God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  I wrote back right away. Jevn joined our conversation, too. With each exchange, my fears dissipated. And soon I realized that the key to open adoption, even more than I’d understood before, was to find the right couple. It wasn’t simply that the right couple would make giving up the child possible. With the right couple, open adoption would be easy. Knowing them would mean liking them. My prior fears were supplanted by a wild generosity; I would not only give them my child—I’d get pregnant again to give more children away to couples like them! But when I mentioned making some kind of commitment, Erica said she’d read that most birth mothers don’t settle on a couple until after the fifth month of pregnancy. I was only in my third, so they wanted to give us time to look around. They did what first loves do—they broke my heart, but they gave me hope for what might be out there, and they opened the door for others to come in.

  * * *

  I kept my tiny roundness concealed beneath my hoodie and oversized T-shirt, but with the adoption process fully under way, I began to tell my friends about it, starting with Sleepy Amy, who took me camping in the freezing rain to help me enjoy my last days of mobility and freedom. She had long black hair and she smiled easily. People called her Sleepy Amy to distinguish her from me. She would fall asleep in the middle of studio, right on her desk or beneath it, and I loved the way she was always undermining everything we were doing there all the time.

  But I dreaded explaining it all to everyone else. They’d express concern, but I’d know what they were really thinking. My classmates would be happy to have me taken out of the competition in studio; Christian friends would think I’d gotten what I deserved. I thought about skipping town. Moving to the farm or to a state no one thinks about. But even if I could escape Ohio, I couldn’t escape the thing growing inside me. Even strangers on the street would think they knew the whole story. They wouldn’t realize that I was studying architecture and had a plan for everything.

  And so I did the only thing I could. I began to talk about it. Eagerly. Openly. I would tell everyone everything, fearlessly outlining the details, omitting nothing. I’d grant them their fears and hypotheses and concerns, and then I’d silence them with certainty. I’d educate them about a kind of adoption they’d never even heard of. The only way to resist being talked about would be to talk about myself and to fill in the juicy details generously. My only armor would be appearing free of doubt. And, over time, I began to build around myself a scaffolding of friends, and colleagues, and professors, and counselors, confident and fully informed about my plan. The only thing I’d admit was that it wouldn’t be easy. But, then, neither was architecture school.

  “I’m pregnant—but I’m doing adoption,” I would say before they could give me advice. It would be as if I planned the whole thing, pregnancy and adoption, like a giant impressive two-part side project I’d taken on out of excess ambition. By the middle of February, I had said this so many times, to so many people, it was a mantra that no longer had any meaning to me.

  I wouldn’t say, “I’m giving up my child for adoption.” Not because Molly told me not to, but because at that point I wasn’t giving up a child. I was going to counseling, learning about the adoption process, eating an egg every day, reading books about adopted children, scanning profiles at night, and consulting with Jevn on everything. Adoption couldn’t be done until after the birth, because my parental rights wouldn’t exist until the baby did. In the meantime, I was doing adoption. Everything anyone could ask me to do.

  * * *

  One evening, Jevn and I met at my apartment for our first phone call with Beth and Ken, a couple from Idaho. We had started spending long evenings on the phone with couples, and late nights sending e-mails. Beth told us about their recent trip to Lake Tahoe and how happy they were to be back. I remembered that their profile had included a photo of a backyard deck, so I asked if they ate meals out there in the summer. Beth said that they didn’t. “Unfortunately, we have a lot of bugs in the summer.”

  I looked across to Jevn, to see if he was thinking what I was thinking.

  I was thinking about eating supper serenaded by crickets under the canopy of maples my dad had planted, on the deck he’d built to extend into them, often still wrapped in towels in our swimsuits after a long day at the pool he’d built in a cow pasture close to our house together with several of our neighbors who shared it with us. Summer was comprised of pilgrimages to the pool and suppers on the deck. And I’m sure there were also bugs. Most likely lots of them.

  Jevn wasn’t looking at me, but he bore the burden of the rest of that conversation. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  * * *

  The conversations we had with couples were often about parenting, which I’d never thought so much about. One evening Mike and Terri described the way they disciplined their two-year-old daughter by holding her tight when she was upset, no matter how loud she screamed, because they wanted her to know they’d be there for her through all of her emotions. I told them my dad thought emotions came from not getting enough sleep. He’d put me in my room and pull the vinyl window shade, but the foggy light of day would seep through the rip and around the curled edges and turn everything deep red. I’d never really thought about it before, but what a difference it would have made to have someone sit with me and talk through it, whatever it was. That was something adoption would do effortlessly, correct faults that ran like deep ruts in a family, persisting through generations.

  I hadn’t felt at ease with Mike until that moment, but sensing the start of a connection, I asked about the love of travel they mentioned in their profile. Mike said that they’d traveled a lot. They didn’t like to eat strange food or spend time in unfamiliar countries, but there was a certain beach in Florida they liked to go to every summer, a place where they liked the restaurants and where everyone knew them. It sounded nice, but it didn’t sound like travel to me. Travel was exactly about not knowing or being known, and I couldn’t help but doubt how well they’d manage in the foreign territory of open adoption.

  I could never know what would sink my heart. I’d set out with so much hope, internalizing couples’ stories, falling asleep imagining their hometowns, straining excitedly to see how far down the road I could picture us all together—but there was always a point when some detail, some way they would say something, would put out the spark. Our conversations led us fast into couples’ most intimate spaces, their profoundest hopes and disappointments, and there were times I couldn’t get out fast enough. Jevn would sigh and shake his head in frustration at me.

  If this were a closed adoption, we’d have been finished a long time ago, and sometimes I wanted Molly to take the decision away from me. I couldn’t know whether my criteria would be more effective than pulling a nice couple at random from the files. I felt guilty for scrutinizing people so mercilessly, couples that had been approved for adoption by every measurable standard. Who was I to say they weren’t good enough? If I wasn’t fit to parent, was I fit to select parents for my child? But no one was setting the rules, and the field was as wide as the Ohio horizon. The only things guiding us were measures we created, ideals even we couldn’t pinpoint, instincts I couldn’t begin to temper. Molly would assure us, frustrating as it was, guilty as I felt, they were enough, and they would lead us to someone.

  We decided we’d give ourselves until the end of March. That was when I would return to school, and we’d both be too busy to be on the phone with couples all the time. It also gave us three months before my due date in July to get to know the couple well. If something happened to make us change our minds, it gave us time to figure out what we were going to do.

  One night after a session with Molly, we walked down the hill to the pizza place to fill out the medical history forms she’d given us—vital information for our official record, to remain permanently accessible to our child. We were seated at a table next to the fireplace, and though our medical histories would be delicately, inextricably intertwined in our child
, as we completed the forms, we might have been any two students thrown together on a school project. Our child a collaboration as unromantic as collecting aluminum cans from the architecture studios.

  When our pizza arrived, we put away the papers, and I remembered the package I’d gotten in the mail earlier that day. I pulled it out of my backpack.

  “We got photos from Dave and Laura,” I said, showing him the envelope. Inside were ten glossy color photos, professionally done, along with a long handwritten letter. They wrote about trying with IVF for years and how they had contemplated divorce on account of it. Laura had almost died in surgery after a fertility procedure. They said IVF clinics deal hope, and they were addicted. It repulsed me. I couldn’t imagine risking my life or spending thousands of dollars just for a chance to have a baby. “I still don’t like them,” I told Jevn. I couldn’t help it.

  “Maybe they’d appreciate a baby more because of what they’ve been through.”

  “They’re putting themselves through it! I want them to have come to terms with adoption before they adopt my child!” He was so fair, so generous in his assessment of people, I was terrified it would be up to me alone to find their faults. “Aren’t you worried about what kind of people they’d be?”

  “Maybe that’s a question we should be asking everyone: how they’ve dealt with infertility,” Jevn said. “Maybe we should write down all the questions we want couples to answer.”

  That was a big problem with this process. We were managing vastly different information about so many different people. I was finding myself comparing one wife’s strange laugh on the phone to someone else’s job in sports management, to another person’s large extended family.

  “Okay.” I tore out a sheet of notebook paper. How have you dealt with infertility? I wrote. “Maybe something like What’s your biggest struggle as a couple?” I wanted to know what really sustained them. If I was giving up my child in part so that Jevn wouldn’t become an absent father, I needed to feel confident that the adoptive parents were going to stay together.

  “And, Are you still trying to have biological children?” Jevn suggested.

  “I think we should ask some general things, too. Like, Are you happy? What are you passionate about?” I added, writing both questions down.

  “Do you have a TV?” he suggested. Neither of us did.

  “No, they probably all have TVs. Maybe, How much TV do you watch?”

  “Where do you keep your TV?” he said. He was right. That would tell us more. I wrote it down. And that got me thinking.

  “What songs do you sing to yourself while you’re washing the dishes?” I said. “I know what my mother would sing: ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ Dad would probably sing ‘Blueberry Hill,’ or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ He’d sing that one on walks because he was too embarrassed to just hold hands without asking.” Those songs took me fast to the deep interiors of my childhood. I wanted to know what my child would overhear, and be filled by, and remember.

  “I know what you’d sing,” Jevn said, smiling. He was probably about to make fun of me.

  “You wouldn’t sing at all! You’d just mouth constantly!” I went on the attack, remembering all the times he’d taken my hands and stepped lightly on his toes and bent his height over like a crescent moon as he looked into my eyes and mouthed the Jayhawks, I’d run away! I’d run away with you, baby!

  “Do you build things?” he suggested, and I wrote it down. Of course that question. Jevn often spent vacations on a friend’s property, building cabins and saunas by hand, using rock climbing gear to hoist himself along half-built structures. He always came back burned and full of fish he caught in the river. Between Jevn and my father, our child would probably be oriented toward making stuff.

  “They should build fires!” I said. I had so many fire memories. Halfway through my childhood, our area got annexed by the city and instituted fire safety regulations, so the fire department was often called to our house, where dad had planted a forest for the exact purpose of producing firewood. We’d have elaborate systems of ropes to guide the fall and then epic bonfires. And, always eventually, the fire department.

  “Yeah, definitely,” Jevn said, thinking. I also remembered shivering in bed, and the smell of the wood, waiting for Jevn to get the fire going, that time I joined him at the cabin by the Arkansas. And the thick steam from the oatmeal rising up into the rafters when I finally got up to make breakfast.

  “What do you do with holey socks?” I said as I wrote.

  Jevn laughed. “What’s the right answer to that one?”

  “I don’t know—it could be a lot of things!”

  This was open adoption. We had more than a hundred families to choose from, all of them approved for parenting by every state and agency standard. But it came down to things no agency could measure. And everything we’d be able to give our child we were giving in these moments, thinking hard about what we wanted its life to look like, and harder about how to find it. We would standardize our data to manage the unmanageable. We composed questions that poked and prodded in places we thought we’d find life. Questions we weren’t sure how we wanted answered. Others that were deal-breakers. We wrote down every question we could think of.

  What kitchen appliances do you own? Will your children share a bedroom? Describe a few of your T-shirts. What did you last give someone as a gift? What is the best time of day? How is your family imperfect? Do you ever build a fire? Do you get dessert? Do you drink Coke? What do you like most about your job? What do you do on a typical Sunday? Thursday? What is fun? How much time do you spend outside each day? What was the last show you saw at a museum or theater? Who was your favorite teacher? Describe your faith without using the word church. What would you say if your child told you he was an atheist? What are your quiet hours? Will you buy a car for your child when it turns sixteen? How old is your furniture? Who is your favorite relative? Do you speak any foreign languages? What do you use your basement for? Do you get any magazines or newspapers? Do you ever sleep late? How would you react if your twenty-two-year-old daughter told you she was pregnant? Who does the housework? Do you have a boat? Plane? Snowmobile? What were you like as a student? What volunteer work do you do? How do you celebrate your anniversary? Do you have a basketball hoop? Will your children have chores? Do you listen to the radio? What toys will you buy for your children? What would you do if your child got a D in school? How do you feel about divorce?

  For whatever its faults, we’d embarked on a process that put all the mysteries of human attraction back on the scales. It affirmed us as parents, best-equipped, for reasons only nature knew, to make decisions for our child. And facing the piles of profiles that night, I had hope. If there were jukeboxes and llamas, there were bound to be tuning forks and telescopes. We just had to find them.

  When the lines of the paper were full, we rotated the page and wrote sideways in the margins. I wrote some; Jevn pulled the page back to himself and wrote others. And after one very thick-crusted pizza, we’d compiled a total of 111 questions.

  NINE

  Of course I couldn’t tell him what I thought about at night. That although I still couldn’t imagine having a child, I liked to think about showing the world to someone who was new to it. I could imagine an allegiance as deep as family and hard work that means so much you can’t feel its hardness. I could imagine how easy it would be for me to offer all the things I struggled to find in couples—things more important than readiness or financial security. I could imagine not worrying about couples from Minnesota and Michigan anymore. And I could imagine Jevn, in time, getting over it.

  Then I would remember dog food.

  It was expensive to have a child. The couples were always describing their big garages, their flexible work schedules, their fenced-in backyards and college funds. Like they knew money was the Achilles’ heel for an accidental mother. None of the invaluable things I had to give mattered in the end, because what I didn’t have was money. I made
a hundred dollars a week working in the dean’s office during the school term; a couple of thousand dollars at most from an internship. I was halfway through the money my dad had saved to help with my first four years of college. Their expensive desires got them babies; mine got me dog food—which I had tasted in the basement once, fishing a kibble out of the big green bag. It was oily and gritty, and I couldn’t swallow.

  * * *

  One afternoon I left work early for a prenatal appointment at the university hospital. The baby was healthy, and my midwife congratulated me for gaining a lot of weight in the two weeks since I’d seen her. I told her I’d added milkshakes to my daily diet. Mama’s finally putting some meat on those bones! she teased me, and I left feeling proud of myself, like I’d really accomplished something.

  On the way home, I stopped in to see the woman I worked for in the dean’s office. Cherry was in her sixties and had the disposition of her name. She was cheery and efficient, and small pops and clicks came from her dentures when she spoke. The plastic rims of her glasses and the chain that kept them around her neck were always bumping an earring or a string of pearls or her teeth between her pale pink lips as she pulled her glasses down to give me direction. She was a secretary from the old school; she used an electric typewriter and knew proper shorthand. She was sitting at her desk opening a stack of mail with a long, silver letter opener when I arrived. She took a moment to place me.

  “Well, hi, Amy! Come in, come in! I didn’t expect to see you!”

  I stood in front of her desk, as I often did, chatting with her as she arranged things on her blotter and tended the phone, gazing at me blankly when it would ring and she’d put the receiver to her ear. I told her about my internship, and she said it sounded perfectly suited to me. Then I told her I was pregnant, and the smile drained from her eyes. She lowered her glasses to the very tip of her nose and raised her penciled-in eyebrows. She paused for a long time, reading me. “Well,” she said, sighing, “you are about to learn the difference between men and women.”