Growing Girls (6 page)

I took her in my arms. She was all skin and bones, a wrinkled angel. I asked George how a person went about rescuing a creature so delicate.

“I was more thinking your goat could do it,” he said, looking over at Cleopatra. Goats and sheep are genetically similar, he said, and a willing goat can raise a lamb. This was news to me. George said our goat would have more than enough milk for this baby, too. Maybe she would accept her as one of her own. Maybe she wouldn’t. It was worth the try. It was either that or let the lamb die.

I felt awkward. How do you go about asking a goat to mother a lamb? I placed the lamb next to where baby Greg was nursing. Cleopatra looked, sniffed, looked some more. In an instant she had made up her mind. The lamb took a good long drink and the bond was formed.

In a way, it was the most natural thing in the world. Here was a creature that needed a mom, and here was a mom with plenty of mothering to give.

I stood there a long time watching this, filled with pride for my goat and her good deed. At one point Cleopatra looked over at me. It wasn’t an expression of thanks or even a knowing. It was a plain old goat look of “What are you looking at?” A bond is a bond is a bond.

I remember thinking that if Anna and Sasha ever complain about having gotten me as a mom, I could send them out to talk to that lamb. “Yeah, you think you’ve got it rough,” that lamb could say. “My mom is a goat.”

We named her Sweet Pea. Within weeks, well before the daffodils came up, she was strong enough to play in the barnyard, tumbling with Greg and accepting Anna’s invitation to wear a hat.

A lot of Americans adopting from China incorporate some portion of their child’s Chinese name into the new American name, but with Sasha we couldn’t figure out a way to do this, just as we couldn’t with Anna. Anna’s Chinese name is Gu Yu Qian. We tried Anna Gu Levy or Anna Gu Yu Levy and everything sounded ridiculous and apologetic. “Levy” is so Jewish: you throw Chinese into it and the whole thing sounds too eager to please. So with both girls we decided they’d head into life with two names; they’d have their American names and they’d grow up knowing their Chinese names, too. Gu Yu Qian translates to “Pretty Like Jade.” When we went to China to get Anna, I bought a jade bead and a small gold chain and I made a necklace that I never take off. I tried to think of something I could wear around my neck that would say: Lucky Red Equally-Fine-in-External-Accomplishments-and-Internal-Qualities.

Every day I checked the Yahoo! group for help with this and other matters, including tips on how to make rice congee and
which stores in Guangzhou had the best deals on baby clothes. Sometimes people would post newspaper articles of interest, and one day this one landed in my in-box:

I read this article over and over again. The first few times I felt like a spy finally finding the corner of the edge of the most critical piece of evidence that would mean the difference between war and peace. Actual words from the actual ghost-mothers. It is so hard for me to believe these women exist, so hard to hold on to the small fictions I invent to remember the truth that happened before my arrival in my girls’ lives. It is as meaningful as imagining the landscape of heaven; I may as well be a kid picturing God up there mixing the potions He’ll pour into the molds to now populate Cleveland.

I can’t hold on to the fact that my daughters were once cradled by the women who gave them their biology, were once jostled about by aunts or grandmothers who took hold of their umbilical cords and made the cut, were once wiped clean of the goo with which they arrived into the world by some trusted villager. I can’t hold on to the fact of her goodbye. I can’t hold on to that one at all.

In my mind I begin both of my daughters’ lives with the pictures that arrived in the mail. The beautiful babies waiting. To think about the rest of it is only to realize how little I think about the rest of it, is only to spiral down again and down again.

What do I want? What does she want? We want to meet one day, as old women, alone in a coffee shop. We want to embrace and fall into sobs. We want to verify in each other the fulfillment of every mother’s pledge: we did the best with what we had. We want to discover an instant kind of love that exceeds all expectations.

Anna came with us to China to get Sasha. To keep her entertained on the plane, I supplied her with many books of stickers. When we arrived in Beijing she had little Poohs and Piglets covering her arms and legs and many people remarked that she looked like one of those tattooed ladies in the circus. Anna remained largely oblivious to the attention and soon enough added Eeyore to the tip of her nose.

Twelve other families were picking up Huazhou babies and so we formed a large group. I could see some of the other parents-to-be studying Anna, and I got the sense that despite
the stickers she became for them a symbol of hope. Here was the healthiest child in the world, a happy kid with a rich imagination who just two years previously had been bundled up in an orphanage, waiting.

It was June and unbearably hot in Beijing but nonetheless we all traveled to the Forbidden City, where we took pictures for our girls to one day hold. Then we went to the Great Wall and bought pearls. Alex and I had both learned when we got Anna that these trips aren’t about sightseeing. Your whole self is used up trying to learn how to be a parent and there is nothing left. Even so, there is the rumble of who you used to be, the person who traveled the world in search of stories and who fell in love with wandering way back as a kid on Lorraine Drive, taking off for a day in the woods. The adventure! Standing on the Great Wall stretching east and west into the horizon, it was hard to be just a person with a camera and a seat waiting on a bus. I wanted to run on that wall. I wanted to climb. But Anna was hot and she needed more juice.

Women who have babies early in life often think of motherhood as a rut, as if there’s a great world beyond they’re somehow missing out on. But I remember wishing for babies as a young woman, feeling my life of adventure was a rut. I try not to make too much of this. Mostly, I just think life is full of ruts. There’s the rut of putting the coffee on the exact same way you did the night before, first the water, then the filter, then eight scoops, then the button setting the timer so that at 6 a.m. you’ll smell it brewing. The rut of waking up to your same radio station, same announcer, same robe, same slippers, same dogs to let out, vitamins, cat snaking between your legs. The rut of the
same bowl of Kix for your kid, same yogurt, same highchair, Elmo. The rut of eating a banana at your desk while checking your e-mail. The rut of: Aren’t I getting boring?
Shouldn’t I perk this life up?

Did I want a second kid simply to get out of a rut? Is that why I wanted the first one? Where would this method of family planning end up?

When we got to Guangzhou the next day, it was even hotter than Beijing and the smog was so bad our guides told us to try to stay in the hotel from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. We boarded a bus to the place where Sasha was said to be waiting for us. We entered an office building and all you heard were babies crying, it sounded like a thousand of them. We waited in a room and Alex held the video camera and his shirt was completely wet with sweat. One by one they brought the babies in and yelled out their names. It was all so hot and chaotic and I wondered where Miss Peng was. A woman was wandering around with a baby in her arms and she was saying, “Ji Hong Bin? Ji Hong Bin?” And at first I shook my head no. Then I heard her say it again and I looked at the baby.

I recognized her eyes. Nothing else. Her hair had been shaved off and she was so tiny she did not look entirely real. Her eyes, just her eyes were huge. They were dark as crude oil and pleading. I held out my arms and when she fell inside it was nothing like it was with Anna. Anna had been a bowl of Jell-O, an armful of peace.

Sasha was a solid jangle of bones, stiff as sticks. I knew she was sick. At that moment I thought: cerebral palsy. Anna reached up to her with a toy but Sasha didn’t take it.

I wondered again where Miss Peng was. Everyone had said she was an angel and yet she wasn’t even here to deliver this group of children. She had something better to do?

I wondered what these monsters had done to this child.

I looked at Alex as I fell into tears. He turned off the camera and came running and when he took Sasha in his arms she clung to him like a starving monkey. She did not let go.

Ten million people live in Guangzhou and yet it’s only China’s fifth-largest city. We rode back to the hotel in the bus and I held Anna and smelled her hair and Sasha was still clinging to Alex. I was sick of all those ten million people. I was missing my rut back home. It was all so circular, so Dorothy, so Auntie Em. You could write an ode to your own backyard if so many people hadn’t already thought of it.

Our room was on the twenty-second floor of the hotel and Anna loved running down the long hallway. It was exactly as it was the day before, when we checked in, except now Alex had a little monkey stuck to him.

In our room we peeled off Sasha’s clothes, a light jumpsuit two sizes too big. She did not mind this or anything else. Her legs were twigs. She seemed profoundly malnourished. She was silent and tight, holding her arms to her chest. We sat her on the floor and surrounded her with toys. She looked but did not reach for any of them, despite Anna’s repeated attempts to offer them. “Why won’t my sister play with me?” Anna asked. I told her to wait. I told myself to wait. But worry had already swept in and through me and now sat on my chest like a stone. What was wrong with her? What was wrong with my baby?
Was the treatment she received at the orphanage so poor that she was somehow shell-shocked? Had she ever been loved at all? Had she ever been held? Had she ever played with a toy?

I tried to sympathize, to understand the ghost-mother and all the ghost-nannies. But forgiveness was so far away now.

I tried to empathize, to put myself in Sasha’s heart. She had just been yanked away from the only family she’d ever known: on the one hand an orphanage, but on the other hand a home. There is a level of comfort in any rut—any.