God and Jetfire (8 page)

I was escorted in a jolly promenade through happy homes and histories, through a world rendered elementary, where quotation marks designated common phrases and important words were written in all caps.
Todd likes to “kid around,” loves “TOOLS” and is quite handy around the house!
Where sincerity was tempered with lightness:
Interior decorating is her passion—she moves the furniture around occasionally to keep me on my toes
(and, in case I did not get the joke:
HA HA!
). Couples made random declarations, as if cornered awkwardly at a cocktail party—
Dressing alike is Fun!
—and fumbled for words, often seeming to forget I was literate and a native speaker of English. Sometimes the uncomfortably self-promotional nature of the form was playfully averted, as with a letter written as a screenplay in which the couple was endorsed, between antics, by their cats, Tillie, Simon, and Bingo.

*   *   *

None of the couples had chosen adoption out of concern for the unwanted children of the world, the way we fertile girls with noble principles sometimes imagined we'd do. Every single one was driven to it by misfortunes they mentioned only briefly. Complex stories inflected toward the positive.
After five years of infertility treatments, two surgeries, fertility drugs, numerous tests and doctor visits, we believe adoption is the answer to our prayers!

I had so many questions. I wondered how it felt to know their child wouldn't look like the partner they said they loved so much. I wanted to know how their relationship had survived the blow of infertility—it couldn't be their common interest in old movies (
Rick makes the popcorn!)
. Maybe it wasn't the place for stripped-bare authenticity, but I found myself wanting to scratch through the polish and explore territory not sanctioned by the agency template. In a situation like ours, with so little time to make such a big commitment, honesty was expedient. I wanted a candid glimpse of the couple. Special signals and particular stories to give me some flicker of an instinct that I'd found someone with whom I could share a future.

Instead they lured me with loose praise, congratulating me for my strength and thanking me for my generosity. They assured me that giving them my baby would be
the most unselfish and mature choice
I would ever make. They tugged at my heartstrings with e-mail addresses like [email protected] and overwhelmed themselves with premature and cumbersome gratitude:
Words are simply inadequate to describe the joy we will experience when we are told that you have made our dreams come true.
They said they admired my courage. They knew I had a hard decision to make. But little did they know I was praying for a miscarriage! That the trinkets of the world they dreamed about by day—rattles and blue bears and birthday cakes—happened to moonlight in my nightmares.

It was only on the topic of openness that the tone of the letters changed. They read like legal contracts written just to be revoked: “We are willing to pursue a level of openness that would be mutually beneficial and comfortable for all involved.” Some said that they would be willing to keep in touch through letters and photos, which seemed to suggest I wouldn't get to see my child in person again. One couple offered a
commitment to openness to sharing every progress
of the child's life, but didn't specify what might constitute sharing (would they send letters through the adoption agency? Could we share an actual experience together?) or progress (the child's first step? Or high school graduation—maybe with no progresses in between?). The whole phrase
commitment to openness to sharing
was so strangely layered, it was surely not to be mistaken for
commitment to openness
.

But shouldn't they be cultivating visions of openness that had the same neon joy and optimism as their idealized dreams of parenthood? If they could imagine rocking my baby to sleep every night, was it so difficult to think about having me over for lunch now and then? I thought that some of the warmth and affection they somehow already felt for my child might spill over to me by association. Or out of gratitude for my courage and generosity.

My sister was the first to call it:
vultures
. She wrote from China, in response to the letters I'd sent her. She said all those long nights waiting for a baby, they weren't dreaming of a birth mother. They were only feigning compassion as they hovered, gliding in graceful circles as they waited to dive in. They wouldn't dare admit that I was merely a means to an end. That as soon as I supplied the vital ingredient to create their family, they would perceive me as a threat to it. That we were natural enemies.

Her mistrust was disheartening, but I knew that there were deep dynamics in play, and I was prepared to be vigilant. I understood the advantage of my position. We were tall, well educated, and white; we didn't do drugs; we'd decided on adoption together and had the support of our families; and we planned to give up our child as a newborn—all of these things, Molly said, would be highly desirable to potential couples. The only sensible thing was to make the most of that, to scrutinize everyone fully, to indulge every doubt, and to demand all the information they were reluctant to give us. Because after we signed the papers, the asymmetry of our positions would be fully reversed.

The letters closed in the spirit of their openings, full of joy and excitement, with easy promises about how much affection the couples had to offer. Couples assured me my baby would be loved and cherished
with all their hearts
, and I wanted to believe them—but by then I'd grown so wary that even those guarantees, so grandiose, so sweeping, so certain, gave me pause. It had been among the very few things I hadn't doubted: I hadn't doubted that the couple who adopted my child would be well equipped to parent, and I never thought my child would be adopted and not loved. Tragedy of tragedies.

*   *   *

I went to visit Molly alone one afternoon when Jevn had class, but I didn't talk about my worries. I knew she'd tell me what I could easily tell myself, that writing a Dear Birth Mother letter is difficult, that couples have no idea how to represent themselves, that their letter is only the first step in getting to know them. She addressed my concerns all the same. We had arrived at the chapter in our workbook called Entitlement; Molly explained that it could be a long, hard process for love to develop between an adoptive parent and a child.

“I'm sure it seems strange, since you can see how much they want a family. But it's not automatic. Adoptive couples go through so much scrutiny and red tape—it can be hard for them to really accept the child as their own.”

The midwinter gray pressed against the windows of the counseling room as she spoke, and from my seat the skyline wasn't visible to orient me. Openness was at that moment the least of my concerns. I needed to know my child would be loved. But how could a couple make such a promise?

“Adoptive parents need to feel entitled to parent in order to feel free to love. But because they don't have the baby growing inside them like you do, they have to accept their parenthood on the basis of legal procedure—and that's really difficult. It can feel abstract and shallow compared with your connection, and it can make bonding with the child challenging.”

I got it, and I even felt sympathy for it. Adoptive parents wouldn't be biologically duped to love. After persuading me of their worthiness to parent my child, they would have to persuade themselves of the same. After bypassing nature to acquire a child, they would have to work against nature to love it. And yet every single couple gave me a guarantee of their love. This was a high-stakes experiment; how could we be sure they would succeed?

“Openness can really help,” Molly said. “Adoptive parents benefit so much from knowing that, of all your options, you chose them. You are able, personally, to give them permission to parent the child. No one at an agency or in court can do that with the same authority.”

She told me other ways Jevn and I could help. We could let them name the child, for example. We could let them stand by at the hospital to meet the baby right after delivery. We could have a formal “entrustment ceremony,” like a wedding, during which our friends and families would gather to witness our bequeathal of parental rights to the couple.

Of course they could name it, I thought. And they'd be welcome to be at the hospital. And yes, we could have a ceremony—with poems from Kahlil Gibran and scripture and coffee and refreshments, whatever it takes. Why would I not do everything possible to help the family to whom I was giving my child succeed in loving it?

That night I returned, as usual, to the profiles, and I really thought I could see it, that struggle to find a way to love. Sheldon and Toni offered what they called a
forever home
and a
forever family
, and though I was insulted by the implication I had only transient and trivial things to offer, I realized that if a couple thought that, they'd feel
more
than entitled—they'd feel
obligated
to parent. Just as I consoled myself with the image of all the worthy families in need of babies, they were working toward entitlement by imagining all the poor babies in need of homes. What would it do to us, I wondered, to know the actual facts of one another?

And perhaps the couple who'd given detailed specifications for what they wanted in a child—
no African Americans, but a Caucasian-Asian mix is an acceptable alternative if Caucasian isn't available, and disabled is okay if disability is mild or medically correctible
—were just being realistic about the limits of their love. Maybe they felt they could only guarantee love if the child resembled them—or perhaps they thought the baby might need such deception, like a nestling who will only accept food from a convincing puppet bird. Better they be sure than take on a child they couldn't love.

But was it not enough that I'd let them name the baby, and be there at the birth, and tell them, wholeheartedly, that I'd chosen them? This was the advantage, Molly assured me, of openness. I could give them entitlement and free them to love in a single stroke.

“But with openness,” Molly had said, “they also see your pain,” and the way she said it, it was a warning. The window of open adoption would open both ways. They would feel responsible for my sadness, which I'd struggle to hide, while the very thing that would enable me to overcome it, and give them my child, and let them name it and be at the hospital—a selfless, strong, and unconditional love—would be an ever-present measure of their own love. My presence could strengthen the structure of their family, but it would have an unpredictable capacity to bring it down. Which explained why some couples negated me even in their letter addressed to me—Bill and Julia, for one, assured me:
this will be
our
child, not our
adopted
child.
Entitlement was just more assuredly achieved in the absence, real or imagined, of the birth mother.

And maybe that was why, the way Molly said it, it sounded like I had some kind of responsibility. As if, although I might not be able to make myself perfectly invisible, I would need to make certain things invisible. But whatever the complexities, what was certain was that the structure had to stand. I couldn't give my child away without confidence that it would be loved, and I wouldn't sacrifice that love for my privilege to peer in the window.

*   *   *

Exhausted, I put the profiles aside and stood up to make dinner. Even more difficult than weighing all our possible futures was imagining the child I was doing it for. The couples seemed to have a clearer image of my baby than I did, but I felt sure we were all just speaking in a kind of code. For them, a child stood for happiness and meaning, the fulfillment of their expectations, but for me the baby was
me
. My protective instincts weren't maternal; maternity had simply given me permission to guard myself as I never had before. I had no independent desire for my child, no separate compulsion to love or care for it, no faith that it would ever be anything but the hardness in my abdomen and a massive distraction from architecture school. I wondered how I could make good decisions for a thing I couldn't see or feel or understand.

My mother called, and I told her, just for fun, that I was thinking about names. Eventually I'd let the couple name it, so they could feel Entitled, but maybe if I could name it for now, I could begin to see it as a person, the way Jevn did. I'd exercise my own entitlement in preparation for passing it on. It was funny to think about naming my belly a human name, like the horse I knew named Stephen. Jevn joked “Alf” or “Thor,” because the baby would be half Norwegian, but I couldn't imagine actually naming a thing with such indecipherable boundaries. It felt as rational as naming a mosquito bite.

I was saut
é
ing onions to put in my stomach to feed an imaginary person who would supposedly gobble them up along with everything else I put in there. Everything was another exercise in imagining the unimaginable. But my mother didn't want any part of the fun. She was afraid I was second-guessing my decision. I should be concentrating on finding the family I was going to give my child to. She reminded me it was not my child to name.

 

EIGHT

Jevn had started saying that we should “heal apart” so that when this was all over, we wouldn't find ourselves clinging to each other for support. And I'd agreed, defensively. We would work as a team to find parents for our child, but there could be no good argument for entangling and confusing and complicating our relationship, becoming emotionally enmeshed. Still, as important as it might be, I'd have put healing apart at the very end of my list of important things to do. It would have followed finding a family, having a baby, giving it up for adoption, and not failing out of architecture school. Sometimes I even thought putting off “healing apart” for now and entangling each other in support could make some of those other tasks easier to do. Other times, finding myself alone would give me a surge of strength I didn't know I had.