Growing Girls Read online

  It’s not that I’m against fighting. It’s just that there’s no one there to fight. No one from Sasha’s earliest days but spirits in the wind. If I throw my punches into the air, scream at what I imagine is left of their scent, go militant for the sake of my child, I turn my child into a victim. I set a stage featuring poor Sasha, the pathetic little orphan with the sad story and the malnourished body and the bald head and now look at her, she can’t even talk.

  Poor Sasha.

  At four years old, she is anything but that character. She has no sense of herself as some sorry object of pity. She is, simply, Sasha. A popular kid with a ready laugh and two best friends and a sister and a gonkey.

  I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should sign us up for China school again next year. We flunked out last year. That was a shame. I was giddy with love and goodness and multicultural awareness that hot September Sunday when we climbed the concrete steps into the community college.

  What a thrill it was to walk into that basement registration room filled with people from China. All ages, men, women, kids. Hearing their excited chatter, the urgent utterances of a language I could not understand, all that dark hair and those almond eyes and those cheekbones jutting out like windowsills. All of it. It made my heart pound with a nostalgia for the stinky Guangdong airport, the crowd, the luggage carts bashing into unsuspecting ankles, Alex wrapping duct tape around our duffel bag brimming with souvenirs. A baby on my hip. Leaving home. Going to America. Going home.

  Standing in that community college basement, I wondered if my girls felt anything, any link at all. Did they remember these eyes and these cheeks and these sounds? Was any of this familiar?

  “Girls, look at all the Chinese people!” I said, stupidly. Perhaps if I gave them a boost, they would recognize something of themselves in these people.

  But: nothing. Anna was coloring in her Care Bears coloring book and Sasha was intent on biting hard enough to get into the Tootsie part of her Tootsie Pop.

  Well, okay. One of the reasons I signed us up for Chinese school was so that, someday, if my daughters ever wanted some of their Chinese-ness, they would have access.

  This is something a lot of people who adopt from China do, some more, some less. I’m one of the less. At least so far. I’m not sure where to stand on this one, how to encourage without forcing, where the line between treading gingerly stops and turns into avoidance. When we first came home with Anna, we took her to a Chinese New Year party hosted by a group of parents with kids from China. All at once a drum sounded and out popped a giant dragon with a giant head and it began to dance around the banquet hall. Anna wasn’t the only child to scream in fear, but she may have been the loudest and was certainly the least consolable. We took her out of the room and huddled with her behind the lobby door where she could at least peek at the dragon if she wanted to, but she reached in fear for the outdoors with pleading arms and tears anyone would understand, so we left.

  China school was a class for kids—you had to be at least three to enroll—with their parents, which Alex and I thought was perfect. In our family we speak of China as a shared family heritage. We adopted it when we adopted our girls. Learning the language together would be a symbolic expression of that, as well as a literal one.

  So there we sat in school together, Mom, Dad, Kikki, and Et, the whole family seated in Room 116. This, I figured, would be a beautiful family experience.

  “Put the desk down,” I said to Sasha, who was only just discovering the thrill of opening and closing a community college desk, that hinge mechanism particularly terrific.

  “Yook!” she said. “Gum!” Many colors of gum, in fact, under that desk, some still ripe enough for Sasha to poke her fingers into.

  “Put. The. Desk. Down.”

  The teacher, an energetic woman with square shoulders, greeted the class quickly and launched immediately into the day’s lesson and soon enough marched up to Anna and said, “Zhe shi shenme?” while pointing to her nose.

  Anna, who was busy drawing cats, looked at me as if she was about to cry. “Zhe shi shenme?” the teacher said again. The question, I’m pretty sure, meant, “What is this?” In a stroke of genius, or because the little boy next to me had just responded to this drill with success, I spoke on behalf of my daughter when I said, “Zhe shi bizi.”

  “Pizza?” the teacher said, turning to the class. “Does my nose look like a pizza?”

  But I didn’t say “pizza,” I said “bizi,” with a soft “b” and the final “i” going up in tone, just as she had said it. She said it again. “Bizi,” I mimicked.

  “No, not a pizza!” she shouted, to the continued delight of the twenty-five people gathered there that day. “This is a language class,” she then reminded us. “Everyone here has to have pronunciation! Also, everyone here has to respect the teacher otherwise the teacher get very, very upset, okay?”

  “Okay,” Alex said, as if to apologize for the entire family. She turned to him. “Zhe shi shenme?” she said, pointing to her eye.

  “Um,” he said. “Hong?”

  She paused, pursed her lips, refusing to even register that answer, then moved on to the girl with the long red hair raising her hand eagerly. “Zhe shi yanjing!” the girl said perfectly.

  “I think you called her eye a rainbow,” I told Alex.

  Right-o. So we were the dolt family. I kept thinking there must have been more of a beginner beginner class, but when I checked the registration form to see what was going on in Room 115,1 saw this was it. The class for three-year-olds was as beginner as it got.

  “Sasha! Get your fingers out of the gum! Put. The. Desk. Down.”

  In our defense, many of the people in the class had taken this beginner course two and three times before, so the fact that we were so very far in the dark in hour one of day one of a semester-long course should not have been so terribly discouraging. And so what if Sasha got nothing out of this beyond a little family bonding with Chinese language going on in the background? And the fact of the matter was that I was proud of Anna for already learning a tremendous lesson in self-control in that she was not, as she repeatedly requested, just going at that giant green chalkboard with those giant sticks of chalk with which she could draw giant cats.

  So, this was fine. This was a beautiful family experience, all right. I listened to the music of the class counting from one to twenty in Chinese, absorbing the wonder, relaxing into the mystery. Then, in one swift motion, Sasha escaped from her desk, darted up to the teacher with a page of scribble she had ripped out of her notebook. “Teacher!” she was shouting, although it came out, “Tee-teetch!” “A present!” she was saying, although it came out, “A prize!” Alex took off after her, and then Anna after Alex, but Anna tripped over the foot of a man in the middle row and landed right on her bizi, which has always had a tendency to bleed, and so I waited.

  It’s hard to know when, exactly, to proclaim a beautiful family experience a disaster, but this does seem to be their way. A beautiful family experience is a snapshot of hope. As if obeying a call for family unity, you pack that picnic and go to that beach, only to find those horrible green flies, but you did think to bring bug spray so you spray the bug spray, but it coats the croissants, and then one of the kids has to go to the bathroom, and then the other one does, and then that luscious mimosa you drank just leaves you caving into a most miserable need for a nap.

  “Oh, well,” I said to Alex, after he called the teacher’s ear a skirt. “So we bond over our shared stupidity. It’s still bonding?”

  “Look, we are not going to go down without a fight,” he said, vowing on behalf of the entire dolt family to be in charge of homework.

  We lasted clear into the end of October. Sunday after Sunday we went through this. Anna drew a lot of cats, but somehow absorbed everything; she learned to count from one to one hundred in Chinese and at dinner would drill her dolt mother and dolt father. She’s going to grow up a scholar, the type who can glance at her notes
once and ace the test. Sasha went along for the ride happily enough, and if I plied her with enough candy, I could get her to sit through an entire class. Plus, she was promised doughnuts at break.

  When I started hearing myself yelling at my girls to turn around and pay attention, to sit up and stop throwing their papers on the floor, when I found myself restricting all use of crayons and markers during Chinese class because-you-girls-are-not-paying-attention, and if-they-did-not-listen-to-what-the-teacher-was-saying-they-would-get-no-doughnuts—that was when I knew.

  The leaves had fallen and the yellow jackets were hiding inside the stone wall and one Sunday morning Anna finally said please, she didn’t want to go to Chinese school; she wanted to stay home and draw chickens. Sasha cheered with the news that we were going to stay home and maybe make apple cider and carve a pumpkin. We had other things to do besides just learn Chinese. We had church and we had each other and we had a gonkey to feed and there was football on TV.

  I think we’ll go back to Chinese school again next year. Maybe the girls will be ready, or more ready, or maybe we’ll end up quitting again in favor of piano lessons. I don’t know how to do this, but I don’t think force-feeding is how. Exposure without expectation, that’s what I want. Anything more is to oblige, demand, slap into an obedience that stinks of apology.

  I don’t want to apologize to my girls for taking them out of China, a homeland that was not, in the end, a home. I don’t want them to grow up apologizing for leaving, as if that crowded country gave them any choice. A lot of people seem to want to romanticize this situation, dressing their girls in Chinese silks and taking them to the mall for professional photographs to hand out. Maybe that’s good. I don’t know. Maybe that’s better than just walking around as a woman who finds herself awakening in fits and starts with a stubborn rage. How dare you leave these girls to fend for themselves, even for a second. How dare you! What is the matter with you people? Discipline keeps me from going any further. Discipline and a duty to protect that runs so deep I know it in my toes.

  Look: My girls are fine. My girls are home. My girls are part of a family. We are Mom and Dad and Kikki and Et. We are yellow jackets hiding in the stone wall. We have our reasons.

  fossil

  “It’s always a leap of faith to infer behavior from fossils,” the paleontologist said. I’m guessing he had to say that because everyone was inferring behavior from the fossil. I saw a picture of it in a magazine and felt depressed for days. The fossil was found in Liaoning in northeastern China and at its center is an adult Psittacosaurus, a small, squat dinosaur with a parrotlike beak that lived 125 million years ago. The skeleton is curled around those of thirty-four babies, each about the size of a Chihuahua. The babies are crowded together with their legs tucked underneath them and their heads raised, indicating that they were watching as their impending doom came to pass. It could have been a flood or a volcano or some other sudden act they couldn’t escape. Or maybe the group was hiding from a predator and the mother was holding her babies tight as they all watched the predator pass. They were about to breathe a sigh of relief, but then, in one loud boom, a mud slide happened and in an instant buried the whole family alive.

  You can make up endless stories that fit the picture, but the one thing I can’t escape is the mother’s futile attempt to protect. Millions of years have passed and here I sit, feeling an ache I believe must be hers. My bones come from her dust, brittle under the weight of her same problems, one more mother trying to figure out how to do the right thing, if her babies are eating enough, or too much, if she’s got them well enough socialized, if she’s giving them all equal time.

  One more mother. We do everything we think is right—except when we’re too damn tired to think at all. Now and again we find ourselves screaming into the wind, words never intended for the child but there they are, stinging, sticking. We are quick to clean up, lick with the guilty tongue that shames us. But that is the exception. Really the exception!

  We are sanctuaries, designed as houses to protect our babies, no matter how stupidly. Not long ago in this current millennium I was in a department store when a guy came running into the shoe department and tackled another guy and the two wrestled on the floor while display shoes flew. The one on top—he must have been a cop—had a gun in a holster. That really was quite enough for me. Instinctively, I threw my coat on my girls’ heads (I threw my coat on their heads?) and I shoved them forcefully into the back storage area where there were stacks of shoe boxes high above us, and we kept running until I saw an exit door that warned that it was for EMERGENCY USE ONLY and I didn’t care. I crashed my body into the door, tripping the alarm, a bell, a very loud bell, and I didn’t care. We stood outside panting in the winter air. Safe. I didn’t care about anything else. Maybe I overreacted, but my girls were safe, so I truly did not mind that I had to fill out a false alarm report with that fire chief who showed up.

  Now I imagine a big earthquake happening somewhere in the middle of that story and 125 million years later they find us fossilized, a woman with her coat over her kids’ heads lying on top of a bed of shoes, and the paleontologist is warning against inferring behavior from the fossil, but some mother takes one look at it and figures it out instantly.

  Now they’re saying we should relax more. It’s in my Newsweek this week, right there on the cover. “The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Why It Drives Real Women Crazy.” There’s a photo of a woman with a baby in her lap and she has all kinds of extra arms bearing the weight of a soccer ball and a pan of bacon and a telephone, the image intended to say exactly what so many of us are saying: This Is Ridiculous. We’re over-parenting. We’ve turned into high-intensity moms because our friends are high-intensity moms and this race toward perfect parenting is driving us mad. I tore into this magazine one night when I was down in the dumps because I forgot, just completely forgot, that I was in charge of the game for Sasha’s Valentine’s Day party at her preschool. Worse, I got to school that day feeling so damn proud of myself because I had remembered that she was supposed to decorate a shoe box and bring it in so all the kids could put their valentines in it. So I strode into school like Cocky Mother with my shoe box wrapped in red paper with kitty stickers on it. Then I got to her room only to discover that all the other mothers had also remembered, but their boxes were bigger than mine. And more elaborate. One girl had a castle with a drawbridge and gum drops on top. One boy had a volcano with candy worms on it. These were … valentine’s boxes? Yes, they were. You put the valentines in the top of the volcano and inside the drawbridge.

  I stood there with my little shoe box. So pathetic. So sad. Poor Sasha, having an underachieving mom like me. I kissed her and said, “Have fun at your party,” and went home and ate Doritos. Later, when Sasha got home with her loot, it became clear that the valentines that she and I had so lovingly prepared the night before—a little card with a lollipop attached—were duds. Other kid offerings included whole bags filled not only with candy but also with pencils and puzzles and little stuffed toys. Bags and bags of this stuff—none of which fit in Sasha’s little shoe box. The teacher had donated to her cause, giving her a shopping bag to carry her loot home in. So, I understood, finally, why the other kids’ boxes were so big. And now I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I figured next year I’d use a beer case and I’d make it into a unicorn head or maybe a treasure box with fiber-optic rainbow lights spewing forth.

  I was thinking this through. I was planning ahead, berating myself for not getting it together. I was about to throw Sasha’s stupid little shoe box in the trash when the phone rang and it was the homeroom mother saying they missed me today, didn’t I know I was supposed to bring in a game for the Valentine’s party?

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I forgot.” I forgot! I had no excuse for forgetting I was, what, too busy taping lollipops onto those pathetic little cards?

  So, I got an F for Valentine’s Day. Or maybe a D-. The really sad part is I walked in that day feeling like an A
.

  The really, really sad part is this has happened to me numerous times with my girls, at picnics with other moms who think to bring tablecloths and fondue pots filled with chocolate for dipping strawberries in—and there I was feeling so proud I thought to bring pretzels—at birthday parties with other moms who think to make doll clothes featuring swatches from the clothes of the birthday girl’s baby wear—and here I was so proud I thought to cleverly wrap the Barbie in Barbie paper. On and on and on, the failures pile high until I wonder why I ever got into this mom gig in the first place, seeing as I’m such a flop.

  So of course I tore into that Newsweek. How comforting it was to find kindred souls and to know there may be so many of us we had mass-market potential.

  I think of “us” as the first post—baby boom generation, girls born between 1958 and the early 1970s, who came of age politically in the Carter, Reagan and Bush I years. We are, in many ways, a blessed group. Most of the major battles of the women’s movement were fought—and won—in our early childhood. Unlike the baby boomers before us, who protested and marched and shouted their way from college into adulthood, we were a strikingly apolitical group, way more caught up in our own self-perfection as we came of age, than in working to create a more perfect world. Good daughters of the Reagan Revolution, we disdained social activism and cultivated our own gardens with a kind of muscle-bound, tightly wound, uber-achieving, all-encompassing, never-failing self-control that passed, in the 1980s, for female empowerment.

  We saw ourselves as winners. We’d been bred, from the earliest age, for competition. Our schools had given us co-ed gym and wood-working shop, and had told us never to let the boys drown out our voices in class. Often enough, we’d done better than they had in school. Even in science and math. And our passage into adulthood was marked by growing numbers of women in the professions. We believed that we could climb as high as we wanted to go, and would grow into the adults we dreamed we could be. Other outcomes—like the chance that children wouldn’t quite fit into this picture—never even entered our minds.