Sometimes when I find myself in an overpowering, emotionally charged situation I end up focusing on minutiae. During my first wedding we had a high mass in a large Catholic church full of guests. I spent the whole time absorbed by the threadbare red carpet on the altar. I can still see the weave now. Why they hadn’t replaced it? When had this carpet been installed? Was the carpet installer Catholic? Did he install the carpet in the morning or afternoon?
I was about to be handed my child, and all I could think was, This is the worst emotional music. What an awful choice. When I get back to Los Angeles I’m going to send them some really good emotional music. This is not the right music for a scared, forty-one-year-old woman who knows nothing about babies and is about to be handed a toddler.
Before I knew it, my name was called. I went to the other side of the room.
They brought in a baby, and put her in my arms.
Baby. In my arms.
She looked up at me, quizzically. She was wearing a light yellow shirt featuring a bear happily piloting a helicopter. Written in black permanent ink on her left shoulder were some Chinese characters. She was also wearing thick red sweatpants, and written across the back were the same Chinese characters. Her square-shaped, pudgy feet were bare.
She tilted her head slightly as she took me in. I tilted my head slightly as I took her in. She felt dense, heavy even. Sturdy and build to last.
All the books say, “Don’t expect to bond with your baby right away. This is just a person, like any other person. You’ll bond over time as you get to know each other.” To my surprise, I instantly felt a deep alliance.
She had a beautiful, distinctive little frown, gorgeous eyebrows, and full, pink, heart-shaped lips. Right away I could feel her vitality and health and her spirit—just the pure survivor in her. She immediately fell asleep in my arms, like, “Okay, all this pomp and ceremony is too much for me to deal with right now. I’m checking out.” Or maybe she was lulled by the emotional music. Whatever it was, it caused a surge of affection in me. I’ve wanted to check out like that, too.
Darcy, Jim, and I took her to my hotel room, and then they left Tara and me alone to get to know each other. I handed her a little doll that my friend Wendy had given me. Tara grabbed it, stared into its face, and then up into mine. She was tentative, quiet, maybe even too quiet. There was a stillness in her that I hadn’t noticed in other babies. She looked like she was either meditating or in shock.
Tara manipulated the doll in one hand for several minutes, moving it between her fingers. She would look back up at me from time to time. I tried hard not to have a maniacal grin on my face, which would—let’s face it—be really frightening. I mimicked her own facial expressions: calm, looking around, glancing meaningfully and quizzically. She took a deep breath, like she might begin to cry, but didn’t. Then she looked back down at the doll and brought her other hand up to it, moving it now with both hands.
I took in every inch of her. Her eyebrow hairs, the lashes on top and bottom of her eyes, her impossibly broad and chubby-red cheeks, her ears, her fingernails, her fingers, the back of her hands and how her fingers moved as she played with the little doll.
They’d put little cribs in the rooms, but that first night, I wanted to hold her and sleep with her. Then I figured she’d probably never slept with another person before, unless it was another infant. So I put her in the crib and tried to sleep. Both of us tossed and turned, but eventually I nodded off. I woke up in the middle of the night. I could see her there in the darkness, silently standing in her crib, staring at me with these piercing eyes. I whispered, “Here we go, baby.”
She did not smile. She never smiled. We started calling her the girl who didn’t smile. On the third day, I was videotaping her in our hotel room, just the two of us. That’s when it happened. A shy grin. I wasn’t sure if it was into the camera, or at me. Oh my God, I thought, this girl responds to cameras. It may be the best or worst of fates that she is about to fly to Hollywood, the city of cameras. I raised my head and looked directly into her eyes, furtively—not with dominance or too much interest. She smiled again. She smiled! I beamed back, giving her my big grin.
She immediately burst into tears. Oops, too scary.
But she let me hold her, and I felt her muscles relax.
I had conjured her and now, here she was.
CHAPTER SIX
Letters from Camp
My letters! All dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
It’s 103 degrees outside right now. This is not typical weather for midsummer Chicago. Unrelenting heat. The low is 80 degrees. I’m not sure what the humidity is, but it feels like 150 percent. We’ve had a week of this, and it isn’t breaking. My friend Jim, the one who accompanied me to China to adopt Mulan, once said about New York City in August, “I feel like I’m walking around inside someone’s mouth.” I’d never heard a more perfect description. That’s exactly what it feels like now.
I’ve been getting up at 5 A.M. and walking Arden to the beach—Lake Michigan—where we watch the sun rise (well, mostly we miss it by about ten minutes, but the sun is just above the horizon and looks like it’s dragging the entire lake up into the thick heavy air) and then walk back again. (I shouldn’t say “we” watch it, because Arden stares at me while I stare at the sky. He’s not interested in sand and water; he wants bushes with squirrels and rabbits, so he’d like to get on with it, thank you very much.)
It takes an hour and twenty minutes to do this walk. When I arrive home, before 6:30 A.M., I’m drenched. Rivers of perspiration pour from the top of my head, and, as they find their way under my hat, create six or so tributaries that cascade, Niagara Falls–like, onto my shoulders. I have become my own ecosystem.
Then I do not leave the house for the rest of the day. No sitting outside at night. I am hunkered down inside, like it’s winter and fifteen below zero. Michael will be coming home in two days and staying for three days before he takes off again. I will explain the appearance of husband/father Blum in due course, but for now, I would like to tell you that I have received my second letter (for this summer) from Mulan, who is, as I mentioned, at camp.
Mulan writes, “Dear Parents, I am really hungry so I should write this letter. I have made so many new friends. My counselors are nice. I need a pen. My favorite color is pink. My hair is in a ponytail. Love, Mulan.”
Her first letter from camp, which arrived three days ago, read: “Dear Mom & Dad, I am having a lot of fun. I need a pen. It is my third day and I have done Arts and Crafts three times and this note is so I can eat. Mulan.”
Mulan’s camp requires her to prove she’s written a letter home in order to get in line for dinner, so this explains how nearly all her letters start, which is to tell us how hungry she is and how this is the reason she is writing to us. The pink and ponytail information is well known by us, so this is filler advertising itself as news. She may have to show she’s written a certain number of sentences.
And they say that letter writing is a lost art.
Oh, I should explain how Tara came to become Mulan, shouldn’t I? Or how she was really never Tara to begin with. To do this, we must go back to those beginning months with Mulan, er . . . Tara. In fact, let’s go back to the plane ride from China.
I had to be in China for two weeks, in order to complete all the legal documents for the adoption. The first week is basically about making the babies Chinese citizens, so that in the second week you can make them American citizens. We had to go to the U.S. Embassy to get visas and other documents for our new babies, which we were required to show upon arrival in the United States. We all went together on a large bus, forty-one adults and nineteen babies. There was a parking lot outside the embassy area that was just for people applying for visas to visit or move to the United States. And the parking lot was filled with people, hundreds, thousands—I couldn’t tell exactly, but it looked like a footbal
l stadium’s worth of people waiting in a very long, snaky line.
Our bus pulled up, and it felt like all those people instantly stopped talking and turned toward us, staring. We got out, the sound of our feet on the steps was loud and inelegant. I looked out at the queue; they were watching us. They were looking at the babies in our arms. My back stiffened at our naked display of privilege. We were kings and queens who’d pointed our fingers at random foundlings who we’d raise for our own amusement. For our own satisfaction. To quell our own beneficent inclination. Before the situation became intolerably uncomfortable (but in truth accentuating it) our facilitators indicated that we should move to the front of the line. We were whisked in, ahead of everyone else.
Finally, it was time for us to go home. Darcy had flown home earlier, but Jim was flying back to L.A. with me, and then on to Seattle. I put Tara in the empty seat next to me and fell into a deep sleep. Then, waking from a trancelike slumber, I felt a poking sensation on my shoulder. I returned to partial consciousness, not quite understanding where I was. Through groggy eyes, I detected a man hovering over my seat. He said, “Hey lady, your baby’s on the floor.”
What was he talking about?
I guessed he was probably referring to the baby I saw on the floor of the plane near my feet. The baby on the floor—oh fuck. My baby. I picked Tara up, and she began to cry. She’d been happily asleep down there. (For several weeks after I got home, I suffered post-traumatic half-nightmares, jerking awake in the night at the dream-sight of that man, bending over me and now malformed like the Hunchback of Notre Dame: “Hey lady, your baby is on the floor.”)
At the airport, I was greeted by a new boyfriend, someone I’d begun seeing just before I left for China. But no. No, no. I don’t want to get into that particular digression. I’m forcing the next Joe into chapter 10. Off he goes.
When Tara and I walked in the front door of my house—just the two of us—she walked in on her own. At seventeen months old, she was walking. This dramatic “threshold moment” was nothing like I thought it would be. I’d envisioned myself carrying an infant in a snuggly. I had truly acquired a person, and she entered her new home on her own two feet.
I introduced her to my two cats, gesturing, “Tara, this is Rita, and this is Val.” Tara pointed at Rita and let out an earsplitting squeal of pure, unadulterated joy. Rita looked up at me with an expression that said: “Why would you do this to me? I’ve only been good to you.” Then she made her way under the bed in the guest room and Tara took off after her. For the first few weeks I would watch Tara’s little behind, stuck out from under the bed, legs flailing behind her as she tried desperately to grab for the cat. A couple of scratches later, Tara got the message, but she remained infatuated, the most undeterred of lovers.
We went to a lot of parks. I’d lived in Los Angeles for twenty years and had never noticed children’s playgrounds. Suddenly with a toddler, they sprang out at me everywhere. People seem much more likely to approach you when you have a child, and that’s both a great and frightening thing. Once someone asked me at the park, “Is her father Chinese?” And I said, “Yeah. I think so. I mean, it sure seems like it.”
They would also go up to Tara and ask her for her name, and she just would stare at them blankly and say nothing. I would allow a short pause and then answer “Tara” for her. One day when she was almost three years old, an elderly man leaned over and asked, “What’s your name, little girl?” I said, “Tara,” and simultaneously I heard my daughter say in a clear, loud voice, “Mulan.” She looked at me with a frown, as if to say, “You can call me Tara. But I answer to Mulan.”
I had to give it up. She was Mulan.
After that, I replied “Mulan” when people asked her name. Their faces would freeze in a smile and they’d say, “You mean, like after the movie?” And I’d say in a gush, “No, no. That was her name in China. I wanted to name her—well, I did name her Tara, but . . . blah blah blah.” I soon tired of that song and dance and eventually just answered emphatically and slowly, “Yes. After the movie.”
Once, a man asked me, “Like after Moulin Rouge?”
I didn’t get to name her in the end. All that frothy blather about the power of giving someone a name, about (read the following nasally, please) dictating the sounds that will emanate from other people’s mouths to identify my daughter, was all for naught. A pretty good introductory lesson in parenting, I think.
Reading my journals from this time, I can see that I was very excited to “do” things with Mulan. We would wake up early, around six in the morning. We’d often go to Denny’s for oatmeal, and then stop at the store. The grocery store was a great activity for us. Mulan would ride in the front of the cart, and I would hand her things to toss into the back. Then we’d go to the park, and I’d assist her on the climbing equipment and push her on the swing and help her go down the slide. We’d return home and empty the grocery bags (another good toddler activity: having her hand items from the paper bag to me, and she’d be absorbed watching me as I put them away). I’d make a snack and we’d get the extra-large Legos out and spread them across the living room floor. I’d glance at the clock after all this, and it would often read 10 A.M.
Ten A.M., people. Dear Lord. How is it that being with a child is so much fun and yet time passes so incredibly slowly?
I learned that being a mother takes a lot of energy.
Before I was a mother, whenever someone used to say something along the lines of how exhausting it was to be a parent of a young child, I would secretly think, Yeah—I won’t be like that. I’m full of energy. I consider myself practically tireless. Motherhood’s going to be a cakewalk for me.
They weren’t talking about that kind of energy. They weren’t referring to calorie-burning energy, although you do need plenty of that. It was more like the kind of emotional energy that is consumed by patience—the kind of energy you expend when you must continually concentrate on preventing yourself from exploding. Like when you patiently pick up the food that’s been thrown on the floor, replace it, and then that food gets thrown on the floor. Every time. This is when you realize that it’s probably better to give a baby just little bites of food, instead of a whole plate, because handing her a whole plate of food is like handing her a playground, and how could you have not realized that sooner and how come this wasn’t in any of the books? That’s the kind of energy we’re talking about here.
Also during this time, I was very busy rewriting my entire childhood. Turns out, my childhood was probably not nearly as bad as I once thought it was. In fact, my newly revised attitude about my mother is that she did the best she could. It dawned on me that the main topic of a thousand hours of therapy had been wiped clean, just like that.
When Mulan was about twenty months old, she went through a terrible time teething. She was up at night a lot, crying her eyes out. Neither one of us was getting any good sleep. One day I was talking to my friend Annabelle and we were comparing notes. She has a son who is about the same age as Mulan. He had been teething, too. As she is happily married, I said, “Wow, it must be nice to have someone there to help you in the night.”
She said, “Yeah, yeah. It can go like that. It can also go like this: You wake up in the night because the baby is crying. You have your idea of how to handle it and your husband has his idea and they are mutually incompatible ideas. You start fighting about it. Now your baby is crying and you’re in a big fight with your husband. Then you finally get up and go to your baby and comfort him and eventually he falls back to sleep. You tiptoe back into your bed, exhausted beyond all reckoning, and there’s your husband. And he wants to fuck you.”
“Oh God,” I said. “That’s much worse.”
At the time, I was working, voicing the main character on an animated TV show. I spent many afternoons recording. One day I was talking to one of the writer-producers, who had three children all under the age of five. I said to him, with circles under my eyes and my head hanging low, “How do you do i
t? It’s so hard. How, how do you do it?”
He whispered to me conspiratorially, “Get her on TV.”
I was confused. I said, “What? Audition her for a television show?”
He said, “No, get her on TV. You know, hooked on the tube.”
I was going to be one of those mothers who didn’t allow any sugar or TV. I said, “Well, Mulan doesn’t even look in the direction of the TV when I have it on at night. She thinks it’s just a flickering light.”
He said, “Keep it on. Direct her gaze. She’ll pick it up.”
He turned out to be right. I gained a whole new appreciation for TV.
In fact, TV turned out to be a godsend. Once she really liked TV, it was a fantastic carrot. Even right now, with Mulan at camp, my TiVo is piling up episodes of iCarly and Cupcake Wars. I encourage this. When we moved here to Wilmette, Michael came up with this great idea. Mulan could “earn” TV by reading or practicing piano. For every minute she did one of those activities, she got a minute of TV. Mulan was suddenly carrying a stopwatch with her at all times, and practicing piano constantly. She began to read and read. Now she is in a special piano program at Northwestern University that she had to audition for, and—at least to me, a not musically talented or trained person—seems quite accomplished. She plows through books and keeps a notebook adding up her time. She gets to reap the reward of TV on the weekends. Genius!
When I first discovered the rewards-and-punishments angle of parenting I didn’t like it. This was not how I figured I would parent. I thought my child would acquiesce to my direction out of admiration and loyalty and love and mostly by seeing that to sacrifice short-term desires for longer terms goals was obviously best.
But, duh. That wasn’t happening.
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