ARIEL: My mom used to say I had a morbid curiosity about euthanasia. Come on! I used to cry myself to sleep just thinking about it. Well, sleep . . . I guess I don’t mean that literally— JESSICA: For the longest time I thought my parents were saying youth in Asia.
HALEY: I heard it that way too! Last year, in fifth grade, I got in trouble when I wrote something about it in my spelling homework. My teacher called my mom, who nearly had a cow. I said, “Youth in Asia or euthanasia, what difference does it make? Getting thrown in a river, left in the open to be eaten by wild animals, or dumped over a cliff? In the end you’re still D-E-A-D.”
JESSICA: I don’t get it, Doc. Why haven’t her parents sent her back?
HALEY: That’s not funny.
DR. ROSEN: Maybe we can let Tiffany finish her thought.
TIFFANY: Mother and Father also told me that my birth parents had to give me away because of the One Child policy. People there want a boy instead of a girl for their one child. So there’s that. But sometimes a woman gets pregnant more than once. Maybe that happened to my birth mom. If the authorities had found out, they would have fined her up to six times her family’s annual income! I’ve heard that! And then forced her to have an abortion. They even force women to have late-term abortions. My parents are big into right-to-life stuff, so they say I never would have been born, as in “Just think about it, Tiffany. If your parents had been caught, the Chinese authorities would never have let you come to term.” As you can imagine, I couldn’t sleep much either. Still don’t . . .
HEIDI: The One Child thing scares me.
DR. ROSEN: How so?
HEIDI: It makes me feel precious but in a weird way. I mean, I wasn’t precious enough for my birth parents to keep, but sometimes I feel like I’m too precious to my mom and dad. I’m their one child.
ARIEL: Heidi’s got that right. Every year for as long as I can remember, my parents have hired a professional photographer to come and take pictures of me. Their excuse is they want a pretty image to use for our Christmas card.
HEIDI: Same here.
HALEY: At my house too.
TIFFANY: Probably all of our houses.
JESSICA: Yeah, so?
DR. ROSEN: A lot of families send out Christmas cards featuring their kids. What makes yours different?
HEIDI: They take pictures in my room—at my computer or painting.
ARIEL: We do ours in the library, and I’m reading a book or something. Once I was playing violin.
HALEY: Ours are usually outside. I’m always the only thing in the photo—no Mom, no Dad, no Whiskers, not even much of the house or garden.
JESSICA: Get it yet, Doc? These are pictures of us as treasured and adored daughters. The object and focus of all attention and love. The object, okay? It makes me want to barf. Hey, everyone, did he tell you about my bulimia? Anyone else have that? Or anorexia? I hate to say it, Tiffany, but you’re a bit cadavery— TIFFANY: I am not!
ARIEL: The thing that really used to make me go ick was the way my mom would brush my hair, straighten my collar, pull on my hem, and— JESSICA: Like they’re never not touching me— ARIEL: I’d spend the afternoon smiling this way, smiling that way, looking into the distance, gazing downward. Pose, pose, pose. On the one hand, our birth parents in China couldn’t get rid of us fast enough. On the other hand, we’re the biggest gift to our adoptive parents. Sometimes I try to imagine what their lives would have been like if they hadn’t gotten me. It’s so weird, don’t you think? In China, we were considered worthless. I mean, really worthless. Here we’re superprecious, like Heidi said. But you could also say our moms and dads got cheated by getting the runts—the throwaways, anyway—of the litter.
JESSICA: At least we weren’t thrown in a well or whatever.
DR. ROSEN: Could we talk a little more about parents?
JESSICA: It’s your group. We have to do what you tell us to do whether we want to or not.
DR. ROSEN: I wouldn’t phrase it that way. I want each of you to benefit from our sessions.
JESSICA: Don’t forget, Doc, my parents are physicians. I know what’s what. You’re going to use us for—
DR. ROSEN: Jessica, maybe we can talk about your need to constantly challenge me another time, but this session is for everyone. Can we get back to my question? Ariel, would you like to tell us a little about your mom and dad?
ARIEL: My mom makes me batshit crazy. Sorry. Can I say that in here? Yes? Good. I love her, but she’s such a mom. She wears things that are totally embarrassing.
TIFFANY: Mothers can’t help it. That’s just the way they are.
ARIEL: That’s very understanding of you, Tiffany, but have you heard your mom talking on the phone to her friends about you? The other night she called me a hormonal monster. Even when she says nice things—I love you and that kind of stuff—a part of me still feels like she’s lying. One time I totally lost it. I yelled at her, “I wish I was in China with my real mom!” She got so mad, she yelled right back at me. “Yeah? Well go ahead! Try to find her! See if she’ll take you back!” Later she came to my room, crying like you wouldn’t believe, and apologized. Soooo many times. I’m like, okay, Mom! God!
DR. ROSEN: Lots of young people say things like that. I wish you weren’t my mom or I wish I had a different dad. Maybe even your mom said something like that to her mom or dad when she was younger.
ARIEL: Maybe. So?
Dr. Rosen: What do you think she was feeling when she came to apologize?
ARIEL: I felt real bad— DR. ROSEN: I hear that, but what do you think she was feeling?
TIFFANY: Maybe she was upset because she’d said something so inappropriate to you. Inappropriate. I get that word a lot from my parents.
JESSICA: She should have felt guilty for acting like the worst mom ever.
ARIEL: Yeah, maybe. But maybe she was right in what she said. I mean, could I ever find my birth mother? No. So who else do I have but my mom and dad?
HALEY: My mom and dad always say that the parents here and the baby girls they adopt have happy endings and “the holes in all their hearts are filled with love.” But what happens to the birth parents? I think about that when I can’t sleep. Were my birth parents left with holes in their hearts or did they just forget about me?
ARIEL: I wonder what it would be like to be a biological child. Or white. When I was younger I couldn’t grasp the idea that a pregnant woman would keep her baby. If I ever have a baby, I hope she’ll look like me, even if I marry someone white or whatever.
HALEY: People will come to the hospital and say, “Oh, she looks just like you.”
ARIEL: No one has ever told me I looked like someone in my family before. When I become a mom, I’ll never have to answer questions from strangers about where I got her, if she belongs to me, or— HALEY: If she’s from Mongolia.
ARIEL: And she’ll never have to answer questions about who her real parents are.
JESSICA: Oh, my God. I hate that! I mean, screw them. What’s real anyway? Isn’t it just what we’re stuck with?