Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey (7 page)

There were no bars on the guesthouse windows, although after the previous night, I was seriously considering putting some on the ones in Bay’s room.

“So what would this experiment in coparenting be like?” I heard myself asking. “Will I have to consult Regina on every decision I make regarding Bay? Will she have to powwow with me anytime there’s an issue with Daphne?”

In that regard, I wondered if I’d even be qualified to weigh in. I suspected a lot of Daphne’s freedoms and restrictions were directly related to her deafness. And as I’d proved in such a grand and humiliating fashion at last week’s luncheon, I simply was not educated. I made a mental note to go online first thing in the morning to research everything I could find about raising a deaf child.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be about coparenting at all,” John suggested. “It can just be a way for us all to get to know each other. For us to get to know Daphne and for Regina to get to know Bay.”

“I want that,” I whispered, and my voice sounded wistful in the pale-lit room. “And I hate the idea of Daphne spending one more minute in East Riverside.”

John reached over and stroked my hair. “It’s a rough neighborhood,” he agreed. “They’ve been lucky so far, but …”

But luck runs out.
And what would happen when it did? A carjacking? A mugging? A home invasion? Three females—one of whom was a woman in her seventies and another of whom wouldn’t hear the door being broken down or a window getting smashed in—would surely constitute an easy target. I shuddered to think how truly vulnerable they were.

Through the window I could see the slate shingles of the guesthouse roof. “Right next door, huh?”

“Neighbors.” John propped himself on his elbow and smiled at me. “You and Regina can be just like Lucy and Ethel. Or Wilma and Betty. It’ll be fun. You can borrow cups of sugar from each other and come up with all kinds of crazy schemes.”

“You mean crazier than the scheme to share a driveway with the woman who is the biological mother of our daughter?” I closed my eyes. “This whole situation is so … unprecedented. I’m terrified that I’ll say the wrong thing, or make the wrong gesture, or the wrong meal.” I thumped the heel of my hand against my forehead and groaned, remembering how utterly incompetent I’d felt during that lunch. “Chicken enchiladas! Why did I have to make chicken?”

“Because you didn’t know Daphne was a vegetarian, that’s why.” John laid his hand gently on my belly, like he used to do when I was pregnant, and I reveled in the warmth, the comfort of it. “That’s kind of the whole point. There’s going to be one hell of a learning curve, and I think the best way to get ahead of it is to have Daphne and Regina move in here.”

“The old ‘keep your friends close and your long-lost daughter and the woman who raised her closer’ trick, huh?”

“Is that what we’re calling her, then?” I felt him smile in the shadowy room. “Our ‘long-lost’ daughter?”

“Hmm.” I wrinkled my nose. “Too soap opera-y?”

“Little bit.” John chuckled. Then he kissed me on the tip of my nose. “We can do this, Kathryn. We have to do this. And besides, it could have been worse. A lot worse. Regina might seem a little abrasive right now, but I think that’s just because she doesn’t know how to handle this any better than we do.”

It was an indication of how loyal he was that he called
her
abrasive but made no mention of
me
threatening her with litigation and calling her a drunk.

I let out a long sigh. “I’ll call her tomorrow and extend the offer to move in to the guesthouse.”

“Thatta girl, Lucy.”

“Very funny. Now go to sleep, wise guy, before I play a rousing rendition of ‘Babaloo’ on your skull!” I rolled over and kissed his cheek.

He kissed me back. “Well, then you’d really have some ’splainin’ to do, wouldn’t you?”

Despite my exhaustion, I felt my mind shifting into “organize” mode.

“We’re all going to learn sign language,” I announced. “I’ll buy a book tomorrow. Or maybe a DVD. I’m sure they have a DVD.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“And I noticed that Daphne wears hearing aids. I think they take special batteries, don’t they? I’m going to get some, just so we’ll always have them handy, in case—”

“Good night, Kathryn.”

“Good night.”

I snuggled under the blanket and drifted off to sleep.

To give you an idea of how nerve-wracking it was to know that my newly extended family (which was the description I’d settled on since I couldn’t come up with a better one) was moving in across the driveway, I will tell you about a shopping trip I made.

When the Vasquezes accepted our invitation to come live in Mission Hills, I promptly went up to the guesthouse and cleaned it within an inch of its life. I swept, I dusted, I waxed, I vacuumed. But John’s college buddies had been merciless on the linens, and I knew there was not enough Clorox in the world to make those sheets and towels look new again.

So I went shopping.

Now, I will cop to having a tendency to “over-engineer” certain projects. When Bay was nine and went to sleepaway summer camp, for example, I packed exactly sixteen outfits (one for every day of the two-week stay and two additional in case she got muddy or a juice box exploded on her). The outfits included socks and underwear and were tucked into sixteen individual ziplock plastic bags. Each bag was labeled to indicate which outfit was to be worn on what day and for which activity. The jean shorts and Spice Girls T-shirt were for Tuesday’s arts and crafts class; the madras Bermudas and green polo shirt were for Thursday’s archery competition. Swimsuits were for swimming, of course (one-piece for the lake, two-piece for the pool) … You get the picture.

Well, I got a picture, too. It was included with Bay’s first letter home, and she was smiling triumphantly, decked out in the tank top and white skirt I’d earmarked especially for tennis lessons. But she wasn’t wearing the skirt ensemble for tennis, she was wearing it for the all-camp canoe regatta. And the socks she had on didn’t even belong to her.

Message received, Bay, loud and clear.

My shopping trip to purchase new linens for the guesthouse was an exercise in that same kind of overthinking.

Every towel and sheet set I owned had been purchased at a store called Scandia Down in Kansas City, and I would be lying if I said they hadn’t all been exorbitantly expensive. But sleeping on those sheets was like sleeping on a cloud, and the towels were plump and thirsty enough to soak up a large pond. I wanted only the best for Daphne, so, being as I was in need of new linens, out of habit I headed straight to that upscale bedding shop.

Then I thought,
Maybe Regina will think I’m showing off by making up her bed with four-hundred-dollar sheets. Will it be thoughtless of me to stock the bathroom with towels that cost more money than she earns in a month?

So I pulled out of Country Club Plaza and drove to Walmart, where I sat in the parking lot, hating myself for a good twenty minutes. What kind of message would these linens send?

I didn’t want to insult anyone, I didn’t want to impress anyone. I just wanted to be welcoming. But I was driving myself crazy over pillowcases!

In the end, I split the difference and purchased new towels and three sets of sheets at Bed Bath & Beyond, reasoning that with regard to price and quality, the chain fell somewhere in the middle between my first two attempts. I was able to relax at last, knowing that nothing could be read into a receipt from Bed Bath & Beyond.

A week later, the moving van arrived, and my heart soared to know that at long last I had all three of my children, if not under the same contiguous roof, at least residing at the same address.

Several of my squirrel collectibles bit the dust in favor of Regina’s funky, brightly colored original artwork. I will confess to feeling a jealousy more intense than I’d ever known when Bay made this connection. Her artistic talent, the origins of which had been so mystifying and untraceable until now, had been a gift from her biological mother all along. That piece of herself that Bay loved most, that defined her, was a piece passed down to her from Regina.

And what had
I
passed down to Bay? The lyrics to The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” (which oddly enough was the only song that could ever lull her to sleep, and which, therefore, I sang to her nightly until she was six; to this day she still sings along when it comes on the radio)? A working knowledge of finger bowls and shrimp forks even Martha Stewart would envy? Oh and, once, a tennis racquet.

John told me I shouldn’t feel that way. He said I’d
absolutely
given of myself to Bay, if not in nature, then definitely in nurture. Any traits and talents that had come to her innately from Regina as seedlings had been coaxed into full blossom by me, cultivated and fostered (I’d bristled at his use of that word, and he immediately took it back). I was the one who taught her to be confident. She learned by my example to expect only good things from herself and to share her spark with the world.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” John had said. Of course, in our case the apple had been picked from the branch and thrown clear across the orchard.

But as I’d learned way back when in chem lab: equal and opposite. The good news was that I was seeing things in Daphne that reminded me so much of myself at that age that it was like stepping through the looking glass and into my own past.

It wasn’t just her looks, and there’s no denying that the resemblance to sixteen-year-old me was startling. But it was much more than how she looked. She moved like I did. She loved to cook and she had an almost obsessive love of avocados. She was a lemons-out-of-lemonade kind of gal, just like I was. Daphne was naturally inclined to look for the bright side of a situation and wring every drop of positivity out of it. There was an innocence about her that I was sure would never go away, and she possessed a desire to please others not because she was subservient, but simply because it made her happy to see them happy.

And although, as a teenager, I had never faced a struggle that matched the magnitude of Daphne’s hearing loss, I believe in my heart that the lion’s share of her courage and tenacity had come to her directly from me. Grudgingly, I made myself admit that Regina had taken the nurturing ball and run with it on this one. I knew she’d done her homework, I knew she’d become an expert on everything pertaining to deafness, and I knew that she worked every day of her life to insure that Daphne, my Daphne, our Daphne would never feel diminished by it.

I will never, as long as I live, be able to repay her for that.

But I will tell you that this adjusted living situation was not without its complications. This mother and child reunion brought with it more than just the opportunity for me to revel in how much Daphne was like me.

If I’d thought John’s college buddies were rough on the place, they were nothing compared to Regina. On the first morning of our new living arrangement I walked in to find her actually stripping the wallpaper off the walls! The wallpaper that had taken me three decorators and I don’t know how many swatches to select. It matched the window valances (although a quick glance told me those were gone, too) and the throw pillows (still tossed artfully into the corners of the couch, but I doubted they were long for this world).

I did what I’d come to do—which was invite this one-woman wrecking crew to join us for dinner on the patio that evening—and sought out my husband.

He knew immediately that I was upset. No, not upset, angry bordering on furious.

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s ripping that place apart,” I reported. “I mean literally—tearing it down.”

“We agreed she could do whatever she wanted,” he reminded me. “That was the deal.... Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.”

Of course I was having second thoughts. She was messing with my wallpaper. It was practically a declaration of war!

“We asked this woman we barely know to move in,” I recapped unnecessarily. “Maybe we should have tried some other way to get to know each other before sharing patio furniture.”

Sharing daughters was more than enough, I was realizing now.

John maintained his calm and looked at me evenly. “What do you want to do now—undo it? Honey, this is our life now. Wallpaper’s just the beginning.”

The scream I never screamed the night I’d awoken in a panic and offered Bay an exit clause was coming up again, beginning in the pit of my belly and begging to be released. But this time John’s words were the ones that threatened to break the sound barrier:
Undo it.

Could I?

Could I send Regina packing just like that? Could I put in an emergency call to the wallpaper guys, begging them to speed over here and repair the destruction my boarder of less than a day had inflicted? Could I send that one-woman wrecking crew back to East Riverside?

Not if I wanted to keep Daphne here I couldn’t.

And so began the clash of the parenting styles. It was more of a cold war than an actual invasion, but make no mistake, the battle lines were drawn. Parenting is something that people hold very dear, something on which they pride themselves. It is intensely personal. “I’m forming my kid, here, so just step off, pal, and don’t you dare comment or judge or suggest.” Backseat drivers, armchair quarterbacks—they’re nothing compared to the “across-the-driveway coparent.” What Regina and I have since discovered, though, is that there are certain universal truths to being a parent. No matter what your methods (or what books you’ve read on the subject), there are fundamental truths that cross all the parenting lines—the ethnic, the regional, the socioeconomic: A parent loves, panics, protects, screws up, bribes, begs, screams, and kisses the boo-boos. Parenting is a privilege. It is a quest, a challenge. It is a lifetime of agreeing to disagree and of gritting your teeth and compromising.