by Scott Simon
Nikki arrived at Martin’s apartment first. They were having drinks and laughing a little too loudly when the doorbell rang. Jean and Paul Simon walked in, and Jean strode straight for Nikki. When Martin tells the story now, he has to stop, steady himself, clear his throat, and blink. Jean Simon walked up to the woman who gave birth to her son and hugged her.
“Nice to meet you, Nikki,” she said and smiled. “Between the two of us, we sure created something pretty special, didn’t we?”
“I’M SO LUCKY,” Martin says a little later. He and Nikki are good friends now, and even more. Not mother and son, exactly, but devoted friends with a place in each other’s lives and a permanent stake in each other’s happiness. Jean Simon died in 2000, Paul in 2003. Nikki, who is only fifteen years older than her son, has become a kind of older family member who knows him less well than an aunt or a cousin with whom he grew up, but is getting to know him better now.
Martin apologizes for having to stop and steady himself as he told the story, and has to hold himself back again.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “But I really miss my mom.” There is no doubt—none—about whom he means.
OUR DAUGHTERS stop traffic. Two winsome Chinese girls who speak English and French interchangeably as they chew bagels (or doughnuts, which they tellingly call “candy bagels”), turn heads, brighten eyes, and light up sullen faces on streets, in elevators, at restaurants, and in airports. People beckon us with cookies, smoothies, and big soft pretzels. “For the girls,” they say. “My treat.” Perhaps we should take our act into a BMW dealership.
Strangers and friends alike tell us that it’s difficult to see our daughters laugh, giggle, and cavort without contemplating what their lives might have been like without us. Well, it’s impossible (unbearable might be more accurate) for us to consider what our lives would have been like without them.
But we can’t regard our daughters as rescued children. That would encourage us to treat our girls with pity, when we know that they’re actually spoiled. I admit it. I am their spoiler-in-chief. We fathers cannot promise to forever protect our children from being hurt, sick, or sad. So we stuff them with food and shower them with things.
Consequently, our girls may yowl for jelly beans, but they are never truly hungry or cold. They have good shoes, clean clothes, their own rooms, more toys than FAO Schwarz, and four flavors of premium ice cream in the freezer. We live along a great river that is plied by boats and planes that bring the world to their door. They travel the world, ride horses, and take ballet. They have been dandled on some famous laps. Celebrities sign books and baseballs for them. When I take our daughters out to breakfast, if they so much as look at a bagel, bialy, cinnamon roll, croissant, muffin, or waffle, more food than a family of four would consume in many parts of the world goes onto their plates, and we walk away from the crumbs without a twinge.
Maybe I should be embarrassed. But does any father want his children to learn life the hard way?
Most luxurious of all in these times: their mother is at home for them.
We want our daughters to grasp the ways in which they are privileged because we feel they will be better, stronger, and wiser for knowing that they have been cherished and favored. They are not victims. Their Chinese mothers loved them so much they risked prison by taking care to put them in places where they were sure to be found. Their mother and I love them so much we went to the other side of the world to get them. Our daughters might feel sorry for the parents who had to give them up. But not for themselves.
I KNOW THAT one day our daughters may be taunted about being adopted. Even as I sometimes tell myself that adoption has grown so commonplace that maybe they won’t, I am reminded (usually by our daughters themselves) how children can be as fiendish and scheming as Stasi agents. So of course Elise and Lina will be teased about being adopted. And they will tease other children for being curly-haired or freckled. Kids toss whatever crockery is around. They will also be teased for being Chinese, French, Jewish, or left-handed, and for wearing their hair, as their mother likes them to right now, in adorable little French braids. But they will grow up knowing that they should be only proud about being adopted. I will consider it a parental failure if our daughters ever try to use it as some kind of excuse.
But I don’t want my determination to make me willfully blind to features of their personalities that may be tied up with the way they came into our lives. I don’t want my eagerness to believe that adoption makes no difference in the way a child is loved—or even, as I am convinced, that it makes only a positive difference—to make me insensitive to the ways in which our daughters may need our support.
A Primal Wound?
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to talk about modern adoption without considering Nancy Verrier. Her 1993 book The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child is an eloquent argument, written both from her personal experience as a psychotherapist and from her heart as the mother of two children she has adopted. Thousands of people who have been adopted cite her work as the missing piece of their lives that has at last made happiness possible. In her clinical work, writing, and teaching she no doubt does more good for more people in a single month than I have in my lifetime.
You can tell that a big fat “but” is ahead.
NANCY VERRIER believes that a “primal wound” is inflicted whenever a mother and child are separated, and that this is true of children who leave their mother’s side just after birth or months or years thereafter. She believes that this primal wound is physical—cellular and structural as well as emotional and spiritual—and that the pain of detachment for mother and child persists, even if people profess not to remember it. This primal wound is unavoidable, and impossible for either mother or child to recover from fully. The wound endures. Love helps, but it is not a cure. The primal wound is not some boo-boo that can be kissed away or healed by ice cream and pony rides.
Nancy Verrier says:
This wound, occurring before the child has begun to separate his own identity from that of the mother, is experienced not only as a loss of the mother, but as a loss of the Self, that core-being of oneself which is the center of goodness and wholeness. The child may be left with a sense that part of oneself has disappeared, a feeling of incompleteness, a lack of wholeness. In addition to the genealogical sense of being cut off from one’s roots, this incompleteness is often experienced in a physical sense of bodily incompleteness, a hurt from something missing.
This is rough stuff for parents to read. It suggests that, love notwithstanding, nothing we have done or can do can spare our children persisting pain. Our pride in the difference that our own care and love may make can prevent us from seeing this wound.
It is hard for parents to hear her analysis and not think we have been accused of ignoring some great brutality toward the persons we love most.
“Babies know their mothers,” Nancy Verrier told me. She is a gracious woman who is used to receiving skeptical calls from parents—and writers—like me, and has a therapist’s gift for phrasing advice in the way that disarms suspicion.
“The babies know their mother’s voice, their heartbeat, their smell, their skin. When they get adopted, they know that the person holding them is not that same person. It’s disconcerting. Mom is everything to them. It destroys their whole world. There are lots of things that get delayed—the whole post-natal bonding period that should follow. That important bond is severed. It’s pretty terrifying, actually. I believe in adoption. But we have to be realistic. They (the children) start life severed from the world they know.”
It is easy to flippantly dismiss what Nancy Verrier says. Believe me, I have (“Well, I think I suffered a primal wound when I wasn’t born as Warren Buffett’s son”). But I try to listen because she also advises—and here, I am more impressed by her practical experience as a therapist than her career as a theorizer—that “the children who feel most connected to their adoptive parents are the ones whose parents truly understand their loss.
… Their loss is hard to see. Children don’t grieve the same way adults do. You have to know what to look for.”
Andrew’s Family
“I THINK THAT childbirth is often revered in memory,” says Steve Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and bestselling author. “But not the real experience. It gets idealized later.” He has more right—more experience—than most men to make that observation. And Steve and his wife, Jeanette, certainly suffered a primal wound.
Their son Andrew was just a year old when he came down with a slight fever. He died in a hospital just a few days later, from rare and incurable pneumococcal meningitis. Steve and Jeanette started going to a support group for grieving parents, and they noticed how many children had died in swimming pool accidents. Steve was already beginning to try to apply his economist’s perception to broader events, and he discovered some startling statistics.
Every year, one child dies for every 11,000 swimming pools. But roughly one child dies from a gunshot for every one million guns. So Steve wrote a short, shocking piece for the Chicago Sun-Times that began, “If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
He didn’t imply that guns were household toys but rather that backyard swimming pools were significantly more dangerous than people realized. It was the beginning of a whole new analytical approach that resulted in Steve’s bestselling 2005 book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and a 2009 sequel, Superfreakonomics.
As Steve took the chance to learn something, anything, from his grief, he and Jeanette decided to adopt a child from China. Conceiving their first child had been difficult. They were emotionally fragile. “Chinese adoption was simple,” he explains. “There was a direct list of steps to get a child, as opposed to domestic adoption or other ways that had no guarantees.”
And then Jeanette Levitt got pregnant. They welcomed a daughter, Olivia, who was eleven months old when Steve and Jeanette received their thumbnail-size photo of the daughter in China who was waiting for them. Jeanette had to stay in Chicago with their baby, and Steve went to China.
“When we first got Amanda’s picture,” he said, “it was the strangest thing. She was just the most beautiful baby that I had ever seen. When I went to China for her, it was instantaneous. By the end of the first day I had fallen completely in love with her. By the end of this trip my bond with her was stronger that I have ever had with any other human being—with my other children, with my wife. Stronger than the bond I had when I was a baby with my parents. I really chalk it up to my chance to be a mother as opposed to a father. Because my wife wasn’t there, because it was my responsibility to take care of her. And she was nine months old, so she was ready to have a mother. I had never been a mother, and she had never had one. It was just incredibly powerful.
“We had just lost a child we loved,” Steve softly recalls. “Then, we had a daughter that we loved. Then Amanda, put into my hands. I never predicted that I would be able to love this ‘stranger’ so quickly, but I did. It changed the way I thought about genes, nature versus nurture, and the way we are wired to love our children. We are set up to love children, and make them ours.”
Steve and Jeanette now have four children. Olivia and Amanda are eight. Nicholas, a biological son, is six, and Sophie, who is five, is also adopted from China. Steve says that every few months he tries to talk to Amanda about the circumstances of her birth in China, and how and why young mothers may cast away daughters that they love.
“I have talked to my daughter as an economist about this issue,” he says. One imagines the winner of the John Bates Clark medal in economics at his daughter’s bedside, pointing at pie charts among the stuffed bunnies and princess dolls. “And so far, she couldn’t be less interested. She’s like, ‘Okay, now let’s talk about something that’s more interesting.’” Someday the topic may be of more interest to Amanda, and may she remember that her father always thought it was.
STEVE LEVITT is skeptical that children who are adopted suffer a wound that endures. “I’m sure that a lot of people, adopted and not adopted, would like to pin all of their problems of happiness or uncertainty on having a primal wound,” he says. “It makes everything fit so nicely. I can see why a lot of people say, ‘That explains a lot about why I feel the way I do.’ But the brains of young children don’t function like that. Let me give you an example.
“Within two days of meeting my daughter Amanda, we had a reunion with her caretakers. She didn’t show the slightest bit of interest in them. She was just totally bonded to me. Those were the people who took care of her for the first nine months, and as far as she was concerned, they had been her parents. But when she found someone new who was totally devoted to her one hundred percent, she just said, ‘Forget you.’”
Steve Levitt notes, with academic respect, that he is not a psychologist. But he needs little instruction about how human beings get through grief. He believes that infants possess astoundingly supple minds. Their neurons absorb a thousand new things every day, and get rid of, or learn how to disregard, what they don’t need so they can keep going. We may not forget, but we know it’s important to go on. The millions of things that we know or feel (or think we do) get sorted by some electrical impulse of survival. That spark puts what needs to be on top so that we can move on.
STEVE POSTS a small entry on his website every year on the anniversary of Andrew’s death in October. “He was born just as the leaves were turning,” he says. “And he died just as the leaves were turning.”
Like Frank and Carol Deford, Steve and Jeanette Levitt have made the son they lost a member of the family they have become. All of their children will know of him, and they will know that however their own lives began, Andrew’s enlivens them. Steve reminds friends of the song from Rent they played at Andrew’s memorial. Their little boy had just a year on this earth and in their lives. But the economist whose own distinct view of data has redefined so many important public debates reminds us that the lifetime joys of children don’t have a measurable index. He thinks of the year that was Andrew’s life:
525,600 minutes,
525,600 moments so dear,
525,600 minutes—how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In 525,600 minutes—how do you measure a year in the life?
How about love? How about love? How about love?
THOSE OF US who adopt get dazzled when we begin to see some of our own traits in our children. I swear that I can hear my father’s laugh in our two daughters. Steve Levitt was touched to come to a parent-teacher conference at Amanda’s kindergarten and be told that she seemed good with numbers and gifted with the power of critical thinking (our daughters have those traits, too; I have often heard them wail, “But she got three jelly beans, and I got two!” demonstrating mathematical skills, critical powers, and a sense of justice all in a single sentence).
Some of this may be a love-struck father’s sheer, hopeful projection. But I know that our daughters are growing up imitating, in one way or time or another, Elmo, Mulan, Suzanne Farrell, and Christina Aguilera. That they should inhale and echo a few of their parents’ traits and interests, too, should not surprise.
Nancy Verrier cautions that parodies shouldn’t be mistaken for the real thing. “Adopted children learn how to please,” she says. Parents should be alert to encourage knacks, skills, and qualities inherited from their birth parents, because their children may be reluctant to heed them.
“Adopted children often feel that they have to fit in,” she explains. “They’re very observant. They’re very good at trying to figure how to fit into their families. So we have to be as observant of them as they are of us. I know so many adoptive children who go into professions that they think their parents want them to. There’s a lot of people pleasing in
adoption. I’ve worked with some families where you find creative, artistic kids in families full of accountants. But if everyone keeps an open mind, it works.”
I’d just add that at this writing, Elise and Lina seem to be on a line to become ballet dancers, avant-garde artists, or Broadway divas. But with all the artists and clowns hanging from limbs on our family tree, I’d be delighted if our daughters showed an inclination to become accountants and tax specialists. I’ll be alert for any signs. I’ll bring home spreadsheet software, tax forms, and children’s biographies of René Descartes if they like. Someone has to take care of the rest of us.
“WHAT ADOPTIVE CHILDREN appreciate most is the parent who understands them,” says Nancy Verrier. “They feel closest to those parents who get what’s going on with them. If they use their adoption as a starting point, and that wound as a fact of life, rather than a posit, their parents can see them as the person they are.”
Nancy remembers a sixteen-year-old girl whom she saw as a patient. She had been adopted at an early age, and seemed equable, if not sunny. She came from a family of accountants. But when she was invited to write poetry, it was filled with anguish and longing that she had rarely shared, and hadn’t wanted to. Her parents were good people and fine parents who would have listened, but she didn’t want to hurt them.
A Hundred Wounds
