Summer Solstice 2014

 The long, liquid light of the June solstice illuminates the bittersweet season of the closing days of mothering two daughters, in an intact home, where I tuck them in each night, and coax them into the day each darkened morning.

Bitter, and sweet. This week, I noticed a title on the bookmobile shelf—Parenting Your Emerging Adult—and plucked it down, adding it to my stack of entertaining and enlightening loan materials. It is dense, and daunting, and clearly can’t begin to address the welter of feelings and challenges that fill my heart.

The day before, I had stated my two intentions for this last, languid summer to my emerging adult child: I want to get you ready in every way we can for the adventure ahead, half a continent away. And, I want us both to conduct ourselves in such a way that when the summer is over, we aren’t both filled with relief at parting, and with regret for the summer we didn’t have.

All along, I have tried hard, almost every day, to parent with intention, to make meaning in the spaces between the unending chores of parenting, homekeeping, partnering my spouse. I’ve tried to have conversations with my girls that held real content, communicated deep values and ideas, and in recent years, that communicate more of my real, non-mother individual self, as best as I can recall her, to my children than I feel I gleaned from my own mother.

It has been exhausting and exhilarating work. I hear many parents looking forward to the lightening of the load, the easing of the endless round of family-tending, but the long light of this June makes me yearn to travel back to a solstice 19 years ago, a long evening spent poolside in the tropical heat of St. Maarten, where we waited for it all to begin.

June 20, 2014

Mary for The Poplar Grove Muse

Goldfish

I met my daughter when she was 10 months old and I traveled to China to pick her up. As beautiful and profound as everyone says it is, our relationship is tinged with a fundamental sadness that covers me from head to toe every single day of our magical lives together: on the day she was born the woman who gave birth to her, or someone close to that woman, picked up this baby, wrapped her in a blanket and left her outside on the ground in front of an orphanage.

Nothing I can say or do from that moment on can mitigate this basic human sadness.  Who or what would make a woman abandon her baby?  I cannot even begin to guess.  Well yes, I can.  I can and I do and I believe that as my beautiful daughter gets older and begins to understand she will ask me and I must be ready to give her answers.

I don’t feel like an heroic person who swooped into a backwards country and made some child’s life magic.  I cringe when people tell me how lucky she is.  It is I, in fact, who is the lucky one.  I feel like I stole something primal and important from a country that is just beginning to find its feet and understand itself.  Sometimes I must confess, I feel like a thief.

A friend and I were discussing adoption one day, she herself is adopted, and she said to me, you have started telling her, her story, haven’t you?

“Um, no,” I confess. “I have not.  I thought I would just wait until she asked.  I figure she will ask questions because we do not look alike.”  

“No,” the friend said, “you must begin to tell her now.  This is her story, you must have her hear it and know it before it becomes a big deal.”

The weight of this story and its import to my girl hangs low and heavy over us every night as we lay down to read. I know without careful consideration that my friend is right, and it is a story she must know as she grows, so that it becomes a kind of backbone story and she can gradually hang other details onto it to eventually create the full and rich story of her life.

So I say to her one night as we are lying in bed, would you like to hear the story of how we met?

“Yes,” she says and now you must know that my girl is not one to climb into bed and wait patiently for her story and then roll over and sleep.  My girl jumps and moves and tosses and turns.  She is motion, so I begin to tell the story to a moving target.  I say it low in an almost whisper so she will strain to hear it, but really I think, I am sad to tell it, sad for her to know the truth.  I almost hope she does not hear me.   

Flash forward two weeks and I’ve told her the story now many times. In fact, after the first time I told her she began to ask for it by name:  tell me the story of the time we met.  And so I begin every night…A long time ago in a far away place there was a little girl named Yi Xiao Jian.

It is at this point that she always interrupts me to tell me her favorite detail of the story.  It is not that we flew on a plane to get her, or the fact that we met in a big conference room, or that we were there with all her friends' mommies and daddies, or that she was first in the room carried in the arms of her nanny. No, the detail she always remembers and tells me herself, before I even get to the end of the story is that Mommy brought her goldfish crackers.

So the story becomes the time I brought goldfish crackers to a very faraway place, and I can see in her eyes that she is making a memory for herself. Years from now, long after I am gone, she will remember our meeting not because she remembers, but because she has told herself a story again and again, making the memory more and more vivid as the time wears on.  Her small fist filled with orange fish shaped crackers and the laughter that came easily as she ate every single one.

Amy for the Poplar Grove Muse

There Are Many Kinds of Hunger

Thanks to Amy Cornell and the lovely Tessa, I've been thinking a lot about adoption lately. This takes me back almost 38 years ago when my son came into our lives. My husband Gary and I had a rough few roller coaster years of trying to start a family. These were pre-fertility expert years, so we didn't get much support from the medical community. We decided to adopt. We went to the Children's Bureau in Indianapolis. Gary wanted a boy and we were told that could extend our waiting time. I didn't care if we had a boy or a girl; I just wanted a baby. We requested a newborn boy and began what turned out to be a two year process. We jumped through all of the hoops, had our last in home inspection and tried to distract ourselves with busyness while waiting. It's kind of like when someone tells you not to think about elephants. What else can you think about? His room was ready and we were ready. (Well, as much as any parent can be "ready" when you really have no clue what it's like to be a mom or a dad.) We had been married seven years; it was time.

He was born October 3, 1972, nine months to the day after our final home review. I got the call on Monday, October 9th from a social worker who was filling in at the Children's Bureau for our social worker who was on vacation at the time. He said we could come up and "take a look" at the baby the next day. Take a look? Was he kidding? Had other prospective adoptive parents rejected babies because their ears weren't just right or their hair was too light? Please.

So now I've received THE CALL and I'm home alone. I wanted Gary to be the first one I told; so I was in for three hours of pacing before he got home from work. When he finally came through the door, all I could do was jump up and down. I couldn't even speak. Of course, he knew what all of the jumping was about. We hugged and laughed and cried. Then we called our parents and friends. Gary was sitting with his back to me when he was on the phone with his mom. All of a sudden he just raised his hand with the phone in it and handed it back to me. He was crying and couldn't talk at the moment. So I finished the conversation with his mom, who was crying also.

After we had called everyone, we decided to go shopping and get a few last minute baby things. The discount store of choice was Ayr-Way at the time. It was where Bed, Bad & Beyond is now. So we made our purchases and decided to get a bite to eat. Arby's on Third Street was close so that's where we ended up. I think I waited in the car and Gary brought the food out. I just remember us both unwrapping the roast beef sandwiches, taking one look at them, then each other, and wrapping them back up. We only hungered to hold our son. We were too excited to eat. We were almost as excited as our dogs who benefitted from our lack of appetite.

We didn't sleep that night either. I sat in the baby's room in the old rocker I had painted a dusty blue and imagined myself rocking him the very next day. We headed for Indianapolis the next morning. Gary was so nervous he ran a red light at a major intersection on Meridian Street. When we arrived at the Children's Bureau, our substitute social worker announced that they couldn't find our baby. WHAT????

He was exactly one week old and had been placed with a foster mother and they couldn't reach her on the phone. (This was all before answering machines and cell phones were invented.) Probably out of desperation, our social worker took us to lunch. We SO didn't care about lunch. I don't even know where he took us; I just remember watching the Jell-O melt on my plate. He kept excusing himself to go use the phone. Between phone calls he tried to make small talk. I think we both wanted to tape his mouth shut. After about the third or fourth call, he returned to the table and said that by the time we got back to the Bureau our son would be there. He explained that the foster mother was at her church bazaar for the day and had left him with her mother. She had left that information with someone at the Bureau, but it hadn't been passed along. It didn't matter. We nearly had him in our grasp!

When they brought him out to us, Gary held him first. I could tell he was going to be good at this. Then he handed him over to me. And there he was. Casey. Our son. The moment I saw him everything became clear to me. Why we didn't conceive, all of the waiting, all of the tears were because this was the baby we were meant to have. Here was someone I knew. A very old soul. A kindred spirit I already had a bond with. That bond has stayed strong and deep. My life with him so far has been an amazing journey. He has such a strong inner core, he is not afraid to be himself. He is a firefighter. It is a wonderful gift to admire your child. And I have been given such a gift. This is just the beginning of my adventures with Casey. I will write more about him on future blogs. In the meantime, I have included a poem I wrote about him, many years after he came into our lives.

For Casey:

The Oldest Soul I Know

I wasn't born to be a mother.

I was meant to be your mom.

No fertile seed inside my womb.

You grew inside my heart.

They say we look alike.

An optical allusion

to the matching twinkle

in our eyes.

Some days I dream you small again,

watch you running in the yard.

See the momma bluebird

let you pet her baby's head.

At times I'm Retroactive Mom.

All mistakes erased.

Am all that you deserve.

But, no regrets for us.

Our gypsy souls

will meet again.

Maybe next time,

you can be the Mom.

Rebekah for the Polpar Grove Muse

Stomach Flu

A nasty stomach virus ripped through our home this week, upending routines, temporarily transforming relationships, humbling each of us by reminding us how vulnerable we are, not only in our bodies, but in our illusion of control over our lives. The fiercely private and independent teenager, for a few miserable hours, is reduced almost to her helpless infant self, weak, utterly dependent on and grateful for the care of her usually unbearable parents. Those who cannot attend school, but most mornings resent rising in darkness, want nothing more than to board the early bus and go; those fortunate healthy ones who can attend school, who unfailingly want to be present and engaged at a desk among peers, long to stay home and bear witness to the mortification of the flesh. All who have not yet been brought down wonder if and when their turn will come, if that twinge of headache or fleeting off taste in the mouth marks the onset of the ordeal.

I, mother and caretaker, am left—loads of laundry, wholesale applications of disinfectant, and many urgent fetchings and carryings later—mourning the fleeting glimpse of a earlier bond, an unconscious and unmediated acknowledgement of the terrifying interdependence and overwhelming love between parent and child.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse