by Scott Simon
“DO PEOPLE who are adopted suffer some kind of primal wound?” Jeffrey Seller asks. “Try a hundred.”
Jeff remembers being told that he had been adopted when he was about four, while he rode beside his father in his family’s car.
“I think almost every important conversation I can recall having as a kid happened in the car,” he says. “People can look just straight ahead. They don’t have to look at each other.”
Jeff is a man of the theater who recognizes the touches of stagecraft we sometimes rely on in everyday life.
“When I was growing up, I had a strong sense of being an outsider. My partner, Josh, thinks I still have a wound. He says that he can notice the ways in which being adopted still makes me crave approval. But I’m in show business,” he laughs. “I tell him, ‘Everyone around me is like this.’”
Jeff was born in 1964 in suburban Detroit, an unexpected pregnancy for an aging couple who already had three sons and hadn’t planned on or prepared for a late-life baby. He was adopted by a family that was going through trying times and was about to have harder times yet. His mother had suffered a series of miscarriages before giving birth to Jeff’s older sister. She suffered another before they decided to adopt. Jeff’s father had a serious motorcycle accident, health complications, job problems, and depression. He lost the family industrial tool business and became a process server.
“My family was going down the ladder,” Jeff remembers of his childhood in Oak Park, Michigan. “Everyone else around us was going up. My parents were not happy or popular people,” he says simply. “Our fortunes kept falling. We literally moved to the other side of the tracks.”
Jeffrey’s father was tall and rugged. His sister was large and struggled with her weight. Jeff always felt conspicuous as “this fair, small little boy.”
“You could just look at us and see ‘which one of these is not like the other?’ But then, I had so many reasons to feel like an outsider. Maybe my wounds have more to do with that.”
Jeff was artsy in a family that thought art was a little eccentric. His first stirrings of sexual feeling were, as the expression went then, “different.” He was a kid from the other side of the tracks in a community of suburban commuters.
“I had a lot of reasons to feel like an outsider,” he says again. “Adoption was just one added to all the others. Was there a wound? Sure. But not just from one knife.”
Jeffrey Seller says that he still recalls how his parents, who could not afford an expensive bar mitzvah party, nevertheless threw one for him so that he wouldn’t feel slighted among his friends. His sister, who was not adopted, was really the wounded party.
“She felt like I was the favorite child. You know what? She was right,” Jeff says. “My mother had had two miscarriages on her way to having my sister. She did not feel warm toward my sister from the first. My sister felt that and could be a very sad little child.” Jeff detects “elfskin” in people: that quality in a performer that makes people want to look at them. “When children are sad,” he explains, “adults just don’t turn on the lights for them. It’s malicious, but it’s life. Babies emit something to adults, and adults give it back. I knew I was cherished, so I seemed to be innately friendly. I smiled, and adults smiled back. It made a difference.”
Jeffrey’s gift for producing smiles proved to be the ticket to his career in the theater. He has produced Rent, along with Avenue Q, In the Heights, and the 2009 dual-language revival of West Side Story. His recollections of his own childhood were sharp enough to make him hesitate when he and Josh began to consider having a family. But if everyone let the pains of childhood discourage them from having children of their own, the history of humankind would have ended with Adam and Eve. Childhood may be as idealized as childbirth.
Jeffrey and Josh have a daughter, May, who is seven, and a six-year-old son named Tommy. Jeff Seller is a sensible, sensitive man who knows that just as art isn’t possible without commerce and compromise, you don’t grow up without losing things along the way.
“No matter what else is true about adoption,” he says, “a birth mother loses something, and her child loses something. We tell our children, ‘Some people are good at having children, and some people are good at taking care of them.’” He skips over the example of his own life to say, “We know that our children came to us out of a loss. Their birth mothers lost them. They lost their biological mothers. But they gained two parents who have the love and inclination and psychological means to take care of them and help them grow up. It’s loss and gain.
“And you know what?” he continues. “That’s life. We lose our teeth. We step out of our diapers. Our hearts get broken. We lose things all the time, and we gain things all the time. The first loss we suffer is one more to add to the pile. There will be more. But there will also be gains. If you never want to get over the first one, I guess you’ll never recover. Whether or not it’s a wound will depend on the person.”
I HAVE A DIM VIEW of parenting guides. Most of them seem just about as comprehensible—and useful—as poorly translated instructions for putting together a toy from Taiwan. However, much of my evaluation is just sheer, pea-brained snobbery, like people who insist that they never watch television yet can sing along with every advertising jingle.
All of the guides about adoption caution parents about the importance of attachment, or the speed and totality with which children who are adopted connect with those who become their parents, the people who are most responsible for nourishing, protecting, and loving them in this world.
Before bed one night, just after I made the rounds to turn out lights and sprinkle treats into our cat’s bowl, I began to thumb through one of those books. It said, as Nancy Verrier suggests, that children who are adopted can be entertainers, eager to superficially please anyone who feeds and cares for them. A child’s true state of mind would be visible in his or her drawings.
The authors showed pictures made by children who hadn’t “bonded” with their parents. The colors were crayon bright, but the pictures were grim and jarring. Little boys and girls had drawn themselves as small, lonely, fragile stick figures, barely visible in a landscape of sinister clouds and behemoth buildings. No parents were in the pictures, not even staring from a cold, uncaring corner.
I went into my study (that sounds grand—I mean the room in which I write, which also holds the cat litter box), where I tape up pictures that our daughters draw on my shirt cardboards. I snapped on my desk lamp and examined armfuls of their drawings, as if they were treasure maps. There were big yellow smiling suns and twinkling stars, shining down on grinning stick-figure little girls holding hands with their mother and father and each other, and their pets. The people were as big as the buildings. Clouds were soft white pillows. Elise had labeled every figure in every drawing: Mama, Baba (me), Elise, Lina, Leona (our cat), Salman Fishdie (our fish), Cutie Pie and Sweetie Pie (our frogs), and Skeebo, Croakie, and Jo Jo (our hermit crabs). Occasionally our huge stuffed dog, Windy, also appeared.
I snapped off the lamp, latched our apartment door, and slipped into bed beside my wife. I drew my mouth gently against her cheek (never, ever awaken a sleeping mother), and rolled onto my back. My eyes filled. We were a family, and our daughters knew it. They felt it. It was a fact of life as obvious and enduring in their drawings as the sun and the stars.
Of course, they also obviously wanted a dog.
OUR CHILDREN connected with us very quickly. Food, care, and unstinting love had something to do with that; I suppose sheer dependence did, too. Our daughters are affectionate. They play games in which they tire of my constant kissing (Lina went through a period I called Little Lollobrigida, when she would wipe my kiss from her small pink cheek and admonish, “No kissa me!”). But when I theatrically sulk off in despair, they smile, throw their small, soft arms around my neck, and brace themselves for another smooch.
My wife and I are indubitably their mother and father. When they have nightmares or skin their knee
s, they cry out for Mama. The jump into our bed in the morning and vie to snuggle next to Mama. When something they taste is too hot, spicy, squiggly, or yucky, they don’t expel that morsel into a napkin, but Mama’s bare hand. When they want a stealthy snack, a made-up story, or a ride on some shoulders, they ask for me.
I tell our daughters stories about a good witch named Beulah, a caramel-corn-eating dolphin named Duncan, and a mermaid named Ethel who bursts into “You’ll be swell, you’ll be great …” at the swish of her tail. The stories are ostensibly recollections from my childhood. But our daughters recommend adjustments to my narratives, like Hollywood producers at a story conference. The final creation wanders in and out of our mingled imaginations and into our dreams. There may be no more enduring bond than that.
But when attachments are strong, there can be sharp anxieties about losing them. Our daughters sometimes seem especially worried about pleasing their mother. Or they seem especially fearful of losing her. Or they get angry with her, as if striking out first is the surest way to avoid being rejected by anyone ever again—a mother especially.
As our girls grow, we have noticed them getting occasional fits of hurt and rage, right on target with all the books that I’ve disdained. The people at whom they might really be angry, beginning with the rulers who mandate China’s one-child policy, are not around to be the targets of their ire. Their parents are right in front of them, arms open. Where better to pour out their bitterest feelings? And what are parents for, if not to try to draw hurts away from our children?
There are times when our daughters have a difficult time with change: saying goodbye, or even goodnight, moving (if even, as we have, across the street), graduating from kindergarten, or ice cream shops that suddenly run out of the sprinkles that they had counted on having. Tantrums are a time-tested way of letting the world, as well as your parents, know that you’d like to call a halt to the rotation of the earth and the momentum of history for one damn minute and make the world pay attention to you. This kind of behavior is scarcely unique to children who have been adopted. But some of these ordinary anxieties might pinch a nerve with children who feel that they have been rejected in life before they had a chance to prove how lovable they are.
ONE MORNING Elise padded out early to find me writing and announced that she wanted to make a crown for Lina. The laptop was put aside. We got paper from the printer tray. She carefully drew the spokes of the crown and capped them with stars. I offered to cut the crown from the paper, with all the twists and turns she had drawn in, but Elise insisted on using her small fingers to work the scissors by herself. She snipped, we folded, we taped, and when Lina cried out from her crib, we rushed in to hold the crown over her small, downy head. Then, when we had gauged her proper size and cut the crown to fit, Elise fixed hair clips on two sides to hold it in place. Princess Paulina! we proclaimed. Lina beamed as we fussed and smoothed. Her small face burst with utter gladness.
Elise and I hummed an improvised processional as we followed Lina’s small strut into the bedroom, where we awakened my wife. Da-da-da-da! Ladies and Gentlemen, Princess Lina of the Realm of Simon! We whooped, laughed, and cheered for the best morning ever.
Then Elise decided that she wanted to dress Lina like a princess, too. She rolled out drawers and dumped boxes, pulling out scarves, jackets, and shirts. She told Lina to stand there while she wrapped and tied. Lina stood still for several minutes, but then she began to bridle at being her sister’s dress-up doll. She began to squirm, then stomped away. Elise pinched her, and Lina scampered away, crying and screaming for Mama. I heard a door slam like a cannon shot.
By the time I got to her room, Elise was ripping the exquisite crown she had made for her sister into twenty and thirty little tiny angry pieces. Her face had hardened like a fist. Her bright brown eyes smoldered with tears. I slid down to the floor with my back against the wall.
“First, don’t pinch,” I said. “If you’re angry, use words.” But Elise had been told that scores of times before. Just repeating that commandment now was as useful as pouring water over a stone. She felt pinched—punched, really—by what she took to be Lina’s rejection. After all the drawing, coloring, ornate cutting, fiddling, draping, dressing, and getting things just so, her little sister had pushed her away and scurried off to claim their mother’s arms. Elise felt rejected; then replaced. We tell our daughters, “Use your words, darling.” But what words would a six-year-old—or a sixty-year-old—know for whatever feelings were cooking and competing in Elise then?
“Don’t pinch. Ever,” I said more softly. Then, after I had said what duty required, I uttered what I knew I had really walked into the room to tell her, even as the words leaped out of my heart ahead of me: “I love you. Your mother loves you. Your sister loves you. Leona loves you. Sammi loves you. Your aunts, uncles, and grandparents, your teachers and the people who work downstairs at the market and the cleaners and the drugstore and the pizza place and the Chinese restaurant all love you. I don’t know much about nuclear energy or rocket science. But I am sure—absolutely, positively, a thousand percent sure—that the strongest force on earth is the love I have for you.”
Elise cocked an eye.
“Where’s da crown?” she asked. I had picked up the pieces and put them on a shelf behind me. “Here, baby,” I said, turning them over to her.
Elise tucked the scraps against her chest and walked away. I followed her footsteps through the hall, into a foyer, into the dining room, and finally into the kitchen where, I was sure, she would present the sad, torn pieces of the lacerated crown to Lina and say “I’m sorry.” We would tape them together and have breakfast on the balcony. Bluebirds would sit on our shoulders, chirping cheerfully and passing jars of honey on their wings.
Lina was clasping her mother’s knees when we got to the kitchen. Elise reared back with her fistful of paper pieces and heaved them at their feet.
“Stupid poo-poo head!” she shrieked. “I hate you, stupid Mama stupid Baba stupid stupid stupid Lina poo-poo heads!”
Well, she used her words …
Caroline held Elise while I picked up Lina. Elise pulled back, she sputtered into my wife’s face, and she screamed. No words: just screamed. She spat, she shrieked, she fumed. She pulled out of Caroline’s embrace, like Ali slipping out of a headlock against the ropes, and reached up to hit Lina’s foot. She was aiming for her back. When I turned away from that attempted assault, she changed strategy and thwacked my rump. Stupid Lina stupid stupid Baba poo-poo head. It is hard to watch a child you love spew hurt, spittle, and wrath. After a couple of rounds with no decision, she went back to my wife’s arms, and this time she stayed and cried. And cried some more.
But within ten minutes (which was probably more like twenty), she was at the kitchen table eating matzo and hummus (no doubt this paragraph makes it all seem so much easier than it really was). Demons had overtaken our daughter. But she was learning to beat them back, and that took grit and character. Our apartment was still standing, and our younger daughter was still whole. I admired Elise. She had earned her matzo and hummus—breakfast of champions.
CHILDREN HAVE TANTRUMS whether they’ve been adopted from China, plucked from bulrushes, or born into the House of Windsor. I don’t believe that children who have been adopted have any more or fewer tantrums than did Lhamo Döndrub (and he grew up to be the fourteenth Dalai Lama).
But those children who have been adopted from China, Russia, Ethiopia, or institutions here have had lives that we weren’t there to share. For our daughters, that meant spending months in orphanages in which they may have been well fed but not always well attended to.
To our daughters, and perhaps other children who have spent their first, formative months in institutions, hunger (or cold, or feeling left alone) may not be just a pang in the stomach but what professionals call a trigger. That twinge doesn’t tell them: You’re hungry. What’ll it be? I see your folks have got bananas, yogurt, bagels, milk, soymilk, carrots, cra
ckers, leftover pizza, guacamole, biriyani, and four different kinds of cereals spilling out of the pantry and refrigerator shelves. Enjoy! Instead, pangs can set off old feelings, if not memories, of howling for food and waiting, reaching up to be held and having no one pick you up and hold you close. A flash of hunger can make children who’ve spent their first months in institutions feel threatened and vulnerable. It can make them cling and claw, and can light a fuse to the fright, fight, or flight reflex.
My wife and I have learned to think about our children the way a baseball manager thinks of his pitchers: You have to know when to pull them. They may look good and seem strong after a hundred pitches. But you have to take them out of the game before the first twinge of fatigue can make them do something you’ll both regret. Take them away, get them food and rest. Don’t wait until you see them begin to wind down.
And don’t be reluctant—or too prideful about the profound attachment that you enjoy with your children—to bring in help. Let them get on the ground and play with and talk to professionals who have seen five hundred other children act like this, children from China, Russia, or Scarsdale. Do it while children are just pinching and shouting “Stupid poo-poo head!” Do it to spare them unnecessary months or even years of angry fits and moods that can’t be much fun for them, either.
Our daughters are our babies; they always will be. But if they wanted for food, warmth, or attention in their first, formative months, they lost a few months of pure, innocent infancy before we ever got to them. They couldn’t assume love in those first few weeks and months when they had just left their mother’s body, and they must have felt suddenly and unnaturally responsible for their own survival.
I think that the love my wife and I give our daughters can help bind whatever wound they have and make them strong. It may even, after a time, help make the wound almost undetectable. Indeed, our daughters’ sense of being responsible for themselves will be an adult asset. But first, they need and deserve a chance to be children.
