When I married Randy Sanders, I had supported his plan to have a vasectomy. Randy Sanders had two grown children at that point and no interest in bringing up another baby. Elated to be with him out in the open after years of secret love, I tried to repress the longing for a baby that was rising inside me. My breasts ached to suckle an infant. Every time I passed the midwifery center on my way to the grocery store, my eyes filled with tears.
A local Taos doctor and his wife had founded a special needs adoption agency, and I convinced Randy Sanders to meet with them and explore the possibility of fulfilling my youthful vow to take on a child society had thrown away. We sat in the agency office, leafing through binders with photocopies of children’s faces and short descriptions beneath them: “Joseph (prefers to be called ‘Joey’) is a handsome nine-year-old boy, part African-American, who was born with a heart defect. This does not slow him down much! Joey enjoys throwing a football with his foster father. He wants to grow up to be a pilot in the air force.” And “Juanita is a quiet girl of seven who does not yet speak but would likely flourish in a family with several other children.” And “Although the right placement has not yet been found for Jason, an energetic boy of twelve who has been in the system since birth, we feel he would be the ideal fit for a retired couple who can devote the majority of their time to nurturing this special young man.”
Every page battered down the doors of my heart. Every child felt like my child. Each time I moved on from one to another it was as if I were single-handedly condemning another soul to Purgatory. In despair, I closed the book and took Randy Sanders’s hand. I shook my head, and we left the office. That night, the phone rang. It was the adoption agency.
“We have just heard about a child who was not in the book,” the social worker said. “We think she might be just right for you.”
The next day Randy Sanders and I drove back to the agency, where they showed us a picture of a ten-year-old girl with close cropped black curls and cappuccino skin. Daniela’s biological father was a Hell’s Angel from Puerto Rico, and her biological mother was a biker chick from South Dakota. The dad was long gone, and the mom had since given birth to three other children by three other fathers. Daniela was the only one of mixed race, and she did not blend well into the ultra-white world of the Midwest. Her mother gravitated toward abusive relationships, which eventually caught the attention of Child Protective Services.
Between the ages of six and eleven, Daniela had bounced from foster home to foster home, and endured one disrupted adoption, before that day in Taos when we sat in front of the social worker and said we’d think about it. Which meant, of course, yes. This was not a cattle auction. I was not about to inspect her teeth and squeeze her flanks. This was a child. And she needed us. Obviously it was meant to be.
We drove up to South Dakota and met Daniela just after her eleventh birthday. A week later we brought her home.
And a couple of years after that, I left Randy Sanders.
When Daniela was sixteen, she graduated from high school early and fled to South Dakota to live with her birth mom (the Other Mother), who had not miraculously transformed into a healthy parent ready to make up for lost time. The Other Mother’s three other children had also been taken from her, and she was still choosing abusive men. Playing on Daniela’s victim conditioning, she convinced our daughter that I was a selfish bitch and she should cut all ties with me. Daniela and I did have a stormy relationship, and I was relieved to have a little break. But I did not want it to be forever, and I pined for my first child.
The trouble was, I had adopted Daniela at exactly the age when a child begins the requisite individuation process. So we were bonding and unbonding at the same time. It was confusing for us both. Plus, attachment to any adult had proved to Daniela to be a risk not worth taking. After being shuffled from family to family for more than half her young life, Daniela was finally placed in what she was told would be a forever family. And then, before she could grow out her hair, I had left the only father she ever knew and all my attention was going to her new four-year-old sister, Jenny. My efforts at single-parenting a rebellious teenager were haphazard and half-hearted. I knew she was partying and probably having sex, but I felt powerless to keep her home.
Daniela’s new boyfriend, a transient from the East Coast, who had been in and out of prison since his teens, followed her to South Dakota. When Daniela discovered she was pregnant, growing tension between her and the Other Mother escalated into a harrowing fight. Daniela called me crying so hard she could not speak.
“Mom, I’m pregnant,” she finally blurted out. “Can I come home?”
Now I was crying too. “Yes, my love, come home. I’ll send you a ticket.”
A week later I was sitting on my knees beside the tub while my daughter lay in the warm water, her belly rising like a mountain amid the great hills of her breasts, and I was singing to her unborn child.
Gopala, Gopala, Devaki Anandana Gopala. Oh sweet baby Krishna, bliss of your mother.
Jacob was born on the spring equinox. I was thirty-six years old, and my new spiritual name was Grandma.
Daniela applied for a job at the local nursing home and rented a place with the father of her baby. When Jacob was six months old, I was in Mexico teaching a writing workshop, and Daniela was house-sitting for me. She decided to seize the opportunity to leave Jacob’s father, who had become increasingly jealous and violent. One afternoon he came over, snatched the axe from my woodpile, broke into the house, and accused Daniela of cheating on him. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into his truck, where he slammed her head against the window and drove away with her. He took her to a trailer on the south side of town and locked her and the baby inside. Jacob inexplicably slept through the whole thing.
A neighbor who heard the commotion called the police. Daniela went to the hospital, Jacob went to my mom’s, and his father went back to prison. I caught the next flight home from Cancun.
Next, Daniela moved in with a manic auto mechanic who treated my baby grandson as an intruder. Although he was only five years my junior, this one called me “Mom.” While I was busy praying my daughter would come to her senses and hook up with someone sane, Daniela discovered she was pregnant again.
“Didn’t you teach her about birth control?” a well-meaning relative by marriage asked me once.
“Good idea,” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Bree was born a week after Jacob’s second birthday.
Niko came along four years after Bree.
Like lotuses, these three beings rose up from the brokenness of Daniela’s life and transfigured us all.
10
JENNY
Two years after Daniela had come to live with us, I was still with Randy Sanders, and I still wanted a baby.
I did not want to want a baby, but adopting Daniela had not made the yearning go away. Throughout my relationship with Randy Sanders, I was always secretly falling in love with other men. There were, I think, a few reasons for this: one is that Randy Sanders had conditioned me to believe that true love was a clandestine affair, and another was that my body craved the body of someone my own age with whom I could reproduce. Not to mention that I was not sexually attracted to Randy Sanders and never had been.
Like a wizard, he had spun such a powerful spell over me that I forsook the family I loved and the boys I had crushes on for the promise of enlightenment and the threat of being responsible for unraveling the fabric of the universe if I were to turn one iota away from our Great Love. As the years went by, our life together lost its spiritual dazzle but grew comfortable, even comforting, and I was determined to prove to the world that I had grown into Randy Sanders. Grown worthy of him.
Not long after we brought Daniela home, I fell in love with Jonah. Randy Sanders and I had taken over the defunct New Buffalo commune and turned it into an alternative high school for gifted adolescents. The entire facility was made of mud, and after several years of not being lived
in, it had begun to return to the earth from whence it came. We moved into one of the smaller buildings with our new daughter, while converting the numerous adobe cells into classrooms and the Great Buffalo Room into our common meeting space. The families of our twelve students helped in the reconstruction project—often in exchange for tuition—and I worked nights as a cocktail waitress at Ogelvie’s Bar and Grill to pay the bills.
Jonah was in transition. He had been living at Lama and was now ready for the next step, but didn’t yet know exactly what that would be. We offered him a space at New Buffalo while he sorted out his life, and he helped with maintenance. Jonah was dark and muscular, funny and Jewish—everything Randy Sanders was not—and he was age appropriate. He had the soul of a poet, and he sang kirtan. His genetic code resonated with mine. And his spiritual fire matched my own. Unlike Randy Sanders, whose self-importance was beginning to embarrass me, Jonah didn’t put himself forth as some kind of rarified being. Jonah’s humility made his singularity all the more luminous.
My previous crushes had sparked and then faded away, flared up dramatically and quietly subsided, seemed at first like something uncontrollable and then turned out to be forgettable. But with Jonah it was different. My desire for him only intensified. It was torture watching him bustling around the property, weeding the grass on the living roof of the Great Buffalo Room, chopping wood to feed the potbelly stoves my mom had donated for the classrooms, making tea in the communal kitchen, and then sitting down with the poetry of Sharon Olds while he sipped it. I was convinced that Jonah was the prefect partner for me. But my vow to Randy Sanders was inviolable.
At first I kept my feelings to myself. Even Jonah did not seem to suspect. I longed to confess my attraction but was terrified of the consequences. I wasn’t sure which prospect was more dreadful: destroying my family or finding out that Jonah did not reciprocate my affection. Then I had an idea: I would ask Randy Sanders if I could have a baby with Jonah. That way, I could stay true to my marriage, satisfy my desire for a baby, and always have Jonah in my life.
I used this plan as a pretext for approaching Jonah.
He was flattered by my interest, but he did not see me “that way.” I was a married woman with a preteen daughter, the headmistress of a school, a pillar of the community. Besides, he wasn’t interested in sharing a child with another man. If he were ever to have kids, he would like to raise them himself. I had to admit, he had a point. It wasn’t like I was offering myself as his devoted mate. I was asking him to impregnate me and then hand over the fruit of our union. Still, he said he’d think about it. This sliver of hope was enough for me. The cart had been pushed into motion, and I let the momentum carry me. I took the next step and proposed the arrangement to Randy Sanders.
He must have sensed that I was starting to slip away from him, because he quickly came up with an alternative plan. He nixed Jonah as sperm donor, on the sensible grounds that if I were to have sex with him I might fall in love with him, and he suggested Michael instead. Michael was an old friend from Lama who now ran a successful city-planning firm in San Francisco. Michael had always been like a brother to me and seemed safe to Randy Sanders. He was good looking, but had proved to be just goofy enough to preclude my being suddenly swept away by his charms after all these years. Plus Michael was in a better position to provide for his baby, which appealed to Randy Sanders as a supplemental source of income. Randy Sanders called Michael and reported back: he too would think about it.
But I didn’t want Michael’s baby. I wanted Jonah’s baby. What I really wanted was Jonah.
“What if we adopt another child?” Randy Sanders randomly suggested one evening as we were washing the dinner dishes. “We could find a younger one this time.”
“Another child? You up for that?” I asked.
Randy Sanders was obsessed with Daniela, scrutinizing her every move and correcting her attitude at every turn, and I knew it was stressful for him being a parent again after thinking he had long ago checked that item off his list.
“As long as it’s old enough to be in school so we have that break during the day,” he said. “And . . . I know you’re not satisfied.”
I couldn’t tell if he meant satisfied with my life, satisfied that our family was complete, or maybe even sexually satisfied. He would be right on every count. But after so many years of being conditioned to believe that the cosmic balance hung on my devotion to Randy Sanders, I could never admit this. Not to him, not to myself.
“What are you talking about?” I squeaked. “I’m totally content.” And I threw myself in his arms to prove it, pressing my body against his.
Daniela pushed open the door to the kitchen, and I sprang back. “Mom, can I have dessert now? I finished my algebra.” Without waiting for a response, she reached on top of the refrigerator for the plate of brownies I had stashed there.
Daniela had called us Mom and Dad right from the beginning. Having lived in eleven foster homes in eleven years, she was ready to settle down—even if her new mother was young enough to be her sister and her father old enough to be her grandpa. At thirteen, Daniela was already taller than me (which was not saying much; I’m barely five feet tall), and she outweighed me by around ten pounds. Temperamentally, we bewildered each other. Where at her age I had been drawing mandalas and reading the Beat poets, Daniela liked to sing commercial jingles from the days when she lived in a house with television, and seemed unable to differentiate between the value of a handcrafted turquoise ring from my mother’s folk-art collection and a rhinestone pendant from Kmart. But we were all making the best of our odd little configuration. Maybe a fourth person would alleviate the pressure, shift some of Randy Sanders’s attention off Daniela, and allow me to baby someone with impunity.
“Hey, Daniela, want a little brother?” Randy Sanders said, draining yet another can of beer.
My heart raced. If he was bringing this up with our daughter, didn’t that mean we had to follow through? We couldn’t dangle such a thing and then pull it back. It would be devastating for a child whose entire early life had unfolded on an open battlefield of emotional assaults.
“Or sister!” she said. “Can I have a baby sister?” She grabbed my hands, yanked hard, snapping my head on my neck. “Please, Mom?”
Randy Sanders chuckled. I stared at him, then turned back to Daniela. “We’re thinking about it, Honey.”
“Yay!” She threw her arms around me. “This will be so cool.”
“This one’s a full hand,” our Portuguese social worker warned us when she came over and laid out pictures of our new daughter. “But I think you can handle.”
A week later, we met Jenny at her foster home in Albuquerque and took her to the zoo. It was my thirtieth birthday. Two weeks after that, Jenny’s social worker met us at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Santa Fe with a paper bag containing all Jenny’s worldly belongings, and we brought her home. It was Mother’s Day.
Jenny was four years old, but she looked like two-and-a-half. She was spindly and weightless, and when I lifted her into my arms her limbs dangled like a spider’s. She barely spoke, and when she did her voice was creaky and her syntax bizarre. Jenny had the most exquisite face I had ever seen on anyone of any age: enormous black eyes, perfectly arched brows, a mouth like a peony bud, flowing black curls, and luminous brown skin. All I wanted to do was carry her around on my hip. And all Jenny wanted was for me to carry her.
I finished out the school year taking Jenny with me to classes. She sat at my desk and colored while I led my students in creative writing exercises and taught them to conjugate Spanish verbs. Jenny was quiet and undemanding. She rarely smiled. There was a certain dignity and reserve about this tiny girl that seemed to intimidate older people, as if she saw into their souls and was not at all sure she approved of what she perceived there.
One day after school, as I sat at my desk grading papers, Jenny stood behind me drawing on the chalkboard. When I finally swiveled in my chair to check out her artwork, I saw a
female form with a bulging belly, inside of which nestled a smaller version of the same figure.
“What’s this, sweetie?”
“That’s you,” Jenny said. “With me inside your belly.”
My daughter was reinventing her history before my eyes. And I liked it.
When Jenny was around seven, we were driving home from school, and I heard her sniffling beside me. I turned to see tears streaming down her cheeks. Her shoulders were shuddering with silent sobs.
“Jenny, what’s wrong?” We were heading down the Hondo Hill into the valley. I stroked Jenny’s long black curls with one hand and steered with the other.
“I don’t want you to die!” she wailed.
“Honey, why are you worrying about that?” But Jenny was crying too hard to answer.
I pulled over to the side of the road, lifted my daughter over the gearshift, and wriggled her into my arms. I did not ask any more questions. I just held her head against my breast as she sobbed.
Finally, she quieted and looked up at me. She lifted her small hand to stroke my cheek. “I was looking out the window,” she explained, “and I saw some trash on the side of the road. I thought, ‘My mom loves Mother Earth. What if she stopped the car to pick up that trash, and a big truck came along and ran her over?’”
Recounting this imagined scenario sent Jenny into a fresh round of crying. I squeezed her and rocked her and crooned to her until she could breathe again. By which time I was breathless myself. I had never been so fiercely loved in my life.
11
MY FATHER IN THE MIRROR
Nine months after we brought Jenny home, I vaulted off the cliff and left Randy Sanders to be with Jonah. But Jonah was not waiting with a safety net as he had promised.
“What happened?” I asked, blinking in disbelief, clutching one little girl by the hand while the older one sat apart, fuming.
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