We arrived. The Arythmics noisily marched us past the apricot-coloured tulips, up our fieldstone pathway — all with great glee, silliness and a wee bit of pretend pomp. We weaved along until we reached the front porch.
We were greeted there by a huge hand-lettered and festooned poster board. It must have been hung on our front door while we were at the hospital collecting our son. I couldn’t read it through my tears, so I asked Robin to read it aloud.
“Welcome Home Michael Asher Rosenbaum Christmas,” he said. “We love you.”
In Michael’s room that afternoon, the air smelled perfumed with the burning scent of sweet molasses wafting through the window from the nearby Redpath Sugar plant on the city’s waterfront. Looking out from the window to the cottonwoods in the distance, I had my first glimpse of the migrating white-throated sparrows on their brief spring stopover.
Robin was now standing at the bedroom door. “You looked a million miles away,” he said. “A peaceful million miles away, so I let you be.”
Pressing my warmed cheek next to Michael’s, I smiled at my lovely husband and murmured, “Nice, huh?”
“Glorious,” he said.
Everything was perfect. It was a gorgeous, sunny spring day. I was home, rocking my newborn to sleep in my arms, running my fingers through his thick bush of hair.
At last, my pine rocking chair and I were exactly where we were meant to be, at home, in Michael’s bedroom with the sun streaming through the antique lace curtains I hung just before leaving for the hospital.
For seventeen years, since my first days in Canada, that chair had followed me in and out of more living spaces than I cared to remember. It rocked me happily through a myriad of boyfriends and consoled me through just as many heartbreaks. In addition to its scratches, it had earned a satiny smooth patina.
I moved my hand off its arms to run my fingers across Michael’s peaceful, silken face. “How can it get any better than this?” I thought, as Robin walked into the room.
He was beaming at the sight of us. This was one happy man. He too had waited forever for this proverbial moment of marital bliss. I was thirty-nine, Robin, forty-three. This precious first child of ours, lying asleep in my arms, was already beloved.
The afternoon sun continued to pour through the lace. It made me woozy as it created shadows on the farmyard trompe l’oeil Robin had painted on the wall next to Michael’s crib.
“I’ll first paint a window, then a scene you’d see through it from a farmhouse,” he announced several days before, while sketching details on graph paper. “Wouldn’t it be nice for the baby to look out on rolling hills and a perpetual blue sky? I can throw in a barn, a few cows, sheep, grass…”
Robin had so many plans and dreams for his son. They were going to build a crystal radio set together and make volcanoes erupt from test tubes. He would teach him to make a raft out of 2x4s, fly a kite and throw a perfect pitch over home plate. Finally, someone to watch Formula One racing with!
I hadn’t yet allowed myself similar reveries … except perhaps for one. I saw Michael standing on the bimah at his bar mitzvah, my father at his side.
“Everyone get a glass,” I said that night to the crowd gathered around our pine table at the homecoming party for Michael. The happy sound of corks popping and bottles overflowing added a festive sort of joy as we raised our glasses.
“Okay. A toast,” I said, not having any idea what I was about to say, but rattling on anyway. “I’ll try to do it without crying, but don’t expect it…” Everyone laughed; they knew me too well. I took a breath. “May this lovely, peaceful Island,” I said at last, “the one our lucky child has come to at birth — may this Island forever bring him, as long as he needs or wants it, the same delight, refuge, inspiration and shelter from life’s storms as it has brought me, his mother, and Robin, his father. To Michael. To Robin. To the Island. To us all.”
After the last guest left the homecoming celebration, Robin lowered Michael into the small, handmade pine cradle next to our bed, on loan from a neighbour. We placed layers of soft flannel blankets on the bottom to cushion Michael’s bony little body. Carved underneath, on the bottom of the cradle were the names and birthdates of babies before him who had spent their first days cradled there. Sometime during the afternoon Robin had etched the next line in the cradle’s history. Michael Asher Rosenbaum Christmas, May 20, 1987.
Robin let me choose Michael’s first and middle names. In the Ashkenaz tradition, I named him after deceased people I wanted to honour, using their first initials. Michael was named after an aunt and my mother’s father. I chose Asher to honour Alberta Evans, a woman who worked for our family when I was a child, a second and beloved mother to me.
While Robin and I liked the sound of both names, their Hebrew meanings had great significance too. Michael meant “he who resembles God.” Along with Gabriel and Raphael, Michael was mentioned in early Judaic texts as an archangel. Asher meant “blessed.”
After the long day of celebration, I crawled under the covers next to Robin. I was exhausted, but sleep would not come.
“My eyes keep popping around my sockets,” I said to Robin, then laughed. “They’ve got shpilkes,” a Yiddish term for the jittery feeling, akin to “ants in your pants.” I again tried to sleep. I wanted to put aside, for a few hours at least, a turbulent undertow attached to my joy.
“What a day it must have been for Michael too,” I said, ignoring the signal Robin was giving by shoving his head under the pillow.
It troubled me to think how wrenching those last few days must have been for Michael. He’d been pulled away from the familiar sounds, movements, fluids, smells, touch and warmth of his birth mother’s body. He’d just begun to adapt to the nursery, then after seven days, was whipped away from that. Somewhere, somehow, this had to affect this sweet young thing’s nervous system. Whether or not it could be measured, it had to have hit hard. How could it not? Even if the world’s top neurological experts told me otherwise, I knew in my heart. This wee little body and its complex collection of neurons, pathways, synapses and soul could not be completely unscathed from not one startling jolt, but two.
To counteract my thoughts, I said to Robin, “Let’s list all of the nice things our little Michael experienced his first day with us.”
The tired new papa grunted into the pillow.
“I guess I’m on my own then,” I said loudly.
“Okay, this will be the last thing I talk about tonight, I promise. But think about it. In one day, our little fella felt heat from the sun, heard Canada geese squawk, shared germs with twenty people dying to hold him, listened to Glen Gould play Bach’s Goldberg Variations, watched hockey in his dad’s arms…”
“And,” Robin muttered from his pillow, “heard his mommy sing ‘Kumbaya.’ Now go to sleep.”
Maybe Michael had shpilkes, too, during the night. He couldn’t settle for long. Except for brief moments of sleep, he thrashed around in his little cradle. We had no idea why. Even after frequent feedings and diaper changes, the poor thing continued to holler and wouldn’t fall asleep. We wrapped him tightly in blankets, which calmed him for a while. So did holding him close to our bodies, caressing and making soothing noises. These moments never lasted long, though. He startled to the slightest movement, sound or change in light around him.
Robin and I took turns staying up with him. One morning, I got out of bed after a total of two hours sleep. I felt sleep-deprived and anxious, partially because of a short but vivid dream I had. In it, Robin and I were frantically running up and down a long, linoleum-covered corridor of a big, two-storey institutional-looking building that I remembered from my childhood. It was called The Home. We were opening doors as we ran from room to room, searching for something. When we didn’t find it, we slammed the door behind us and rushed into the next room. At the end of the corridor, we lay down and cried. We never found what we were looking for — a child.
The Home was a drab, gloomy-looking brick building near Winship, my elemen
tary school in Detroit. I was never sure then what The Home was, only that many of the kids who went to Winship lived there. It was shrouded in mystery.
I found out in my teens that The Home was an orphanage. In my memory, kids who lived there wore frayed clothes, had drippy noses, didn’t do well in school, and were always in trouble. I believed they ate only cold porridge and mashed potatoes with canned gravy and peas, morning, noon and night.
I went to Winship for nine years but never once visited The Home. I never asked my parents why kids lived there. Nor did any teachers address the obvious question. Why were so many kids at our school not living with their parents?
It wasn’t hard to understand why my dream that morning felt so haunting. If our Michael had been born in the 1950s like those other kids, he would have been one of the orphans. And what if parents looking for a child never chose him? Both Robin and I were already thinking Michael was frail, so I shuddered to think of him living in an orphanage, being raised without parents to give him extra doses of care. And I shuddered at the disdain he would have met from the likes of my friends and me.
Another building next to the main structure was a Home for Unwed Mothers. Many of the children at school were probably born in this building, shifted to the other where they would wait for the big dream — adoption — so they could move into a family to live happily ever afterwards.
I graduated Grade 8 with a handful of Home Kids still amongst us, dozens coming up behind. I didn’t know then that if you weren’t adopted into a family by the time you hit an age with double digits, chances were you never would be.
There were more children to adopt during my youth than families for them to go to. Thus, orphanages. A social shift in the early 1970s changed all that, with the introduction of birth control pills and sex education in the schools, and more readily available and safer abortions. Promotion of safe sex and use of condoms had impact as well. All these factors, along with a relatively more accepting attitude towards single motherhood, meant babies to adopt were fewer. That’s why when Robin and I were ready to adopt, Alan said, “You have to find your own.”
Unlike the ending of my dream, Robin and I did. But our dream didn’t come true exactly like we thought it had.
We kept Michael next to us at night. Because he never took more than a few ounces of milk at any one time, we feared missing his repeated squeals for a top-up if we moved him downstairs. Despite strategies offered by friends, family and parenting gurus on how to train Michael to drink more, and therefore sleep more, we weren’t successful; he was crying every few hours. After warming his formula, we fed him in the bedroom, tucked him back in the cradle and rolled over for a one-or two-hour trip into dreamland.
When people asked “How’s Michael?” we usually said “A little unsettled.” It seemed kinder than “fussy” or “agitated.” But agitated was more like it. If he wasn’t performing a serpentine full-body squirm, he was flailing his arms and legs in the air, as if swimming freeform in ether. His little razor-sharp nails often swiped at his face, scratching it when contact was made.
To make him feel more grounded, we swaddled him with soft flannel blankets wrapped tightly around his body, arms and legs tucked inside. The gentle pressure against his skin and feeling of containment definitely made him more settled, and we hoped comfortable.
Repeated visits to the pediatrician ended with “He’s doing fine. It looks like his digestive system may be underdeveloped and giving him a bit of trouble, but he’ll grow out of it. Just relax.” I liked our pediatrician a lot, but relax? How could we relax with a crying, fidgeting, fussy baby we didn’t know how to comfort?
Despite reassurances, this was a common conversation between Robin and me: Do all babies cry this much? Dunno. Do all babies squirm this much? Dunno. Are we doing something wrong? Probably.
Michael was so tiny and seemed so frail, we thought the pine cradle, small as it was, might still be too big. We switched him to a woven reed basket we bought. It was the same model Cecil B. DeMille used in The Ten Commandments, when he directed Miriam to put her brother Moses in it before sending him down river. It was also the one my friend Ellie used as her laundry basket.
Michael did seem a bit more settled in the narrower space — perhaps the confines made him feel safer. We experimented with something even smaller during naptime one day while visiting friends in the city. We placed Michael in a small dresser drawer we padded with soft blankets, to see if he would stop thrashing if he wasn’t swaddled. To our astonishment, he fell asleep immediately. It wasn’t convenient to use a dresser drawer at home, so we layered in extra blankets in his basket to make him snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug, as my father used to say when he bundled me up at bedtime.
Michael, like a crate-trained pup, was more secure in small, tight spaces. Perhaps it helped him feel less adrift in the forces of nature he was born into. Though he was a full-term baby at five pounds thirteen ounces, he was acting more like a preemie.
“I’m wondering if his body isn’t ready to be outside Kira’s womb,” I said one morning after wrapping Michael in blankets. “Maybe there’s too much for him to take in. Think of all the sounds, smells, touch, light and movement coming his way. They may just be too stimulating.”
It was silly to think I would miss Michael’s nighttime calls if he were downstairs in his own bedroom. Even though I didn’t have the leg-up provided by a new mother’s hormones, I wasn’t about to miss my baby’s cry. Our tiny child had a remarkable ability to let both Robin and me know he needed us. Like a hospital intern, I was always on call. Red Alert was the default position my sympathetic nervous system was starting to call home. I was lucky the CBC gave Robin four weeks of paternity leave to stay with me. Our worlds were being rocked upside down by this needy little guy.
Feeding time with Michael was a blessedly peaceful time, one of the few. I had invented a way, I hoped, to compensate for Michael being deprived of a nice warm breast to suck on. Whenever I fed him, I sat in our oversized, cushy green leather chair with my legs tucked under. I held Michael tightly against my chest so he could feel my heartbeat. I dropped my head down until our foreheads touched, and gently pressed my cheek against his. One of my irrepressibly curly locks would usually brush against his skin as my warm breath drifted over him. Not the same as a breast, but pretty cozy, I thought. How could it not be good for him?
My favourite feedings were in the wee hours of the morning when I would get up, wrap myself in a chenille bathrobe, and bring Michael downstairs. We’d sit on the rocking chair in the living room in front of the French windows, and wait. From our front-row seat, we’d watch a fiery red and orange sun rise above the waters of Lake Ontario. I felt soothed by the calm and quiet from the stillness in the world at that time of day, I was sure Michael could feel it too.
I always took heart watching him suck enthusiastically as dawn pushed aside the night. Michael wasn’t the only soul being nourished in those moments.
I was thrilled when my parents visited a few weeks after Michael was home. My dad had become so frail, I worried that flying from Florida, followed by the shlep to the Island would be too hard for him. When I registered concern, his only words were, “Nothing could keep me away.”
We first thought my parents should come immediately after we brought Michael home, for his bris, the ritual Jewish circumcision that usually takes place when the male child is eight days old. I knew my dad would want to hold his grandson in his arms during the ceremony. But we brought Michael home when seven days old, so of course we couldn’t have the ceremony on day eight. We originally assumed it would be shortly after, and planned my parents’ trip accordingly.
The pediatrician told us not to do it. He thought Michael’s health was too fragile to have the circumcision right away, and he couldn’t predict when he’d be ready. “When he puts a little more meat on his body,” he said, “we’ll know.” Instead of waiting for who knew when, my parents came when Michael was two weeks old. I knew they wouldn’t be back f
or the bris.
I never worried that my parents would love Michael less because he was adopted. My sister Sharon had an adopted child, and my parents’ love for her was never in question. When I told them I couldn’t get pregnant, they didn’t betray any disappointment in their voice or push us to try longer. They appeared to accept what we told them and asked to be posted every step of the way along the adoption route. I was lucky. And enormously grateful. This scenario is not always de rigueur in families with adopted kids. There’s no passing on of the grandparents’ genetic line.
“I bet my dad will do nothing but kvel the whole time he’s here,” I said to Robin before my parents arrived. And that’s pretty much what he did, kvel. In Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, the book I somehow managed to hang onto since my father gave it to me when I was a teenager, the word means to take great pride and pleasure; a peculiarly Jewish joy most often associated with the accomplishments of one’s children. My father was doing just that, experiencing a peculiarly Jewish joy.
From the plush green leather easy chair we set up for him in the living room, my dad kveled non-stop. He couldn’t stop smiling, and the twinkle in his eye which had noticeably vanished after the Detroit riots had miraculously returned, if only temporarily. Everything delighted my dad. Of course, his delight delighted me. Bringing him joy remained high on my life’s to-do list, in part, as payback for the years of the “care packages” he had sent me in Washington.
But in recent years, bringing my dad pleasure was like asking Job to buck up. Yet there he was in my home, kveling as he watched his baby daughter be a mother, taking enormous pleasure as I bustled around the house, fearlessly performing high-wire acts like warming bottles, changing diapers, doing laundry, rocking Michael.
The biggest thrill of all for me was watching my dad kvel at his new grandson. My dad’s heart was full when Michael was in his arms, so much so that one day I watched as tears sailed down his cheeks. It wasn’t because of anything Michael did, how he looked or how he acted, though. He just loved Michael for being.
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