“The wind,” I say, “I think of it as letting go to the wind. You know? Not fighting it. Just kind of allowing yourself to ride along with it.”
“That’s good,” she says, nodding. “I like that.”
We sit in silence. There really isn’t much wind today. There are some geese overhead making a racket.
“Aren’t we having a great time?” she says, finally.
“We are,” I say.
“I’m so glad you’re going to have a daughter,” she says. “Daughters can be such great friends. Aren’t we great friends?”
“We are.”
It’s been only a few days since I told her about our decision to adopt from China. I’m surprised she’s so nonchalant about it. You know, just dropping the D-word like that. Daughter. I’m going to have a daughter. Whew. Big word.
I was anything but calm telling her and my sisters about the adoption. I don’t know why I was so nervous telling them. Maybe it’s the whole baby thing. I’m the baby of this family. The baby has a responsibility to stay … a baby.
I suppose we all have themes that run our lives, stories that get put on us like tattoos, stories told to us or stories we learn to tell ourselves, stories that become so fused with the self they become confused with the self.
With my announcement about choosing to adopt, well, now I was revealing myself to be someone else: a mom. That pretty much squashes the baby identity. You can’t be the mom and the baby. So good-bye, baby. Wasn’t this going to disrupt everyone’s view of the universe and all the galaxies beyond?
Um, no. In a word. No.
My mom and sisters were happy when I told them. Purely happy. In fact, the general consensus was that this is just what this family needs: a baby. A new life to focus on.
And already, for my mom, motherhood is just part of who I am, just something she can very nonchalantly refer to on an autumn day, under an oak tree and a gaggle of noisy geese.
“When your daughter comes, I think we should have a party,” she says. “I could get one of the banquet rooms at Riddle Village. Would that be too weird to have a party for your daughter at the old folks’ home?”
At least she’s not calling it the funny farm anymore. But “daughter.” Okay, that D-word is going to take some getting used to.
“No, Mom,” I say. “I don’t think that would be weird at all.”
And so Alex and I have begun to spread the word about our decision to adopt. Not too far, though, and not too wide. Alex has been talking to his kids. How strange this must be for them. Amy and Peter have had their dad to themselves all these years, and even though they’re now adults, with their own complicated lives, the idea of a brand-new baby sister has got to be unsettling. But the thing that’s great about Amy and Peter is they can say that. They can say, “This is weird for me, Dad.” Well, the first thing Peter said was “Whew.” He said, “Give me a moment to comprehend this.” By now he’s had a few weeks of moments, and just yesterday he reported that he may be inching his way toward being excited. It’s funny; I would have thought Amy, who is twenty-six and two years older than Peter, would have had the tougher time. She likes being daddy’s little girl. But she has demonstrated the most astonishing maturity. “It would be selfish of me not to share you, Dad,” she said. “Plus, I’m kind of used to it, you know?” Alex was a surrogate father to many of Amy’s high school and college friends. Theirs was the house kids knew they could run to. Alex would take them in, talk to their parents, help smooth things over.
And as for the rest of the story, Alex is telling Peter and Amy everything. But I am not, so far, telling anyone anything. It’s a matter of privacy, I suppose. It’s different from adoption. With the adoption, there is an actual baby to consider, a baby who has already, at least metaphorically, begun her long journey to her new home.
But, with the rest of the story, well, there really is nothing yet to talk about.
The rest of the story is this: We’re doing it. Our one free IVF cycle. Does that seem surprising? Maybe. It’s surprising the way you can be so utterly sure in your mind that you are going to make one choice, and then at the last minute the opposite choice swoops in and grabs you by the throat, says, “What are you—crazy?”
It’s crazy not to. Right? It’s sort of like, well, here’s a coupon for a free gallon of milk, so why not use it? That’s how I’m looking at it when I am thinking clearly and rationally, which is almost never.
The truth is this dream isn’t about a gallon of milk. This is about: a baby. A baby that might grow inside me. A baby made out of me and Alex. The most natural dream in the world.
But I am not looking at that. To look at something like that is only to increase the wanting and the hoping, which is only to increase the disappointment if the thing doesn’t come true.
So I am looking at it as a free gallon of milk.
The one thing I am seeing clearly, in all of this, is the irony: Were it not for our decision to adopt, we wouldn’t be doing the IVF thing at all. It was our decision to adopt that enabled us to pursue the possibility of having a biological child in the first place.
A safety clause, perhaps? Is that what it is? Underneath it all, was I so worried that the pregnancy wouldn’t work that I needed to first make sure I had a baby somewhere waiting in the wings?
I don’t think so. I really don’t think that’s it at all.
For me, it’s only in the knowledge that I’ve begun my journey to find my baby that I can even begin to imagine making her a brother or a sister. Maybe it was Alyson, maybe it was a purely romanticized notion that filled my mind like some very lovely cartoon, or maybe it was something else. But I see the adopted child first. And then a sibling. If possible, a sibling.
If the IVF thing works, then what we will have will be insta-family! Two babies. Two! Well, plenty of people have twins. Plenty of people.
But—two?
Before we leave Philadelphia, Alex and I stop at my brother’s house. It’s high on the hill known as Honey Hill Farm, a farm that is, well, a lot nicer than our farm. It’s a manicured farm with a pond large enough to accommodate two zooming Jet Skis. It’s a farm of thirty rolling acres featuring a grand stone farmhouse, an actual paved driveway, and flower beds that were modeled after the gardens at Versailles. My brother does things—big. My brother is a streamlined diesel-powered behemoth freight train. In comparison I am but a puny Amtrak commuter.
He and his wife Eileen are happy to hear the news about adopting from China, although their responses differ considerably.
“One?” my brother says. “Why don’t you get two or three?”
“Well,” I say, not sure where to start on my answer, which is quickly overpowered anyway, by Eileen, the Queen of Gush. “A baby! A baby! A baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaby!!!!!!!!!!!” She grabs my arm, tugs it up into the air, and twirls herself under it. “A baby!” See, I love her. She makes such a good Italian, even though she’s German, but she’s got the mushy, sloppy, kissy, huggy thing down. I have loved her since I was eight years old and my brother brought her home for dinner and she had perfectly wicked dyed-blond streaks in her hair, the first dyed-blond person to ever set foot in our house. I was nine when they married. I couldn’t believe my luck. In a way, I suppose I adopted Eileen, and she adopted me. In a way, I suppose most families have plenty of people in them who were adopted.
“I’m going to be your baby’s favorite aunt,” Eileen announces. “I am going to Toys ‘R’ Us and get started on my … strategy.”
It’s fitting, after all, seeing as I worked so hard all those years ago to be Alyson’s favorite aunt.
She’s here. Alyson. I can see her out by the boxwoods, coming inside. Alyson. The one who started it all. The first baby I ever held. The oldest grandchild and so far the only one to be brought into the family through the kind of adoption that gets recorded on paper. She’s twenty-four years old now, an artist with long blond hair and about twenty earrings in each ear and a smiley face tattoo on her big toe. She
shares my brother’s passion for life, specifically his passion for flowers and shrubs and anything that grows. She’s working, with his help, on starting her own greenhouse business; she’s already secured a loan for a ten-acre spot, and it’s a good bet that she’ll be landscaping most of Pennsylvania by the time she’s thirty.
“Bean!” she says to me when she comes inside. She’s called me Bean ever since she was two, trying to pronounce my name. “What are you guys doing here?” She opens her arms wide enough to hug both Alex and me at the same time.
“We came to see Grandmom walk,” Alex says.
“How about that, huh?”
“And they have news,” Eileen says. “Wait till you hear this one.”
“What?” Alyson says, looking at me. “About Grandmom?”
“No,” I say.
Something in my tone. She gets the shift. “It’s big?”
“Pretty big,” I say with a smile.
“Don’t tell me,” she says. “You’re pregnant?”
I shake my head to indicate maybe yes, maybe no, sort of. “We’re adopting a baby from China,” I tell her.
Her head drops forward, like you do when you’re trying to follow a complicated math problem on the blackboard at school. She seems to be computing something in her mind. She’s looking at me, squinting.
I don’t say anything. Nobody says anything.
Then her face falls. Oh, she seems to have arrived at her answer. She looks at her mother, me, Alex, her dad, back at me. Her eyes have welled up. She’s blinking, moving toward me. “Oh my God,” she says, wrapping her arms around me. “Thank you.”
On the long drive home, from one end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the other, I have plenty of time to think about Alyson, about why she reacted like that and how it caught me off-guard. For her, I suppose my announcement was some kind of validation. My decision to adopt must have in some way said: Yes. You really do belong. My decision to adopt must have in some way said: See? I wasn’t kidding. I wasn’t kidding all those years ago when you were in second grade and full of your first doubt; I wasn’t kidding when I said how happy I was that you were part of this family, no matter how you came to it. I wasn’t kidding when I said the how of coming into a family is as irrelevant as the where. The what and the why are the only things that matter. The what and the why are: love.
I wasn’t kidding. In fact, I so wasn’t kidding that I am now bringing in another who will travel your same path. A baby born in another woman’s body. But a baby that belongs here, with us, in this family.
It makes me feel like a fraud thinking about trying to get pregnant. A fraud. I’ve been getting all sorts of blood tests taken. The doctors are getting my body ready. I feel like a damn fraud.
We stop at the Blue Mountain rest stop for some coffee refills and a chance to stretch our legs. They have a room with pinball machines. They have one of those machines with the big metal claws. You put your money in, move the joystick around, and try to pluck yourself out a toy.
Fifty cents per chance. I’ve never actually tried one of these machines before. And here I am with two quarters in my pocket. So what the heck. I put the money in. The claw goes flying toward the back wall like it’s alive, and it falls before I can get control of it. It falls with a thunk. And when it comes up from the pool of toys, I see I’ve won, I’ve snagged myself a toy! The claw glides over to a chute, drops it, and it goes sliding through the chute. When I retrieve it, I see it is a doll. An Asian doll. The character Mulan from the Disney movie. I am standing here looking at it. Alex walks up with our two cups of Maxwell House.
“I just won this,” I tell him. “I just won a Mulan doll.”
He looks at it. “I guess it’s our daughter’s first official toy,” he says.
Daughter. Yeesh. Why is everyone so nonchalant about using this very big word? And here’s her first toy. Well, I guess. But in this moment the doll is a kind of validation all its own. Down the chute. Here comes the girl, down the chute. What difference does the chute make? The chute. My daughter is somewhere, and she’ll come to me down a chute; mine or someone else’s, it hardly matters whose. Mechanics are, after all, just mechanics.
I’m standing here wondering how to explain all of this to Alex. I have no idea how to explain this.
“You mean I have to share my toys?” is what I end up saying.
“Definitely one of the downsides to parenting,” he says.
CHAPTER TEN
I’m standing in a bathroom stall at Wal-Mart, throwing a needle in my stomach like a dart. You’re supposed to hold it like a dart. I’m getting pretty good at it. I pinch my stomach with one hand, grab a hunk of flesh, toss the dart in. It’s a little needle. It doesn’t hurt. I have little red dots all over my belly from two weeks of these injections.
I’m on Lupron, one shot each morning. The hormone is helping my ovaries store all the eggs that the egg-stimulation medication, which I inject at night, is supposedly producing, so I’ll have as many chances as possible to get … fertilized. It’s the middle of January. By Valentine’s Day, I could be pregnant. Whew. Is it hot in here? I swear this Lupron is giving me hot flashes.
I feel horrible. I feel like a chicken. I feel like what I think a chicken must feel like every morning before she drops her eggs. Bloat. Major bloat. Actually, this must be much worse than what chickens feel like. No chicken in her right mind would live like this. Then again, most chickens probably don’t have a choice.
Whew. See, the Lupron is making me wacky. I’m a big, overstuffed, wacky chicken. I don’t know how much longer I can take this. That’s what I’m going to say tomorrow morning when I go in for the ultrasound. I’m going to say, “I don’t know how much longer I can take this.”
Whew. It is really hot in here. And now someone out there by the sink is using that hand blow-dryer thing, which is not helping. And how exactly should I dispose of this used needle? Ordinarily I do these injections at home, but this morning I had to run errands, and the timing of the injections, they said, is critical.
And so I’m here in Wal-Mart. I’m in Wal-Mart to buy little baskets to use to organize my closets with. I’m doing this so that when the social worker comes to our house in a few weeks to decide if Alex and I are acceptable adoptive-parent material—a decision she will then pass on to the folks at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who will take our fingerprints and send them to the FBI so as to determine whether or not we are criminals—I will at least reveal myself to be a person with organized closets.
Whew.
It is definitely hot in here.
Working on adoption paperwork at the same time as an IVF cycle, it’s a lot. The Lupron, the chicken bloat, the needles, the trips to the hospital for blood tests and ultrasounds, plus throw on top of that the FBI and the INS—well, it’s just a lot. Putting together a dossier for international adoption is a full-time job, and managing an IVF cycle is another one.
We could have waited, of course. We could have done these sequentially. We could have waited until next year after we get home safe and sound with the baby from China, then tried our luck at the fertility clinic afterward. But the doctors made a fairly good case that it’s now or never for me. They said my eggs are just getting older and older. They said for me every month is critical, every month my chances decrease. They definitely turned the panic meter up several notches.
And there was no way I was going to delay the adoption. No way. Nonnegotiable. My baby is waiting. I’ve got to get to her. I’ve got to hurry.
If all goes as planned and there are no snags, we should have all our paperwork in to the adoption agency by April. These papers will then be sent to the government office in China. About seven months after that we’ll receive a letter revealing the identity of the baby who has been chosen for us. We’ll get a picture of her, and a medical report. We’ll find out what orphanage she’s living in. About six weeks after that we’ll travel to China to get her. It all adds up to about a year from now. A
whole year.
So it’s paperwork. It’s forms to fill out and get notarized and certified by the Pennsylvania Secretary of State in Harrisburg and then authenticated by the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, and some by the Chinese Consulate in New York. It’s a pile of paperwork a foot high so far.
And it’s Lupron. It’s 0.5 milligrams in my belly each morning. I’m trying not to whine about this, about the chicken bloat, about the little red dots on my stomach. I did, after all, choose this. I chose all of this. The doctors gave me the option of forgetting about my aging eggs. They said I could just take my time and boost my odds considerably by entering the “donor egg program.” You know, let someone else grow the eggs, which she would then donate to me. They brought out a book. It listed the characteristics of women willing to donate their eggs. Education. Height. Weight. Hobbies.
I have a few friends who chose this option. I remember them talking about the book. To them, it really did seem to be a quite simple matter of increasing the chances at becoming pregnant. To them, the pregnancy was the thing.
To me, it isn’t. It’s another path toward becoming a mom, a path that has opened up thanks to an insurance company.
And I couldn’t imagine another woman’s eggs in my body. I just couldn’t.
So I said no. I said I am redeeming my one free IVF coupon now, while my chances with my own eggs are best. And that will be that. In truth this is a long shot at best; most women you read about go through half a dozen or more IVF attempts before producing a baby. So my chances are slim. But it’s not really about the odds, as I see it. It’s about the boost. It’s about some sense of obligation I have to give God the boost. I wonder if that makes any sense at all.
This is a maze. You can’t really say one way is better than another. You can only say your way is your way. How one woman feels her way through the maze is not a model for another woman. It’s just an example. It’s a story. It’s a story from which to gather courage to move forward on your own path.
The Exact Same Moon Page 16
