Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  Then why did it feel like he was walking away from me?

  By October, my relationships with my birth fathers had disintegrated to cards: postcards from Quint, and a note from Jake, who apologized for not keeping in touch. I met Quint for another lunch. He told me for the third or fourth time that I was his only blood relative. I reminded him again that he had two grandsons.

  “Oh, right,” he said, as if this were irrelevant information. “What are their names again?”

  The last time I heard from Quint was a postcard from Cuba. “Lunch when I get back,” it said behind a colorful picture of Havana. I never heard from him again. From time to time I see him on television. Once I went to the movies without knowing he had written the film, and when his name appeared on the huge screen, I gasped so loudly that a woman two rows down shushed me. It was like something secret and shameful had suddenly burst out into the open. Sometimes when I come upon him on television, I change the channel quickly. Sometimes I stare hard, trying to see a resemblance. I never do.

  But over the months and years, I felt more and more connected to Faith. The first year, for our birthdays, we took each other to the theater. It occurred to me sadly that I would never think of taking my mother to a show. We had never discussed a book we’d both read. In fact, we rarely discussed anything, because most discussions ended with me feeling criticized and angry.

  One weekend around Thanksgiving, my kids slept at my parents’ house for a night. My mother and father brought them home on Sunday and stayed for dinner. Walking down the hall toward the kitchen, I heard my mother whispering to Lenny, the whisper I’d heard my whole life from around a corner, up the stairs, down the hall.

  “He’s just like she was at that age,” I heard her say, and I knew she was talking about Damien, now a teenager, and me. “I really pity you.”

  I didn’t even hear Lenny’s answer. I turned on my heel and went upstairs. I am wonderful, wonderful, I said to myself. Wonderful—and strangely, I thought of the story of the ugly duckling.

  I went into Alex’s room and took the book of Hans Christian Andersen stories down from the shelf. From the beginning, the story says, the poor little bird was doomed—his egg was bigger than the others in Mother Duck’s nest and took longer to hatch. Mother Duck was advised to abandon the egg, but she waited patiently. At last he emerged, but she knew something was wrong with her baby. “How big and ugly he is,” she said.

  Though Mother Duck hesitantly accepted her ugly offspring, the rest of the duck community was less tolerant. They pushed him and bit him, chased and harassed him, called him a “hideous creature.” His siblings wished the cat would get hold of him; the girl who fed the ducks kicked him aside. Eventually, even his mother gave up on him. “I wish to goodness you were miles away,” she said. The poor little ugly duckling felt shame, he felt different… he felt defective.

  He left home and tried to live with the wild ducks, who thought he was “frightfully ugly,” but grudgingly accepted him as long as, they warned him, “You do not marry into our family.” He fled and hid, cold and alone, searching for a place to belong.

  In the spring he flew into a garden where he saw three swans drifting in the water. Overcome with a strange melancholy, he swam fearfully up to them. “Kill me!” he begged, and bowed his head. But when he bent his head to the water to die, he saw, for the first time, his reflection, and recognized the truth. He was really a beautiful swan. He was accepted by the swans. Children fed him, and people called him handsome. “I never dreamed of so much happiness when I was the ugly duckling,” he said.

  I stared at the watercolor image of the beautiful swan. It was the adoptee fantasy, come true: I have found my family and they are better, more powerful, more beautiful than those with whom I was once forced to live. My mother didn’t understand me, but it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. And it wasn’t because there was something wrong with me; it was because she couldn’t. She wasn’t supposed to; I am not hers. I am not defective, I am not flawed, I am not wrong. I am a swan.

  27. BUNNY

  EVERY WOMAN

  IS A DAUGHTER

  Children begin by loving their parents;

  as they grow older, they judge them;

  sometimes they forgive them.

  OSCAR WILDE

  THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  There was a little girl

  And she had a little curl

  Right in the middle of her forehead.

  And when she was good,

  She was very, very good;

  And when she was bad,

  She was horrid.

  Those are the lines that both Jil’s mother and mine felt perfectly described each of us. I actually had a clump of hair that curled onto the middle of my forehead.

  What the rhyme meant in earlier years was approval. When I was good (when I did what my mother wanted me to do), I was very, very good. The rest of the time I was horrid. On my own side of the forehead, I wanted to do what I wanted, no matter how far from my mother’s wishes that might be; but—and this is a huge BUT—I still wanted to be approved of. I wanted to be considered “very, very good” simply because I was me.

  I never doubted that my mother loved me. She just found me different—and difficult. She felt it was her responsibility to mold me—to fix me—and to equip me for all of life’s difficulties yet to come. A refrain I heard many times: “I’m your mother. I love you. But no one else ever will if you behave that way.”

  The struggle between us was simple: She wanted me to match her expectations, and I wanted to be me. Neither of us was quite fair, and between us, we made an unhappy circle—my mother would have approved of me if I had been different, and if I really wanted to be approved of, I knew I had to be.

  I knew my mother found me to be a difficult child; and somewhere, somehow, I thought she must have good reason. The seesaw was always between good and horrid; I never stayed in the middle for very long.

  My mother gave me many good things: Her love, even without her approval, was first. Second was the intensity she provided that helped me make my own mold—sometimes, yes, in opposition to her, but no less valuable for all of that.

  My father was different. I’m not sure that I would describe him as “approving,” but he was definitely accepting, and that mattered a lot. He worked very long hours—like Jil’s father—and wasn’t home at reasonable (for a child) hours. Partly because of that, he was like an adoring uncle, a personal Santa Claus, rather than a disciplining father. I don’t remember him ever telling me not to do something, except once: At the height (or depth) of adolescence, he asked me to try not to upset my mother so much.

  I think there are many daughters who, like me, adored their fathers and struggled with their mothers. Daughters are so often angry at their mothers, and forgiving of their fathers. Fairy tales tell the same story: It’s the wicked stepmother who won’t let Cinderella go to the ball; it’s the jealous queen who tries to murder Snow White in the forest. Hansel and Gretel are sent away by their stepmother, but clever Gretel saves them by pushing the witch into her own oven (oh! the symbols!). In “Beauty and the Beast,” as in so many tales, the father is loving but weak.

  The story line of The Prince of Tides is a striking example. The father was a bastard—violent, angry, and not quite sane; the mother protected her children as best she could. The cure for the grown child comes when he is able to tell his father than he loves him, and to tell his mother that he’s angry at her. Yes, it’s more complicated than that, but this is what it boils down to. The grown child needs to break through father-anger to love, and mother-love to anger. The triumph is love for the father and, at best, forgiveness for the mother.

  For small children, mothers have an enormous amount of power. It isn’t difficult to understand a child’s anger: She sent me to my room, she won’t let me stay up late, she makes me eat food I don’t like, she’s always telling me what to do. The relationship is harder for daughters and mothers; from a Freudia
n point of view, after all, they love the same man; but that’s only a small part of the story. Aside from sheer chemistry, sons are part of “the other” for their mothers, and many boys are much more openly loving than are their sisters, who save their adoration for daddy.

  The long and short of it is that mothers can be dumped on. Even in cases of childhood abuse, the mother is often blamed for not keeping the child safe; and she’s as much resented for that as the perpetrator is for whatever he may have done. The exercise of power has to do with control and guilt; safety has to do with love.

  As parents, most of us start out wanting to do well. We each want to be the best mother of all, the most loving, the most approving, supportive, understanding. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Today I’m going to mess up my children.” But it happens anyway, and mess up we do.

  When my children were small, I thought I was a perfect parent. Now I know I wasn’t. Further, and not just to excuse myself, I believe there really isn’t any such thing as a perfect parent, not even a nearly perfect parent. There isn’t any way a child’s needs can be perfectly met: No one has enough love (or time) to fill every moment of childish desire, demand, and want, and children, on the other hand, live in a world of perception and emotion that is by definition childlike, and to an adult, too often irrational and inexplicable. For parents, the scales of love—the balance—is elusive. Too much love is smothering; too little can be fatal.

  It cannot have been easy to have been my child. But I think one of the best and hardest things about being a mother is that, as you go along, doing what you think is best, you are full of earnest conviction, eagerness, and—yes—love; meanwhile, your children’s currents are often running in another direction. That’s just the way it is. That’s why if you think about what you’ve done wrong as a mother, you’ll have one list, and if you ask your children, and they’re willing to tell you, they will have a completely different one.

  I wish I could do motherhood over again. I’m an adult now: I wasn’t always then. Growing up turned out to take much longer that I thought it would; I think, somehow, one expects it to happen by a certain date: maybe with your first vote, or after graduation from college, or maybe to come along with your first full-time paycheck. Certainly it’s not a wedding present. Nor is it in a box wrapped in pink and blue paper to be opened at the baby shower.

  Growing up, it turns out, requires work, as well as determination, persistence, dignity, courage, and humor—and just plain time. It would have been much better if I had finished the process before I had children, but I didn’t. Yes, I wish I could do motherhood over. I definitely have a list of things I regret, moments that will make me cringe forever, much that I wish I could undo or redo. But we’re stuck with who we were, and what we did or left undone.

  Losing Jil was the first thing I did wrong for my children. Her loss reverberated through everything else, sometimes consciously, most often below the surface of awareness. I was still a child when that happened, but I’m responsible for it even so; and I hope I’ve been forgiven.

  I can imagine—though I’d much rather not—not knowing Jil. After all, there were a great many years, more than four decades, when I didn’t know her. But I cannot imagine that she doesn’t exist.

  I would not want anyone to read what I’ve written here and think I believe that for a woman who is pregnant with a child she can’t keep, adoption is a better option than abortion. No matter what your belief about the moment of conception, there is always a choice to make. No one makes it easily; no one chooses abortion with any pleasure. But for most of those who do, the pain does not linger throughout their lives: They aren’t haunted by memories or birthdays. Yes, that bit of life, smaller than a walnut, might have been a child: but there’s a vast difference between “might have been” and the reality of a baby. The loss of a healthy newborn is a hurt that never leaves. I’m not saying that either option is correct; but I do believe that adoption is, finally, more difficult, more painful, than abortion—which is not a reason not to choose it. The choice I made was a relatively passive one, and left a residue of many years of sorrow and pain; but it is a choice I am so incredibly glad I made.

  In her memoir Borrowed Finery, Paula Fox writes about her childhood and the ways in which her parents literally abandoned her. She grew up to have a child she was unable to keep, a daughter who was adopted as an infant. When they met as adults, they recognized each other immediately, as Jil and I had in that crowded restaurant on the Upper West Side. “I walked off the plane,” Fox writes on the next-to-last page of her book, and describes meeting her daughter in the airport waiting room. “I found her beautiful. She was the first woman related to me I could speak to freely.”

  On the last page, Fox continues, “I have had splendid close friendships with women. What I had missed all the years of my life, up to the time when [we] met, was freedom of a certain kind: to speak without fear to a woman in my family.”

  Jil’s existence, The Baby separate and real, was as urgent in its effect on me as her demands to be born, and the sharp spasms of my own womb had been twenty-four hours earlier. Her leave-taking, as her birth, was slow and painful, and her absence inevitably became a part of my life. But what Jil and I have now is so rare and so special, so full of closeness and joy, that in some ways, it’s hard to remember the missing decades. How incredibly lucky I am now to have Jil as part of my life. I am filled with gratitude for all that we have and have always had— and our amazing good fortune in searching and in being found. I am grateful for Jil, both The Baby who was, and the woman who is.

  28. JIL

  MYSELF

  The phone rang at 5:00 a.m., waking me.

  “Your mother’s breathing became very labored during the night,” the resident on duty at Mount Sinai Hospital said. “We told her we thought she needed to be ventilated. She asked if we would sedate her to do that, and we said yes. She agreed, and we did the procedure. But we need to do some further tests, and we need your permission as her health care proxy.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, sitting up, struggling to be calm. “I just saw her last night, and her breathing seemed okay.”

  “Yes, this began around midnight,” he informed me.

  The doctors had told her that they thought she might have clots in her lungs, but my mother had refused to do a CAT scan, as she had refused almost all treatment except painkillers; but after the doctors and I argued with her, she’d agreed to it. “But the CAT scan results showed that her lungs were clear,” I said.

  There was a pause. “What CAT scan?” he asked.

  “The pulmonary doctor thought she had blood clots in her lungs so they did a CAT scan, and my mother told me it was clear.”

  “Your mother never gave permission for a CAT scan,” he said. “We wanted to put her on blood thinners, just to be safe, but she wouldn’t take them. We’d like to do the scan now—we need your permission for that, too.”

  I was stunned, but realized that this made perfect sense. My mother didn’t capitulate. She just wanted to make me stop nagging her.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was perfectly obvious that my mother didn’t want any treatment; but how could I say no to the CAT scan I’d been begging her to have for days? Especially since this wasn’t even what was wrong with her. She was in the hospital for treatment of her cancer.

  The doctor could hear my confusion.

  “Look,” he finally said. “I understand your mother can be…” He paused to search for the word: “challenging. We can deal with the immediate problem and help her breathe. Then we can talk about where to go from there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do the CAT scan. I’ll be there in about half an hour.”

  “Thanks.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “Have the test results from the surgery come in yet?”

  We’d been waiting for more than a week. The immediate results, taken in the OR, were fairly positive. The section tested showed that the tumor
was a slow-growing type that would respond well to treatment. But, as the surgeon told me three times, we had to wait for the full test results to know what we were dealing with, especially with a tumor of this size. Despite his warning, I was trying very hard to be positive, if only to stem the tide of my mother’s negativity. It was hard to be hopeful when my mother lay behind a frozen wall of silence, waiting to die.

  My stomach was in a knot that had become permanent these last few weeks, ever since my mother called and said to come see her; she wasn’t feeling well.

  Her voice on the phone frightened me; the sight of her frightened me more. Sitting in the white leather bucket chair in the living room, she looked shrunken and stiff. She’d aged ten years since the last time I’d seen her, only two weeks before. She’d lost weight and her hair, always an immaculate blond helmet, was disheveled, one side flat against her head, the other puffed out, as if she had been napping. My mother does not nap. Her hands quivered in her lap like moths, and when she stood up she was bent over, hunched. Her skin even looked different, puckered, dry, and parched. How could someone change so much so quickly?

  She had been to the doctor, she told me. I was hushed, shocked, by this announcement. My mother had never had a physical, a Pap smear, a mammogram, a check of her cholesterol, or a bone density test. Once, when I asked her if she was going to have a colonoscopy, she looked at me, lowered her eyebrows, and said, “What are you, nuts?” That was the end of that discussion.

  She only had a doctor because years ago, her insurance company required a primary care physician’s name on a form. Someone said they had a doctor who was “nice,” so my mother put his name down. Surprisingly, he was nice, nice enough to keep my mother as a patient, even though she never allowed him to do more than take her blood pressure.

  Now she had terrible pain in her abdomen, low down, below her stomach. When I asked her how long she’d had this pain, she swatted the air at me. “A while,” she said. I pressed her.