The Mothers A Novel

7

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The pièce de résistance of that weekend in North Carolina was not the pom-poms or the filling out of the profile form, or even the meat-filled dinner; it was not the sleepless nights in a lonely, sad hotel. It was the film.

Good God, the film.

It began Sunday morning’s training session. Nickie wasn’t there, so Crystal and Tiffany, now seated at the head of the pushed-together tables, timidly waited for all of us to file in.

When we were all accounted for—public relations Gabe and journalist Brian filing in last and without apology—Crystal or Tiffany stood up.

“We have a movie this morning!” she announced.

The other one, Tiffany or Crystal, also stood. “We usually try and have birth parents come in to talk to you guys. And also some of our clients and the kids they’ve adopted. But today, we’re going to show a movie instead.”

I looked at Ramon, my face asking, Why? Another wave of panic: this place is not real. They have no real birthmothers. They have no real people who have adopted real children. This isn’t even a real table. We are in a diorama, I thought, like the one depicting Native Americans swaddled in smallpox-infested blankets Lucy and I had seen at the Smithsonian.

Tiffany or Crystal continued. “It’s a little out-of-date and it was really for when we started doing open adoption in the late eighties and early nineties. Just warning you! There’s some serious hair here.”

Crystal and Tiffany giggled, their fine blond hair shining in the light, the pink of their vulnerable skulls peeking through.

James, the volunteer fireman, stood up and flicked out the lights.

Of course the fireman volunteers, I thought as the television went on, a square of blue and then a crude version of the sun shining over the agency logo, flickering across the screen.

I half expected a sex-education tape to come on the display, the film of a dachshund giving birth to puppies, little beings slicked in blood and embryonic fluid, that I’d seen in fifth grade. The boys and girls had watched separately, equally entranced and repulsed by what was happening on-screen. And yet the girls all thought, Will this one day be me? I don’t see how that’s possible, we all thought, that this is our lot in life, this grossness.

Bleary from the previous night’s whiskey and lack of sleep, I was grateful to be passive and watch a movie, to not have to think or consider our future. I was tired of deciding.

The movie, a term I use here only loosely, began with a young woman, perhaps eighteen, who had placed her child for adoption and couldn’t have been happier about it. She spoke to the shaking camera in the backyard of a large stone house, a child, perhaps three, playing with a woman on an elaborate swing set behind her. “Come to mama,” the woman, in her late forties perhaps, cooed to the little girl as the young woman told the camera about knowing she could not parent and yet when she’d had her child, she had become a part of this new family. Through openness, she said. It had been amazing.

The birthmother, who, one could tell when the camera panned out a bit, held a balloon as she spoke—was it a gift for her or the child?—discussed how she saw the family and her daughter often, sometimes five times a year, and always—no matter what!—on Mother’s Day.

I admit my heart fell a little. Am I allowed to ask where I fit in here? There is a woman who gives birth and that is not I. And then she is in our lives—Ramon’s and mine, ours, whatever that life will look like—however she chooses to be. I accept that, but I had to turn away from the screen; when do I get to be the mother?

Perhaps never. This, I realized now, is also an option, even if it is not a box I have checked. Breathless, the adoptive mother—that’s what she kept calling herself, that’s what everyone but the child referred to her as, and the rumble of a riot began again in my chest—discussed how open adoption had given them a whole new layer to the notion of family. As she said this, the birthmother presented the child with the balloon. The child promptly let the balloon go and at first everyone sucked in their breath, and then, as if becoming aware that this was being filmed, they caught themselves. Let’s all wish on it, the adoptive mother suggested. On command, everyone closed their eyes tighttighttight, and the balloon floated gently up into the sky.

Then a new couple abruptly flashed on the screen. They looked high school age, and attractive.

“How did you decide to place your child?” an off-screen interviewer asked.

They spoke about being very much in love and also devoutly Christian but not wanting children so early in life. I was cheered by this couple, who sat close to each other and answered the interviewer’s questions. One day, she said, taking the boy’s hand in hers, we will have a family of our own.

I hoped they would, and I thought about loss and what it can do to love. And how the hardship was really more hers, bodily anyway. Or perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps the birthfather wandered through his days unsure what was the matter, but knowing, profoundly, that something important, ineffable, had escaped him.

“How did you decide on the adoptive parents?” the voice asked.

The couple looked at each other and laughed. “It sounds so silly,” he said, “but I’m a musician. I mean, I want to be. And Tony, the adoptive father, also plays music. We both like, umm, Crash Test Dummies, Barenaked Ladies, alternative stuff, and he had that on his profile. It made me feel connected to him. Now we hang out and jam together. It’s kind of awesome, and I feel like we chose for our baby what we might have been.”

The young woman nodded her head. “Or what we might become,” she said. “Now that we have the chance.”

“It’s true it’s the littlest thing that makes you decide,” she said. “We chose to live close and be involved, we have Christmas together, and Mother’s Day of course, and it is really nice to be able to see our daughter growing up. But before that we weren’t sure about near or far, we just knew not in New York City. That was our number one criteria. Not in New York City, people get shot there.”

I snapped to attention and looked around the room to see how the others had reacted to this. Martin and James were nodding their heads in agreement. And so were Herman and Alex, and I even saw Paula and Anita smiling a bit, though perhaps this was just to show goodwill toward the couple. Or, I thought in a more sinister manner, they were smiling about the competitive nature of this venture; if no one wanted to place babies in New York, then we were out of the running. Get rid of the straight Brooklyn couple! Which only meant more opportunity for the gun-bearing fireman and his nurse partner.

The only person I didn’t look at was Ramon.

After the film, James the fireman flicked the lights on.

Tiffany or Crystal rubbed her hands together. “Let me just say, the New York comment was from a long time ago.” She looked at Ramon and me. “I meant to warn y’all about that.”

Paula cleared her throat. “So what happened to that couple anyway?”

“What do you mean?” Crystal or Tiffany asked, cocking her head.

“Well,” Anita said, and I noticed how often she completed Paula’s sentences in a way that made Paula shrink back in her chair, “the musician couple, in college. Are they still together? That was what, fifteen years ago. Do they have kids now?”

Tiffany and Crystal nodded. One of them said, “Well, they broke up when they were in college, not long after this was filmed, actually. And we lost track of them, to be honest. They don’t see the adoptive family anymore.”

“What?” Brian the journalist said. “I thought this was a film to promote openness.”

“It does, and we as an agency do, but, to be honest, many of the birthmothers lose contact. If they move, or have other children, more often than not—statistically speaking, I mean—they fall out of touch.”

You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar, but who the hell wants a collection of bees? And so I asked, “If openness is best for the birthmother, and dealing with her grief is a large part of this, which I totally understand, but if it’s also about the child knowing who her family is so she doesn’t have to fantasize about her parents, and doesn’t feel abandoned, well, what happens, say, when the child is four, and the birthmother just disappears? What

about the child’s grief? To feel left twice? How is this healthy for anyone?”

The room was silent but for some head-bobbing in assent, and I could feel myself galvanizing my troops, a trait I inherited from my mother.

Crystal or Tiffany paused a moment before speaking. “The child will know the reality. Open adoption is not a science, but from the research we all know open adoption is best for all parties. It is.”

I looked around the table and all of us were nodding, myself included. But how did we know? We didn’t, after all, have children.

“But there is no guarantee that it works for everyone or that it is stable at all times,” she continued. “This is about people.”

I thought of myself as a teenager, those nights I screamed at my mother, who would not let me go to a concert or to a friend’s to study. What would that have been like had I known I had another mother, just in the next town or state. I could, in these fraught moments, tell my mother I liked this other mother better, or worse, that I was leaving to find her. What would I do if my daughter left for her biological mother?

The lawyer, with her purple hair, her lost furniture, her fears, made every ounce of sense now. Someone else out there will always be the mother. This is true for the lawyer’s children as well—it is the biology of adoption—but that mother will be unfindable.

Better, I thought then, to colonize a country, take the Chinese children, the Koreans, the Ethiopian babies that, yes, I knew would be black than to live through the thought of the mother’s arriving, or worse, perhaps, the anticipation of her sure departure. I had no idea what the effect of her going, leaving that teenager only to disappear, would be.

“There’s no guarantee of anything with children of your own either, genetic children, I mean,” Tiffany or Crystal said.

“That’s a good point. Nothing in life is guaranteed. It just isn’t.” Gabe shared this with the rest of us.

“Exactly,” Crystal or Tiffany said.

Family, just the word. Even second generation.

There it was: my grandfather holding my hand in the dark movie theater as we watched the red balloon in the film, hovering over the streets of Paris, waiting for its chosen little boy. I imagined it now, my grandfather long gone, the balloon that birthmother held, lingering at my window, and then following me down the streets of my Brooklyn neighborhood, past our butcher and our cheese shop, the yoga studios that weren’t there when I moved in, past the restaurants with their local and sustainable food, past the park with the fountain kids run through all summer long. It waits for me at Harriet’s favorite grassy hill, where it will meet all the other pink metallic unicorn balloons in Brooklyn, and it will soar up into the sky, far above my brownstone-lined borough, above our city; all the balloons, together, will carry me high into the air, and very far away.