The Mothers A Novel

2

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I had always thought about what a mother is in relation to what she is not. I knew, had I the choice, for instance, that I would not choose to be my mother. My mother was stretched thin. My mother was nervous. She grew up in the fifties. For her, working was a political act. Being a mother was both the equal and opposite of a political act. As an adult I believe in my mother’s politics, and I understand as a chronicler of history—women’s history in particular—that making a choice was necessary. But as a kid, I did not care about postwar American society and the myth of the feminine mystique; I just wanted my mother to take me to soccer practice.

Claudine used to call me home to read to me at 4:30 P.M., when other kids were still eating cereal together in front of televisions or kicking the can along tar-pocked streets.

It was always winter, and twilight, and I remember leaving my friends’ houses and crossing the darkening street for home. Lucy would be waiting there, and Claudine would read us the story of the magic pot, a folktale about a poor farmer who found a magic pot that would multiply to the hundreds whatever anyone placed inside it. My mother heard the story on one of her trips to Kenya and later found a book that illuminated the tale with batik-like illustrations. The pot kept giving and giving but soon the king heard about it, and, being king, wanted it for himself. Fighting ensued, which eventually led to the unjust death of many villagers, and the pot grew dusty, its magnificent talent wasted, the villagers still unfed but with the knowledge now of the luxury they were missing. Lucy would be curled in Claudine’s lap, and I, propped on my elbows, imagined our mother doing what she described in her postcards like testing the water supply or showing women how to make milk from U.S. government–provided nutritional powders, a property almost as astonishing as the magic pot’s.

Once my mother asked me what I would put in the magic pot. Candy of course, I told her, but what I’d meant was her love. And now? I have wished on every eyelash, each ladybug touching down on a bare freckled shoulder, for all the grade-A fertilized embryos a girl could hope for. Or no: actual babies are what I want. A magic pot full of babies, one for every childless mother, two for me so they can have each other, the way Lucy and I once did. A magic pot filled with a chance to fix the past. Because that is also what a mother does. She fixes the past from the future. If you cannot be a mother, how do you fix the way in which you were mothered?

_______

Ramon and I were back on 95, heading south toward the adoption agency. Every state has different adoption laws and practices, and it turns out New York is one of the most difficult places to adopt in. National adoption agencies, with offices in the baby-making hubs of our country, were what many of the people we’d spoken to had chosen, and so here we were, going to the closest office, that magical place that held our future. We were to arrive at six o’clock for an initial meeting—a mixer! the informational packet had said—that would begin our weekend of adoption training. Should I bring sneakers? I’d asked Ramon while packing. This training, will it involve a track? A long jump?

To his credit, he’d laughed. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was really just a grueling boot camp? he’d said.

“I wonder what this is going to be like.” Ramon looked away, out his window at the red brick buildings off the highway, nearing Richmond.

“Me too,” I said. “I’m excited though. Are you?”

“I am. Relieved, too.”

By “relieved,” Ramon meant that we had finally jumped off the in vitro fertilization journey—and by “journey,” I mean path through the fairy-tale forest to hell—and had moved on to a newer gamble, the gamble now not being whether we get a kid, but when we would get a kid, and what that child’s genetic makeup would bring. Why gamble on science, Ramon and I reasoned with each other, when our luck has always been suspect?

Ramon had wanted out of the science before we’d even begun, believing my body, which had undergone surgeries and chemo, had withstood enough. Ramon’s mother, who had perhaps taken three Tylenols in her entire life, was against any shred of medication, and Ramon had inherited her resistance. He bludgeoned his hangovers with an occasional Advil and his bouts of depression with drinking. He had never told his mother about my illness—when we went to the lake or the sea with her, I wore a one-piece suit to hide my scars.

Had we unlimited finances, there is no telling what we would have done, but Ramon and I had come to terms with not being genetically linked to our child. And sometimes, we agreed, too much choice gives you, well, too much choice. I remember thinking of the march on Washington senior year of college, how I’d held that round blue sign high: TAKE YOUR LAWS OFF OUR BODIES!

I thought I’d never be able to use a surrogate for this reason. We are not, I used to scream at the boys in sociology class, incubators!

Looking at Ramon in profile as he drove, I could register my own sadness that we would never see his dark face and long nose replicated. Other parts of him that I have blamed on Spanish and Italian temperament, I reasoned, I would be glad to never encounter in my children.

And there was also the cancer. I would be happy not to pass that along to anyone.

Relief. I wasn’t sure I could use that word. I was relieved to be done with my body as Western: a place where the fertility cowboys, spurs of their boots dragging in the sand, tied their horses to my body’s rotting post. They kicked open its rusty-hinged doors, guns blazing, dead bodies and cracked eggs left behind them in clouds of red dust. And either you won the shoot-out and ran off with your own kid swaddled in your 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 fetuses in uteri, the same photos my mother had shown me when trying to explain how babies were made.

Ramon had spent several years in Argentina and Venezuela, and so a South American child made sense to us. He was a native Spanish speaker, and Guatemala seemed a viable option until we were told that night at Smith Chasen that Guatemala had also recently closed to Americans. The Hague Convention, which prevented organizations from paying women to have children, as well as the trafficking of babies over international borders, had been signed into U.S. law. Of course I didn’t want to take someone’s baby, someone who was being forced into placing their child up for adoption. I didn’t want to buy a child. And yet, I couldn’t help but think of getting here before those laws had started to affect intercountry adoption, in the golden age, when you lined up and paid your fees and got your fingerprints taken and your HIV tests, and then you got in a queue and when it was your turn, you left that country with an infant. And then that infant became your baby. And that baby grew into your child.

We had been cut off from Asian countries, where one was not to have ever had a mental illness—no antidepressants, not a single therapy session, not a one. But for me it was not reasons of mental health that precluded Asia; it was cancer. No. Cancer. Never. None. We were ineligible to become parents of children from an entire portion of the world.

Now Ramon and I passed through Richmond, its factories billowing black smoke, the large buildings almost New England looking in their stoic red-brickness, and I remembered a couple who sat next to us on that row of chairs at Smith Chasen, two men in beautifully tailored suits, crisp shirts with the faintest blue stripes, pastel ties. One was dark—Latino, I think—and the other looked as if he’d spent his first twenty summers on the bow of a boat in topsiders and Bermuda shorts, one knee bent as he looked out to sea, his blond hair feathering in the wind. The darker one raised his hand as we watched slides of orphanages flip by.

“I know that some countries don’t allow gay couples to adopt.” He cleared his throat. “What are the criteria for Russia?”

I want to say the social worker looked uncomfortable, that she shifted her papers and cleared her throat, but she did neither of those things. “I’m sorry no one told you this before tonight,” she said. “But we don’t take on homosexual couples for international adoption. Most countries will not consider it.” She smiled; her one concession seemed to be that she did so without showing her teeth.

The couple looked at each other, stunned. Then, as if on cue, they stood up and tried to leave the row with dignity, but they had to step over Ramon and me, who had not had time to stand and make room for them to pass. We tried to, believe me, but it was badly timed, and so we blocked them rather than cleared a path. When they finally exited our row, knocking several chairs imperfect, I began to cry. I sat down and put my head in my hands as I heard more rustling, the sounds of more same-sex couples exiting the room.

After they left, a single woman, also banned from parenthood, filed out, and then it was Ramon’s and my turn. No cancer, we were told. No matter how long it’s been in remission. Not for Asian countries. There was a ringing in my ears so loud, but I could not answer it. Ramon went to stand, but I jerked him back into his seat. I would not leave the room.

_______

Perhaps, we thought, someone with experience could explain this process to us. A colleague gave me the name of an acquaintance—their kids were in school together—a lawyer facilitating adoptions who had adopted two Russian children, simultaneously, five years previously.

The lawyer was kind enough to meet me for coffee uptown. It was just after she’d had a hair appointment and as she approached my table, I could see her hair was rather purple, like an elderly person’s, and, because it was combed back and sprayed high, away from her face, it revealed two slits at each ear, where her skin had been pulled too tightly and then resewn.

“This is how you get the best ones,” she said, meaning the children, after we’d said 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.”

“Coming back for the child?” I asked.

She 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.

_______

“This is going to be great,” I said, as if we were on our way to Club Med. I looked out at the road. We had just left 95 and now were on the diminutive 85, which made us feel like we were headed somewhere undiscovered. “But also, I’m nervous.” What had the sign said? Martina? I’d just seen a sign that said RALEIGH 100 MILES, I do remember that, as I remember thinking how close my parents were to Raleigh and how strange that seemed, as I consider my parents staunch northerners.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Ramon, still the fingers gripping and ungripping the wheel. “I’m going to speak Spanish to the child, no matter what the ethnicity. I’m going to speak Spanish and Italian.”

As he said this I felt a combination of psychotic rage and unbearable sadness. At first my violence-bordering anger was against all Europeans who, as we uneducated isolated Americans know, speak so many goddamn languages. It quickly, however, honed in on Ramon. “Really?” I asked.

“Of course! I’m Spanish and Italian. My mother spoke to me in Italian for my entire childhood, and that’s important to me to pass on.”

“But I don’t speak either of those languages, Ramon.” It was my great shame that, as many years as I’d been going to Terracina, I had never learned to speak Italian. The old farmers who lived next to his mother thought I was an idiot. Here comes the illiterate Jew who killed Jesus, they said to one another as we pulled in each summer. I don’t know that they said this, as Ramon is the worst translator in the history of translators, but I’m quite sure it was something to that effect.

“Well, that’s not my fault, Jesse.” He looked straight ahead. “What will you do then? What will you pass on to the child?”

I didn’t know if I would burst into tears or tear my husband’s head off. What would I do? Take our African-American, Italian-and-Spanish-speaking baby to Hebrew school?

“What will I pass on to the child,” I said, more to myself than Ramon.

I remembered Passover at my great-grandmother’s house in Cleveland, all the cousins rushing to find the afikomen as if it held the key to something besides Nana Sadie’s checkbook. Great-Uncle Sid with his magic quarters, his colored silk scarves pulled out of the most unfathomable and, I now see, inappropriate places. There were long dinners and a photograph of Ronald Reagan my father had gotten for his grandmother-in-law, who, for some reason that no one could fathom, had cast her vote for him, the first and last Republican vote in our family.

“I blame Cleveland,” my father had said, laughing, as he slid macaroon after macaroon off Sadie’s delicate three-tiered dessert tray and dropped them down his gullet.

Three generations dipping our fingers into salted water, passing the bitter herbs and the charoset, three generations, piling the horseradish high on the gefilte fish, leaving the door ajar for Elijah, even if Sadie lived in an apartment building. It was three generations singing “Dayenu” as if our lives depended on it, my grandfather the attorney, bent and birdlike; his wife, three times larger than he, belting it out; even Great-Aunt Sylvia, who was deaf, sang, in her low sad voice. And Lucy asked the four questions. Wherever we were, always, Lucy was the youngest of us all.

Three generations. All at one table. I will be the one to break that.

“Yes,” Ramon said. “You have to think about legacy.”

My child would be heir to what? I closed my eyes as we drove, and I thought of Harriet, asleep at my mother’s feet as she moved around the kitchen, before a new stove she had not used until three months ago. She’d had to go downstairs to the fuse box to figure out how to turn it on. I thought with regret how we had spayed Harriet, and so we would never have her puppies, and just the thought of never seeing her or her likeness again made me breathe heavily, tears collecting at the corners of my eyes. And beneath all that was this: where do I fit in here? Most women become pregnant and they carry their babies and then they breast-feed their infants, who need them to survive. Ramon and I were the same. We were two bodies. The baby would need us equally, and yet Ramon would have his seventeen languages and his countless rich cultural experiences to share. I didn’t know what I could offer, and while I began to ponder all the perils of assimilated Judaism, really it was just this, only this: was I the mother?

Wasn’t I supposed to be the mother?