The final question pounds at my insides: Didn’t she want me?
Most adopted kids wonder about the same question. Kids simplify, and for many adopted children it goes like this, a belief in our rawest core: if we’re good, they want us, and if we’re bad, they give us away.
The deeper my mother digs in the dirt, the more hatred is dredged up in me. Mother-blame sets in. I hate her for her brief answer, hate her for adopting me, and hate myself for being adopted. Nothing bothers me about the identity of my birth father. Not yet. It’s primal, the complex bond between a mother and daughter. Why didn’t my prison mother keep me? Didn’t she want me? If I love Mother, am I betraying my other mother? But isn’t she the one who didn’t want me? I try not to think about this.
The more muddled and saddened I feel about losing my prison mom, the more I hate Mother. I cringe every time she says those words—“we love you”—and every hug adds to the hate.
MY BROTHER, JONATHAN, was adopted at birth and is almost two years older than I am and Caucasian. For much of my childhood, I didn’t know he was adopted, perhaps because he didn’t seem to suffer in the same ways I did. For some reason I just accepted him as my brother, maybe because I didn’t have another brother. He was it. I loved him as my protector and hated him for it at the same time. I hated his whiteness and felt jealous of it. I hated his boy-ness, his handsomeness, his charisma and social ease. I hated his favored standing in the eyes of my parents. And I loved him.
Light-olive-colored skin gave him the look of an Italian boy, with all the verbal and charismatic traits of a first-born. While my grades were sometimes higher than my brother’s, Jonathan was an affable young man—the polar opposite of his moody, timid sister. I’m the one who stretched the rules. Jonathan was bar mitzvahed and was a track star in school. He wore a confident attitude and fitted pants and t-shirts that showed off his muscles. We got along well, though our musical tastes clashed. He played the Beach Boys and surfer music of the 1960s. I cranked up Aretha, James Brown, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone.
My parents sent Jonathan to comfort me whenever I couldn’t stop one of my crying jags. Sometimes I’d sob and sob and sob until my throat muscles felt like they’d snap. He’d sit by my side and pat my back, and I’d calm down, simple as that. I remember him saying, “It’s all right,” even though “it” wasn’t all right, and I didn’t know what “it” was. His tenderness helped. I knew he loved me.
Every week after Sunday school, my mother and brother and I stopped at the Twenty-Third Street Bakery in the inner-city Central District, the only Black neighborhood in Seattle. While my mother ran in to pick up snacks for us, we waited outside in her faded-green Plymouth.
One Sunday Jonathan grabbed my shoulder and shoved me under the front seat of the car. I was still small enough to fit under it. He whispered in a panic: “I’ll lock the doors! They might take you!”
By “they,” I knew he meant someone whose skin color matched mine more than his. My t-shirt tore over my brown-skinned back from where the coiled car-seat springs stuck out.
Whenever someone walked by the car, he repeated his order, as if a Black family would take me away. Like me, he wasn’t sure in which world I belonged, but I knew he loved me with his big-brother protectiveness.
When Mother got into the car with a bag of doughnuts, Jonathan grabbed for the sugar and glazed ones, but I wanted to run away in our yard to climb trees, seclusions high in the sky.
MY FIRST MEMORY in my adoptive family is a recurring dream. The dream goes like this: From high above, I’m looking down on myself right before sleep descends in the bedroom I share with Jonathan. The room is dark, other than the nightlight by the roofless wooden dollhouse by my bed. Just when my spirit is about to leave my body and float around the world, a vision startles me. Five or so unrecognizable faces of women surround me in a half-circle. We are in a room full of movement, a busier environment than the sedate atmosphere of my childhood home. In this mirage, the onlookers’ faces, sometimes visible and other times obscured behind vertical lines, peer down at me as I rest on my bed. Narrow wooden rods hide their bodies below the shoulder. I wake soon after I fall asleep, the dream so brief.
The same women stand around me every night. I’m not distressed; I just feel crowded, my personal space invaded. I crave solitude. I wake up weepy, not fearful about the dream but, rather, sad about its recurrence, the repetition of images I can’t understand. I sniffle in the night so no one will hear.
Jonathan, asleep in his bed on the other side of the room, has no idea what’s going on. He’s a deep sleeper and never hears me stir or cry in the night.
MY RECURRING DREAM haunted me for years. I call it my crib dream, the vertical lines maybe crib rods from my past. I couldn’t shake the dream and even grew to expect it every night. After a while, the dream women at the edge of my bed stood like a wall between the world and me. They never left, yet I can’t identify who they were. When my brother and I moved upstairs into our converted attic bedrooms when I was around age seven or so, though, I never dreamed the vision again.
After I unearthed the news about my roots, I began to wonder if my dream vision had started in prison with my birth mother and other inmates, the vertical lines representing iron window guards and not crib rods. Or was the image a memory from one of my foster homes?
I have no idea if Mother heard me cry—whether it was from my bedwetting, even as a grade-school girl, or from my angst about waking up in the morning with my thumb in my mouth—but I knew she cared for me in the night. I longed to stop wetting my bed and sucking my thumb, tried and tried and just couldn’t. Not until my teens.
Many times after I’d woken up crying, I’d sit up, lean over the edge of my bed, grip my pillow so I wouldn’t fall out, and grope around in the dark for the single graham cracker my mother would hide each night in one of the rooms of the dollhouse next to my bed. The tooth fairy also visited the same dollhouse rooms the nights after I lost a tooth.
I’d discover my treasure and then sit up in bed and nibble it, one hand under my chin to catch the crumbs. The crackers appeared night after night, yet my mother and I never discussed this secret ritual. I locked my tenderness inside.
Memory can play tricks on us. Or maybe we trick memory to serve a deeper purpose. Maybe I kept the dream alive so I could keep the sensation of my prison mother surrounding me.
The longer I kept her with me, the more I pushed away Mother, the one I should have loved, the one I wasn’t sure I wanted to love. The longer I kept myself outside my family, the more I lived with the memory sensations of my first home in prison. I’d begun to glamorize my birth mother, to romanticize our relationship, romanticize the prison and whatever sent her there.
The longing stayed with me, but I didn’t know for what. I couldn’t control any of it.
CHAPTER THREE
RIVER OF QUIET
MY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS SEND ME to the principal’s office at least three times a week. One day I pull the fire alarm, another day I hide above the dropped-ceiling tiles and jump on top of my teacher. Bits of sheetrock rain down on her as I thump onto her desk. On another day I sit on a boy’s lap in the first row, and on a different day I wave the blue-gold flame of my stolen Zippo lighter, my favorite score from my parents’ bedroom, over toilet paper rolls and crumpled wads of paper towels in the girls’ bathroom trash can. No false fire drill this time.
All the trouble I stir makes me forget about the prison, forget the fact of my birthplace. It’s gone from my consciousness, but deep inside, a river of quiet anguish runs through me.
My gut’s in a constant tangle, and Mother drags me, trip after trip, to the doctor’s office for my stomachaches.
“Nothing wrong,” the doctor says on a visit.
She and my mother discuss bland foods.
Nothing wrong? This isn’t a food problem. What about the big prison secret?
It’s one of the random days I remember I was born in prison.
They’re all crazy. Everything’s wrong.
All the wrong out there, I store deep inside a cave, and stay mute for days at a time, day after day after day. No one can get to my deepest feelings.
My mother doesn’t miss a beat in her mission to groom me into refinement. Piano and French lessons, Hebrew in Sunday school, swim-team workouts where I train in the butterfly and breast stroke, and a two-week modeling class. It’s like forced servitude inside a world of arts and civility, tea and classical music, hours on hours of traipsing around the Seattle Art Museum, when my instinct wants to run free and play and prank. Prancy by nature. At the same time I find peace in art and music. Our family ritual of tea at night is way too civil.
But my ballet on the weekend . . . Every Saturday afternoon from the time I’m in third grade, my mother walks me to the last house on our dead-end street where I sashay across the oak floor in the basement of our neighbor’s homemade dance studio and do grand plié at the ballet bar.
I love the freedom and silence of dance. The classical music, the meditation, and the athleticism all ease a struggle I later learn relates to sensory-integration issues often triggered in drug-exposed children. The shiny, varnished oak floor, the bright reflection of the sun on the mirrored walls, everything makes life better for the hour I’m cocooned in the studio filled with sweat and fluorescent lights. Most of all, I love my pink tutu and love grinding the leather of my ballet slippers into the dusty box of resin.
Dance is my relief from feeling abnormal, an escape from the angst. No one’s told me what race I am, yet I see I’m weird because nobody else in my world is brown with white parents. I already know I’m adopted, but what else? And why am I a different color than my parents? I need answers.
MY PARENTS TAKE my brother and me to the theater, ballet, modern-dance performances, poetry readings, museums, and everything kooky and experimental in the arts. The magic of dance and mime touch my soul more than anything, then or now. It started when I was around eight. I’d dream of theater and movement, mime and dance, from the moment I sat in a darkened theater with my parents and Marcel Marceau tiptoed on stage in his white ballet shoes and mimed inside an invisible box.
But I’m sure I don’t belong in the world of dance or theater. Apart from my love of dance, I’m a tomboy, and besides, the ballerinas on stage and the dolls in stores only have blonde hair. Not light caramel-brown skin or wavy black hair like mine, so thick it volumizes into troll-doll hair whenever the humidity spikes. It’s the 1960s, long before Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamison have shown the world ballet isn’t just for white people.
Besides, how can I flit around in the dance studio like a fairy or dream of grand jetés across the big stage with red velvet curtains if my dance teacher—if anyone—ever finds out my secret? The more I suppress it, the more profoundly I believe I’m a bad girl. I think being prison-born means I need to walk tough in the world.
I ALSO CRAVE adventure.
Spring leaps into the first day of summer, liberating me from sixth grade. It’s before I find the letter.
Away from the confines of my house and family, I’m emancipated and brave, not the timid, compliant, and sometimes mute little girl my family thinks I am. Whenever I’m out on some adventure in the neighborhood, my mother’s words that boil my blood—“you’re one of us”—disappear. It’s magic. She’s gone. My family’s gone. My school and the kids with their jeers of “ching-chong” and taunts of pulled eyes, all gone.
One day I head to a neighbor’s house across the street where they’ve just finished building a ten-foot-high retaining wall. Cement still damp, it calls to me.
I tread across the dewy lawn and plant both feet firmly on the concrete where the grass meets the top of the wall. The back of my tennis shoes hang into the grass.
Heights jumble my guts, but I’d do anything—even fly to the moon and back if I could—to dance on the hairline between fear and excitement. I leap. I fly. I drink in every blast of adrenaline as if my very life depends on it.
Inch forward, I tell myself. Then I lift a foot, ready to jut my toes over the wall’s edge. My rubber soles slip, still slick from the moist grass, and the fear of falling fires panic in me. My stomach pulls tight. The world around me vaporizes and my head fills with the fervor for risk and fun: danger-fun. My whole universe right up to the edge of this second disappears. The rush of adrenaline drowns out everything else—my past, my pain, even the lockdown. Rather than quiver in terror, I’m at peace in the face of fear and excitement.
I slide on the wall up to the arches of my feet. Adrenaline rips through me and crackles my world open, my senses on fire. I inhale the whole neighborhood—chlorine from my best friend Wendy’s pool next door, dog poop in someone’s backyard, fumes from the Ferrari revving at the end of the block. The crack of a baseball across the yard means Jonathan won’t check on his little sister. It all mingles in my lungs and floods me as I teeter on top of the wall.
No one’s around as I teeter on the wall. Just how I like it. I’m not here to impress anyone. I’d rather daredevil alone.
Petrified to even peek over the wall ledge, I pace back and forth on top across its six-foot length. Then I lean to gaze past the brink onto the hard-packed dirt below. The soles of my tennis shoes, now dry and squeaky, catch on the concrete. I stumble. Back away. My heart pumps and swells into a bowling ball in my chest. Terror and excitement clash inside me.
Better sit, I tell myself, and plop on top of the wall and dangle my feet. I press my palms into the concrete nubs, bend at my waist to peer down, and dig my nail-bitten fingertips into the edge, not much to grip onto. So I push the heels of my shoes into a crevice in the wall to stabilize. Then I lean over farther to gauge where the concrete meets earth.
Almost sick to my stomach from the jumble of fear and anticipation, I pop up to my feet. My mother’s voice rings in my head: Be more careful, dear.
“Careful” is not part of me unless I’m around my family, my teachers, or my mother, and only then does caution seep into me like an oozy infection.
A few kids, mostly boys, gather below me. They dig in the dirt with sticks and fling pebbles against the wall. Behind them a swing-set sits empty. Lobe-leafed ivy grips a fence. A songbird perches on top and flaps its wings in a dance to the da-da-da-dat da-da-da-dat of a jackhammer from a few houses away. Maybe there’s another wall under construction for me to climb. Pretty soon some boys from next door run over to join the kids at the bottom of the wall and they all toss their heads back to look up.
I squat down a bit as if to high dive off the end of a diving board, then swing my arms forward and fly, feet first. I whoop with glee and the kids hoot and howl. One of the boys jumps up and down and shouts: Do it again!
Yes, do it again, I tell myself in the split second after I hit the dirt. I’m high from the flight and relieved to land, yet at the same time hate how my feet must ever touch ground again. Why can’t I soar into eternity? Maybe I was born in the wrong body—meant to fly, not walk.
My courage balloons with the claps and cheers, the kids egging me on.
“Anyone wanna try with me?” I ask my audience. No takers.
“You go again!” a boy shouts. He pumps his fist in the air.
I race up the grassy slope to the corner where the wall meets the house. This time, with no pause, as soon as I reach the top and without one look down, arms out in a perfect second position—a T—head high, in my longest stride, I step straight into space. Three quick steps of walking on air! Then I plummet down.
CHAPTER FOUR
ON THE EDGE
I LAND ON MY FEET AS ALWAYS. When each succeeding jump grows duller, the one thrill left catches my eye on my last flight through air: a flurry of snapdragons and purple and yellow pansies in the garden. They beam their happy-smile faces at me. Beauty blurs with speed but nothing equals my first thrill, alive on the edge.
I’ll do anything to soar in the air and feed this adrenaline rush, where something drives m
e to take risks, to jump from heights, from a tree, a wall, the small cliff down the street from our house, from on top of the swing set in our backyard, a rooftop, the moon. I need the high, the fire in me between fear and fun. It also helps calm the bounce in my brain.
It happens anywhere, most often at school or at home. Ideas ripple behind my eyes as if a tsetse fly had burrowed there and infested my senses. Sometimes thoughts tumble through my brain and I can’t connect them in order. Then, it’s free-for-all fun inside my head where my wires spark wild and crossed. It can happen when people talk, when I write, or when I read. It can happen when I speak. My imagination chases a phrase somewhere and I might not come back in time to catch the next sentence. The flow, the meaning, sails away. Then I’m in sensory overload and sentences swim. My thinking turns into a cut-and-paste collage and once I put the pieces together, a slow-motion static buzzes in a hive inside where I need to decode and unscramble key words, phrases, sentences. Everything mashes together while I patch the full meaning into something that makes sense. How can just twenty-six letters in the alphabet whirl up such pandemonium?
None of this is good for a daughter with a scholar for a father who lectures us kids, not yet double-digit ages, in sentences a paragraph long and addresses us as if we’re graduate students in his advanced seminar on Paradise Lost, the epic poem to which he devotes his entire career as a literary critic. As an undergrad at Yale, my father’s advisor suggested he not write about Milton for his thesis because, as my father tells the story, “How could a Jew understand Milton?” Yale and Harvard once had a quota of ten percent Jews. As it turns out, my father ended up an expert on Milton and was asked later to teach in their summer schools.
I DON’T ALWAYS let on when I need help but my teachers reexplain homework assignments until I understand. It just takes their patience, with a hand on my shoulder and one extra try. Or two tries. Or five. Sometimes I just pretend I understand.
Prison Baby Page 2
