by Scott Simon
In fact, if you ever wonder about the impact adoption has had on the world, stop to consider a few names: Moses, Aristotle, Tolstoy, John Lennon, Steve Jobs. And I don’t even have to include Joseph adopting Jesus to make that point, though it is irresistible to add that Joseph and Mary had to go through a lot fewer interviews than my wife and I did. Well, maybe one major one.
The Catholic Church played a large role in bringing about modern adoption. The modern church receives a lot of criticism for adhering to family planning policies many believe only increase the number of abandoned children (and so they may; but people who believe that birth control will substantially reduce teenage pregnancies sound as naïve about the various reasons that young women have sex and get pregnant as the Church). But for centuries, the Church was also just about the only institution that offered practical help to scared young girls and their children. Young women left their babies on the steps of churches, and in front of nunneries, not to abandon them to a dubious fate, but because they knew that the Church would raise the babies they could not keep as oblations—gifts to God. The Church not only established orphanages and foundling homes but provided opportunities for the children reared there that often improved on the harsh class distinctions of the time.
Historians suggest that modern adoption in North America grew out of the great westward migration. Thousands of children got separated from their families in the push across the continent, for scores of reasons. William Tecumseh Sherman, for example, was born in Ohio, one of eleven children. His father died when he was nine and his mother was hard-pressed to care for her entire family alone; so a family friend, Thomas Ewing, brought him into his family. Other parents died trying to get out of czarist Russia, imperial Germany, or afflicted Ireland, or migrating from New York to Oklahoma. Their children would be taken in by fellow refugees or migrants. Or parents would work to get their children out with aunts, uncles, or family friends, and plan on coming over themselves within a few years; then Cossacks, Hussars, pitiless winters, or the czar’s army would upend those plans. Stan Mikita, the great hockey player, was born Stanislav Gvoth, but was adopted when he was eight by an aunt and uncle because they could get out of Czechoslovakia and bring him into Canada.
Orphanages and foundling homes multiplied in major cities as children were abandoned, or simply fell off the sides of the engine of history. The Ruth family of Baltimore had seven children, but only two survived past infancy. The parents worked such long hours, for so little pay, that they signed their son, George, over to the custody of the priests at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. That’s where Babe Ruth grew up and learned to play baseball. Some of the most principled social activists, such as Jane Addams, turned their attention to orphanages and foundling homes. So did lowlifes who saw them as sources of child labor.
In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt convened the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, which called for the gradual replacement of orphanages and foundling homes with placement in families. Roosevelt called families “the highest and finest product of civilization” and insisted that children were entitled to nothing less.
I once did a story on the DNA studies that tied Sally Hemings’s descendants into Thomas Jefferson’s family line. I was not flabbergasted to learn that Mr. Jefferson had likely fathered one or more of her children. But it was fascinating to find out how DNA studies and oral histories suggest that a great many children in colonial society were fathered by someone other than the name listed on their birth certificate. The fathers were not only slave masters, like Mr. Jefferson. Many children had biological fathers who were a family “friend” or neighbor, a traveling tradesman, a sympathetic parson, the spinet repairman, or a brother-in-law. As the poetry of Anne Bradstreet suggests, even Puritan society wasn’t puritanical.
But I have grown to believe that while the identities of the actual biological fathers were often concealed, that doesn’t mean they were unknown to their mothers—or, for that matter, unsuspected by the men who loved those children as their sons or daughters. I think many fathers just didn’t care; they loved the child they held in their arms regardless. They chose to be their father.
This wasn’t adoption, exactly. But it may have been a reasoned choice made by families who realized that conception could occur in an isolated moment of carelessness, naïveté, or duress as well as love. Real parenthood is earned.
Room Service, Please
WE RETURNED to Nanchang three years later. We had waited for another child for two years, and although I understand why adoption officials cannot say, “Hey, sure, take another,” the second wait was even harder to endure. The day we were supposed to receive notice about when to go across to China and enrich our family with another child—we didn’t. No one knew why. In the absence of hard facts, we assumed the worst. There must have been something squalid in our background. I must have made some public criticism of China that they couldn’t abide. A neighbor must have tipped off Chinese officials that I spoiled Elise so much, they had to prohibit us from having a second daughter to damage with the love of an indulgent father who doesn’t know the word “no” in any recognizable language.
Then one day we received Lina’s picture in an email, and a notice that we had four days to leave to get her.
But first, the picture: a thumb-sized portrait of a chubby baby with red-apple cheeks sitting in a field of yellow flowers. “My gosh,” I said to my wife, “it looks like Switzerland.” (Photoshop Switzerland, apparently.) Paulina Luman Simon, named for my cousin Paula, who had just died, wore puffy pink knit pants pulled up to her chin.
“Like some guy on a New Jersey bowling team,” said a friend.
Ten days later, we checked into the same hotel in Nanchang where we had stayed when Elise came into our lives (the same dismal espresso bar is on the ground floor; I made Elise climb into my lap and pose for a photo there, as I had when we first received her). Shigu, our trip coordinator, was with us once again.
“Be in your room at four o’clock,” he said. “Your baby will be brought to you.” I turned to Caroline and said, “Talk about room service.”
We were too nervous to eat lunch, and merely picked at indecipherable items from the buffet. We inflicted Elise with stories about her first night at that same hotel restaurant—“Oh, you were so hungry! Oh, how you cried! Oh, you were sooo cute!”—and she was by now old and smart enough to sense how important they are for us to tell, so she indulged us as long as I took her in my arms for some ice cream. We went upstairs and read and colored with Elise, paced, stretched, and sighed. Four o’clock came without a knock; Caroline and I pretended not to notice. Then 4:05, and finally 4:10.
A knock at the door.
“My sister, my sister!” cried Elise. “Omigod, let’s get the camera,” Caroline replied with a credo for our times. We opened the door.
Two smiling orphanage officials had a baby in their arms. She was red-faced, she smiled gently, she was beautiful. They placed her in our arms softly, as if she were asleep. We brought her over to the living room table to put her down and take a look. Caroline blurted what was on both of our minds: “Are you sure she’s the right one?”
The baby they had placed in our arms looked smaller than the one in the picture, even a little pale. She was hard to recognize without the Alpine meadow they had pasted in behind her.
Dire thoughts flashed in our minds. Had we been given the wrong baby? It’s not that we were preoccupied with getting a child with certain qualities or lineage. We believed that any child given to us was the one meant to be ours. But we didn’t want to fall in love with the child in front of us—she had begun to squall; we had begun to kiss and comfort her; the clock was already ticking—only to have the grinning orphanage officials return with sheepish smiles in a few minutes to say, “So sorry. Our mistake. Wrong baby. Hope that you didn’t get too attached.” We already had.
Caroline and I rolled our eyes up and down Paulina’s tiny limbs, looking
for clues while she kicked and cried. Then Elise reached out. She put her arms out to her new sister with a gentleness with which we had never seen her reach for a cookie, or our cat. She said softly, “It doesn’t matter.”
WHEN LINA WAS RESTIVE and distressed over the next few days, Elise was often the one to settle and comfort her. She’d put her own small hand on her sister’s downy little head as if to say, “Look, our father is silly, but you can train him to do anything you want. And our mother is smart and beautiful. Don’t worry. I’m your sister.”
In those moments, the kind of platitudes that sophisticated people are usually embarrassed to utter suddenly looked as big, bright, and undeniable as the sun and moon. Race, blood, lineage, and nationality don’t matter; they’re just the way that small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it’s warm and that it beats through a loving heart. I think that all parents want their children—we won’t be around forever, after all—to be happy, strong, and brave. But in that moment, Elise revealed something even more elusive and worthy: kindness.
I knew even then that our little girls would fuss and contend as they grow up. Elise was a sweet and exemplary older sister while we were in China. After we got home, she began to grasp that Lina was not just some higher form of souvenir but a baby who demanded scads of attention and heaps of food, soiled her diapers, and usually had to cling to her mother’s arms. A few months followed in which Elise continued to hug Lina. But she sometimes embraced her, as a friend put it, “the way a python hugs a pig.”
But at the moment when Elise saw a child enter her life in tears, the little girl who had once herself been given up reached out with instinctive tenderness.
Caroline took Paulina and Elise into the bedroom. The two grinning orphanage officials sat me down with a sheaf of forms. No words I ever put into an essay, news story, or novel will be as precious to me as the ones I wrote that will probably rest forever unread in the fathomless files of a vast bureaucracy.
“Why do you want to adopt this child?” the form asked. I answered, “Because we love our first daughter so much that we wanted to get her the best present in the world—a sister to come along for the ride.”
MY WIFE AND I are still clearly in the rapture stage of parenthood. Friends—indeed, total strangers—observe the good times and abundant giggles that we share with our children and caution, “Wait until they’re teenagers.” They seem eager to teach us that the perfectly hatched chicks we hold in our arms have been wired with time bombs set to turn them into snarling demons when they strike thirteen. Parents often attach a story as a testament. “Cutest little kid in the world. Then the Hell’s Angels rode through town, and …” I suppose that I have to defer to their experience. But right now, I enjoy the way our daughters reach out for life in bigger and bigger armfuls as they grow, and I look forward to those years, too.
(Show me that paragraph in a few years, on one of our worst days.)
So while this book begins with our personal story, I have also sought the advice of friends who were adopted, or have adopted (or both, in a couple of cases), and who have lived the miracle of adoption for longer than we have.
I have left out some names and details in some stories because everyone, including our children, will have to live with what’s here, and I owe them consideration. But it’s interesting that no one wants to leave out some of the most uncomfortable details when they know they are essential to understanding their story.
I also hope that I can earn a little understanding for my language. Writing about adoption is fraught with opportunities for people to take offense. If you write “is adopted” instead of “was adopted,” or “foreign” rather than “international,” some people consider it not just a verbal slip but a moral failure. I think that some of these rhetorical diktats make sense (“my child,” not “my adopted child”). But several just bewilder and irritate me (“parent” as a verb) and even offend reality. Am I really supposed to say with a straight face that our daughters’ birth mothers “chose an adoption plan” rather than “were forced to give up their babies”? And is any parent supposed to refer to those children with the Chinese adoption ministry newspeak term “abandoned” that fixes all blame for mothers’ giving up their babies on the gallant young women who defied cruel edicts to bear them?
I don’t think people write clearly when they’re cringing. I hope readers accept that any verbal mistakes I make are committed with a decent heart.
OUR DAUGHTERS have always been told that they were adopted (the antique idea of keeping it a family secret to be revealed at some moment of maximum impact is, for obvious reasons, unavailable to us in any case). They know a fair number of the particulars already. They will learn more as their age demands, and discover as much as we do. Elise already knows a little about the chief alternative method for starting families (I’m thinking of pregnancy in the traditional manner here, not in vitro procedures; I have no doubt that one of her grade school pals will be happy to fill in the details).
But most children who have been adopted go through a delightful period when they assume that adoption is the natural order of the universe.
(And indeed, if no other point stays with you from this book, I hope you will agree that it is.)
Elise once pointed to our cat, Leona, whom she calls Nana, and asked, “Mama, was Nana a baby cat in China?”
“No, darling,” Caroline told her. “But she was adopted. Just like you.”
Elise says that when she grows up, she wants to have a baby boy. “But China is too far,” she said. “I think I’ll go to Chicago.”
Intimate Intrusions
THE IMPULSE to bear, as well as to care for, children is deep. My wife and I tried until we were black and blue from all the ways there are of getting pregnant these days, traditional and state-of-the-art. There are a lot of words to describe a couple who are trying to reproduce on demand. “Romantic” isn’t among them. I will make no attempt here to describe my wife’s experience, which was discouraging, depleting, and depressing. It is easier to talk about my own mostly comic aggravations.
You are invited to take a seat in the waiting room of a fertility doctor. Men nod tightly, smile wanly, and feign profound interest in an old National Geographic (“Clinging to life on an offshore crag, the nonmammalian tuatara has little changed its appearance since the Jurassic …”). You do not ask your seatmates, “And what brings you here?” When their name is called, you do not pump your fist and shout, “Go get ’em, tiger!” When your name is called, you do not smile, wink, and swagger out saying, “Back in a flash!”
An earnest young man takes you through a subdued hallway that looks less like a hospital passageway than a corridor in an airport motel. Oh, if these walls could speak! He shows you into a room outfitted with a recliner lounger, large-screen television, tissues, and piles of magazines that are not National Geographic (which might do the trick for a nonmammalian tuatara, but probably not for a human male). He hands you a small plastic cup. No thanks, I never drink before six. The nice young man asks if he can get you anything else to make you more comfortable. Taco chips? A brewski? Hey, can I watch a ball game in here? Poor choice of words …
He closes a door. You hurry to lock it. Oh, sorry, sir! I thought Reproductive Services was the photocopier! You hear the man slide some kind of sign into place. Quiet—Man at Work? You quickly survey the inventory of videos. Where were these when I was a teenager? Every video seems to have Whips, Chains, Nymphs, or Studs in the title, and I don’t mean Terkel. Frankly, my dear, I’d rather see Casablanca. You leaf through the magazines. Playboy is on the top, but the interview inside with Quentin Tarantino distracts me. I admonish myself: Bear down! I pick up another magazine that makes Playboy look like The Economist. But the effect is not invigorating.
Finally, I lie back and think of England. The deed is done, the Eagle has landed, I came, I saw, I conquered (or perhaps that’s in reverse). On my first occasion, I placed my contribution through a small
revolving door designed to receive it (similar to the portal used to pass food to prisoners in solitary confinement, I noticed) and told a nurse, “I filled a couple of cups. In case you need extra.” She sighed. “Every man makes that joke.” Another time I was led into the chamber by a young medical technician who looked up from his clipboard.
“Hey,” he said. “The Scott Simon?”
I nodded.
He called out as he closed the door, “Have a good day, Scott.”
I wondered if doctors later looked at the contents of a vial under a microscope, observed the sperm kicking and swimming, and remarked, “You know, they don’t look like he sounds.”
Over the months that we submitted ourselves to such labored laboratory procedures, I’d occasionally have to cancel some kind of appearance. Of course, my small contribution was already on ice. The presence of the father at conception was strictly unnecessary. But the procedure was draining, mortifying, nerve-racking, and emotional. I wanted to be with my wife if it didn’t work, and wanted to be with her if it did, and we could break out a bottle of … diet Dr Pepper. Public relations personnel would explain that I was having a “medical procedure.” A few groups expressed suspicion. I was clearly healthy enough to be on the air. What kind of “medical procedure” kept me from fulfilling my obligation to them? The PR people hemmed, hawed, and finally said, “It’s personal.” I’ll say. But ultimately I had to pick up the phone and tell someone who’d been especially persistent, “I’m sorry, but my wife and I are scheduled to conceive a child that day. I’d like to be around for it.” He gulped and sent flowers.
I JOKE ABOUT all this now because it still hurts. If you are trying to create a child and can’t, you feel that you are a failure. You feel that you have fallen short at one of the few things that scientists, creationists, Jesuits, Lubavitchers, atheists, polygamists, and monastic Buddhist monks agree that every living thing from a gnat to an elephant was put on this earth to do: seed new life. Continue the species. Keep creation going. Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseats of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can’t two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child?