“Oh, I’m not worthy …,” he says. He peels the tissue paper back carefully, like it’s an ancient map he’ll need to read later. He looks at the boots, me, the boots. “I have just two words to say,” he says finally. “Yee,” he says. “And HAAAAAA!”
A few good marveling minutes later, he turns to me. “Doesn’t that pillow of yours look lopsided? Huh? What? Could there be something under that pillow?”
I reach under. I pull out a silk pouch, green with yellow fringe. I shake the pouch, and a pair of sapphire earrings falls out like stars.
“Happy birthday,” he says.
“Back at ya, birthday boy,” I say, because this is what I always say.
Okay now. And please forgive me. But here’s the thing about the meeting about adopting from China. The thing I probably should have mentioned. The meeting is scheduled for September 22. Yep. The birthday.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a reason I didn’t mention this. There is a reason I have not made too much of this in my head. Because when one is thinking about certain things like babies, there is a tendency to make too much of certain other things. There is a tendency to look for signs. Signs in every cloud in the sky and the position of every rubber band on your desk and the pattern of every other date on your calendar—most especially the birthday you happen to share with your soul mate and husband.
And I don’t believe in signs. Or I don’t believe in making decisions based on signs. I think whenever you find yourself making a decision based on signs, well, that decision was really already made. The signs are really just signs of how clever you are at inventing the validation you need.
And this decision is anything but made. We’re looking into the China adoption program, but we’re looking at a lot of other ways of building a family, too.
Where am I, and why am I not there to grab hold of that baby? This seems to be my driving question. If I’m a mom who needs a baby, and if there’s a baby out there who needs a mom—a lost little girl on a bench with desperate eyes—well then, it’s my responsibility to look, to do whatever I have to do to find her.
And yet I’m the one missing from that dream. So who really is finding whom?
Alex and I have talked about becoming foster parents. Maybe that’s where the girl is, maybe she’s bouncing through the U.S. foster care system. It certainly makes sense to go looking there. In the foster care system you have a whole population of kids who need moms and dads. So why not enter the system, take in a foster child—most of them are older children—with the hope of one day adopting? We’ve gone to a few meetings. We’ve learned that before we would even be considered as adoptive parents of a foster child, we’d have to take classes. We’d have to become versed in RAD, reactive attachment disorder, and PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome, and countless other conditions that some of these children suffer. We are game to do this. As a psychologist, Alex thinks he might bring special skills to a troubled child. As a new parent, I think: um. I think: I was hoping to maybe learn how to do the diaper thing first. Is this really the way for a new mom to jump out of the gate? I don’t feel qualified to meet the complicated demands of a child who has suffered through so much so young. On the other hand, who does? These are the kids with perhaps the shortest supply of potential parents. That alone makes me want to jump in.
And maybe I will someday. I would like to, in theory. And in theory I would like to get some actual mom experience under my belt.
In theory.
Theory is really all you have to go on, and theory is really just a puzzle your head does to stay occupied while your heart does all the work.
These are impossible decisions.
Who knows what the pull is? This is a maze. Adoption versus sea monkeys versus foster care versus international adoption versus domestic adoption versus foster care versus sea monkeys versus China versus Guatemala versus Russia versus domestic versus international versus sea monkeys. It’s a bewildering maze to walk through. You make a right, hit a wall, or maybe just get scared because that alley is too dark. So you turn around, find another fork in the road, and make a left. That path keeps you moving, moving, and moving, until you hear a song playing somewhere, or you smell a smell that pulls you left, then right, then left again. It’s the way you do the maze. There are probably a million ways to do it. You can’t say that the way another person did it was wrong or right. The most you can say is that your way is … yours.
There are practical considerations. There is: twenty thousand dollars. That’s the approximate cost of adopting a baby, whether it be a domestic adoption or an international one. Twenty thousand dollars. Interestingly, twenty thousand dollars is also about what it costs for one IVF cycle at the fertility clinic. One sea monkey chance. This, at least when I first did the math, was convenient. Because there was no way. At least not right now. There was no way Alex and I could come up with much more than twenty thousand dollars. We certainly couldn’t come up with double that. So we couldn’t do both. We couldn’t do adoption and IVF.
This really was convenient. This was some real-world evidence to help support our decision to not bother with the fertility clinic. If I had twenty thousand dollars to spend on becoming a mom, I would do the sure thing, not the bet. Why would I gamble?
But then I did a stupid thing. Not that stupid, really. I called my health insurance company, just to find out what the deal was. In a few states, insurance companies are required to pay for infertility treatments, but in most states, like Pennsylvania, they are not. And most health insurance companies don’t offer much, if any, coverage when it comes to infertility treatments. Did mine?
As it turns out: yes. The lady on the phone said my policy would cover one IVF cycle. The whole thing—free.
Was this a sign? Was God answering my prayers for guidance through … managed care? “Hey, here you go. Here’s the one little boost I need to make this thing happen.”
But of course, it wasn’t a sign, because the decision was far from made. No, this was just one more fork in the road.
The church hosting the meeting about adopting from China—the meeting that happens to be on my birthday and Alex’s birthday, a coincidence that holds no, absolutely no significance—is inches off the highway, with hardly any clearance from the road. It’s a big old orange-brick church with two matching steeples with copper tops. It must have been terrible when they announced the plans for this highway; I can just picture the old folks at some spaghetti dinner or bingo night railing at the city planners.
Alex is looking for a place to park. He’s wearing his cowboy boots, which apparently are squishing his toes quite severely—a pain he says he is enduring in the name of all cowboys with squished toes throughout time.
I’m wearing my earrings, which are not squishing my ears, not even a little. I’m loving these earrings. I’m loving this birthday.
I’m eager about the meeting. I’m drawn almost instinctively to the idea of international adoption. I’m drawn to the romance, I suppose. To the sheer adventure of it all. I have friends, Vince and Chris, who adopted from Guatemala, and another friend, Lynn, whose baby came from Bolivia. I remember so clearly the day six years ago when Lynn stepped off the plane with baby Sam in her arms. I wouldn’t have missed that moment for the world. Lynn, who is single, had traveled with her social worker. They looked utterly bedraggled by the journey. And yet Lynn had a lightness to her step. I mean, she bounced. And Lynn isn’t the sort of person to … bounce. But now she wasn’t just Lynn. She was: Lynn and Sam. It seemed she really did have a whole new center to her universe.
Carmela, Vince and Chris’s daughter, came next. She was accepted into the fold as simply and as automatically as Sam. These were our friends, and these were their kids. You couldn’t see anything else. Adoption, among our friends, was a nonissue. Race, among our friends, was a nonissue. Maybe I’m just lucky to have such a large group of friends who are this way. Friends who think souls are souls no matter what the p
ackaging and no matter what the transport that brought them into a parent’s world. Then again, maybe this is one of the reasons I’ve chosen the friends I’ve chosen. Like minds. Like hearts.
So certainly one of the reasons I’m drawn to international adoption is because these are the models I have. I have no one in our immediate circle of friends who has adopted domestically. I have, of course, my brother and sister-in-law who adopted Alyson. But that was a 1970s-style adoption. Things have changed a lot since then. And I’m not talking about the sensationalized headlines of domestic adoptions gone wrong—of birth-mothers who change their minds at the last minute, sometimes after the child has been in the home and hearts of his new parents for months. No, leaving all that madness aside, when I look at adoption in this country now, I have a difficult time finding a place for me.
“Open adoption” is the current trend. In an open adoption, a birth-mother has the ability and perhaps even the legal right to stay involved in the life of the child. The arrangements vary widely. For many families, it’s little more than a matter of the adoptive mom and the birth-mom swapping holiday cards—if even that—and of the adoptive parents keeping in touch with the birth-mother should access ever be needed for the psychological or medical welfare of the child. There’s certainly a lot to be said for this arrangement. It has got to be better than the very old days when adoption wasn’t talked about, when kids weren’t actually told that they were adopted, when the thing was to pretend, and the child’s file was closed, end of story. The child would never, not even as an adult, have the right to discover the identity of his or her birth-parents.
But now it appears the pendulum has swung the other way. Now there are some families who have their child’s birth-mother over for regular Sunday dinners. Now there are birth-mothers and birth-fathers and birth-grandparents and birth-aunts and birth-sisters coming to the child’s birthday parties. Now there are birth-mothers who have arranged for formalized visitation rights, days when they can come take the kid to the movies or the mall.
Maybe that’s a nice thing. I don’t know. I do wonder how a child understands having all these parents in his or her life. Sometimes I think of open adoption the same way I think of the “open marriage” experiments back in the 1970s. Interesting concept, but did anyone make it work? Did anyone, in the end, want it to work? Boundaries are a rather necessary component to human well-being. Would you want to live in a house without any walls at all?
But the thing that keeps me from pursuing domestic adoption is more basic than all of this. It’s the competition. It’s the way it’s done now. You don’t just sign up with an adoption agency and wait your turn. You have to put yourself out there, as you would to try to land a job or a role in a play. You have to snag yourself a birth-mother, find a pregnant teenager who likes you well enough to allow you to raise her child. (In some states she can request that you pay her college tuition, rent on her apartment, and numerous other expenses.) I’ve read of couples making fancy brochures, advertising themselves to birth-mothers in the hopes of winning the so-called first prize of adoption: the increasingly rare white infant.
Competition? An ad campaign? A first prize? In the end, it’s just not the call I’m trying to answer.
If a whole lot of moms are lined up outside the door, requesting interviews from one baby lucky enough to have so many willing moms, I say, “Let the moms in!” I say, “Good luck, moms!” Why would I get in there and muddy things up? I’ve got a baby to find. My baby. Where is she?
If I were to adopt a baby domestically, it would probably be an African-American infant. That would feel right. Those are the babies in this country with precious few moms lined up outside the door. One of those might indeed be the child I am searching for or the one searching for me. Alex and I have tried the idea out on some people. We live in a rural area. And in America rural is hardly a word you associate with diversity. And so we said, for instance, to Billy, we said, “What if we adopted a child of African-American descent? How would that child be received by this community?”
“I wouldn’t do that to a kid,” Billy said. “That child would have a hell of a time in school around here. Why would you do that to a kid?”
Talk about the ugly side of living in the country. Talk about the bleakest of truths. In this way, neither Alex nor I will ever become country people. There is racism out here. Plenty of it. You can pretend all you like that it’s not here, you can go about your days refusing to believe that these beautiful hills contain pockets of ugliness, but in the end you have no choice but to face it.
We tried the idea about adopting an African-American infant on the old lady one day. She said, “A child is a child.” She said, “What the hell difference does the color make?” That was comforting. That was such good news. Then one day when we were visiting the old lady, her son and daughter-in-law stopped over. I was surprised to find that her daughter-in-law is black. A soft woman with an easy smile and gentle brown skin. I wondered, for a moment, if this was one of the secrets. I wondered if this was one of the reasons people shunned the old lady. I hoped not. I prayed not.
I wondered about some of the small-minded ways of country people. I tried to be sympathetic. I tried to remember that ignorance is quite different from evil. I thought about the need to educate. I thought about taking a stance and taking on the responsibility for change. I thought, well, this is what I must do. I must adopt an African-American baby and show them. I must teach them. I must convert them all.
Then I thought: a child. This is a child we’re talking about. A child is not an example, not a teaching tool, not a political symbol, not a catalyst, not a vehicle, not a mechanism. A child is a child.
I thought: If and when I finally make it through this maze and get to my baby, get to the girl on the bench with the eyes looking for me, and if she turns out to have a skin color declaring a heritage that my neighbors can’t accept, well, I suppose we’ll move.
“Okay, you go in first,” I say to Alex, when we get to the door of the room where the meeting about adopting from China is being held.
He looks at me.
“I’m too shy,” I say.
“Oh … my … God,” he says, grabbing the bridge of his nose.
“Kindergarten?” I remind him. “Lunchbox? Underwear in lunchbox?”
Alex lets out a big, audible sigh. He turns to go in first, then stops. He brings his arm around me, yanks, so when we go in, it’s more together than him first or me first. Oh, I’m sure we look like one lovey-dovey couple entering this meeting about becoming parents.
We have to wade through a lot of legs to get to two open middle seats. I hate middle seats. There are about seventy-five people here to learn about adopting from China. See, I hate sitting next to strangers. I lean in to Alex on the right, so as to maximize my personal space on the left.
There’s a child up front. A little girl, maybe about two, Asian. She has pigtails. She has on light blue corduroy overalls. She’s coloring. She has a juice box next to her.
I think: Is she available? Does she need a mom?
Hmm. Perhaps I’m a little too open to this idea?
As it turns out, she has a mom. Her mom goes up to her, helps her gather her crayons and papers, carries her to the back of the room. The talk is about to begin, and the little girl and her mother are apparently a later part of the program.
A man of about forty stands up, greets the crowd. He has a gentle face, a thin beard, slim shoulders; he could be a physics professor. He tells us that he and his wife started this adoption agency five years ago, after adopting their own child from China.
He tells us about China. He tells us about the babies in China, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them, who need moms and dads. Infants found in front of shops, on pavements outside hospitals, at tollbooths on highways, anywhere you can imagine. Infants, almost all of them girls, who end up in state-run institutions—the tragic result of a government policy to control a population explosion that has reached dire
proportions.
China’s so-called “one child policy” was instituted in 1979. It’s a complex system that requires a woman to fill out an application form in order to obtain permission to have a baby. And in most cases she is allowed only one. If she gets pregnant without permission, she could be forced to have an abortion, pay steep fines, and she could lose her job and home.
Cultural biases dating back to the time of Confucius place a value on boys over girls in China. In rural areas boys are needed to help with the farm. As men, they are the ones who care for elderly parents; in marriage, a woman becomes part of her husband’s family and must leave her own behind. And so in China, if you can only have one child, there is every reason to want a boy rather than a girl.
So each day mothers in China are making the most difficult choice imaginable. They are leaving their baby girls at train stations, on the steps of government office buildings, at open markets—public places where they know the babies will be quickly found. Since what they are doing is illegal, they often hide and watch in secret, waiting for their babies to be found and taken safely away. The infants are taken to the local police station, then to hospitals, and finally to orphanages. There they are made available for adoption.
In any given month about six hundred Chinese girls are adopted by American families. China allows older parents as well as single mothers to adopt. The program, run centrally by a branch of the Chinese government, is reliable. Adoptive parents don’t have to deal with the black-market baby-sellers or political turmoil found in some other countries. And the babies available for adoption in China are almost always in good health. Adoptive parents have to travel to China and stay about two weeks, while the adoption is finalized.
Alex and I are sitting here listening to all of this. It’s hot in here. Stuffy. The lights go down, and soon a TV up front is flickering with the beginnings of a video. The film is not what you’d call professional quality. There is some Chinese music dubbed over this first part showing a group of Americans roaming the crowded streets of Beijing. The Americans look lost. They’re pointing at pigs hanging in market windows, then huddling around a woman selling pearls. They have cameras and good walking shoes just like regular old Americans. Then the scene abruptly switches. No more music. Now it’s the echo of people talking, although you can’t quite make out the dialogue. The camera settles on the beige carpet, then finds the Americans seated on a sofa, squished onto that sofa, in a hotel room, stark and nondescript. Their eyes are wide and tired, and their ankles appear remarkably pink. Finally, a door opens. And in comes the parade. Chinese woman after Chinese woman, each carrying a baby bundled thick. People point, babble, a translator points, babbles. And one by one the babies are handed to their new parents. “Mama,” the Chinese women are saying to the babies, pointing to the American women. “Mmmmaaa—mmma!” And the new mamas, they are stiff as boards, holding those babies. For a moment they are just … stiff. And some of the babies are screeching, and some of the babies appear too stunned or too confused to react at all. And then the new mamas, one breaks down into tears, and one giggles uncontrollably, it’s laughter and tears and laughter and tears in a jumble of joy beyond dreams.
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