God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  Photographs were strewn throughout—in Florida swimming with a dolphin, him backlit by the Planet Hollywood sign, her backlit by the Planet Hollywood sign, snowmobiling in Aspen, professional photos with his hand expressively positioned on her stomach, occasionally an idyllic picture of the Eiffel Tower or a beach in the Bahamas, with neither of them in the frame to suggest they were there to see it. Several couples shared their photos of the Magic Kingdom, all taken from approximately the same location. There were photographs shot in a single day by the kind of photographer who directs you to rotate your head on your neck in exceptional ways, who’d arranged the couple in various still lifes: beaming between the forked branches of a tree, sitting on rocks beside a small waterfall, donning different-colored raincoats and, inexplicably, sunglasses.

  There were zany photos of her, standing on her head in the living room (Mindy has flipped!); him leaning proudly against the hood of his stock car (Vrrrrroom!). Photographs had been cut out with pinking shears and surrounded with glittery stickers hand-stuck to the page. Captions were often handwritten with arbitrary capitalization, framed by thought bubbles, and more often than not terminated with exclamation points: Birthday time is Fun time! Margins featured baby rattles, stacked blocks, and teddy bears. In one case, an actual rattle was attached to the letter’s cover, securing its position at the top of the pile. Sometimes there were appendices, with letters of recommendation from mothers and fathers and good friends and siblings of the hopeful couple, vouching for their “constant, effortless, and plentiful smiles. What sweeter emotions could a child be given?”

  I was escorted in a jolly promenade through happy homes and histories, through a world rendered elementary, where quotation marks designated common phrases and important words were written in all caps. Todd likes to “kid around,” loves “TOOLS” and is quite handy around the house! Where sincerity was tempered with lightness: Interior decorating is her passion—she moves the furniture around occasionally to keep me on my toes (and, in case I did not get the joke: HA HA!). Couples made random declarations, as if cornered awkwardly at a cocktail party—Dressing alike is Fun!—and fumbled for words, often seeming to forget I was literate and a native speaker of English. Sometimes the uncomfortably self-promotional nature of the form was playfully averted, as with a letter written as a screenplay in which the couple was endorsed, between antics, by their cats, Tillie, Simon, and Bingo.

  * * *

  None of the couples had chosen adoption out of concern for the unwanted children of the world, the way we fertile girls with noble principles sometimes imagined we’d do. Every single one was driven to it by misfortunes they mentioned only briefly. Complex stories inflected toward the positive. After five years of infertility treatments, two surgeries, fertility drugs, numerous tests and doctor visits, we believe adoption is the answer to our prayers!

  I had so many questions. I wondered how it felt to know their child wouldn’t look like the partner they said they loved so much. I wanted to know how their relationship had survived the blow of infertility—it couldn’t be their common interest in old movies (Rick makes the popcorn!). Maybe it wasn’t the place for stripped-bare authenticity, but I found myself wanting to scratch through the polish and explore territory not sanctioned by the agency template. In a situation like ours, with so little time to make such a big commitment, honesty was expedient. I wanted a candid glimpse of the couple. Special signals and particular stories to give me some flicker of an instinct that I’d found someone with whom I could share a future.

  Instead they lured me with loose praise, congratulating me for my strength and thanking me for my generosity. They assured me that giving them my baby would be the most unselfish and mature choice I would ever make. They tugged at my heartstrings with e-mail addresses like childofourdreams@aol.com and overwhelmed themselves with premature and cumbersome gratitude: Words are simply inadequate to describe the joy we will experience when we are told that you have made our dreams come true. They said they admired my courage. They knew I had a hard decision to make. But little did they know I was praying for a miscarriage! That the trinkets of the world they dreamed about by day—rattles and blue bears and birthday cakes—happened to moonlight in my nightmares.

  It was only on the topic of openness that the tone of the letters changed. They read like legal contracts written just to be revoked: “We are willing to pursue a level of openness that would be mutually beneficial and comfortable for all involved.” Some said that they would be willing to keep in touch through letters and photos, which seemed to suggest I wouldn’t get to see my child in person again. One couple offered a commitment to openness to sharing every progress of the child’s life, but didn’t specify what might constitute sharing (would they send letters through the adoption agency? Could we share an actual experience together?) or progress (the child’s first step? Or high school graduation—maybe with no progresses in between?). The whole phrase commitment to openness to sharing was so strangely layered, it was surely not to be mistaken for commitment to openness.

  But shouldn’t they be cultivating visions of openness that had the same neon joy and optimism as their idealized dreams of parenthood? If they could imagine rocking my baby to sleep every night, was it so difficult to think about having me over for lunch now and then? I thought that some of the warmth and affection they somehow already felt for my child might spill over to me by association. Or out of gratitude for my courage and generosity.

  My sister was the first to call it: vultures. She wrote from China, in response to the letters I’d sent her. She said all those long nights waiting for a baby, they weren’t dreaming of a birth mother. They were only feigning compassion as they hovered, gliding in graceful circles as they waited to dive in. They wouldn’t dare admit that I was merely a means to an end. That as soon as I supplied the vital ingredient to create their family, they would perceive me as a threat to it. That we were natural enemies.

  Her mistrust was disheartening, but I knew that there were deep dynamics in play, and I was prepared to be vigilant. I understood the advantage of my position. We were tall, well educated, and white; we didn’t do drugs; we’d decided on adoption together and had the support of our families; and we planned to give up our child as a newborn—all of these things, Molly said, would be highly desirable to potential couples. The only sensible thing was to make the most of that, to scrutinize everyone fully, to indulge every doubt, and to demand all the information they were reluctant to give us. Because after we signed the papers, the asymmetry of our positions would be fully reversed.

  The letters closed in the spirit of their openings, full of joy and excitement, with easy promises about how much affection the couples had to offer. Couples assured me my baby would be loved and cherished with all their hearts, and I wanted to believe them—but by then I’d grown so wary that even those guarantees, so grandiose, so sweeping, so certain, gave me pause. It had been among the very few things I hadn’t doubted: I hadn’t doubted that the couple who adopted my child would be well equipped to parent, and I never thought my child would be adopted and not loved. Tragedy of tragedies.

  * * *

  I went to visit Molly alone one afternoon when Jevn had class, but I didn’t talk about my worries. I knew she’d tell me what I could easily tell myself, that writing a Dear Birth Mother letter is difficult, that couples have no idea how to represent themselves, that their letter is only the first step in getting to know them. She addressed my concerns all the same. We had arrived at the chapter in our workbook called Entitlement; Molly explained that it could be a long, hard process for love to develop between an adoptive parent and a child.

  “I’m sure it seems strange, since you can see how much they want a family. But it’s not automatic. Adoptive couples go through so much scrutiny and red tape—it can be hard for them to really accept the child as their own.”

  The midwinter gray pressed against the windows of the counseling room as she spoke, and from my seat the skyline
wasn’t visible to orient me. Openness was at that moment the least of my concerns. I needed to know my child would be loved. But how could a couple make such a promise?

  “Adoptive parents need to feel entitled to parent in order to feel free to love. But because they don’t have the baby growing inside them like you do, they have to accept their parenthood on the basis of legal procedure—and that’s really difficult. It can feel abstract and shallow compared with your connection, and it can make bonding with the child challenging.”

  I got it, and I even felt sympathy for it. Adoptive parents wouldn’t be biologically duped to love. After persuading me of their worthiness to parent my child, they would have to persuade themselves of the same. After bypassing nature to acquire a child, they would have to work against nature to love it. And yet every single couple gave me a guarantee of their love. This was a high-stakes experiment; how could we be sure they would succeed?

  “Openness can really help,” Molly said. “Adoptive parents benefit so much from knowing that, of all your options, you chose them. You are able, personally, to give them permission to parent the child. No one at an agency or in court can do that with the same authority.”

  She told me other ways Jevn and I could help. We could let them name the child, for example. We could let them stand by at the hospital to meet the baby right after delivery. We could have a formal “entrustment ceremony,” like a wedding, during which our friends and families would gather to witness our bequeathal of parental rights to the couple.

  Of course they could name it, I thought. And they’d be welcome to be at the hospital. And yes, we could have a ceremony—with poems from Kahlil Gibran and scripture and coffee and refreshments, whatever it takes. Why would I not do everything possible to help the family to whom I was giving my child succeed in loving it?

  That night I returned, as usual, to the profiles, and I really thought I could see it, that struggle to find a way to love. Sheldon and Toni offered what they called a forever home and a forever family, and though I was insulted by the implication I had only transient and trivial things to offer, I realized that if a couple thought that, they’d feel more than entitled—they’d feel obligated to parent. Just as I consoled myself with the image of all the worthy families in need of babies, they were working toward entitlement by imagining all the poor babies in need of homes. What would it do to us, I wondered, to know the actual facts of one another?

  And perhaps the couple who’d given detailed specifications for what they wanted in a child—no African Americans, but a Caucasian-Asian mix is an acceptable alternative if Caucasian isn’t available, and disabled is okay if disability is mild or medically correctible—were just being realistic about the limits of their love. Maybe they felt they could only guarantee love if the child resembled them—or perhaps they thought the baby might need such deception, like a nestling who will only accept food from a convincing puppet bird. Better they be sure than take on a child they couldn’t love.

  But was it not enough that I’d let them name the baby, and be there at the birth, and tell them, wholeheartedly, that I’d chosen them? This was the advantage, Molly assured me, of openness. I could give them entitlement and free them to love in a single stroke.

  “But with openness,” Molly had said, “they also see your pain,” and the way she said it, it was a warning. The window of open adoption would open both ways. They would feel responsible for my sadness, which I’d struggle to hide, while the very thing that would enable me to overcome it, and give them my child, and let them name it and be at the hospital—a selfless, strong, and unconditional love—would be an ever-present measure of their own love. My presence could strengthen the structure of their family, but it would have an unpredictable capacity to bring it down. Which explained why some couples negated me even in their letter addressed to me—Bill and Julia, for one, assured me: this will be our child, not our adopted child. Entitlement was just more assuredly achieved in the absence, real or imagined, of the birth mother.

  And maybe that was why, the way Molly said it, it sounded like I had some kind of responsibility. As if, although I might not be able to make myself perfectly invisible, I would need to make certain things invisible. But whatever the complexities, what was certain was that the structure had to stand. I couldn’t give my child away without confidence that it would be loved, and I wouldn’t sacrifice that love for my privilege to peer in the window.

  * * *

  Exhausted, I put the profiles aside and stood up to make dinner. Even more difficult than weighing all our possible futures was imagining the child I was doing it for. The couples seemed to have a clearer image of my baby than I did, but I felt sure we were all just speaking in a kind of code. For them, a child stood for happiness and meaning, the fulfillment of their expectations, but for me the baby was me. My protective instincts weren’t maternal; maternity had simply given me permission to guard myself as I never had before. I had no independent desire for my child, no separate compulsion to love or care for it, no faith that it would ever be anything but the hardness in my abdomen and a massive distraction from architecture school. I wondered how I could make good decisions for a thing I couldn’t see or feel or understand.

  My mother called, and I told her, just for fun, that I was thinking about names. Eventually I’d let the couple name it, so they could feel Entitled, but maybe if I could name it for now, I could begin to see it as a person, the way Jevn did. I’d exercise my own entitlement in preparation for passing it on. It was funny to think about naming my belly a human name, like the horse I knew named Stephen. Jevn joked “Alf” or “Thor,” because the baby would be half Norwegian, but I couldn’t imagine actually naming a thing with such indecipherable boundaries. It felt as rational as naming a mosquito bite.

  I was sautéing onions to put in my stomach to feed an imaginary person who would supposedly gobble them up along with everything else I put in there. Everything was another exercise in imagining the unimaginable. But my mother didn’t want any part of the fun. She was afraid I was second-guessing my decision. I should be concentrating on finding the family I was going to give my child to. She reminded me it was not my child to name.

  EIGHT

  Jevn had started saying that we should “heal apart” so that when this was all over, we wouldn’t find ourselves clinging to each other for support. And I’d agreed, defensively. We would work as a team to find parents for our child, but there could be no good argument for entangling and confusing and complicating our relationship, becoming emotionally enmeshed. Still, as important as it might be, I’d have put healing apart at the very end of my list of important things to do. It would have followed finding a family, having a baby, giving it up for adoption, and not failing out of architecture school. Sometimes I even thought putting off “healing apart” for now and entangling each other in support could make some of those other tasks easier to do. Other times, finding myself alone would give me a surge of strength I didn’t know I had.

  We’d say goodbye in the computer lab or amid piles of profiles in my apartment at night. I had to remind myself that the answer was somewhere ahead of me in the terrifying darkness, not in the comfort of the past, still near enough to touch. One night after he left, anxious for progress, I reached out to one of the couples in my maybe pile.

  Hello!

  I found your webpage on the internet, and I’d like to get to know more about your family. I am a 23-year-old student studying architecture and piano. I am 3 months pregnant. My boyfriend and I have broken up and are considering adoption. The baby is healthy, and I am healthy—no drugs or smoking, etc. I am vegetarian. No health problems in the families either. I’ll be getting a test soon to find out about Down syndrome and some other diseases. Please let me know if you are still trying to adopt a child. I hope to talk to you soon.

  So long—Amy

  I didn’t really believe there could be someone out there on the other end. I cc’d Jevn, and I pressed send, and those words
, like my childhood prayers for a horse, were instantly absorbed by the night.

  I went to bed eager for oblivion, and soon I was floating on my back in a pool of water. With my toes, I could feel the thickness of the black lane stripes below me. Everything was all the same—the same temperature, the same wet softness—and it didn’t seem to matter what I decided about anything. I oriented myself and looked for a side of the pool to get out, but the yellow walls of the dome above it had shrunk to meet the edges. There was nothing to hold on to, nowhere to climb out. I looked down to discover the slick bottom had disappeared, and far below my feet there was an endless network of pipes generating machine-shaped currents, sucking in, pushing out, churning into an infinite turquoise darkness.

  My nightmares were often about drowning. It was like I really was a water baby, always looking for the world I was really meant for. Those pipes and fans and pumps were planted in my memory from the many times my father took me to job sites—dams and coal refineries and water treatment tanks and chicken feed processing plants—to interest me in engineering and to remind me that piano was not a viable career. Those places below the ground and beyond chain-link fences made the world we live in seem like a thin veil over a spinning, churning reality.

  When I awoke, I was alone. And I’d gotten a response.

  * * *

  Erica and George were a little older, like my parents had been when they had kids. They had a son through an open adoption. They were Christian. They were environmentalists by profession. They were working on a project in Norway, Jevn’s ancestral home. And their permanent residence was in Maryland, not far from my grandparents’ sheep farm. But most of all, most incredibly, they were flesh and blood and alive somewhere, tapping back against the glass!