The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,6

arms or you got shot down in some horrible haunted ghost town, ended up with nothing but a moonshine hangover.

When all the science we could muster had failed, we thought we’d adopt internationally. Ramon was international, after all. We went to a very fancy adoption agency—Smith Chasen, on the Upper East Side—for an introduction to international adoption. It was as if we were applying to prep school. The chairs lined up perfectly, the metal of each arm touching the next just so, and pristine forms on clipboards were fanned out on tables, which made us feel we needed to be special, chosen even, for entry into this arrangement. And so we sat, straight as pins, poles up our hopeful, anal-retained asses, as we waited for the social workers to illuminate us about what countries we might plunder for a baby.

This was 2009. The whole world was on the verge of financial collapse, and in regards to international adoption, I had the sense that, like going to college in the eighties, I had missed a quintessential moment. While I still banged around Washington, DC, shaking my fists, it was hardly the age of protest. The Freedom Riders, beaten, had already come home. Civil disobedience was long over. It seemed we had missed the opportunity to adopt a child abroad by a hair as well. Ten and twenty years previously, due to the one-child policy, Chinese girls were easy to come by. There were so many Chinese girls in New York City schools that our friend’s child, Zoe—the third Zoe we knew—thought anyone Asian at her school had been adopted. Now I knew that the removal of all those Chinese girls had clearly taken a toll on the country: China was now a rich country of young men. It would be quite difficult to get a Chinese child, we were told, under the age of five.

A five-year-old. I had gotten Harriet at eight weeks old; she’d been teenier than a loaf of bread, and just as soft and delicious. I’d adopted her in part to recover from illness, to take care of instead of only being cared for, a final escape from the invasiveness of having been opened and basted closed.

Harriet. I was in graduate school then, with more time than I would ever have again in my life, and so I did obsessive obedience training with her—sitting, staying, handing over the paw, a game where I shot her and she played dead—all to prepare her for future visits to sick children in cancer wards, places she would never go because I could never go back.

Commands aside, it had been important to me to raise a puppy as my companion, and I felt similarly about a child. I could let go of the genetic link quite easily, and with it release a child from inheriting my mighty nose, my proclivity toward migraines, my rash rush to anger, but I could not let go of the prospect of mothering an infant.

Given my family, a heady combination of Eastern European Jews, I was inclined to choose a child from Russia. When the criteria for adopting a Russian child went up on the screen at that first meeting at Smith Chasen, we found we made the cut—bravo!—but what the country was offering was hard to bear. Children in orphanages, the environments unclear, and I thought of a child perhaps untouched from infanthood. The long wait for a Russian child flashed on the screen, along with a chart of how orphanages tried to adopt those children out first locally, in the town or village, and then state-wide, and then nationally. So by the time the possibility of that child arrived here, she was often three or four, and, I could not help but wonder, passed over why?

I could not have known at that introductory session that two weeks later, Russia would put a ban on U.S. adoptions as a result of an American woman who placed her adopted Russian child alone on a one-way plane to Moscow with a note that said: This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues. The child was dropped by a hired driver at the Russian Education Ministry in Moscow.

I thought about the woman who sent that child back to Russia as we drove south, where babies—babies available for adoption—came from. Because of religion, I thought, remembering the fanatics in front of the abortion clinics we defended in college, who held Life magazine’s blown-up pictures of