The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,8
hello and ordered. “You send flowers to the people helping you.” She blew into her tea. “You just do it. They say it’s a queue but it’s not really a queue. Send flowers, and you can get better ones than the ones you’re supposed to get.”
I had no idea what this woman was talking about. It felt similar to the beginnings of my peregrinations through the underworld of infertility treatments—needles filled with Follistim and Menopur, hot stone massages, progesterone, acupuncture, wheatgrass shots, estrogen patches, potassium IVs. Once I did not know the meaning of some of those words. Here, I began to write everything down in my adoption notebook, a red leather-bound book I’d had for years. I did not yet understand that what the lawyer meant was: try not to get the Russian kid who has never been touched, she will have bonding issues.
“Bonding issues can ruin your life,” she told me. “If you’re at all unsure about the condition of the child, that’s where Felicia Hirschfeld comes in. She’s famous for looking at videos and measuring the heads of Russian children—actually she measures heads from all the Stans: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan—any Stan she’ll do. She did it for Angelina Jolie, and,” she said, “for a well-worth-it fee, she will also do it for you.”
“Did Angelina Jolie adopt from a Stan?” I asked, after writing down the name of the woman who measured heads. In addition to securing my memory, writing these facts came with the bonus of removing myself entirely from what, I was finding, was a one-way conversation.
She waved me away. “No, she didn’t, but it’s Angelina and Felicia Hirschfeld is the best—The. Best.—so Angelina used her for her African child.”
“Oh,” I said. I would soon learn that most everyone adopting a child referred to Angelina Jolie often, and by her first name. “Ramon and I were thinking about Ethiopia as well.” I looked up at the lawyer, the sides of her face tinted purple where the stylist had not wiped her skin clean of dye. We were thinking of Ethiopia because the criterion for Ethiopia was: you can get a child now. They can be six months old, and the orphanages were said to be clean, with loving caretakers, and they did not seem to care about cancer. I imagined getting a grant to learn about a feminist activist community movement in the Sudan while I waited for my baby to make her way to me. Perhaps my own mother, with all her access to the developing world, might be able to help in this situation as well. The Ethiopians, my mother once told me, are the most beautiful people on earth.
Was I allowed to care about beauty? I had no idea, but this lawyer looked at me, her chin quivering, pointed down. “You know . . .” Her index finger drew imaginary lines on the sticky table. “If you get an Ethiopian child, that child will be black.”
I stopped writing and looked up. We were in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in one of the most diverse cities on earth. “Obviously,” I said. “Of course we’re aware.”
“Well, I’m just saying that if you have a black baby you will have to pal around with black people.”
I took a long sip of my coffee. “Okay.” I went back to writing. Pal around, I wrote. With black people.
“I’m glad you see my point. Your people are Russian.” She raised her chin.
I nodded. She was not wrong.
“It matters,” she said. “Let me tell you about international adoption. It’s not open. You do not want open. That’s the way they do it now, domestically.”
“Really?” I looked up from my note taking. “I thought research was showing open—where all of us know each other to some degree—was best for the child. I’ve got adult friends who didn’t know their biological parents and I don’t know that it was better for them. They have a lot of fantasies about where they might have come from, who their parents might have been. They have to decide as adults if they want to find these people, strangers really. It can turn their worlds upside down.”
She smiled. Her face stretched, a drum, a lampshade. “I had a mother who would give me furniture and then take it back. Give me a beautiful dresser—inlaid, just gorgeous—and then take it back. A mirror. Take it back. I just couldn’t bear that. Someone’s mother coming back, I mean. Taking them back.”