Summer 2003
Maud and I decide to take Jasper, Grace, and baby Sam to Costa Rica for six weeks. We are in the mood for adventure and figure Costa Rica will be affordable and give us all a chance to learn some Spanish. We stay in a rustic house our mother bought a few years before in Cocles, a small village on the Caribbean coast.
Costa Rica is a world away from the dry, hot Southern Oregon summer: Technicolor green, balmy with sea-scented air, almost always between eighty and eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with brief dramatic downpours two or three times a day. Jasper spends most of his time running around the village, playing with a pack of local children. A natural leader at five, he has almost everyone at his service, shouting out orders in English. He doesn’t learn more than four words of Spanish the entire time we are there, but he makes many friends. At the beach, I watch Jasper chase screaming girls, play soccer with passionate intensity, and let waves topple over him as he hangs onto the hands of his closest chums, Burlington, Jakel, and Kevin. I’m impressed by how Jasper fully embraces these friends, how he curls up in their laps, covers them with kisses, and says whatever he wants to these older boys with backgrounds and looks about as opposite from his as you can get. Hermanos sin sangre, the boys say of their bond with Jasper, brothers without blood.
I am struck by Kevin. Seven years old, he has a thick mass of dark, curly hair and a broad grin. Instead of stealing mangoes from our open kitchen as some of the other kids have done, Kevin climbs trees and brings back offerings: coconuts, limes, and something new to me called fruta gorda, a delicious fleshy fruit with a flavor that reminds me of bubble gum. When I prepare dinner each night, Kevin eagerly helps me peel garlic and cut stalks of fresh lemon grass from the garden. I know he is staying with his aunt, our neighbor and friend Liliana, who with her husband Bobby takes care of our mother’s house. But I don’t learn Kevin’s story until I’m helping Liliana hang out laundry one morning toward the end of our trip.
Kevin has just skipped by on his way down the road, and I mention to Liliana that he seems like an especially bright and thoughtful little boy.
“Ah, yes,” she says in her thick Caribbean accent. “But I don’t know what to do with him.”
“What do you mean?” I ask as I hang a boy’s button-down school shirt on the line.
“His mother can’t take him back,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “She gone crazy, hit him and his brother really hard and all.”
“What about his father?”
“My brother?” she says, then raises her eyebrows and shakes her head again. “Him have no job. Drinks, you know.”
“Kevin’s a sweet kid,” I say.
“I know. I love him. But, ooh, we have so many children!”
“I’d take Kevin in a second,” I hear myself say.
“Yes,” Liliana says in her lilting voice. “Wouldn’t it be good.”
We hang the rest of the laundry in silence. I’m aware of a heaviness in my chest. I’ve just received an e-mail from a childhood friend with the sad news that he and his wife have lost their first (and what will turn out to be only) baby, stillborn at nine months along. I wonder why the child lottery works the way it does, with eager parents who can’t have children or lose them, and others with healthy, beautiful kids they don’t want or can’t take care of.
*
I try to put the idea of adopting Kevin away, considering it crazy and impossible, but on my return home I find myself thinking about him quite a bit. I imagine his soft brown curls, his big grin, the way he dances in the waves of the ocean. I don’t want him to live in a family where there isn’t room for him, where the resources are stretched too thin. I want to take him in my arms, spoil him, let him know he belongs somewhere, is not just cared for but wanted.
I’ve raised the idea of adoption with Dicken several times over the years, but he’s always said he wasn’t interested: “If we have another, I’d like it to be our own.” So I’m not even planning to tell him about Kevin, but one day, as we drive back from an Ultimate Frisbee game at a friend’s place, I blurt it out: “There’s this kid in Costa Rica, his name is Kevin,” I begin. “He’s very cute, and he and Jasper get along really well. And he needs a home. His parents have abandoned him.”
Dicken is quiet, and I think, Oh well, I tried. I knew he’d say no. I look out the window, turning my head so he won’t notice the coldness I feel.
Then Dicken slows the car down and says, “Wow, I just got a really strong positive feeling.”
“Really?”
“Tell me more about him.”
*
A few weeks later, after some exploratory calls to Liliana and her family, including the news that Kevin says he wants us to adopt him, Dicken flies down to Costa Rica. His first few days, he remains in San Jose to undergo Lasix eye surgery and see a dentist to have several crowns replaced, saving us thousands because medical care is so much cheaper there. Then he takes a bus to the Caribbean side and with my written directions makes his way to Liliana’s house. I check e-mail every hour or so that day and light up when I finally see a message from him in my inbox. His e-mail says his eyes are improving—he’d been unable to e-mail earlier because of his blurry postsurgery vision—his mouth is sore, his laptop was stolen on the bus, and he can’t get over what a stunningly beautiful child Kevin is.
The next day Kevin’s uncles, Bobby and Walter, take Dicken by car, dugout canoe, and on foot into the jungle reservation near the Panama border to find Kevin’s mother, Flor. She has two little boys underfoot in her simple wooden house. Flor gives Dicken her blessing for the adoption. “She loves Kevin and recognizes his intelligence and wants to give him a chance for a good education,” the uncles translate. “She is only in agreement with this because it’s what Kevin wants, and because Bobby and Liliana admire your family and assure her you are good people.”
Dicken e-mails the news from the Internet café just across the road from Liliana’s house. He says he sees Kevin as a special child with great potential.
He’ll be very suited to getting an advanced education, learning English, getting out of provincial Cocles. I think Kevin might end up doing something great, maybe going back to Costa Rica as an adult and making a difference on a big scale.
I have been looking at this potential adoption on an interpersonal, intimate scale—thinking of how Kevin needs a home and loves attention, seeing the ways it will affect all of us as individuals. I love hearing Dicken’s broader, more global view.
As I sit with all of this, I am filled with a strange, subtle peace, a profound sense of expanding space within me. I am so grateful to Dicken that I vow to give him another baby of our own. In my mind, it’s the only reward worthy of the heroic journey he’s undertaken for something I initiated, something I didn’t expect to get.
*
This begins what will turn out to be a lengthy and complicated adoption process. The agency we hire takes our $4,000 deposit, sends us a few forms, and then mysteriously stops returning my phone calls. Then the number goes out of service. A Google search reveals a newspaper headline reporting that the agency has been closed by authorities in Florida—its owner was arrested on child-smuggling charges. We almost give up. But a lawyer we know in San Jose offers his direct services, so we hire him, paying him a lot less than we would have an agency. This means we have a representative in Costa Rica, but none in the US. We have to track down just about every family document on both sides, ours and Kevin’s, and have each one certified, authenticated, recertified, and stamped by the US Secretary of State’s office. It is a long, laborious, frustrating process, especially as the laws in Costa Rica seem to change every few months, including one period of time where the government outlaws foreign adoption altogether. But we persist.
My brother is supportive, but comments, “You’ve always been the good child. You’re gonna get even more points from Mom now that you’re adopting a needy kid.”
I think of all the ways I haven’t been good, the mi
stakes of my youth, the dark judgments and self-recrimination. Ben’s image of me seems almost absurd. But I know what he means. The self I present to the family is the one I have always so badly wanted to be, the good girl, a deserving, lovable person.
“I’m not trying to get points with Mom,” I tell Ben, a little defensively. “This is really a selfish move. He’s a super cute, bright child. It’s not like we went through the usual adoption route, which is such a crapshoot. We’re doing this because we really want him, and because it all seems to be lining up so perfectly, like it was meant to be.”
This is all true—and at the same time my brother is right. We were raised with the message that we should make up for all we were given by doing good works for the less fortunate. And this plays into my deepest parenthood angst. I feel painfully responsible for anything negative Jasper experiences because, I reason, if it weren’t for me and my choices, he wouldn’t be in the world having to go through all the trials of being human. In my twisted logic, I don’t take credit for any of the joy Jasper feels, only the pain. Having another baby would only compound this conflict, I’m sure.
But adopting a child is different. I will not feel completely responsible for Kevin’s pain. I will not rake myself over the coals for every mistake, for every time I fail to protect him from a negative emotion. However painful his life may be with us, I’ll tell myself it will never be as painful as it would have been if he had stayed in Costa Rica. And even if he ends up in jail or rehab, I can blame it on his early childhood, not on myself. I will be sad for him but I won’t feel at fault, I won’t hate myself for failing him. In my more rational moments, I know this is all ridiculous, that there is no way to measure pain, compare childhoods, or know what Kevin’s life would have been like if we hadn’t met him. But mostly I see myself being Kevin’s mother in all the outward, glorified ways, without having to bear the weight of mother-guilt.
I don’t discuss this deep-seated motivation for adopting Kevin with Dicken, and I don’t know what his own inner process is. I only know he supports me in my desires and is a generous, loving person, especially when it comes to children. He felt utterly abandoned when his family sent him to a strict all-boys boarding school at the age of eight, so I figure he deeply empathizes with the pain Kevin must have experienced when he was sent away to live with an unknown aunt and uncle at six.
Sometimes I envy Dicken’s ability to trust in his intuition as a parent. He doesn’t try to puzzle out what adopting Kevin means; he’s eager to get Kevin here, but doesn’t feel the sense of urgency I do. He’s simply ready to welcome him whenever he arrives.
Fall 2003–Summer 2004
I will fly down to Costa Rica four times in the next eighteen months, Dicken joining me on two of those trips, to meet with lawyers, judges, and social workers. When obstacles pop up, or unexpected financial demands present themselves, I look at Dicken and say, “Are we crazy? Should we give up?”
Dicken peers at me with steady, reassuring eyes. “Don’t worry. This is going to work out.”
I believe him, and feel the strength of our partnership, which gives me the courage to keep moving forward.
Each time I fly down for meetings in San Jose, I take a bus to the Caribbean coast and visit Kevin for a day or two before going home. One time he is at least an inch taller, and his hair is cut so short I don’t recognize him at first. But he runs to me and reaches up to kiss me on each cheek. Oh my gosh, I’ve never had a Costa Rican greet me this way! Costa Ricans tend to be more physically reserved, friendly but not demonstrative. The double kiss on the cheeks is more European; it was how Dicken said goodnight to me the first time we met. Kevin so clearly fits in our family.
Kevin takes me to his cousin Cristina’s sixteenth birthday celebration, an informal gathering in the alley with a few strings of cheerful streamers hung between palm trees. Kevin reaches past the bowls of candy and plantain chips and stuffs tuna-covered crackers in his mouth. He tells me his favorite foods are chicken, rice, and beans. No sign of a sweet addiction. A dream kid. He offers me a cracker, calling me “Mami.” An older boy cousin hears him and asks Kevin in a mocking, challenging tone I can easily discern even in Spanish, “Who is your mother?” Kevin looks worried, falters. I quickly coach him to say he has three mothers: Flor, Liliana, and me. His cousin smiles broadly. “Tres mamas, que suerte!” Three mothers, what luck!
I hear Kevin telling everyone at the party, “Tengo tres mamas y tres papas.” I have three mothers and three fathers.
I fly back home from that trip more sure than ever that we are on the right course.
CHAPTER 6
August 2004
I’m rereading Awareness by Anthony de Mello, an Indian Catholic priest and teacher. I’ve found this book comforting since I first came across it in my early twenties. Each time I read it, I discover something new.
This time, one passage in particular strikes me:
Generally, we seek to cure our loneliness through emotional dependence on people, through gregariousness and noise. That is no cure. Get back to things, get back to nature, go up in the mountains. Then you will know that your heart has brought you to the vast desert of solitude, there is no one at your side, absolutely no one. At first this will seem unbearable. But it is only because you are unaccustomed to aloneness. If you manage to stay there for a while, the desert will suddenly blossom into love. Your heart will burst into song. And it will be springtime forever.
For me, this describes an inner experience, not an outer one; I don’t need to be in some remote mountain range to get this. But I wonder: will I ever learn to be alone, to slow down and be with the vastness inside me?
September 2004
Dicken now works from home, writing and consulting, no longer running a day-to-day practice. He teaches seminars to health professionals about once or twice a month around the US and occasionally abroad. I spend most of my time with Jasper, who we’ve decided to homeschool. With the spare hours I get from sharing childcare with Maud and a group of families nearby, I help Dicken with writing, editing, and odd jobs like trips to the post office.
At last we’ve struck a balance, a way of sharing roles that works for all of us. Dicken gets to be even more involved as a parent, and that makes the daily work of childrearing easier for me. Jasper and I are both reassured by Dicken’s presence; and I feel like I’m contributing to the business. This arrangement is closer to how I originally pictured life on the farm: everyone interconnected, working toward the same goals.
Right now I don’t want to explore the vast desert of solitude. This feels like the beginning of idyllic times.
*
I’m lying in bed one afternoon holding Chippers, one of our two new baby guinea pigs, against my chest. He’s making sweet, chirrupy noises as I stroke his soft fur and thin, veined ears.
Dicken walks in and says, “You look happy.”
“I am. I’m a proud new mother.”
“Shouldn’t that be grandmother? Doesn’t he belong to Jasper?”
“Technically, yes. But who do you think is going to end up doing all the work?”
“Well, you are the expert,” Dicken says. “And look how happy the little guy is with you.”
We adopted Chippers and Patch from a local rescue organization. I’ve always had a thing for guinea pigs; I raised eight of them when I was little. I especially love Chippers, who is small and brown and named after one of my childhood favorites.
“Won’t he pee on you eventually?” Dicken asks.
“No, he’s much too polite for that.” I lift him to my face, kissing his furry cheeks and smelling his sweet cedar-chip scent. I can feel his hot breath on my skin.
“You really love him, don’t you?”
“It almost hurts, I love him so much. You know, I think I won’t need another baby. This is just as good.”
At breakfast the next morning, Jasper and Grace, ages six and five, are hatching a plan.
“Let’s build the guinea pigs a hug
e fort by the chicken coop,” Jasper says.
Grace’s eyes grow wide. “But what if the mean rooster gets them?”
“He can’t get out of the coop, Grace.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“We can make them tunnels and a loft,” Jasper continues.
“And a kitchen and a hot tub and a trampoline,” Grace adds.
Jasper rolls his eyes as he stuffs a big mouthful of pancake into his mouth. “Papa made these pancakes,” he says. “I only eat Papa’s pancakes.”
“Me too,” Grace says. “Papa Dicken’s pancakes are the best.”
The kids talk about supplies they can get from the barn for their project. I’m pretty sure the idea will be dropped before it’s actually started, but then I catch Dicken, who has been quietly reading the New Yorker, peering at the kids from behind the magazine. I can tell by his expression that he’s getting ideas.
Sure enough, by the end of breakfast, Dicken has sketched an elaborate design on a scrap of paper.
“Papa, you need to make this part much, much bigger,” Jasper says, pointing to a section of the blueprint.
“Yes sir,” Dicken replies, obediently erasing and redrawing the section.
The kids are excited and run out the door, headed for the barn.
I pick up half-eaten plates of pancakes and head for the sink.
“I’ll be at my desk in a little while,” Dicken says. “Let me know if I get any important calls.”
I spend the morning editing a book Dicken has written on blood chemistry analysis. I can hear occasional hammering outside.
In the early afternoon, Jasper bursts in the office door. “Mom, you have to come see the guinea pigs’ new house!”
I walk down to the bushes by the chicken coop. Dicken, bent over adjusting wire mesh, straightens up and smiles a little sheepishly.
“I got a little carried away.”
“Wow!” I say, genuinely impressed. “This is amazing.”
The guinea pigs’ new home is a large, elaborate dwelling made of wood and wire mesh, with multiple levels, sheltered areas, and access to fresh grass. The kids are squealing like little guinea pigs themselves.
Five Hours Page 4