I forgive you.
Please forgive me.
I love you.
Good-bye.
In the ICU cubbyhole next to my mother, I looked at the tubes coming into and out of her. I was used to them, even the one that went into her nose and was dark with backed-up blackish-green bile. I stroked her hair, stiff and coarse, and held her hand, strangely warmer than usual.
Saying good-bye to my mother meant saying good-bye to the dream I’ve always had that, at some moment, probably near the end, we would somehow manage to get past our anger and disappointment, and really talk, in a way that would not make me tense, waiting for her criticism, her dismissal. She would say I love you, and I would say it, too. Most important, she would say, “It’s not your fault.” I always knew this was complete fantasy. Yet I still imagined it would happen.
Now she was saying nothing at all.
“Mom, I hope you can hear me,” I told her. “I really, really hope I’m doing the right thing. I want to say thank you; I know you did your best. It didn’t always work out so well, but your intentions were always good. I’m sorry we were never… I’m sorry I wasn’t the daughter you wanted. I’m so sorry.” I started to cry. “For all the stuff that didn’t work between us. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me. I’m trying to do what you would want me to do. I’ll take care of Dad. I’ll take care of your grandsons.” I put my hand to her pale cheek. “I hope you get to see Mema and Poppy, and Uncle Bernie, and Kenny. I hope they’re there, somewhere, waiting for you.”
The next morning Alex came to the hospital and sat in the ICU with me. I don’t think I could have done that at his age—spend an entire day watching my grandmother die. But he did, and I am forever grateful.
After flying twenty hours, from Sarajevo to Zagreb, from Zagreb to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to New York, Lenny and Damien arrived at the hospital with their luggage that afternoon. We talked for a while; then Damien was alone with his Nana for a few minutes to say his good-byes—then Alex. After both boys went home, Lenny said his good-byes, and we watched as the nurses took all the tubes out of my mother and turned off the ventilator. After all the hours and days of listening to its calming whoosh, the ICU cubicle was strangely quiet. We pulled in another chair and Lenny and I waited. Exhausted from his twenty-hour round-the-world journey, he soon fell asleep.
I watched the monitors and my mother. Her blood pressure slowly dropped. The numbers went lower and lower. Her breathing slowed, then sometimes stopped, then started again. I stood next to her, unafraid of my mother for the first time in my life. For once, I felt I’d done right by her. I’d given her husband, who loved her so dearly, a chance to kiss her good-bye. I’d given her grandsons, who also loved her, their chance to say good-bye. I was standing by her, doing what I believed she wanted me to do.
It was the best I could manage. She would always be a mother duck, and I would always be a swan. But I would be the best swan I could.
Her breath got softer and softer as the numbers dropped lower and lower. It was as if she were waiting, too—waiting for this to be finished. Lenny stirred in his chair; seeing me standing, he came to my side. We watched, together, holding hands, as my mother drew another breath, and another; and then stopped.
Two years later: The pain started over a weekend, a sharp, piercing pain in my stomach that was worse every time I bent or stretched. I waited a week for it to go away. When it didn’t, I went to the emergency room, thinking I might have appendicitis. I spent nearly eight hours in the ER, flipping back and forth between scared witless (it’s cancer, I’m dying) and surprisingly calm (it’s nothing, just indigestion), until finally a doctor took a look at my cold naked tummy and said, “You’ve got an incision rupture.”
“What do you mean?”
“The surgical incision you had has ruptured,” he said, pressing gently on my navel. “Your hernia surgery…”
“I’ve never had a hernia,” I said.
“Well, it sure looks like it. I can see the scar, very faintly. And you can feel the rupture.” He put my hand on the middle of my stomach and pressed gently. Sure enough, there was a knot, like a peeled grape, just under the skin.
I thought he was crazy. But a few days later, the doctor I went to for a second opinion said, “It’s an incision rupture.” Peering closely at my navel, he went on: “You can see the scar.”
I asked my father if I’d ever had surgery as a baby or small child. “No, of course not,” he said. When I pressed him: “You were never even in the hospital. You were always perfectly healthy.” Did the adoption agency mention anything about surgery? What about my foster mother, the lady with the beautiful plants in Queens?
“No, nothing.”
I asked Faith as well.
“Do you remember the doctors in the hospital saying anything about a hernia when I was born?”
“No, definitely not; you were perfect.”
But the third doctor confirmed it. “Definitely a surgical rupture,” he said. “Right here.”
A few weeks later I had a small piece of mesh sewn into my abdomen to hold the rupture together. I left the hospital after only a few hours with a bandage patched onto my stomach and an excuse to stay home from work for a few days.
Faith called daily to make sure I was okay. Friends called; my dad checked in. My kids took good care of me, as did my husband. I felt cared for, and loved.
When I went back for my one-week checkup, I asked again what it was. Surely once he opened things up, the surgeon would find that he and the other doctors had made a mistake.
But they hadn’t. His theory: I had most likely been born with a hernia and had it repaired before I was adopted at five months old. Perhaps that was why I stayed in foster care so long—to make sure the surgery was a success.
I felt like I’d been abducted by aliens. I had surgery I never knew I had. It was from another life, when I was Jessica. There was no one to ask: What is that red line across my stomach? No one to tell me what happened.
There may always be pieces of the puzzle that fit or don’t, that make sense or don’t. I may know where they fit, but I may not. And just when I think I have all the pieces, something new will come along and scramble it all over again.
How do you become who you are? How much is in your blood and how much do you pick up along the way? What is inside you, unalterable and fixed? How much do you know about who you are, about how you came to be? What does it mean to be a daughter, a mother, a family? What is learned, and what can never be taught?
Some pieces of my life have never lost their sharp edges. I don’t believe in the things that often provide answers: destiny, fate, predetermination… God. Was I born a blank slate, to be written on at will? Did I put myself together from bubble gum and glue? I now know who I came from, but I still don’t know how I came to be.
Our lives—Faith’s and mine—were marked by adoption. She lived with the shame of what she had done, as I lived with the wound of what had been done to me. Faith says she would not want anyone reading this to think she believes adoption is a better option than abortion.
I would not want anyone reading this to think I don’t believe in adoption, despite how it affected my life. What I do not believe in, however, is pretending that adoption and biological birth are exactly the same thing—that adoption is the magic wand that books like The Chosen Baby would have us believe, that makes a child you adopt identical, somehow, to the child of your womb. It is not the same thing. That does not mean, however, that adoption isn’t beautiful, or wonderful.
In order to be found, you must first be lost. But when it comes to adoption, we focus on the finding, and pretend the loss does not exist. And there is so much loss—loss that deserves attention, respect, and recognition. The loss of the birth mother, of her child. The loss of the adopted child, of her biological family. The loss of the adoptive mother, of her fertility. For adoption to work—to really work, not just be a bandage over a wound—we must acknowledge the wounds, mourn t
he losses, open them to the light, and accept the scars.
In the 1950s, adoption was marvelously simple. Today the world of creating families is becoming more and more complex, with foreign adoptions, private adoptions, mixed-race adoptions, special-needs adoptions, not to mention all the interventions of infertility treatments and surrogacy. People can now adopt frozen embryos—the sperm from one man combined with the egg of one woman— implant them into the womb of another woman, and raise them as part of yet another family. We have moved so far from what once was a simple process that defining motherhood itself may soon be impossible. Is it the woman who created the egg? Carried the fetus? Raised the baby?
I would never deny any woman the breathtaking joys of motherhood. But we can’t ignore, and shouldn’t pretend, that all these things are purely positive, with no scars, no problems to overcome, no primal wounds, or no reasons to mourn.
Giving birth is a simple process, but in the end there’s nothing simple about it. Biology may not be destiny, but it’s a hell of a lot more powerful than any of us give it credit for.
I am so grateful for having found Faith, for being able to try to put together the pieces of who I am. But in the end, despite all the pieces and the discoveries, I’m still not sure what I was born, and what I was made, how much was a product of genetics and how much was the result of my upbringing. The big things in life, I’ve come to realize, don’t have easy answers. And sometimes they don’t have answers at all. What is nature and what is nurture? Why am I who I am? I don’t think I’ll ever know.
I’ve been very lucky to have so many wonderful pieces to put together. If there are still a few rough edges, a few pieces out of place, that’s okay. I don’t regret having been adopted, because I’m pretty happy with who I am, and the way my life has taken shape. I can’t really imagine myself any other way. I accept that sometimes life is simply random, and that sometimes there are no answers.
In the end, we are who we are. And that’s not a bad thing.
Bunny and her mother—about 1971.
Bunny at about ten years old: “There was a little girl and she had a little curl . . .”
Bunny in her twenties.
EPILOGUE
“I’m so sorry.”
That was just about the first thing Faith said to me when I found her
“For what?” I asked.
“For giving you away,” she said.
To me it never felt that there was anything to forgive. For one thing, I’d been told my whole life, since before I can remember, that adoption was “for the baby’s own good.” I believed that, and once I knew Faith’s story, I agreed: I don’t think she had a better choice. But also, it’s impossible for me to imagine being anything else. I am adopted, I have green eyes, I am female—these are the incontrovertible facts of who I am. I could move to Rome, I could convert to Bahai’sm, I could even have gender reassignment surgery. It doesn’t matter: I’d still be an adoptee.
While we were completing the editing of this book, Faith was diagnosed with what turned out to be terminal cancer.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to me, again, one morning on the phone.
“For what?” I asked, again.
“I’m sorry we didn’t have more time together,” she answered.
This time I agreed.
Thirteen years sounds like a lot, but it wasn’t enough. Thirteen years wasn’t enough, thirty years would not have been enough, a hundred years would not. No amount of time is enough to say, “Now I am done with this person I love. Now I can manage to live happily without her.”
When Faith was first diagnosed, it seemed like an unpleasant bump in the road. She told me about it on the phone, making light of it.
“When this is over,” she said, “we’ll have lunch. We’ll go to a show. When this is over, I’ll have you and Lenny here for dinner.”
“When this is over” lasted through vicious chemo that landed her in the hospital for two weeks, weakness that put her in a wheelchair, pain that wracked her body, a second opinion that hurt worse than the cancer, more treatments that didn’t seem to be working, a second hospital stay. Despite the amazing list of similarities between us—passion for Kevin Kline! tiny hands! love of show tunes!—we did not share the quality of optimism. I was terrified. Faith was calm, upbeat, uncomplaining. When I asked, on the phone, how she was feeling, her answers were either “Fair” or “So-so” or, on really bad days, “Not so great.” And they were always immediately followed by, “But how are you?” When I asked what I could do—make soup or bring books or get DVDs—her unvarying response was, “Just call me.” I called almost every day.
After the third, and worst, opinion, hospice care was called in, first at home, then at a facility in the Bronx. I went to visit. The receptionist gave me the room number, but when I walked into the room and saw a stranger in the bed, I walked right out. I double-checked the room number, then the chart hanging on the wall. I seemed to be in the right place, but it wasn’t until I saw a small photo of Faith and her husband on the nightstand that I accepted that this was indeed my birth mother. Her head was nearly bald, her skin pale and tight over the bones of her face, her mouth a gaping darkness. There was so much less of her—less hair, less weight, less being.
I knew she wouldn’t be awake; her son, my half-brother, had told me she hadn’t awakened in several days. Her breathing was deep and sluggish and reminded me of my mother’s profoundly slow breathing as she lay dying in the ICU four years earlier.
I spent an hour sitting by her side. Twice she opened her eyes and stared, her eyes blurred as if clouded by cataracts. Her mouth moved, and gargled noises emerged. It seemed as if she were trapped underwater, lost in a dense blanket of fog that she couldn’t break through. I wanted to reach out and grab her, pull her up through the water, back into the world.
She died just a few days later.
I conjugate my loss: I have lost Faith, I have lost, I am lost. This feeling is strange, confusing, and all I can think to do with it is call Faith and talk about it, or send her an e-mail. I cannot quite conceive that there will be no response. I feel as if I am at sea, alone, adrift with my loss. I was not part of her family, she was not part of mine. Over the years, I met her husband and son only a handful of times. Her daughter, my half-sister, refused to meet me, for reasons I have never understood. Faith met my husband and children several times, and a few close friends, but she lived her life with her family and I have lived my life with mine.
We saw each other more often than I saw any of my friends, and most of my family, and we talked or e-mailed at least three or four times a week. We were our own private island, each other’s therapist, pen pal, safe house, and long-distance lover—the person who knows no one else in your life, so you can therefore tell her everything. But she was more than just the recipient of every confession. Maybe because we never had to go through all the mother-daughter drama, we were able to connect as friends, and as something more, something I’ve never been able to define, but it was extraordinary and unique and wonderful. I will miss talking to her, and I will miss hearing her deep, musical voice. I will miss her wisdom, her warmth, her enthusiasm. We were enormously similar, but I always thought of her as a better version of me: kinder, smarter, more compassionate.
I know how fortunate I am to have found Faith—not just to have found this missing piece of my life, but to have found this particular person, this remarkable connection, this warm and enriching relationship. It is one thing to love someone you are related to; it is something else entirely to genuinely like and appreciate her.
Losing Faith leaves my world a little grayer, and a lot emptier. I have lost a friend I could always turn to, always count on. I have lost someone who made me feel loved, and safe, and welcome. Faith thought I was perfectly wonderful, wonderfully perfect. I thought she was, too. I feel an enormous loss for what she was, and for what she was to me. I will miss her greatly.
J.S. Picariello
September
2010
Jil with her mother.
Lenny, Jil, and Damien at 14 months.
Jil and Kenny.
Bunny examining a bust of her head. The photo was taken by Jake.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks to a crucial few: To Faith, for wisdom, love, and understanding. To the dearest of old friends, Joanne Rubin and Jeri Darling, who listened and listened and together became Janey. To Neva Sharon, for keeping the letters and a long and valued friendship. To Dr. Diane Meier, a remarkable woman and caregiver. To Helen Morris, who always gets it. To my sons, Damien and Alex, who make me laugh and make me proud. And to Lenny, who always believes in a better me than I ever believe in myself. Alla famiglia!
—JS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
After graduating from NYU film school, Jil Picariello became an advertising and marketing copywriter, working for several ad agencies and a long list of major magazines, including New York, People, Parenting, and Reader’s Digest. A New York native, Picariello holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two sons.
Bunny Crumpacker was the author of seven books, including The Sex Life of Food and Perfect Figures. She also wrote a children’s book, two books based on food pamphlets published from 1875 to 1950 (a chronicle of American cooking in those years), and was the coauthor, with her husband Chick Crumpacker, of a book about jazz. A New York native, Crumpacker worked as a caterer, editor, newspaper columnist, and school community relations officer. She and her husband, a record producer, lived in the Hudson Valley, just north of New York City.
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