I apologized politely and explained our situation.
“I can’t help you," she said, adding that scheduling our FBI fingerprinting alone would take up to a month.
“What if I brought over the paperwork personally?” I tried.
“You can’t.”
“But we have a baby waiting," I said.
“You can’t”
After several more rounds of this, she grudgingly told me to write “Do Not Open in Mail Room" on the envelope containing our filing fee and initial forms. “That might speed things up some," she said. I didn’t ask why the mail room was opening her letters in the first place.
“Could I have your name? Then I could address it directly to you.
There was silence at the other end of the phone. “Hello?” I said. “Are you still there?”
More silence. And then, “It’s Bernice, but if you put that on the envelope it will only slow it down.
“And remember, never use this number again. And don’t give it out to anyone." With that, the phone went dead.
Right around that time I read about a toy company that was marketing a line of “girl positive" action figures as alternatives to Barbie. One of them, a snowboarder, was supposed to have been adopted. Her accompanying “biography" said, “Someday she wants to find her real parents, but in the meantime she rescues pets." I shot off a letter to the company’s founder: “I don’t dispute the loss that some children who were adopted feel," I wrote, “but the people who walk the floor with a child when she’s sick, who weather her tantrums, kiss her boo-boos, celebrate her birthdays, attend her school plays—the people who are actually there are her ‘real parents,’ don’t you think? To imply otherwise under the guise of empowerment’ is offensive.”
Honestly, though? If I hadn’t been trying to adopt myself, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
My indignation may have been legitimate, but it was also a reflection of my insecurities: I wasn’t sure whether I would feel like Kai’s “real" mother. Koko FedExed us a photo taken moments after his birth. There he was, naked on a baby scale, his arms and chicken legs flailing, his eyes screwed shut, his mouth a rictus. His head, with its patchy black hair, was squeezed into a point from its journey down the birth canal. I looked at that squalling, outraged creature and felt… nothing. Was I supposed to love him on sight? Was I supposed to know that he was my son? Who was this child, anyway, and what were we signing up for?
“All of that is horrible to contemplate," agreed my friend Deborah, who had adopted her two children. “But it will all go away as soon as you have the baby—your baby—in your arms. Being a parent is so much more powerful than any of those fears. You’ll just forget about them.”
I wanted to believe she was right, but I kept thinking about the disproportionate number of adoptive boys with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, criminal records. “Adoption is scary," said another friend, a psychologist who had herself been adopted. “I won’t tell you it’s not. In the end, though, you have to accept that you can’t have control over everything. Whether you give birth or whether you adopt, Peggy, parenthood is all about surrender.”
There was a problem. Japanese babies bound for San Francisco weren’t being allowed in the country. Bernice had frozen all further adoptions, rejecting the documentation the Japanese used to declare a child an orphan. “I know of three families so far who’ve had difficulties and there may be more," said Susan Kawamoto, an acquaintance who’d just adopted her second baby from Japan. “It’s only in San Francisco. Nobody’s having trouble in Sacramento or San Jose. And there’s nothing wrong with the paperwork. We adopted our daughter three years ago with no problem, and nothing has changed except the person running the agency." As far as the Japanese were concerned, Susan and her husband had been their son’s legal guardians since birth, but she’d spent five months trying to convince Bernice of the same. In the meantime, Susan’s son had been parked in a maternity ward in Tokyo, at a cost to her and her husband of a hundred dollars a day.
“It was awful," she told me. “I wasn’t allowed to contact Bernice directly. I couldn’t even get her phone number. There are protocols for everything, and no one wanted to break the rules." She tried pleading with the Japanese Consulate, but they refused to intervene. Even her local adoption agency abandoned her. “Bernice is the gatekeeper for all international adoption," Susan said. “It was like they didn’t want to jeopardize their relationship with her over one child. There are so few adoptions from Japan, maybe it didn’t seem worth it.”
Working through various intermediaries, Susan finally convinced Bernice to meet her in the lobby of the INS building. “She claimed she was being extra cautious because the Cambodia program was recently shut down over charges of baby selling,” Susan said. “It was ridiculous. As if all Asian countries are the same. The situation in Japan is nothing like Cambodia. But I didn’t argue, because if she wanted to, she could throw up obstacles forever.”
Although Susan eventually managed to get her son home, the other parents she knew hadn’t, so far, been as lucky. “There’s no way of knowing whether you’ll ever be able to get your baby out, Peggy," she said. “I’m so sorry.”
At that moment my hesitations vanished. I had a cause again. The grief, anxiety, and fury I’d felt during the previous five years turned molten: no way in hell was some government flunky going to keep me from my child. I called the head of Asian adoption in Washington, but even when, out of desperation, I dropped that I write for the New York Times, he wouldn’t interfere with what he termed a “local matter." We looked into changing our address to Steven’s mother’s in L.A. or my parents’ in Minneapolis, but that wasn’t practical; we’d have to start the home study again with another agency and there would be questions about why we’d moved so suddenly, why our tax returns and employment were in the Bay Area. If we explained, those officials might decide to reject the adoption as well.
Next, I tried our political connections: former vice president Walter Mondale, who’d been an ambassador to Japan, was an old law school buddy of my dad’s; Steven was friendly with Norman Mineta, who was, at the time, secretary of transportation, the only Democrat in the cabinet of the first Bush administration. Surely, one of them could pull some strings. Our agency cautioned against it. “Going over Bernice’s head could antagonize her," the social worker warned. “She might make things even harder.”
Bernice seemed untouchable. There was no way to know whether the adoption would go smoothly, be delayed for months, or could happen at all. What’s more, Koko’s mother, kind and generous as she was, was in her eighties; she couldn’t care for a newborn indefinitely.
“Maybe you should go to Japan until we can bring him home," Steven suggested.
“How would that work?” I asked. “Where would I live? And for how long? And what if we couldn’t get him back at all—what would I do then?” I tried to imagine being alone with a newborn in a foreign country. “Oh God!" I moaned. “I can’t believe we’re going to lose another baby.”
“Peg," Steven said, sharply. “You’ve got to stop defining yourself through tragedy.”
My eyes widened. “But this is tragic.”
“You have to learn to appreciate the opportunity no matter what happens.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Well," he said. “I always thought if I had a child, I’d go out and buy two baseball gloves, a big one and a little one. Because it takes a long time to break in a glove. And I’d oil them and work on them so they’d be perfect when he or she was ready. And I feel like if I did that for Kai, even if the adoption didn’t work out, I’d be grateful for the time I had oiling the gloves and imagining him as my son.”
I wished I could share Steven’s attitude, that a few days’ fantasy about playing ball with my child felt worth having my heart shredded yet again. I admired him for it in the same abstract way that I admired his composure when faced with the mountain lion, but it wasn’t me.
> I lay awake that night, spinning on the hamster wheel of my thoughts. “Kai-chan," I whispered into the darkness. “Are you my son? Am I your mom? We’ve worked so hard these past few weeks to find out. We’ve tried every way we could to be sure we’ll be able to bring you home, if this is your home.
“And even if it’s not, we’ll always be the ones who named you.”
My forty-first birthday fell five days before our trip. I’d been feeling bloated and bitchy all week—industrial-strength PMS, I figured. It had been two months since the donor cycle and I was still waiting for my period.
On a whim, I peed on a leftover pregnancy test. I held the result behind my back as I walked into the bedroom. “Remember that romantic weekend in San Francisco?” I asked Steven.
A glance at my expression and he knew. “You’ve been pregnant before," was all he said. “This doesn’t change a thing.”
Two babies. One baby. No babies. When I told my mother, she offered to move in with us for six months. A friend joked, “You’ll have Irish twins!" And I—I who was never sure I wanted’ even one child—was terrified. Two babies. One baby. No babies. The refrain beat a tattoo in my head. I didn’t know what would happen; I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. Over the next few days I forgot two interviews, left my wallet at the supermarket, ran a red light. I showed up at a friend’s house for a party a day early all dressed up with a pan of overcooked brownies. I was lucky nothing worse occurred.
“What should we do?” I asked Steven. “I already feel so invested in Kai, but I don’t think I can handle more than one baby. Besides, our house is too small. And the cost of private schools …”
“Well, do you want to abort?” he said.
“Of course not! I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”
“Do you want to give up Kai?”
“And risk ending up with nothing? I don’t think that’s an option.” Surprisingly, I didn’t have a strong preference for a biological child over Kai; or perhaps more correctly, I was afraid to have one. The baby within, as I’d come to think of it, was too precarious, impossible to believe in after three losses. Kai was a real, living child; he’d already insinuated himself into my dreams. I found myself wishing the pregnancy, and the problem, would disappear. On the other hand, if I had to go through one more miscarriage, one more D&C, I thought I would surely go mad. “Is it wrong that I feel more scared than anything else?” I asked Steven. And to myself, I added, Does it make me a bad mother before I’ve even started?
At the FBI office, would-be Americans sat in rows of hard plastic chairs, filling out forms for green cards and watching Regis Philbin bray from a TV bolted to the wall above them. A security guard looked at our appointment slip, then pointed, unspeaking, to a blue line painted onto the dirty linoleum. We followed it upstairs to a second waiting room, and when our names were called, into a third. When it was my turn a woman grabbed my hand and pressed it onto a computer screen. My fingers were cold and damp; it took several tries to get it right.
“How long will this take to process?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a couple of months.”
How could that be, I wondered bitterly, when a fifteen-year-old could get our criminal record in ten minutes on the Web?
Driving home, Steven suddenly burst into laughter.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, startled.
“Do you realize that we both just drifted off in the middle of a conversation?”
He was right: I’d stopped speaking mid-sentence, become lost in thought. It had taken him ten minutes to notice.
“This is really the test of how stress affects pregnancy," I said, dryly. “I’ve never been so overwrought in my life. If the baby within can survive this, it can survive anything.”
Although nothing was certain, we decided to go to Japan and hope for the best. Steven had lots of friends in Tokyo; maybe one of them had the connections to get us around Bernice. We went to Baby Gap and bought Kai a warm hat, a blankie, a teddy bear. I held up a white romper trimmed with yellow duckies. “This may be for our son," I told Steven, and he smiled. A friend insisted I borrow her baby sling in case we wanted to take him for a walk. “Can’t we just carry him in our arms?” I asked.
She looked at me pityingly. “You have a lot to learn," she said.
We converted five thousand dollars into yen to cover Kai’s stay in the hospital as well as Koko’s and the Tanimotos’ expenses. "Pack the camera in the carry-on," I told Steven, “so we can take pictures of ourselves going to the airport and getting on the plane." Maybe we couldn’t give Kai a birth story, but we could tell him the tale of how Mommy and Daddy came to Japan to meet him.
It was the day before Thanksgiving and the airport teemed with babies. They were perched in their strollers, snuggling in BabyBjörns, ferried onto planes that, like storks, would whisk them to the arms of loving grandparents. I averted my eyes, unwilling to let myself believe that next year, one way or another, I would be among them. I panicked when the plane’s engines started. Some studies have shown that stewardesses have abnormally high rates of miscarriage. What if the radiation on the flight killed the baby I was carrying? I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about anything, but as I held Steven’s hand, I recalled that other trip, so long ago, when we first decided to try to conceive, when I still had the arrogance of the ignorant. I never imagined I’d end up here, never imagined I’d put myself through so much for something I wasn’t even sure I wanted. But rolling along the landing strip, I realized: I did want to be a mother. I wanted it badly—wanted the love, the delight, the vulnerability, the boredom, the surprises, all of it. I wanted to find out who parenthood would make me. I had just become afraid to admit it, even to myself. As we took off, I felt the plane’s vibrations in my teeth. I gripped Steven tighter, but said nothing.
We dozed most of the way across the Pacific, waking in what was, with the time change, early evening on Thanksgiving Day. As we approached Osaka, the plane banked to the left. The man in front of me turned around, his headphones still on, and pointed excitedly out the window. “Fuji-san!" he said. I looked down at Mt. Fuji’s perfect, snow-tipped cone glistening with the deep plums and corals of the setting sun. Dawn on the mountain is called “Buddha’s Halo." I’ve never seen it, but it couldn’t be a more glorious or tender sight than this one.
“The view makes me want to climb it," Steven said, and I nodded. The sacred spirits, or kami, of the mountain are reputed to heal pilgrims, both body and soul; that sounded good to me. The trouble is, five thousand people a day make the trek during climbing season, littering the trails with trash and sewage. I suspected we were better off admiring the mountain from this silent, abstract distance. As the peak faded from sight, I remembered reading that Fuji-san is actually three mountains. The lava from Shin-Fuji, the one we could see, had buried the other two. It was the mountain’s most enduring lesson: sometimes you have to dig deep to discover the truth.
He was so tiny, so very tiny—only three weeks old. Chisa Tanimoto, Koko’s mother, gently settled Kai into my arms and I gazed into his eyes. I’d never wanted to love someone so much in my life. In the picture Steven snapped at that moment, my expression is a tug-of-war between excitement and apprehension.
The previous night, we’d met Koko in Osaka; she’d told us we were expected to take Kai with us, keep him in our hotel room for our three days in Hiroshima. “But we don’t know anything about taking care of a baby," Steven protested.
She was firm. “You’ll learn," she said. “Kai needs to be with his parents.”
Koko’s mother and sister didn’t speak much English. They demonstrated how to diaper the baby, pantomimed how to prepare his bottles. They indicated we should feed him every four hours, no more, no less. Then Mrs. Tanimoto wrapped Kai in a blanket, handed us a pack of supplies, and called a cab. I cradled him carefully, feeling a bit like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothing, clomping around in oversized high heels and sm
udged lipstick.
“What should we do now?” Steven asked, back at the hotel.
“I don’t know. Maybe get some lunch?” It took our full combined effort to wedge the baby into the sling. He seemed content there, nestling against the warmth of my body, though I checked him every few seconds to make sure he hadn’t suffocated. I wrapped my jacket around the two of us and we walked through the Peace Park, the branches of the cherry trees now winter bare. As with the last time I was pregnant in Japan, I found the smell of the local cuisine sickening—a particular torment since eating there was one of my greatest pleasures. Instead, we chose an Italian restaurant that was largely patronized by middle-aged salarymen and their young, female companions. Kai slept on the banquette next to me while we ate. The waitresses cooed over him, and later another couple with small children noticed us and smiled. It was kind of fun, this business of being parents.
That is, until the sun went down. At six o’clock Kai began yowling like a wet cat, his mouth stretched wide, his face an angry tomato. We changed his diaper, gave him a bottle (though it was not yet “time"), but nothing helped. Worse yet, jet lag was starting to hit me along with the heavy-limbed queasiness of pregnancy.
“I’m sorry, Honey," I said, handing the wailful bundle to Steven, “but it’s time for a crash course in fatherhood." I put in earplugs and passed out.
For the next eight hours, Steven paced the small patch of hotel room floor. Sometimes he took a break and sat in front of the TV, dandling Kai on his knee, but the baby never tolerated that for long. A bottle would soothe him briefly, but soon he’d be at it again.
I took over around two in the morning. “What is it, little guy?” I asked. Maybe he was colicky, or gassy. Maybe he was simply fed up with being passed from person to person—he’d had three homes in as many weeks—and longed for the smell and taste of his mother. One baby. Two babies. No babies. I tried to imagine pacing the floor with a newborn while helping a nine-month-old adjust to a new home, a new country, a new language, new parents. The notion left me numb. One baby. Two babies. Sometime around daybreak, Kai dropped off to sleep and so did I. Steven snapped our picture again, curled up together on top of the blankets.
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