So then, I just thought, I’ll eat the cake.
Then I was all by myself, eating a cake.
And suddenly I was overwhelmed with such a deep explosion of need. It was like a gong clanged in my heart, and I realized that I just had to have a child of my own. Someone I could make a shamrock cake for, who would inherit my superior contempt, which would be balanced out by my new burgeoning zeal for it. And then maybe the child would have a child, too, who could carry on the family superior contempt.
It was true, if I had a child on my own, this kid would most likely never have a father, and that was sad because I had really lucked out in the father department myself. But I figured that if I could not provide a father for this child, or an example of a loving adult partnership, what I could provide was this: a home without a bad adult relationship in it. When I thought about it that way, it was a big plus. Even a gift.
Why couldn’t I just adopt on my own? I realized I probably could. Did I really care that I shared DNA with my child? It was theoretically possible to harvest eggs from my still-intact ovaries and then hire someone to have the child for me.
What did I have, biologically, to pass on that was so important? My Irish heritage with its tendency toward alcoholism and depression? Skin so pale and pink that it might not fare well as the coming generations have to deal with increasing heat and searing sunlight?
On the other hand, if I did hire a surrogate to have my child, I would be able to send out an announcement to friends and relatives that could feature a picture of me and my arm around a pregnant woman, with this written across the top: SHE’S HAVING MY BABY! The idea of confusing all my acquaintances as to whether I was announcing I was coming out of the closet and/or having a child appealed to me. But no. No, no. I had to admit that I didn’t care if I shared DNA with this child.
And frankly, I didn’t want to add more people to the world. I think that the Hebrew god is regretting saying, “Go forth and multiply,” when he looks down (albeit metaphorically) on our planet. I like to think he wishes he’d written, “Go forth and multiply in a sustainable manner.”
During the swirl of my coalescing decision, I got a call from my friend Bob, who asked if I wanted to meet him for dinner at a restaurant about two miles away. Bob wanted me to see Thai Elvis, this guy who does an impressive impersonation in a restaurant in Thai Town. Even though I hadn’t been agreeing to meet with friends very often, and I had a belly full of my shamrock cake, I agreed.
When I got to the restaurant Bob had already ordered the papaya salad and fried morning glory and was discussing the curried frog legs with the waiter. I felt a surge of happiness. No, I didn’t have a committed male partner to adopt a baby with. But I had wonderful friends, and if you added them all together they were more than the sum of their parts.
Bob and I dug in and I was suddenly aware that I was over the Food Network. I wanted real food. I was tired of just looking at it on TV. I told Bob about my plan to go ahead and adopt on my own. We toasted the new baby. He was genuinely thrilled. For the first time in many months, I felt calm and confident. I felt light as air, like a hundred-pound weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
I settled back into my seat, savoring the food and listening to “Hard Headed Woman.” As I enjoyed the music, the company, and the food, it occurred to me that the green papaya salad and Thai Elvis proved unequivocally that you don’t have to be ripe to be delicious, and you don’t have to be the real deal to rock the house.
CHAPTER FOUR
China Sweeney
Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.
—Bill Cosby
I tried to figure out what this whole single-woman-adopting thing was all about.
It quickly became clear that it was all about China.
China has a one-child-per-family policy. It’s loosening up a bit now. The Chinese prefer sons because, traditionally, it’s the boys who take care of the parents in their old age. This has meant that many Chinese girls have been abandoned. And, at the time I was adopting, China did not discriminate against single men or women who were seeking to adopt a baby. This made China ideal for me.
I immediately started the process with what they call a home study. It involves a lot of paperwork—getting three years of tax returns together and proving you have life insurance, for example. I had to get three friends to write letters about what a great parent I would be, and I had to have them notarized. I had to have a “home inspection”—which frankly got me a little frazzled. But my social worker assured me that if I had a roof over my head and a bar of soap in the bathroom, I would pass.
The inspector told me I had to get a five-foot fence around my pool. I had a small backyard in L.A.—and a really teensy pool off to one side. I asked, could it be four feet? He said no, children could hop over a four-foot fence. I argued that my daughter would be from China and would probably be really, really small. “Could I have an exception?” He didn’t laugh. He frowned and wrote some things down in his notebook. I tried to rescue the awkwardness and said, “I guess what I really need to adopt right now is a desperately ingratiating tone!” Again, no laugh, just more scribbles in a notebook.
(Oh, for the record, when I told my gynecologist—a Lebanese doctor in Beverly Hills—that I was adopting from China, he said, “No! You should adopt from Brazil.”
“Brazil?” I asked—temporarily thrown by his objection to my choice of country for adoption.
“Yes!” he said. “Brazilian babies laugh a lot. Asian babies are very serious. You’re funny. You need a laughing baby.”
“I’m not looking for an audience. I’m looking for a child to parent,” I sputtered at him. Then I laughed. This was ridiculous. But my doctor didn’t laugh. He was serious.)
I thought about names for the baby. This was a big deal for me. The idea that I could control the actual vowels and consonants that a person would forever be identified by was intoxicating. I tried to think of names that might have special meaning, Michaela maybe—after my brother Michael who died, or Emma after Jane Austen’s Emma, or Claire after St. Claire (girlfriend of St. Francis, and patron saint of television!). Maybe even Henrietta, after my beloved grandmother, called Hen for short. I could make it Etta, after Etta James! My mind reeled.
My mother had begun calling me with her ideas for names. And even though I have friends whose kids have these names, and I love them, when my mother would suggest them, I hated them. They all screamed, “I’m-From-China-Sweeney.” Once I picked up the phone, and without a “hello” my mother blurted out, “How about Lily or Pearl?” One day she called bursting with joy, “I’ve got it! China! Call her ‘China’! China Sweeney.” I said, “Mom, I’m not going give her some cartoony-Chinese name.”
I got all my paperwork in and then cleared my work schedule for several months during the fall of that year, when I figured I would be traveling to China. But everything was taking longer than expected. I decided to make use of the free time and spent two and a half months traveling around China.
A month of that time, I was with my friend Bill, who works for the Sierra Club and is an experienced backpacker. We planned on backpacking as well as staying in cheap hotels. At one point we were in Yunnan Province, which is in southwestern China. There’s a mountainous area just northwest of Lijang where three great rivers nearly converge (the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween). It’s a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site. We were hiking in a fairly densely forested area and got lost. We wandered around for six or seven hours, only vaguely knowing where we might be, and hoping that the small village we were trying to visit would somehow appear.
Finally this boy, who was maybe fifteen years old, found us and tried to communicate. He was very curious. He spoke no English, but he gestured for us to follow him. We did. He took us to the house he shared with his parents. It consisted of one very small, dark room, with a gas grill in one corner and mats around the edges for beds.
The boy offered us a pear. As far as I could see there was only one pear. (I’m not saying there weren’t other pears, and probably food was stored where I could not see it, but there was just one pear visible.) We accepted his offer. What is frozen in my memory is how he opened his pocketknife and peeled the pear—with such precision. It was delicate and deliberate. It was magical. The pear opened for us like a flower, and he offered us pieces.
I looked around the house taking it all in. My daughter might come from a home like this one. My daughter was not going to grow up in the land of her creation. The poignancy of the utter randomness of what was to come overtook me. I had to regulate my breathing so my tears would not arrive to embarrass me.
After we ate our pear, he took us to a very special place, Tiger Leaping Gorge, a scenic canyon on the Jinsha River, which is an upper tributary of the Yangtze. Even though this is a popular spot that we’d read about in guidebooks for hikers, there was no one else there. We sat together for a long time, whiling the rest of the day away. We learned the boy’s name, or at least we thought we did. He pointed to himself and said what sounded like “Miur-shwa.” We approximated it back, and after a few attempts he vigorously moved his head in an approving manner.
It came back to me with particular force: I was going to name someone. But what?
A week or so later, Bill and I were in Tibet, spending time touring through monasteries, and sometimes sleeping on monastery floors. There was always a Buddha on the altar, and the goddess Tara was by his side. I loved her story. Tara was brought into being when the Buddha cried for all the suffering in the world. His tear fell into a lotus flower and out sprang Tara, the goddess of compassion. Tara comes in many manifestations.
Bill flew back to the States and I went on to Bhutan for a couple of weeks of hiking. In every schoolhouse there were paintings of Tara, along with Jampelyang, the god of wisdom. I began to think about how Tara is also an Irish name. I mean, there are the Hills of Tara, and St. Tara, and even jewelry—Tara brooches. The idea of naming the baby Tara took hold. She would be Tara. Tara Sweeney. Of course! How could it be any other way? When I got back home to Los Angeles, I eagerly filled out my final adoption forms with the name I’d chosen.
In January, about a month before I was due to fly to China to pick up my daughter, I came home to several messages on my answering machine. It turned out that the Chinese government had a new policy regarding single people adopting children from their county: you had to prove you were not gay. My adoption facilitators had been leaving increasingly frantic messages about how this was the day that they assigned me a specific baby, but the assignment could not be finalized. I had to fax a notarized document, signed by someone who had known me for more than ten years, stating that I was not gay.
Ten years? What was that supposed to prove? My initial instinct was to reject the whole idea of providing such discriminatory and unimportant information. I wondered if the adoption would be called off if I did not comply. The phone messages seemed to imply that it would be.
I imagined calling old boyfriends and offering, begrudgingly, with an exaggerated comic gulp, to “prove” I wasn’t gay in order for them to sign the document. Then I heard the final message from my facilitator: “Miss Sweeney, we waited all day to get a letter from you stating that you are no gay [yes, ‘no gay’—that’s how they phrased it] but then we convinced the officials that since you were married before [a brief starter marriage in my twenties with a divorce made in heaven], you’re probably not gay. So they just went ahead and assigned a baby to you. Congratulations! You have been assigned a baby!”
I went from relieved, to euphoric, to concerned. What did they mean, they just “assigned me a baby”? I imagined a bunch of Chinese bureaucrats sitting around in the offices of the orphanage, bored and smoking, and feeling irritable. Finally, one of them barks, “Oh, hell, let’s just assign her that cross-eyed drooly baby in the corner.”
Not that I wouldn’t be thrilled to have the cross-eyed drooly baby in the corner.
But is she the cross-eyed drooly baby in the corner?
CHAPTER FIVE
Strong and Beautiful
White moon comes in on a baby face.
The shafts across her bed are flimmering.
—Carl Sandburg
I didn’t find out any details about the baby I was assigned until a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to leave for China. This is what I found out: She was seventeen months old. She was from a suburb of Guangzhou called Tian. I was given a form with a two-inch-square photograph of a baby with black hair standing straight up like she was Eraserhead. Her gaze was skeptical and somewhat menacing at the same time. Her expression, “Who the hell are you?”
I had asked two dear and long-loved friends to come with me: my friend Darcy, whom I’ve known since grade school, and who has two sons and a lot of baby experience, and my dear friend Jim, who is a film critic and lives in Seattle. I was going to be in great hands.
The baby was seventeen months old! This was a surprise. I’d been preparing myself for an infant, maybe six months old, but this child was a toddler. She might even be walking around already. I hadn’t childproofed the inside of my house! I ran to the bookstore and bought International Toddler Adoption to read on the plane.
We were traveling with a group. Forty of us were going to Guangzhou to adopt nineteen babies. Most of us were in our thirties or forties, and childless. When we gathered for the first time at LAX, we all had these expressions on our faces, like, “This was such a good idea. In the abstract.” And, maybe more accurately, “What the fuck are we doing?”
One couple had just found out that they were getting twins, which they hadn’t requested or anticipated. The expectant mother, who already looked wiped at the prospect, joked, “I figure it must have been all those fertility drugs.”
I laughed. It was true; almost every one of us had his or her own harrowing story of infertility. On the plane, I noticed that the twins’ mother-in-waiting was reading War and Peace. I wondered how long it would be before any of us would be able to read a long, serious book like that again (although maybe Tolstoy is exactly the point of view needed for the long haul of parenting).
I opened International Toddler Adoption. I was promptly horrified. Each story involved a desperate attempt to put a positive spin on a terrible situation. “Mary Ann feels things are going much better now with little Rodney, even though Rodney’s tried to burn the house down twice, and her husband has left her, and she had to quit her job. Some days, after she’s held Rodney down during a thirty-minute tantrum, his eyes meet hers and she feels they’ve made a connection. Which makes it all worth it.”
I began to hyperventilate. I was absolutely about to ruin my life. My heart raced. I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips as they turned the pages of this book. I guess a lot can get screwed up in a kid in the first year or two of life. I blissfully, hopefully, and ignorantly thought I was going to be handed a blank slate. She’d have a predilection for spicy Cantonese food, sure, but she’d also surely blossom into a brilliant, fully realized person, molded by my kind and confident guidance.
Reading this book, I realized I’d been quite naïve. Things could be complicated. Perhaps nightmarish. What would I do? What if the rest of my life was a psychological arms race with an emotionally damaged child? Eventually I peeled my freaked-out mind off the underside of the overhead compartment and calmed myself down. I would survive.
The baby I was adopting was officially named Tian Mulan. Tian was the name of the town in which she was found, and was presumably from. This name was used as her “family name.” Mulan was the name they’d given her at the orphanage. “Mu” means strong in Chinese, and “Lan” means beautiful. Even though I thought it was a lovely name, I couldn’t let her keep it. I worked in Hollywood. Mulan was a popular Disney animated film. People would think it was the only Chinese name I could think of.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to dismiss this name. Maybe someo
ne in the orphanage really did think, when they first saw her, “strong” and “beautiful.” I decided to make Mulan her middle name. Tara Mulan Sweeney. This is what I wrote on all the documents.
When we arrived at the hotel, our Chinese facilitators told us, “Come to ballroom tomorrow at ten, we give you babies.” The next morning, all the nervous adults dutifully showed up in the hotel’s garish gold ballroom. An officious Chinese gentleman standing next to me announced: “First we will begin to give you babies, then we also play emotional music.” He turned to me and said in a confidential yet offhand manner, “Last time we no play emotional music. Not as good.” I wondered, “What’s the emotional music? Maybe some ancient Chinese folk tune, orchestrated with lutes? Or a little Yo-Yo Ma?”
He placed a banged-up 1980s boom box on a table.
The facilitators herded everybody to one side of the room, and then they began the baby transaction process. Names were announced, and the adopting parent or parents were maneuvered to the other side of the room, facing the crowd. Then, from a door behind them through which they could not see, a Chinese facilitator appeared holding a baby above his head. The crowd saw the baby before the prospective parent(s) did. There was a game-show quality to the presentation, as each baby appeared from behind Door No. 1. It was hard not to imagine scenarios in which a particular baby’s looks might cause the crowd to gasp or boo. But everyone was well-behaved, and of course the babies were beautiful.
Around the third or fourth baby handoff, the guy who was manning the boom box took his cue and pushed his button. Out of the speakers blared a tinny version of “My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from Titanic).” And not even the Celine Dion version from the movie. This was a generic Chinese Muzak version scored for electronic instruments meant to sound like acoustic ones, or vice versa. It was hard to tell.
If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother Page 3
