The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,9
looked at me, incredulous. “For the child,” she said. “Yes. I cried for weeks when my mother took the beautiful dresser. A stunning mid-century piece.”
I had that same horrible feeling that I would leave many conversations about adopting with: paralyzing anxiety. They made me politically uncomfortable, or they made me fearful that I had made a fallacious choice, taken an incorrect path through the wrong forest, and, because of this, my magic pot would not only not be brimming with babies, it would not even be partially filled, not even with one infant. If every meeting, every conversation, each scrap of knowledge I accrued, told me something about adoption, here was my lesson from this meeting: When you are adopting a child, the rules of social conversation are not applicable. When you are adopting a child, you are allowed to say what you please about race. You will eventually have to write it down on a form for everyone to see, what race you want, what race you do not want. You will have to know this, but you will not have to explain your reasoning. You will not have to explain anything at all. You simply do not check the box you do not want. And, somehow, in this new country, because of the Hague laws and democracy and capitalism and America, and the fact that you will become the mother of this child, everything you say will be correct.
I couldn’t imagine what it meant for a baby to be taken. Back.
As we were readying to part out on Seventh Avenue, a bright robin’s-egg-blue day, I asked the lawyer why she’d waited so long to adopt.
“You know,” she began, her fine hair separating in the wind, “my brother died when I was five. We were playing in the street up in Westchester, in our neighborhood.” She paused. “He was hit by a car.” Another pause. “I was five. I just didn’t know if I could do it,” she said. “Be a mother. And then before I knew it, it was too late. And then it was really too late.”
That had been over six months ago. I was thirty-eight.
“Just yesterday,” the lawyer said, “I went to pick up my children, and the teacher’s aide, she called my children over and said that their grandmother was here.”
“How awful,” I told her, with emotion.
“Their grandmother!” She had nodded her head, and I could tell she was in that moment, turning the injustice of it over, of aging and biology, letting it roll around, a marble on her tongue, pinging against her teeth. And then she turned and began to walk uptown. She didn’t wish me luck or tell me to be in touch if I had questions. She didn’t even say good-bye.
_______
In the end, Ramon and I decided on domestic adoption because we didn’t meet the criteria of many countries due to my illness, but mostly it was because we desired an infant. I put out of my mind the notion that a mother could come back and take the child away and what that could feel like, because we were told that once there was a match with a birthmother, we could be in the delivery room, holding her hand. The birthmother, we were told, would be like family. This became the fairy-tale narrative we lived by, there from almost the beginning of our once-upon-a-time. I imagined, as we headed to this agency down south, away from New York and its difficult laws that few agencies were licensed in, that we would name our baby Grace, like a lot of the adopted girls I knew. Grace, as in “divine,” as in “God’s Grace,” because of all we had to do to find her, the child that was ours from the ancient beginnings of time, but that we’d had to be tried and tested and trained to find.
The birthmothers, we told each other, are real. They have what we want: not the stitched pink stripe, the ticking black spot, not the hand-forced specimen swimming free in a sterile cup, but flesh and blood and bones, a thread sutured to life. I thought about Grace now, on this highway. Ramon and I were relieved when we decided on adoption, and we believed we would find comfort in going to Smith Chasen for that horrid meeting, and now we felt relieved that finally this process could make sense to us; there would be logic to this grace.