The Mothers A Novel

20

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December 2010

Though we were told contact eases up over the holidays, November through January were the months of the birthmothers. After Katrina, California Allison called to tell us there was another young person—Edwina—who might be contacting us. I heard the word clearly: might. She was choosing between three families. I waited for the call, but I was not surprised when Allison called to report that she had decided on a family with another child.

“She wanted siblings for her child,” Allison said. “A big family, which was how she grew up.”

That felt below-the-belt, as if Edwina, twenty-two and in Indiana, knew we were too old to ever do this again.

“This is such a good sign,” Allison said. “So many contacts. Even if they don’t work out, there’s clearly a lot that’s appealing about your profile.”

I sniffed.

“You know what?” she whispered, and I could picture her covering the mouthpiece and looking around to make sure no one was listening.

“What?” I whispered back.

“We have this game we play here at the office. It’s called: Who Would You Want to Adopt You. You know? What couples!”

“You do?” I imagined that board game, little cards of our profiles turned facedown, a tiny wheel to spin before choosing a card.

“And I chose you guys! Bethany did too. We think you guys would make such awesome parents!”

“Oh my gosh, thank you!” I said, thrilled.

It was not until I got off the phone that I wondered about this office game, these social workers, the ones who did the birthmother intakes, the ones who dealt with the prospective parents, the administrators, all of them looking at each of us, so desperate for a child that we have submitted to this wearying process. We, the prospective adoptive parents, the Christians from Mississippi, the long-distance runners from La Jolla, the Pakistani and white doctors from Indiana, all the profiles Ramon and I had looked through on the agency website to see who we were up against, all the ones we saw fall away, Matched stamped digitally across their photos. We were being judged not only by the birthmothers, but also by the gatekeepers to the birthmothers.

And still, I did not care. Because the gatekeepers had selected us! All I could think about as I went to call Ramon with the disappointing report of losing Edwina, was the great news that finally, we’d been chosen.

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Just as I didn’t speak to Carmen and Edwina, I never spoke to the following birthmother either, though looking back I think I could hear her, the steady rhythm of her breathing in the background of my conversations with the birthfather. They were a couple from Cairo who had a sick baby at Mount Sinai, on the Upper East Side. How sick, we didn’t know, but they needed to go back to Egypt, where they claimed they could not get proper medical care. I wanted to visit the baby at the hospital so, as I was told by the birthfather, we could speak to the doctors directly about the child’s illness.

“No way,” Ramon said. “We cannot get to know these people and get caught up in their lives and then have to say no to a sick child we can’t take on. They could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills racked up already.”

“You’re being negative again,” I said. “We can talk to the doctors ourselves! We can talk to accounting, too.” What would going to a hospital be like, I wondered, and seeing a two-week-old child hooked up to strings and needles, a marionette. I didn’t know if I could bear seeing a child suffering, crying, without any sound. I had cried so often when I was alone, in the dark, and yet I could not hear myself. But this was not about that. This is to say that my mother had come every day. I could do that too, be the mother who comes each morning and leaves after dark and heals the child with her singular mother’s love.

“What would be too much for care in Cairo?” Ramon asked. “Cairo is a modern place. What kind of an illness would this baby have? We are not going until the agency gets information about it. We just can’t.”

“Please, Ramon.” I saw myself lifting a fragile child, attached by wires, a machine beeping.

All weekend I thought of raising an Egyptian child we had cured with the power of our big love and our democracy, our Americanness—well, mine; Ramon just had a green card—but the man did not put his wife on the phone. I didn’t want to pressure him, as I theorized that birthfathers, while adorned with more colorful feathers, are easily frightened too, but I began to think that the mother did not want to give up her baby—a red flag, yes? I thought of her hovering next to her husband, silent, as he signed away their sick child.

A social worker I did not know called me on Monday to tell me the man had signed the release for her to talk to the doctors, but that he had also done something peculiar and disturbing. He’d asked her, she said, if there were any single women in search of children, to which she had responded, yes. He’d then asked if any of those women would be interested in marriage, because he would prefer a second wife here in the States to an open adoption.

“What?” I asked. I could not wrap my head around it and I thought of my absent father-in-law, all the way in Java with his second, unofficial wife. And then I thought that this new social worker was racist against Muslims and so was telling me something so stereotypical I considered having her fired.

“Yes,” she said. “You heard me correctly. He asked for another wife.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We’re not that kind of agency,” the social worker told me, as if to imply that I was that kind of adoptive parent, who, already married myself, mind you, was out to marry a married Egyptian man who would be leaving me here in the States to raise his sick child. “It was a red flag that you never spoke to the birthmother,” she said.

This mistake, somehow mine, I thought, would surely make them all rescind their votes for us as parents they’d most like to adopt them. So were we back again at square one?

Square one: the place where those who haven’t yet been chosen, wait.

“Jesus,” Ramon said when I told him.

“That’s exactly what I said.”

“I’m just wondering, what the hell is the agency doing to help us? I mean in the beginning we were told we had such a great chance. We’re straight. We are young. We’re open with race.”

“We aren’t young.” It was six months away now. The numbers were set to shift radically then.

“Compared to a lot of those couples, we’re young. I speak Spanish. We translated every goddamn line of that goddamn letter into Spanish. Has one Hispanic birthmother called us? No.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I thought all the Spanish stuff would help.” So much for the Ramon Advantage.

Ramon was silent.

“I think people are scared of New York maybe,” I said.

“I thought New York would make us seem cool.” Ramon looked intently at his laptop.

“That’s because you’re from Europe.”

“I thought that this was going to be easier.”

My throat grew thick, as if it were stuffed with cotton. “And what are you doing, Ramon? Because I’m the one talking to these people.”

“Jesse.” He was still looking straight at the screen. Who knew what was on it. “It’s really the woman who should field the calls. It just is.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“You really think I should be the first to talk to the mothers?” he asked.

“They are not the mothers!” I said. “I am the mother,” I said. “Aren’t I supposed to be the mother?”