God and Jetfire (9 page)

We'd say goodbye in the computer lab or amid piles of profiles in my apartment at night. I had to remind myself that the answer was somewhere ahead of me in the terrifying darkness, not in the comfort of the past, still near enough to touch. One night after he left, anxious for progress, I reached out to one of the couples in my
maybe
pile.

Hello!

I found your webpage on the internet, and I'd like to get to know more about your family. I am a 23-year-old student studying architecture and piano. I am 3 months pregnant. My boyfriend and I have broken up and are considering adoption. The baby is healthy, and I am healthy—no drugs or smoking, etc. I am vegetarian. No health problems in the families either. I'll be getting a test soon to find out about Down syndrome and some other diseases. Please let me know if you are still trying to adopt a child. I hope to talk to you soon.

So long—Amy

I didn't really believe there could be someone out there on the other end. I cc'd Jevn, and I pressed send, and those words, like my childhood prayers for a horse, were instantly absorbed by the night.

I went to bed eager for oblivion, and soon I was floating on my back in a pool of water. With my toes, I could feel the thickness of the black lane stripes below me. Everything was all the same—the same temperature, the same wet softness—and it didn't seem to matter what I decided about anything. I oriented myself and looked for a side of the pool to get out, but the yellow walls of the dome above it had shrunk to meet the edges. There was nothing to hold on to, nowhere to climb out. I looked down to discover the slick bottom had disappeared, and far below my feet there was an endless network of pipes generating machine-shaped currents, sucking in, pushing out, churning into an infinite turquoise darkness.

My nightmares were often about drowning. It was like I really was a water baby, always looking for the world I was really meant for. Those pipes and fans and pumps were planted in my memory from the many times my father took me to job sites—dams and coal refineries and water treatment tanks and chicken feed processing plants—to interest me in engineering and to remind me that piano was not a viable career. Those places below the ground and beyond chain-link fences made the world we live in seem like a thin veil over a spinning, churning reality.

When I awoke, I was alone. And I'd gotten a response.

*   *   *

Erica and George were a little older, like my parents had been when they had kids. They had a son through an open adoption. They were Christian. They were environmentalists by profession. They were working on a project in Norway, Jevn's ancestral home. And their permanent residence was in Maryland, not far from my grandparents' sheep farm. But most of all, most incredibly, they were flesh and blood and alive somewhere, tapping back against the glass!

I wrote back right away. Jevn joined our conversation, too. With each exchange, my fears dissipated. And soon I realized that the key to open adoption, even more than I'd understood before, was to find the right couple. It wasn't simply that the right couple would make giving up the child
possible
. With the right couple, open adoption would be
easy
. Knowing them would mean liking them. My prior fears were supplanted by a wild generosity; I would not only give them my child—I'd get pregnant again to give more children away to couples like them! But when I mentioned making some kind of commitment, Erica said she'd read that most birth mothers don't settle on a couple until after the fifth month of pregnancy. I was only in my third, so they wanted to give us time to look around. They did what first loves do—they broke my heart, but they gave me hope for what might be out there, and they opened the door for others to come in.

*   *   *

I kept my tiny roundness concealed beneath my hoodie and oversized T-shirt, but with the adoption process fully under way, I began to tell my friends about it, starting with Sleepy Amy, who took me camping in the freezing rain to help me enjoy my last days of mobility and freedom. She had long black hair and she smiled easily. People called her Sleepy Amy to distinguish her from me. She would fall asleep in the middle of studio, right on her desk or beneath it, and I loved the way she was always undermining everything we were doing there all the time.

But I dreaded explaining it all to everyone else. They'd express concern, but I'd know what they were really thinking. My classmates would be happy to have me taken out of the competition in studio; Christian friends would think I'd gotten what I deserved. I thought about skipping town. Moving to the farm or to a state no one thinks about. But even if I could escape Ohio, I couldn't escape the thing growing inside me. Even strangers on the street would think they knew the whole story. They wouldn't realize that I was studying architecture and had a plan for everything.

And so I did the only thing I could. I began to talk about it. Eagerly. Openly. I would tell everyone everything, fearlessly outlining the details, omitting nothing. I'd grant them their fears and hypotheses and concerns, and then I'd silence them with certainty. I'd educate them about a kind of adoption they'd never even heard of. The only way to resist being talked about would be to talk about myself and to fill in the juicy details generously. My only armor would be appearing free of doubt. And, over time, I began to build around myself a scaffolding of friends, and colleagues, and professors, and counselors, confident and fully informed about my plan. The only thing I'd admit was that it wouldn't be easy. But, then, neither was architecture school.

“I'm pregnant—but I'm doing adoption,” I would say before they could give me advice. It would be as if I planned the whole thing, pregnancy and adoption, like a giant impressive two-part side project I'd taken on out of excess ambition. By the middle of February, I had said this so many times, to so many people, it was a mantra that no longer had any meaning to me.

I wouldn't say, “I'm giving up my child for adoption.” Not because Molly told me not to, but because at that point I wasn't giving up a child. I was going to counseling, learning about the adoption process, eating an egg every day, reading books about adopted children, scanning profiles at night, and consulting with Jevn on everything. Adoption couldn't be done until after the birth, because my parental rights wouldn't exist until the baby did. In the meantime, I was doing adoption. Everything anyone could ask me to do.

*   *   *

One evening, Jevn and I met at my apartment for our first phone call with Beth and Ken, a couple from Idaho. We had started spending long evenings on the phone with couples, and late nights sending e-mails. Beth told us about their recent trip to Lake Tahoe and how happy they were to be back. I remembered that their profile had included a photo of a backyard deck, so I asked if they ate meals out there in the summer. Beth said that they didn't. “Unfortunately, we have a lot of bugs in the summer.”

I looked across to Jevn, to see if he was thinking what I was thinking.

I was thinking about eating supper serenaded by crickets under the canopy of maples my dad had planted, on the deck he'd built to extend into them, often still wrapped in towels in our swimsuits after a long day at the pool he'd built in a cow pasture close to our house together with several of our neighbors who shared it with us. Summer was comprised of pilgrimages to the pool and suppers on the deck. And I'm sure there were also bugs. Most likely
lots
of them.

Jevn wasn't looking at me, but he bore the burden of the rest of that conversation. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

*   *   *

The conversations we had with couples were often about parenting, which I'd never thought so much about. One evening Mike and Terri described the way they disciplined their two-year-old daughter by holding her tight when she was upset, no matter how loud she screamed, because they wanted her to know they'd be there for her through all of her emotions. I told them my dad thought emotions came from not getting enough sleep. He'd put me in my room and pull the vinyl window shade, but the foggy light of day would seep through the rip and around the curled edges and turn everything deep red. I'd never really thought about it before, but what a difference it would have made to have someone sit with me and talk through it, whatever it was. That was something adoption would do effortlessly, correct faults that ran like deep ruts in a family, persisting through generations.

I hadn't felt at ease with Mike until that moment, but sensing the start of a connection, I asked about the love of travel they mentioned in their profile. Mike said that they'd traveled a lot. They didn't like to eat strange food or spend time in unfamiliar countries, but there was a certain beach in Florida they liked to go to every summer, a place where they liked the restaurants and where everyone knew them. It sounded nice, but it didn't sound like
travel
to me. Travel was exactly about not knowing or being known, and I couldn't help but doubt how well they'd manage in the foreign territory of open adoption.

I could never know what would sink my heart. I'd set out with so much hope, internalizing couples' stories, falling asleep imagining their hometowns, straining excitedly to see how far down the road I could picture us all together—but there was always a point when some detail, some way they would say something, would put out the spark. Our conversations led us fast into couples' most intimate spaces, their profoundest hopes and disappointments, and there were times I couldn't get out fast enough. Jevn would sigh and shake his head in frustration at me.

If this were a closed adoption, we'd have been finished a long time ago, and sometimes I wanted Molly to take the decision away from me. I couldn't know whether my criteria would be more effective than pulling a nice couple at random from the files. I felt guilty for scrutinizing people so mercilessly, couples that had been approved for adoption by every measurable standard. Who was I to say they weren't good enough? If I wasn't fit to parent, was I fit to select parents for my child? But no one was setting the rules, and the field was as wide as the Ohio horizon. The only things guiding us were measures we created, ideals even we couldn't pinpoint, instincts I couldn't begin to temper. Molly would assure us, frustrating as it was, guilty as I felt, they were enough, and they would lead us to someone.

We decided we'd give ourselves until the end of March. That was when I would return to school, and we'd both be too busy to be on the phone with couples all the time. It also gave us three months before my due date in July to get to know the couple well. If something happened to make us change our minds, it gave us time to figure out what we were going to do.

One night after a session with Molly, we walked down the hill to the pizza place to fill out the medical history forms she'd given us—vital information for our official record, to remain permanently accessible to our child. We were seated at a table next to the fireplace, and though our medical histories would be delicately, inextricably intertwined in our child, as we completed the forms, we might have been any two students thrown together on a school project. Our child a collaboration as unromantic as collecting aluminum cans from the architecture studios.

When our pizza arrived, we put away the papers, and I remembered the package I'd gotten in the mail earlier that day. I pulled it out of my backpack.

“We got photos from Dave and Laura,” I said, showing him the envelope. Inside were ten glossy color photos, professionally done, along with a long handwritten letter. They wrote about trying with IVF for years and how they had contemplated divorce on account of it. Laura had almost died in surgery after a fertility procedure. They said IVF clinics deal hope, and they were addicted. It repulsed me. I couldn't imagine risking my life or spending thousands of dollars just for a chance to have a baby. “I still don't like them,” I told Jevn. I couldn't help it.

“Maybe they'd appreciate a baby more because of what they've been through.”

“They're
putting
themselves through it! I want them to have come to terms with adoption before they adopt my child!” He was so fair, so generous in his assessment of people, I was terrified it would be up to me alone to find their faults. “Aren't you worried about what kind of people they'd be?”

“Maybe that's a question we should be asking everyone: how they've dealt with infertility,” Jevn said. “Maybe we should write down all the questions we want couples to answer.”

That was a big problem with this process. We were managing vastly different information about so many different people. I was finding myself comparing one wife's strange laugh on the phone to someone else's job in sports management, to another person's large extended family.

“Okay.” I tore out a sheet of notebook paper.
How have you dealt with infertility?
I wrote. “Maybe something like What's your biggest struggle as a couple?” I wanted to know what really sustained them. If I was giving up my child in part so that Jevn wouldn't become an absent father, I needed to feel confident that the adoptive parents were going to stay together.

“And, Are you still trying to have biological children?” Jevn suggested.

“I think we should ask some general things, too. Like, Are you happy? What are you passionate about?” I added, writing both questions down.

“Do you have a TV?” he suggested. Neither of us did.

“No, they probably all have TVs. Maybe, How much TV do you watch?”

“Where do you keep your TV?” he said. He was right. That would tell us more. I wrote it down. And that got me thinking.

“What songs do you sing to yourself while you're washing the dishes?” I said. “I know what my mother would sing: ‘You Are My Sunshine.' Dad would probably sing ‘Blueberry Hill,' or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.' He'd sing that one on walks because he was too embarrassed to just hold hands without asking.” Those songs took me fast to the deep interiors of my childhood. I wanted to know what my child would overhear, and be filled by, and remember.