by Amy Seek
“It’s so warm for February!” Tami exclaimed. “Bob and I thought we could sit out on the terrace.”
Another alien world had opened itself to me. Bright and sterile, like the Neighborhood of Make Believe or a 7-Eleven at midnight. An imitation of regular life, shimmering with artificial color. All the evidences of normalcy, but barren and dormant, buzzing with man-made energy. I could hardly believe I was a part of it, the other half of an unnatural partnership.
We’d been communicating for a couple of weeks over e-mail, but the real reason we decided to meet them was simply that it was time to take the next step and start meeting people, and they lived close by. They gave us a tour of the house, and then we went outside to sit on the terrace. Tami scurried back and forth to the kitchen, bringing us refreshments on a tray. They hovered around us, chatting nervously and making sure we were comfortable.
“We use this table for parties sometimes in the summer … and I grow vegetables in the garden over there, beyond the hydrangea. Tomatoes, squash, just a few things. We just got this patio furniture last year.”
I wondered how often that ducky got knocked over stepping into the shower. Whether visiting nieces and nephews were allowed to play with it. Was it put there in the hope the baby would somehow follow? Was it there for a home study, a subtle communication to a social worker that they were prepared to parent, down to the rubber ducky at bath time?
Or was it teetering there for me? Had they anticipated the moment when I’d find myself sitting alone in the bathroom? Was it there to help me more easily project the life of my child into this place, down its corridors and into its rooms? Imagine, as I sat peeing, its life unfolding, growing up within these walls, waking up every morning in the green room just around the corner, light combing through the clean white shutters with the sunrise? Did they put the ducky away when no one was coming or going? Was it braver to have a place where you stash your rubber ducky, or braver to face it every day, in the absence of the thing it stands for?
Bob was a pilot, and he guided us around the side of the house to show us the Cessna parked in the driveway. I told him that my father had his glider license, and I’d been flying since I was young. It was my dad’s favorite thing to do and his single extravagance, experimenting with physics in an engineless plane. I might have mentioned it as a thing we had in common, a familiarity with small planes and airfields, an intimacy with flying. We could have smiled at the implication.
“Motorized planes seem really hefty compared with gliders!” I said, instead pointing out the difference. I was wary of anything that appeared to be a promise, or a decision, or a leaning toward a decision. I’d realized as soon as they greeted us that we wouldn’t choose them, and it was something of a relief to tour their house knowing that nothing they said or showed us would ever touch my child.
We walked through the side door into the basement and sat down on the couch in the finished area, where there was a large television in the corner. Bob seemed anxious, impatient with our conversations about college, and planes, and neighborhoods. He took hold of my forearm.
“Amy, I hope you’ll choose us. We are really interested in talking with you further.” That hope went without saying; that was why they’d written to us. That was why we were here. His eyes began to swell.
“Sometimes at night I go into the nursery and sit in the rocker … I dream of the day I’ll bring our little baby home, and our family will finally be complete.” He clenched my arm heavily. “I long for the day when a child will put its little arms around my neck and call me Daddy.”
I nodded like I understood, but I refused to accept the burden he was trying to give me. I couldn’t rectify nature’s injustice; I couldn’t be responsible for making his dreams come true. And I could never give my child to a couple who thought they needed it. There wasn’t such a thing as needing a child the way the starving kids in Africa need food. And, although I’d once thought that need was exactly what would make me feel good about giving my child away, now I wanted to find the opposite. A couple should want to have kids because of the abundance of curiosity, and passion, and love they had to give—not because of an absence the child would only fail to fill.
* * *
Couples we met expected to win us with charm and warmth they couldn’t convey in a profile. We’d see how real their lives were, and it would be harder for us to reject them. But inside the actual house my child might grow up in, the smells and the light and the temperature provided immediate answers, and a few days later, we would have to let them know that their perfect house and natural wood toys and family and friends and pets and playgrounds were, for reasons we felt powerfully but couldn’t explain, not enough.
But just days later as we drove to meet another couple, I reminded myself that no one would give my child the life I would have given. We needed to finish this process; we needed to rest. I told myself that might mean compromise. The new family would think differently. They would do things I wouldn’t do. And, somehow, it would all be okay.
I could smell the bulk spices and home-cooked whole grains from Kaitlynn and Roger’s doorstep. As we sat down in the living room, Kaitlynn explained what openness meant to them.
“We visit Elizabeth’s birth grandmother four times a year. I guess we see Nikki about once a month, but we only see Jeremy once a year because he lives in Florida now. Jeremy is her birth father,” Kaitlynn said as she stirred Jevn’s tea and then handed it to him.
We’d sent them our list of questions, and what had been really impressive was how little they’d tried to impress us with their answers. They said they didn’t spend much time outside and weren’t normally happy. The last show they saw? It was last Sunday, but he couldn’t remember what it was, and he didn’t like it very much. Do you ever build a fire? Nope, no reason to. How is your family imperfect? Let me count the ways! We don’t have much money. We don’t keep our house clean very well. We don’t play enough games together. We eat out too much. We don’t spend enough time together. Holey socks? Throw them away. Do you drink Coke? I prefer Pepsi products. And I love fast food. What do you read? Reader’s Digest and not much other than that. How do you celebrate your anniversary? A night out at a local hotel.
They hadn’t skipped a single question, and they answered as though they were taking a polygraph. Their answers were so unapologetically wrong, I was intrigued. As people experienced in open adoption, they were perhaps boldly communicating that honesty is the key, the single thing needed to make an open adoption successful. They lived nearby, so we thought we’d give it a chance. But after just a few minutes in their living room, I could see that honesty alone wouldn’t make this work. The consequence of being doted on by two parents and two birth parents, eleven grandparents and great-grandparents, ten half siblings, seventeen nieces and nephews, fifteen adoptive uncles and aunts, and countless other birth aunts and uncles, birth grandparents and great-grandparents, celebrating six Christmases and five Thanksgivings, was plain to see: their adopted daughter, Elizabeth, was spoiled.
Maybe they would have spoiled any child, biological or adopted, or maybe the radical openness was meant to compensate for adoption’s built-in sorrows; they’d made adoption a better-than-biological childhood, and Elizabeth, spinning gleefully in the middle of the room while we watched, was ecstatic proof of it. But she was also a thing in the world with which my own child would have to deal.
“The sibling matters,” I said to Jevn as we drove away.
“Definitely,” he responded.
* * *
At my mid-February appointment, my midwife sent me home with a fuzzy photo of wild white clouds against an ominous black sky, tick marks along the frame and a dotted circle, placed in what seemed an arbitrary corner of the fog. The grainy image had moved on the monitor as they rolled the cold plate through the gel over my abdomen. They read my belly like a crystal ball, and the airy features of my future had a sex. It was advisable for me to know so I could tell the adoptive couples if
they wanted to know. But when they handed me the photograph of a foggy penis and the callout “boy,” I still could not believe it was a thing, still growing inevitably toward a moment when I would no longer be able to not believe it.
My sister and I decided to call him Lìu, the Chinese word meaning six and pronounced as a single, downward syllable, “Lyeeoh.” We liked the sound; the translation didn’t matter. Why not name my indigestion the Chinese word meaning six? She told me her students named themselves all kinds of names, imitating the sound of English names: Banny, Fransquall, Denven, Dawie. They often got their names by looking in the dictionary: a girl named Rainbow, boys named Pal and Stiff, a girl named Purple—she knew two, in fact. There were girls named Phoenix, Irony, and Naive. She knew a guy named Pink, a girl named Tower, another girl named Siren, and a guy named Bank who had changed his name to Shell. Some named themselves after favorite foods; she taught two girls named Apple and one named Chocolate. There were normal names like Harry and Elvis, but those were girls, and Hannah was a guy.
Lìu. Leo. LYO. I am so excited.
TWELVE
It was early March. It was time to start making decisions. This is about the boy, not you, Jevn would say. I was being selfish, he was saying by saying that. I wasn’t focusing on what was good for our son; I was letting myself get hung up on my own feelings about the couples. Perhaps there was no way to give up a child without suppressing a certain uneasiness about it. And yet ignoring my instinct to protect my son made adoption feel exactly like abandonment.
His top choice was Jeff and Cindy, the couple with the mama, papa, and baby boots, and one afternoon we met at my apartment to speak with them. Jevn sat on my futon with the phone in his lap; I sat in my desk chair in front of him.
“Hey, guys! How’s it going?” Jeff said.
“Hi, Jeff,” I said.
“How’s your Sunday?” Jevn asked.
“We just got back from an amazing ride, the Little Miami River watershed. Gorgeous day. I had DJ on the back of the bike the whole way. He fell asleep on the drive home. What’s up with you guys?”
“We’re doing well; I think we’re just doing a lot of thinking about the adoption,” Jevn understated. “I wanted to ask you and Cindy about how DJ’s birth mother approached this process.”
“Hi, you guys,” Cindy joined in. “You know, I think she struggled a lot, too, but in the end she saw everything we had to offer, and she just knew we were the family for her son.”
“I keep returning to my operating principle,” Jevn said, “that this adoption is about the boy, not us.”
He was always drawing this distinction between the boy and us, but I still couldn’t think that way. I could only think with my son. My selfishness included him. But if my task was to ignore the alarms I experienced in my blood, beating through vessels that wrapped around him, I needed time to learn a new kind of discernment; I couldn’t simply let go of thinking altogether.
“Well, it’s about everyone—the child, the parents, the birth parents,” Jeff responded. “You have to come to a decision that everyone can live with. We have a beautiful arrangement with DJ’s birth mother. We’re always sending her pictures or talking on the phone, and we meet up two or three times a year.”
“Are there any negative aspects of open adoption, in your experience?” Jevn persisted. One negative aspect, Jevn probably thought, was the birth mother’s freedom to reject even those couples who fit her own criteria perfectly. I looked at him angrily, and he averted his eyes.
“I think I’m the wrong one to ask about negative aspects of open adoption,” Jeff answered. “As long as there’s mutual respect, I don’t see the problem.”
Jevn stopped his line of questioning, but he’d substantiated my doubts. Jeff answered too breezily. He was a jock. That’s why I didn’t like him. They didn’t just go for long hikes; they rode in three-hundred-mile bike races for which they’d had to have a helmet specially made to fit their infant son. I’d tried to tell myself: at least he’ll take my son outside a lot. It wouldn’t matter that he’d be ripping through energy goo as they sped past rivers and trees whose silences would be obliterated by cheering onlookers and blow horns. Jeff’s being a competitive cyclist didn’t in any way preclude quiet walks in the woods and good conversation on other days.
“There aren’t any negative aspects,” Cindy said definitively. “There’s nothing different or special about it, as far as I’m concerned.”
Cindy often reminded us about how comfortable she was with adoption. She couldn’t understand other people’s hang-ups over infertility, and she insisted that there was no difference at all between adoption and biological means of having a child. But whether she felt comfortable or not, I thought, there was a difference, not the least of which, the arrangements I hoped we would make throughout my son’s life to see each other. She said they kept all the things DJ’s mother had given him in a box Cindy painted with an Indian motif, and I wondered if we would also be reduced to a box and stored away.
“I think we should meet them,” I said anyway, after we hung up, because Jevn really liked them, and I wanted him to see I was trying. “We need to figure out our next steps with everyone we’re still in touch with.” We had begun sending out notes to certain couples we’d had significant contact with, saying we did not think we were a “match.” It was scary to be dismantling bridges when we still didn’t know if there’d be one that held. Couples usually wished us luck, but sometimes they responded angrily, as though we’d deliberately led them on.
“And Robert and Deb want us to come out for spring break,” Jevn said, getting his things together to go back to studio. He was always leaving as soon as our immediate business was done. He showed so little curiosity about my body, erupting and stretching as we spoke, that I was embarrassed when my belly moved visibly in his presence. A vulgar reminder of my general unwieldiness. I could no more focus my mind to make a decision than I could discipline my body to sit still.
“Yeah, should we meet later today to talk about that?”
I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted a break from being broken up. I wanted him to acknowledge the reality of what was happening in the space between us. I wanted Jevn’s arms and mine holding our son together. But he was an arrow, shooting straight toward a target. He would help in every decidedly productive way, but my emotions and my rapidly evolving body were forbidden territories in the new world we inhabited together. He said we could talk about talking later, and he closed the door.
I was getting used to that, and it was getting easier. He no longer filled the frame the way he once had. I was grateful for his help, but some days I wished he was less involved so I could enjoy the single certainty of hating him.
* * *
When he left, I thought, no, it has to be Robert and Deb, the Colorado couple. Robert and Deb were great. I could imagine being proud to talk about them: that Deb’s grandfather was a professor of philosophy; that her grandmother was the first woman in Poland to earn a Ph.D. Deb assured me she’d never think about drinking Coke; her father used Coke to remove rust from car parts. And they were resourceful—not so much with holey socks, but they said they’d decorated an avocado tree they grew from seed for Christmas.
That morning I’d gone to church, and someone I’d spoken to afterward had reminded me that trials were blessings to produce endurance. I wondered, endurance for what? What could be harder than this? Jevn sometimes said the same thing, that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But I hated my own strength. Every convincing appearance of it infuriated me. The pastor had read Ezekiel, and I preferred the comfort of its violence: I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.
* * *
In the morning, I tripped over a bag of coffee beans sitting on my stoop. Attached was a folded map with directions to the nearest coffee grinder. I followed it and shared a cup of coffee with my neighbor Andy. Sometimes Andy
would knock on my door with groceries in his backpack and make me dinner. He wouldn’t call or arrange it, he’d just come in and start cooking.
And I can’t persuade the father of my baby to walk one pace slower to stay beside me, I thought later that morning, as I stepped into the elevator behind Jevn.
Molly showed us a sample of the Permanent Surrender of Child form. In addition to my name, age, and address, and my child’s name, date and city of birth, there were three lines for me to fill out, stating why I was requesting Catholic Social Services to take custody of my child. Molly addressed me. “Here we’ll give a summary of your reasons, that you’re a full-time student and that you’re not married.”
I had never expressed it so straightforwardly, and I was surprised that those reasons were enough. If I did lose contact with my son, he might look up his records and think it was as simple as that.
The document outlined the items I would surrender with my signature: all my rights as parent, including visitation, communication, support, religious affiliation, and right to consent to my child’s adoption.
“Technically, you’ll give custody to the agency, not the adoptive couple, and then we place him in a home. Of course, since we’ve been working together, I’ll advocate for the placement of your child with the family you’ve chosen, and I’m sure it will be approved. I’ve never seen that not work out.”
I wasn’t concerned about the legal details; I was only worried about finding a family. Since December, I’d been steadily approaching the day when I would have to be able to sign that form, but I had assumed that by now, I’d have taken all the steps, that they would have led to the couple, and then the Surrender would just feel like the next move forward. I was so much closer to the end, but I was as far from being able to imagine signing that form as I had been last January.
