Immediate Family

by Ashley Nelson Levy

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  AND OUR MOTHER. Here is a woman who woke up in the dark every year on the morning of your birthday to decorate your doorway with streamers, who left notes in your lunches, who called the mother of every boy who bullied you. Here is a woman who offered up the hours to soccer games, science projects, school plays, who taught us which prayers to say when we were scared, or thankful, or had lost something. Here is a woman who asked us hard, direct questions because she wanted to know who we were, what mattered to us or worried us or thrilled us, who knew that despite any resistance we longed to be asked, to confess, to be known. Here is a woman who told us every chance she got that she loved being our mother. And here is a woman who never lived with the fear that your birth mother would come back for you, but did her best to navigate the absence, the second original sin.

  Here is the only person on earth who has understood the weight and dimension of each loss and success. Who knew what it meant when you found a best friend, when you found a wife, when you graduated from college, left the mission trip. Who, whenever you strived after anything, did not warn of unreasonable expectations as I did, but who encouraged you, who said, And why shouldn’t he be entitled to his ambition?

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  WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE MARRIED, you’d asked me, and instead of answering with what everyone knows going in, I should have told you what I didn’t, that the night before I got married I clung to our father, the night I went off the pill I clung to our mother, that all bright and ubiquitous changes in a life are always bound up in some kind of goodbye, some departure from one core unit to the next.

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  LIKE ANY MOTHER, real or imagined, ours contains a thousand lives that we’ll never know. Only recently she told me that there were days in the beginning when she would go out to the shed and smoke. Later, when you were out of the house, when calls would come in about money, she’d sometimes return to the shed, though more often she found herself back at church, her prayers filling the empty pews. I don’t think the experience was what she had expected; I don’t think it fulfilled the visions that had stayed with her from St. Christopher’s. Some days I don’t think she felt like she was helping anybody by bringing you here, least of all you.

  But these are only a mock-up of hard times, moments extracted from an entire life. What I know for certain is how much she loves you, how much she would have loved to hold you as an infant, to finish that paperwork sooner. But when the day came she dropped to her knees at the sight of you, took you into her arms, wrapped herself around the end of a long, tender wait. While all the anxieties of a new mother flooded in, she held you.

  AT THE RECEPTION our parents and I work the room as if on the campaign trail. We exchange kind words with every cousin, aunt, uncle, and close family friend on your bride’s side we can find; I escape to the bathroom only once to unzip the side of my dress and take a few deep breaths.

  The location is a small hotel set on the water with dark wooden beams and vinyl flooring. Your guests collect around a large fireplace and under the tasteful white bulbs that have been strung from the ceiling. In the back corner a lone bartender serves beer, wine, and an insta-headache cocktail that the two of you crafted for the occasion. Each round table of six holds hydrangea and candles, and the windows surrounding the main room offer one last look at the water before the sun goes down.

  On the wall by the dance floor, photos of the two of you are projected. This was your idea, of course. I had voted against it because slideshows like that seem reminiscent of the dead, each flashing image the length of a little life itself. But you’d insisted, so our mother and I collected old photos from the albums to be shown alongside the engagement photos with your bride. You appear as a three-foot Musketeer, then as a man in love, then again as a boy riding the teacups. I look over at your brother-in-law and he knows what I’m thinking: I’m still waiting for the moment to give you away. The site coordinator comes over and whispers in my ear.

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  AT THE LIBRARY last week I came across the line I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs, and for a moment I forgot about you and the speech. Lately I’ve been feeling something: not that I’m old but that I don’t feel so young anymore. I remember when my husband and I first began trying for a child, how often I cried in our old apartments, about whether it was worth the time, the toll on my body, the grief. Soon it was a grief that loomed so large the whole world seemed to fit in it. Slowly, over time, after a very long wait, there came other kinds of days, days like today, where I look at you and your bride and notice again how big the world is, but not because it hurts any less.

  What’s it like to be married, you asked me. When I tell my husband that the line makes me think of him, that I love him with the passion put to use in my old griefs, he knows that it is both a kindness and a sadness. It’s a sadness we’re both ready to be free from, with the whole world stuck in such a small container, a house.

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  AFTER YOU CAME BACK from the mission trip, our mother pulled your Life Book from the shelf and brought it downstairs. She sat with you at the kitchen table and read it aloud and, for the first time, you listened to some of the beginning. Not so long ago, a little boy was born in a faraway country. His name was Boon-Nam and this baby was you. Our father came in from the garden and sat with you, too. You had some questions as she read, and they answered them. We don’t know what the woman who gave birth to you looked like, but we imagine that she must have been very beautiful. What do you think she looked like? They told you again about your siblings.

  They never wanted to associate those early years of your life with secrets or shame. In all the years on the shelf, a copy of your birth certificate rested inside that Life Book, the sole piece of paper that identified you as Child No. 4. They noticed this late and recalled Khun Preeda looking into our eyes and telling us that there were no siblings.

  Again you nodded and took the news quietly. I don’t know if this is information you’ll pick up again later in life, or facts to be filed back on the shelf for good. I don’t know if it’s just become part of the family mythology given to us as children, the stories that follow us around forever. I don’t know how these stories have served you growing up, but I’ve found that in my own life they’ve become the foundation. They were built to give you your place in the world, and helping to construct them has also given me mine.

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  RECENTLY I WENT TO A DISCUSSION GROUP in the city. There were about fifteen of us in the room; only three of the five panelists showed up. Based on the description, it was supposed to be a talk about adoption in contemporary literature. But it turned out no one cared about books; one woman raised her hand to tell her story about her daughter adopted from Guatemala, about how once walking through the streets, a young girl followed them for blocks saying, But why would you adopt her? Why? Why? Why? and then a panelist said, By definition adoption is a tragic thing, it starts as a tragedy, then another woman said, If I pick him up too quickly, people think he’s getting abducted, then another woman, then another woman, and soon we were all sitting in a circle, talking over one another. It was mostly adoptive mothers there, a few adopted children, a few fathers. There were tears. I sat there listening. Even in all the reading I’d done, all the internet wormholes I’d traveled, I had still never heard people sit around and talk like this, about what it really felt like to be us.

  After the discussion was over I stuck around, waited shyly to speak to one of the panelists. I had liked what she’d said about her son, whom she’d adopted as a toddler, and I told her so. Are you a mother? she asked. No, I whispered. I said a few things quickly and then she asked to exchange emails.

  Later that evening, an email came through. It was just a pdf from the Child Welfare Information Gateway. I opened it and it said:

  By three years of age, a baby’s brain has reached almost 90 percent of its adult size. The growth in each regio
n of the brain largely depends on receiving stimulation, which spurs activity, providing the foundation for learning. Just as positive experiences can assist with healthy brain development, experiences with maltreatment or neglect can negatively affect development, including changes to the structure and chemical activity of the brain and in the emotional and behavioral functioning of the child. The plasticity of the brain often allows children to recover from missing certain experiences, but it is likely to be more difficult.

  The last page of the pdf showed a picture of two three-year-old brains held side by side, one marked as NORMAL and the other as EXTREME NEGLECT.

  I looked at the picture and the old rage picked up in my chest, the instinct to defend you. I started a handful of responses about the problem with case studies, how they never filled in the full picture. Or the problem of anger or forgiveness or grief, how often they lacked a workable definition, or a clear explanation. Then instead of hitting send I shut my computer and turned out the light.

  I turned the light back on, opened my computer. I looked at the picture again. It almost looked like a face, that three-year-old brain, and its frown was suddenly all I could see. It reminded me of a frown I used to love, a frown I still love, a frown that remains framed on my desk just out of the sunlight.

  LAST NIGHT I told you that today might be hard for us, that you’d be all grown up, and of course there was more but that’s where we stopped. I thanked you for asking me to speak, leaving out how difficult it was to speak to you, for you, about you, despite your bright portrait in our minds.

  I wish I’d told you that there’s so much possession wrapped up in love. Some days you don’t see it or feel it at all, until something brings it into focus. Like that day you cut your head open at the basketball court and called me instead of our parents. I ran all the stop signs across town, double parked, sprinted to the group of boys circled around you, while you held a stranger’s T-shirt to your face. We didn’t know it was normal for a head wound to bleed so much, and I wondered if I might fail you and faint on the spot. And as you stared up at me, scared, waiting for my instruction, it was possession I felt as I ran to you, helped you up, put your arm around me, and led you back to my car. I talked you through that ride to the hospital, blood on the seat belt, blood on my shirt, my hand on your shoulder, and it wasn’t until the boys had left your side mirror that you began to cry, shocked more by your fragility, I think, than your pain, and with each deep breath you took in to collect yourself I thought, mine, mine, mine.

  Like that day on the court when I saw you for the first time since the mission trip, since the fight, since so long without speaking. You’d called and said, It’s enough, I think we should see each other, and offered to come to my apartment, but I’d suggested there because it was a place where love always felt easy between us. You passed me the ball and we played under the hoop where we’d played as children, because words were no longer of use.

  I wish I’d told you what my doctor had said, to see if you could walk me through it. She’d said, You have a few choices left, things that didn’t really feel like choices at all.

  I will be his parents one day, I told your brother-in-law once.

  We will, he said.

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  YEARS AGO, when your brother-in-law moved to California from New York, I witnessed him say goodbye to his brother. They are shades of each other, as you know, one always mistaken for the other despite the years between them. We stood in the parking lot of an Italian restaurant, heading west in a U-Haul the next day, and I watched the two men cling to each other in a way that went beyond the boundaries of their bodies, like two twins fitted snugly in a womb. Their physical selves recognized each other up close, they recognized the oncoming danger, and they suddenly held on for dear life. A decision made biologically. I saw it from a distance and it shocked me. It shocked me to think of us, both ignorant to the recognition of a similar version of ourselves walking around in the world.

  But that wasn’t the case at all, because you had three siblings walking around somewhere. Three siblings plus me. And I will confess that I haven’t known much jealousy in the decades that I’ve been your sister. I’ve hurt for you, worried for you, but rarely coveted. And the feeling reached me there on the concrete, thinking of your siblings. I was jealous of the three strangers you’d likely never know.

  Recently, in a box full of paperwork, I found their names. They didn’t live on any of the official documents, but instead on a single piece of Marriott stationery, given to our father on his return trip to Thailand two years following your adoption. He’d gone back to the orphanage and brought a white bear for each child, donated by a Sonoma County radio station, and standing once again in Khun Preeda’s office, he watched her fill in the missing information from our last visit. The note is dated April 1996 and reads in careful handwriting: Kamnan (18 years), Sunti (14 years), Dara (11 years).

  This is what I mean about love: in the wild possession I felt when I saw their names, the youngest sister exactly my age. And though our parents have told you all this, I put the paper back and closed the box like a secret, because I wanted you to belong to me alone.

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  THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES over the course of your life—when our parents have gone traveling, when you brought your wife over to the apartment—when the room has quieted and I’ve held binoculars up to the future, visions that flutter in and out as quickly as the birds, and I’ve glimpsed the day when we both become orphans. I have tried to taxonomize the ways you will need me. At night in bed while my husband sleeps soundly, I do not hear Who am I? Who am I?, words that would so often call out to me as a girl. Instead I think: What is a mother? I have only ever had that one to go on, one who is so impressive to me, so full of grace that any comparison to myself feels ridiculous. I think of how I have loved you and failed you. I think of how I have lost us to our stories. Have I stolen your life, your dignity, for the sake of mythology? Of self-preservation? Perhaps I haven’t grown up at all.

  And yet. When I think of the way I love you, how I have built you a roof with my love, thatched thick by careful hands, I consider the way it stands firm even when the world shakes. It is my nature to shoo you under at the first sign of trouble, simple as holding you, as breathing; it is my nature to ensure your protection.

  And I know that you, too, loved me immediately from the beginning, despite my pale skin, and Mom’s ears, and Dad’s hair, and for this I will be forever grateful.

  Then it’s my turn to stand up and speak.

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  I DO NOT SAY: Not so long ago, a little boy was born in a faraway country. His name was Boon-Nam and this baby was you. The woman who gave birth to you knew that she could not give you all the things you needed, and so you came to us. Or rather, we came to you.

  I do not say that many years later you told us you were ready to return to that faraway country. We said we’d join you but you wanted to do it on your own. We felt the kind of puncture in our heart and shins akin to growing pains, except by then you were already grown. So we helped you plan the trip and sent you on your way. It seemed like the story should end there and, very briefly, it did.

  I do not say that broken hearts are so wearisome to carry around, because I don’t have to tell you that. I understand why you’re quick to put it all behind you, to do your best to forget once the anger subsides.

  I do not say that everyone carries their own narrative of the world in their head. We’re made most human by these visions, in how limited or expansive a life’s story can become, the conviction with which we believe things should or might or did happen, and in all the ways we get it wrong. I had visions of your return to the Babies’ Home; I saw you walking the halls, eyeing the beds and the floors and the children with the same kind of scrutiny and care as we once had, the images branded there mostly forever. I could see you so clearly as you drifted down the canal on that boat. But you never made it to any of the places traced in my dreams, close as you w
ere, and I realize now that maybe you never will.

  I do not say that it’s an impossible task, trying to fit you on a page. To describe how much I love you, how my love for you works. Like a tantrum or a firework, a dizzying ride in a teacup. Like an old, intimate joke that through the decades keeps its punch line, though nobody can remember how it started.

  I do not say that I still can’t answer how our story should be kept or told, how it falls in or out with history’s long catalog of wounds and tropes. I have only come to this: meeting you that day all those years ago became the axis on which everything else has spun.

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  WHEN THE TWO OF US WERE STILL CHILDREN, I used to imagine your birth mother looking down on me every time I was tough on you. It scared me to consider what she might be thinking, if she was happy with the results of your life. Imagining her up there would often put me on better behavior, for a few minutes at least.

  Now I look at you with your suit, your wife, and I say goodbye to old fears and welcome in new ones. I try to speak for our mother and father who love you so dearly, but mostly of course I speak for myself. You asked me just the other day if you could still come home as often after getting married, now that you were all grown up. There is so much I cannot tell you about the future, Danny. But I’ll be there to open the door, to hang up your jacket; I’ll be there to welcome you in.