by Tina Traster
I look skyward and thank whoever it is who watches over.
But as I glance back at Julia, my stomach clenches.
Oh my God. What are we going to do about your party? How can I introduce you to the world with a neon sign that says, “Bad mommy”?
I call Ricky back.
“What’s the matter?” he says, alarmed.
“No, nothing, but what are we going to do about Saturday?”
“What do you mean?”
“Julia looks terrible. How can we … ?”
“Don’t worry. Babies heal quickly. We’ve got five days before the party.”
“Are you sure? Should we cancel?”
“I don’t think so. All the arrangements are made. Everyone is coming. Try to calm down. Maybe go for a walk with Julia, if she’s okay. If you’re okay.”
“You’re right. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve also got to get a more reliable babysitter. I have to get rid of Lurnie.”
“Look. You’re upset. Try not to focus on a million things. Take a walk. Keep an eye on Julia. I’m sure she’s fine.”
I dress Julia and negotiate her into the stroller. What was I thinking? I should know she has no sense of boundaries. As we start down the street, I recall a telephone conversation I’d had a few weeks ago with our adoption counselor. She called because we hadn’t filed a written postadoption report, which we are supposed to do every six months. I wasn’t particularly apologetic because I resent the agency’s continued involvement in our life. Still, I agreed to give an oral report. The questions were basic. Yes, Julia was eating, gaining weight, meeting milestones. I told them I could see she’d be walking soon. Yes, she was a good sleeper. Of course, I’d said we’re all very happy. Then, an odd question. “Does she recognize danger?” Of course, I’d whipped out, not thinking twice about the question. After I hung up with the counselor, I wondered what she meant. Does she recognize danger? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn’t sure I’d given an honest answer. Julia crawls away from me without any concern as to my whereabouts. She thrusts toward any cat or dog she encounters. She hesitates at nothing. In Julia’s mind, it didn’t occur to her that the edge of the bed was a cliff.
It’s a long afternoon before Ricky comes home. When Julia naps, I’m scared she won’t wake up. I check obsessively to make sure she’s breathing. I feel her skin for fever, but she’s cool. Her eyes aren’t glazed. After I feed her lunch I’m afraid she’ll vomit, but she doesn’t. If she had died it would have been my fault. I’m racked with guilt. My confidence is shattered.
I have seen babies left on parents’ beds before, surrounded by a barricade of pillows. Those babies don’t roll off. Why? Something occurs to me. Other babies sleep in bed with their parents. The bed is a place where they’ve been breast-fed, lulled to sleep, coddled. Julia has never spent a night in our bed. She’s a good sleeper, and Ricky and I agree we want to keep our bed a marital bed and not make it a family bed.
The sound of Ricky’s key jiggling the lock is music.
I run into his arms and convulse.
“It’s all right,” he says, stroking my hair. “Where is she?”
He walks to the playpen and brushes his hand gently along her purple forehead.
“Wow. That’s a shiner.”
I avoid his eye.
“We could call her Gorbachev,” he says.
It’s Saturday. We are preparing for the party. Julia has been fine. The bruise is a lighter shade of gray and not as pervasive as it was at first. Ricky comes into Julia’s nursery while I’m slipping a floral sundress carefully over her head.
He looks at me intently.
“She’s fine. It’ll be fine. Every baby has taken a spill at one time or another.”
I know he’s right, but still.
Ricky just got off the phone with his mother. She and my mother are in the party room in my parents’ building, setting up the food and drinks. He is going to head over with balloons, and I’ll catch up in forty minutes.
“Take Julia. I’ll meet you there.”
888
Everything is festively arranged when I arrive. My mother says hello, but we don’t kiss or embrace. “I’ve got something for Julia,” she says, pointing to some shopping bags in the corner of the room.
“Thanks,” I say, sweeping past her to say hello to Ricky’s mother and then to the guests who are streaming into the room. I’m on guard, holding my breath, waiting for someone to ask what happened to Julia. No one does. Seems conspiratorial.
“Ricky, look, it’s Robert and his wife,” I say.
We have not seen Robert, Laura, or Noa since the day we left Moscow on the Orphan Express with our babies. Noa is fourteen months and walking. She’s a beautiful child, with a shock of long, silky black hair. Although Laura is white and Jewish, she too has a long, exotic mane that somehow makes her look like Noa, even though the child is of Muslim descent. Robert and I hug in a long embrace. Laura brushes past my cheek with an air kiss. Noa paws at Robert’s pants; she wants to see Julia. I bend down and put the babies side by side, though Noa looks more like a toddler. Ricky says hello, too. He takes Julia from me, and he and Laura break into a side conversation.
“So, how are you doing?” Robert asks with deep chocolate eyes and a crinkled brow.
“I’m okay. I’m, uh, good. How are you?”
He rolls his eyes.
“What a life-changing experience,” he says. “I remember the day we were in the visa office together. God, that seems like a lifetime ago.”
“It was,” I say.
“Are you and Rick happy? Have things been going well?”
“As you say, the whole thing is life-changing. I’d say overwhelming.”
“I know what you mean. It’s hard when you’re an older parent. You’ve got a whole lifetime behind you, and then suddenly you have to be, you know, that life isn’t yours anymore.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I say, feeling lighter, for a change. “I wasn’t totally prepared for this.”
“Yeah, but hey, what’s the choice? You gotta go with it? No?”
“You are right,” I say. “Come, have something to eat.”
A conversation with a squeak of honesty. Refreshing.
I move through a sea of people. Everyone is having fun. Fiddler has gone around a couple of times. The food table is pilfered. The wine bottles are empty. The babies are groggy. We are saying good-bye. So many promises to do this or that. So many “Congratulations.”
Light is falling as we stroll with Julia north along Broadway to our apartment.
“It went well,” Ricky says. “Good job.”
“I think everyone enjoyed themselves. Julia was a big hit,” I say.
“Many people remarked on how beautiful she is,” he says. I look at Ricky with a C’mon look.
“What?”
“No one said anything? Not one person asked about the bruise on her head? You must have sent a communiqué telling people to stay mum, no?”
“Yes, that’s what I did.”
“I thought so.”
We laugh, and he plants a kiss on my lips.
Twelve
I am sitting on a plush couch in a communal lounge on the top floor of my mother’s condo waiting to meet two Upper West Side mothers and their children. Julia, dressed in lightweight, geometrically patterned pants and a matching T-shirt, barrels between the bookshelves and the television before heading to the floor-to-ceiling windows. After finding these women on an Internet chat site, I’ve been communicating with Jen and Nancy by e-mail for the past couple of weeks. I’m especially excited to meet Nancy, who has recently returned from Kazakhstan with her adopted daughter.
Jen arrives first. She is all freckles and a wild mane of auburn hair. Her little boy, Jason, is slumped over in his stroller, napping. Jen sweeps into the room and extends a hand to introduce herself. I invite her to take a seat and say, “That’s Julia,” pointing to the far corner of the room.
Julia doesn’t look up or acknowledge us. We are chatting for less than ten minutes when Jason begins stirring. He rubs his eyes and seeks Jen’s attention. “Hello, Angel,” she hums, lowering her face two inches from his. “Hungry?” she asks. She lifts the fleshy baby out of the stroller, opens her blouse, and brings him to her breast. He suckles contentedly.
“Are you breast-feeding?” she asks.
Before I can answer, I notice a looming figure in the doorway. This must be Nancy, and though she is under five feet, she looks like a giant because she’s carting a baby in a large knapsack. I greet her and lead her to the couch where we are sitting. Jen, still feeding, says hello. Then Jen reaches into her cavernous bag and tosses toys and a large rubber ball onto the floor. It had never occurred to me to bring toys. Jason, still clutching his mother, entwining himself in her hair, is not interested in the little trucks or the puzzles, but Julia makes a beeline for the red and white rubber ball and snatches it. She throws it in front of her and chases it, again and again.
“Wow,” says Jen. “She’s a powerhouse.”
Meanwhile, Nancy is unpacking her baby, Vera. Vera is thirteen months, two months older than Jason and Julia. Nancy hands her shoes to put on her feet, but Vera holds up the shoes to Nancy’s face and Nancy puts them on for her. Immediately, Vera lunges for the ball in Julia’s hands and snags it. Julia does not put up a fuss. She has no “that’s mine” reflex. She just moves on to other toys strewn on the carpet. I watch this curiously, because we have not been around other babies that much. But I have noticed time and again that Julia never puts up a fight when another child takes something from her. On the other hand, I have never seen her commandeer something another child is holding or playing with.
Nancy, forty-seven, is an animated pixie. After our introduction, she jumps right into her story about having spent a month in Kazakhstan before she and her husband, Dennis, could bring Vera home. Like Ricky and I, she and her husband are older, first-time parents.
“So tell me about your experience in Russia,” she says, smiling at me, then at Julia.
I shift my attention to Jen, realizing I’d left her question about breastfeeding hanging.
“Julia is also adopted.” I say to her.
While I talk about our adventures in Siberia, Jason grows more animated, though at eleven months, he appears to be behind the two little girls. Jen says he’s not walking yet. Vera is spinning around the room like a tornado. I recognize her manic energy. It’s the same behavior I see in Julia, moving this way, then that, here and there, eyes darting, scrambling, climbing up, climbing down, unable to sit still. But there’s one difference. Although Julia takes off like a rocket into space and leaves me behind, Vera is like a planet circling a star. She’s back at Nancy every few minutes, seeking attention. She clings to her. Doesn’t let her speak. She puts her face right up close to Nancy’s.
“Go on, Vera, go play with Julia.”
Vera runs to Julia with an impish grin and takes the remote Julia’s examining in her hand. She tears off across the room with maniacal peals of laughter.
“It’s okay,” I say to Nancy. “Julia will find something else to play with.”
Nancy looks surprised. I imagine she’s accustomed to a mother getting up to console a child who’s just had something snatched from her hand, but I know it won’t faze Julia and it doesn’t.
We spend the next hour getting to know one another. We agree to meet in a week’s time in the park and to recruit other mothers and their babies. On my walk back home, I replay in my mind what I’d witnessed, as I always do when I’m around other mothers and their babies. While Jason sought his mother’s attention in a passive way, Vera used all her energy and wiles to engage her mother relentlessly. In both cases, Jen and Nancy were distracted, constantly tending to their children. Julia is so self-contained, I’m less needed.
The playgroup sprouts like fungal mushrooms in a marshy meadow. By August, we have a dozen mothers and their babies, most around eleven months old. We meet once or twice a week in the playground or spread a quilt of mismatched blankets in the park where we while away long, hot summer days.
To the unknowing eye, Julia is not particularly different from other children—at least not on the surface. She is walking, she has as much hair and as many teeth. She is stringing together words to make sentences. But there’s one glaring difference between Julia and the others: Vera and Jason and Jane and Jack express a range of moods and emotions. On one day, a child is cranky or clingy; on another, he’s perky, more exploratory. Julia has one consistent demeanor. She’s always cheerful, exuberant, active. The mothers constantly remark that she’s the happiest child they’ve ever encountered. She doesn’t complain. She never throws a tantrum. I’d like to believe the mothers are thinking, “Wow, what is she doing right to have such an even-tempered, agreeable child?” But in my own dark moments, I wonder why my child is so robotic, so mechanical. Why she never seems to have a bad day. What does it all mean?
Even when it comes time to leave the park, I simply say, “Julia, it’s time to go,” and she pops herself in the stroller. I see other mothers spend twenty minutes negotiating with their child, and usually they must resort to a sugary treat to close the deal.
Today, like at every playdate, the broken and interrupted conversation revolves around parenting. Milestones. Diets. Sleeping schedules. The latest equipment. Extracurricular activities. Anxiety over nursery school admissions. Our group is spread on the grass. The children are feasting on Pirate’s Booty and Cheerios, plunging their little hands into plastic containers some of the mothers have brought. Julia, in a rare moment, is on the blanket, sitting with her feet sticking out in front of her, chomping on what I assume are the snacks. But someone yells out, “Oh my God, she’s choking!” I look up and her face is crimson. I grab her and pry open her mouth. There are blades of grass at the back of her throat. I put my fingers in her mouth and pull them out one at a time. She sputters and coughs.
“Here,” someone said. “Give her water.”
Julia takes the sippy cup and gulps hard. She looks up at the crowd of faces and then takes a few more sips of water. I hear someone say, “She’s brave.”
I assume she said that because Julia never cried during or after the scare.
“She’s okay,” someone else says.
“You okay, Julia?” another mother asks.
I hear a voice in my mind saying, Go pick her up and embrace her. But I don’t because I know she’s fine. I know in a moment she’ll get back on her feet and start running around. I know that if I try to coddle her, she’ll reject me in front of the crowd. I survey the faces of the other mothers, feeling judged, though there’s a good chance that nobody will give this incident a second thought except me.
“Make sure you keep those chips away from her,” I bark, abruptly pulling the bowl away from Julia. The three of us are sitting at an outdoor table at a Mexican restaurant. It’s a beautiful early summer evening, but I’m still shaken from today’s incident.
“What’s the matter?” Ricky says
I tell him how Julia was eating grass, but I hadn’t noticed until a playgroup mother pointed it out and how I got to her in time, but still…. As usual, he reacts calmly, saying children get up to mischief.
“I know, but I think other mothers and their children are so in tune with each other. I’m just afraid one day something will happen, and it will be too late for me to come to her aid.”
For once, Ricky does not gloss over my concerns with his eternal optimism. Instead, he grows quiet, contemplative.
It’s hot today, and I wish I was at the beach, sitting on a lounge chair, reading a book, alone and not at Riverside Park standing at the edge of a sandbox-turned-urban swimming pool. Julia is always the first child in, and she romps and splashes with gusto. She likes to squash her bottom right against the nozzles of the sprinkler. Most children approach the fountains tentatively. From the corner of my eye, I notice Vera tugging a pail from ano
ther child. Nancy slices through the shin-deep water like a motorboat to quell the mayhem. They’re at a distance so I can’t hear the words, but I can see Nancy trying to reason with Vera to give the pail back to the boy and Vera is thrashing and flailing.
I watch the scene and wonder if Julia would be territorial and possessive if I were more like Nancy. If I had worn her on my back or in a Snugli when she was younger, if I fussed over her constantly, if we slept in a family bed, would Julia be more prone to jealousy, rage, moodiness? Does her lack of these emotions signal a problem?
“Oh good, you’re early,” I say to Jen. “The locker room’s upstairs.”
Jen and I are taking a mommy-and-me swim class with Jason and Julia. In the locker room, I notice how Jen leaves Jason on the bench lying down, and she glides over to the locker to take out his swim trunks and a diaper. I watch this tableau in disbelief. She trusts him to remain on the bench until she returns, and he does. I picture mother ducks and their chicks and the natural order of things. I feel envy because it is never like that with Julia and me.
When in the pool, the water exercises force Julia to rely on me, which is good. She instinctively realizes she needs me to keep her safe and afloat, and she holds on and lets me guide her through the swimming exercises.
Back in the dressing room, we pull the wet suits off our toddlers and towel-dry them. Jason is drowsy; he’s content to sit in his stroller and peck Cheerios. Julia is tooling around, heading for the toilet stall. Still dripping in my wet suit, I chase her.
The first whiffs of fall are upon us. The air is crisper, the sky is bluer. The streets are busy again with postsummer seriousness. Riverside Park is not as crowded. My playgroup has been meeting a little less frequently. I’m relieved, because even though it provided structure and filled time, being around this group of nice mothers, a group I built, has been causing me pain and ambivalence. The more time I spend with them, the lonelier I become. The version of motherhood I witness contradicts everything I experience. I’m in some parallel universe feeling alienated, even angry. Last night Ricky asked me if I was still going to playgroup. I told him I was losing interest. He said he understood, but I didn’t know if he really could.