Not enough for any one post, so here are some tidbits:
-I would like to punch the person who previously owned our house. He apparently let his cat climb up the 80 year old trim of my downstairs bathroom for at least a decade. There are claw marks from floor to ceiling, not to mention the huge gauged-out spot where the cat apparently sharpened it’s claws. Mother Effit! I would clock that guy if he wasn’t already dead.
-If that wasn’t enough of a clue, Yes, I am back to my Annoying House Project. Good news, though! Next week someone is going to come and pump all the gook out of the Cistern! Then they will block it off and never will we have to think about it again except whenwe are stuffing dead bodies in there !
-I have the misfortune of marrying a man who has chosen a career that would be much more successful and easily accomplished if we lived in a Big City. He has the misfortune of marrying someone who is much more of a Mid-Sized City kind of gal. Oh, Country Mouse and City Mouse, how ever do they get along?
-In totally unrelated news, despite all my previous griping about wanting to live in China, at this point in time I would decline even if obscene amounts of money were being waved in my face (which, for the record, they are not). Not the least of my reasons for said rejection would be the fact that China is now scrambling VPNs and internet is unreliable there. (And it is dirty.) China has also been throwing lots of lawyers in jail lately and I happen to be married to a lawyer. Probably, no one pays you while you are in prison, right?? Where would I get my obscene amounts of money then? (And did I mention it is really really dirty in China?)
-Hong Kong, on the other hand, has good internet and is quite clean and frequently desanitized. It is unclear if they toss around obscene amounts of money there, though. And rent is a bajillion dollars. And we probably couldn’t get a Chinese speaking Ayi. The girls might like to learn Tagalog though.
-Probably the only place we will ever move will be right next door to this very annoying old cat-scratched house. Maybe I should try to get a Chinese speaking Ayi here? If only someone would move a major investment bank to town or something like that, we would be all set.
-Early today, L was walking around the house saying (quite loudly) “Mom! Where’d you get that cock? Whose cock IS that? Is that your COCK?” except it turns out she was saying CAULK because I left a tube of it lying on the kitchen table.
-Speaking of the table, we have been eating off a plastic folding table for the past 10 months. This is because my parents borrowed my dining room furniture to stage their lake house. Not the lake house they actually LIVE in, mind you. The SECOND lake house they bought on the very same lake. (Why? Liberal girls with parents who are rabid Republicans do not ask questions like that. Girls like me have parent-child relationships balancing so precariously that any talk of real estate could quickly topple into WHY THE GOVERNMENT CHARGES TOO MUCH FOR TAXES and then it could go to WHY TEACHERS ARE OVERPAID AND ARE BILKING HONEST CITIZENS WITH THEIR EXTRAVAGANT PENSIONS AT AGE 50 and god knows we don’t want to go THERE.)
The good news is it seems they are possibly going to sell the extra lake house by the end of April and I can finally eat on laminate wood table and put my other actual furniture in my actual house. And soon, I will paint over the wood fillered cat scratches and dry out the cistern so if we have to sell the house, it wouldn’t be a disaster.
Let’s all cross our fingers, shall we?
I kind of blew my load on those last posts. Also,it is hard to come back with some random every day post after you bare a sliver of your soul on the internet. But here we are, nevertheless.
We are in a period of adjustment. Mr. A is settling into his new job. The girls have settled back into school. And I have….well, I have been moping around.
I am not exactly sure what my problem is. It is probably one part crappy weather and several parts lack of a Big Thing to look forward to, plan and obsess about. No more house to buy, no Big Trip to plan, no searching mystery to solve.
I have been trying to shoehorn the next house (the one we will build next door) into Big Thing status, but it is really several years and lots of money away from my current reality. Grasping at straws for a Big Thing never ends well.
I also think I am missing my little family. On the trip, it was just the four of us as a all-in-one unit. For better of for worse, we were intertwined in a way we aren’t here.
Here, the world is competing for our time and attention. We are ships passing in the day (at night we are not passing as the girls are asleep and Mr. A is at work), coming and going, rarely are we together in the same way. For as much as I was tired of the trip by the end, I kinda miss it now.
Yeah, so that is all that is going on here. Mopey. Let’s all cross our fingers that I will feel better when it warms up a little.
Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.
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I brought Mr. A in to look at the pictures.
“Do you think it is really them?” I asked.
“Uh, I don’t know? Maybe?” he said.
I kept looking at the pictures. Maybe I could see a little bit of L here or there. Maybe not.
As that day went by, strange things started to happen when I looked at L. It was like little features of her face would almost pop out at me. Parts of her where she resembled the man in the pictures. Parts of her that looked like the little girl. She would make a certain expression and I would see her brother or her sister echoed in her face. She would turn her head and I would see them.
It was the strangest sensation.
Here is a little girl I know intimately. I know every curve and every freckle. I know her face better than I know my own, but it was like I was seeing her for the first time. It was a powerful, powerful feeling.
And the more I looked at the pictures of L’s family, the more I could see her in there. I put pictures of L as a toddler next to her brother and I was shocked to see how similar they looked in some ways. They both had exactly the same S-shaped curve around their chubby cheeks. They had the same distinctive, full, cupid’s bow lips. Their little button noses were just the same.
Soon, I couldn’t look at L without seeing her family written all over her face.
Emotionally, I was whipped back the other direction from the feelings I had when I originally opened the pictures:
How could I have hard feelings towards this man who is so much a part of the little girl I love? How could I fault them for loving their son who is so very similar to the little girl I love myself? How could they not love the perfect daughter they kept? Of course they do.
It was a lot to process.
But at the end of the day, there was no way to deny it. This was L’s family.
L’s story was being rewritten and I was no longer the storyteller. She doesn’t have a fairytale family and an everyday family. She has two families, both real and human. Her mother and her father are not saint or villains. They are just people. Even though I always knew that, it was like my heart didn’t really believe it was true.
Names and faces. They change everything.
Please read Names and Faces (pt.1) first.
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We asked our contact if they had pictures of the family. Yes, there were pictures of the father, brother and sister. (There were no digital photos of her mother.) But they couldn’t be emailed right away. We would end up waiting a week before we saw the pictures of L’s supposed family.
On a weekend morning, I went to my computer and there was an email with three attachments. I sat down to open them.
The first photo I opened was small. Maybe one inch by one inch on my computer screen. It was a photos of an attractive Asian man. But…I couldn’t be sure he looked like L. He looked serious, not smiling and looking straight at the camera. And attractive. (I will admit, I was a little distracted by the fact the he was quite attractive.) He also looked pretty middle class. He had a stylish haircut and a very nice shirt.
He certainly wasn’t how I imagined L’s father would look. He didn’t look like a peasant farmer. He wasn’t unshowered or sunburned or wearing dirty clothes. The photo was clearly taken by a cellphone or computer. He wasn’t in the countryside. He looked like a guy Mr. A might hang out with. He didn’t look like a guy who goes around dumping babies on the side of the road.
Then I opened the picture of L’s little brother. He was a chubby little guy wearing a slightly grubby shirt. He was cute and I thought maybe just maybe there was a hint of a resemblance to L. But the photo resemblance wasn’t like those stories you hear of an adoptive family recognizing their child’s sibling on an orphanage group. It was more like here is a chubby Asian baby and L was a chubby Asian baby. Babies look just kind of babyish, don’t they?
Then I opened the photo of L’s sister. My first thought was, “Damn. This whole family is so attractive!” The picture was of a pretty little girl, but she wasn’t the spitting image of L. I still wasn’t sure.
As I stared and stared at her pictures, I noticed she was wearing very nice clothes. Matching clothes. A matching shirt and jacket that looked very new and nice and clean. She had a cute little haircut too. She looked like a child who was loved by her parents.
It was like a kick in the gut: These parents love and take care of their little girl.
They kept this little girl but abandoned my little girl. My baby girl who was alone in an orphanage where she didn’t get enough love or attention. They let my little girl end up in an institution where she didn’t get enough stimulation to make her eyes work right and where she sat in a walker so much her thigh muscles were very underdeveloped when we met her. They left her alone in the world to fend for herself as a helpless little baby. These are the people who made the choice that resulted in my daughter suffering so much trauma when she entered our family.
And they loved their daughter. The daughter they kept.
Where in these pictures was the Evil Birthfather Who Dumps Babies? Where was the Tragic Unwanted Older Sister? Where was the Little Brother I was determined not to like?
These were just pictures of a family. An ordinary family that looked a lot like mine.
All the unconscious assumptions I didn’t even know I had made were crumbling around me.
To be continued…
Names and Faces (Pt.3)
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.
-Alice Walker
We have this tendency, people who have adopted from China, of idealizing The Chinese Birthmother. She is a tragic figure, worthy of our sympathy. A mother without her child. Forced by her authoritarian government, her patriarchal culture and her family to abandon her baby. They are saintly, these Chinese Birthmothers of our imaginations.
It is a privilege we have, as adoptive parents in closed adoptions (particularly those of us who adopted from China) , to fall back on this iconized representation of the Birthmother. It is clean and clearcut. The stories we tell aren’t cluttered up with the messy details of real life, of women who are participants in their cultures and families (patriarchy and all).
It is a story we tell as mothers ourselves. We want our children to believe mothers are good people and loving parents: Mommies care for their children. Mommy will take good care of you. Mothers love their children, just the way I love you. The obvious underlying message is that a mother would never be separated from her child if she had control of her own destiny. When we tell our children this story, it is as much about their birthmothers as it is about ourselves as mothers.
The converse of The Chinese Birthmother is The Chinese Birthfather. He is a hazy character. We assume to be the person who makes the decisions. He wants a son so badly he is willing to throw our daughters under the bus. He is possibly the person who left our children on the street somewhere; he abandoned them to the elements and an unknown future. We try to say we don’t think he is a bad guy, but we are afraid that he is.
And I don’t know about other adoptive parents, but I also had an idea about Chinese birth siblings. Actually, it was mostly about The Brother. In our discussions about searching and possible outcomes, the one hardened place in my heart was toward The Brother. I could imagine that we would help with money if it was for The Sister. We would send her to school, college even. But The Brother? The one whose much anticipated (likely pampered and spoiled) existence was likely the one who forced our daughter from her family? No, I thought, if HE is so important, let THEM pay for HIS school. But The Sister, she was clearly a victim in this situation, just like MY daughter. I almost felt like The Sister would be an extension of L, a girl we could support who would show her family just how valuable a girl could be. We would help The Sister, I thought.
Knowing L’s family members’ names changed everything for me. When you name someone, they become a real person. On the phone that day, hearing their names, I could almost feel “something fall off the shelf” inside of my heart.*
That quote is from Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God:
“…something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of him tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.”
I never knew how spot on that imagery was until that moment.
When I heard their names, I could feel The Icon crumbling away from the flesh and blood people inside. I didn’t know they were yet, but it wasn’t The Birthmother or The Birthfather. We were about to confront real people –complex people with complex motivations and complicated lives.
To Be Continued…..
Names and Faces (Pt. 2)
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