so long. I couldn’t take my eyes off these women. The resemblance. My heart warmed as I thought of Mom and Claire. I gently placed Sam back in her stroller, pulled a notepad from my backpack, and started a letter to Claire: