Childbirth left me with nerve damage, pain and trauma, two autoimmune diseases, and a son who is a miracle to me. Would I do it again? Never. As I worked to heal my wounds, I began to accept that the large family my husband and I had dreamed of wasn't going to happen. I could have remained the anxious mother of a singleton in a small New York City apartment, but my husband would not give up.
“You agreed with me when we met!” he argued.
“That was then. This is now.”
“But you said you wanted three,” he pressed on.
“Things change,” I shushed him –our one child was sleeping.
“This isn't China, you know, we can have more than one!”
“If you want more, find another uterus.”
“So you'll go with a surrogate?” he asked, groping, hopeful.
“That's not what I meant.”
“You can't change things now.”
“Why not?” He wasn't going to make me have more children.
“Because I have dreams,” he told me, “our dreams.”
And he is right – we do have dreams of our children, plural, rolling over each other like young bears in the woods, fighting in the backseat of our car on the way to those woods, singing campfire songs, helping each other put bait on the fishing lines by the lake. In the winter we imagine them skiing and skating, racing and jumping. We dream of them fighting and playing and play fighting, and we practice what we'll say when they come to us to annoyed, enraged or overjoyed.
We want our biological son to have a sibling who annoys him, stretches him and makes him laugh. We want our adoptive child to have our biological son for a brother, because we know what a great big brother he will be. We want them to have each other to commiserate with over how awful their parents are. We want them to complain about us, gang up on us, and teach us how to laugh, how to cry and especially how to let go of all that we cling to, like all the things in our home they will break, including our hearts.
My husband is a Taurus, sign of the bull, stubborn one, so eventually he wore me down. But our second child, I told him, would be adopted. Adoption is an amazing privilege. We actually got to choose the age, gender, color, birth continent and country of our child. All of these choices have meanings that go far beyond what we can currently imagine, but Imagination played a huge part in our choice, because we had to imagine whom we could love. Parenting is, in my opinion, even harder than childbirth.
I guess if you get through the first part, you feel confident later, but since I think of my laboring as a failure, (did I say emergency caesarian and on-going complications?), I don't have a lot of confidence in my parenting. So I insisted we go to the toughest adoption agency where I would really feel scrutinized. Now, when I read their home-study, (the document they wrote about what a great family we are and how well we parent and how able we are to accommodate and love another child), I can almost believe it, but I still have lingering doubts.
I never told them that when my bio-son was handed to me, I was shocked to find him bald and blue-eyed. I didn't feel any warm gush of love. I didn't even like him. If it wasn't for the bond we developed via breastfeeding, and the fact that he was the most perfect of babies, I don't think we ever would have the close relationship we have today. But maybe I'm not great with babies. I could really do without all that poop. And in our current world, we can actually adopt a child who already knows how to go poop on his or her own.
I am not a baby talk kind of person. A part of me thinks my son learned to talk super-early because there was no other way he could get through to me. So if I was going to adopt, I wanted it to be an older child, at least three years old, who I could automatically love and communicate with, if such a child existed.
So I went to the playground and watched all the different children. I am not a gusher or a coo-er. My son and my dog – I would kill for, but I am the practical variety mother, a doer, on-the-go; displays of emotion are not my forte. However, in that playground, with the squeaky, like nails-on-the- blackboard swings, and the screaming kids splashing each other (and me) with water balloons, I found out that African-American children grab my heartstrings. Suddenly I realized that I do have a soft, warm and fuzzy side. Having been raised by African-Americans, this should not have surprised me.
Until I was eight, Sarah, a black woman from South Carolina, whose last name I never knew, bathed me each night, held me after nightmares, gave me sweet tea to wash down the yucky-tasting medicine, and patiently brushed out my curls. She loved me. And until I was sixteen, Mark Ellis worked for my family. Mostly he built things or fixed things, but he also drove me to school and picked me up and brought me home. He smoked (and stank of) cigars. He liked to watch Flip Wilson and Pearl Bailey on TV. He had a voice and a laugh that sounded like steel wool, but I loved
him, and I like to think he loved me too. To be taught how to care-take and love by black folks is to grow up wanting to care-take and love them back.
So when my husband wouldn't let our dream of siblings go, I insisted our child be black. Our social worker pointed out that it is one thing to love an African-American child, and another thing to love his teenage self. I hopped on the subway and imagined: which person would I want hogging my bathroom and eating me out of house and home with all his friends on electric guitars every day? Same answer.
We researched many possible ways to adopt an African American child, but, for various reasons, we eventually ruled out domestic adoption. Even though I don't speak Amharic and our adoptive child would probably have to lose his birth language, Ethiopia was our next choice. When we told people we were waiting to adopt an Ethiopian child, the most common response was, “Oh, they are so beautiful there!” But when we found our child, a three year old French-speaking boy in the Congo, and we switched countries, responses changed.
“What made you decide to adopt?”
“Why Africa?
Some ask, “Do you know his whole story?” As if there might be something dangerous lurking beneath his sweet gaze. When I assure people that I know his story, they want me to share it with them. “I am saving his story for him. It's his to share.” Some understand, but others think I am hiding something. I can feel their fears. I am often asked if he has been tested for AIDS. (He has.) One family member asked, “so he's from Africa?” and then added, “So that means he'll be black?”
So I have a lot of work to do. First I have to brush up on my French, so my son won't lose his birth language. But the real work is about patience and love. I don't mean the patience and love of parenting, I mean working on my responses to those who do not have my imagination. African-Americans have spent lifetimes educating and explaining their point of view to white people, and now it is my turn to take up the role of educator, to be a visual aid, to show that yes, white people do love black people; can raise black children, just like black people raised me.
Adoption is as much of a miracle to me as birth. Every choice we made led us closer to the child we believe was always meant to be our son. Fingers and toes crossed, in less than four months, my husband will travel to the DRC and bring him home.
So ask me why I chose to adopt a black boy from the Congo. Because I expect to continue to field these questions from strangers and friends alike that may be touched with fear or seasoned with hate. I believe that these conditioned responses originate from a failure of imagination. Yes, he is mine. Yes, they are brothers. I choose to believe that those who judge me have merely failed to imagine the possibilities we all can hold in our hearts, so I hope they will ask, because I want to tell everyone: I did it for love.
