Growing Girls Read online

  “So you’re beating yourself up for being a scared little girl?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “Because I’m better than this.”

  I sighed. I could see in an instant that the whole Melissa Etheridge strategy had bombed.

  I looked over at my girls, who were taking turns jumping off a giant rubber pig. They were not, in that moment, scared little girls, but I could recall witnessing plenty of recent fear-filled afternoons—an easier and more immediately accessible source of material than all the scared-little-girl days of my own youth. Who doesn’t have a hundred chapters of those? I reminded BK of the day she had accompanied me to the girls’ swimming lessons. Sasha was the little swimmer everyone wanted her to be, a fearless tumbler who would throw herself into the water, leaping like a flying squirrel off the side and landing in a belly flop. People actually applauded. Then there was Anna, sitting there on the edge dangling her toes. Over and over again the instructor pleaded with her to come in, and when she finally did it was only to wade. The instructor showed her how to put her head under water, but the most Anna could manage was to touch that water with her lips protruding into a kind of pathetic kiss. Then she would run out of the pool as if for dear life and sit again on the edge.

  “Do you think we should have yelled at Anna?” I asked BK. “Do you think we should have taken her out back and given her a whuppin’ for being scared?”

  She smiled, shook her head no, got the point.

  “You don’t beat up a scared little girl for being scared,” I said. “You take care of her.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She sat there nodding. I sat there nodding.

  “I’m not Melissa Etheridge,” BK finally said. It came out like a big exhale and an apology all in one. Even I felt the relief.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s really okay.”

  “I feel like I’m letting a lot of people down,” she said.

  “We’re just all trying to figure out how to help,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay to be scared,” I said. “It’s really okay.”

  “I don’t want to die, okay?” she said.

  She sipped her soda and I curled my straw around my thumb, both of us falling into a silence stripped free of the awkwardness of before.

  “You know what,” she wisely said, “I don’t think even Melissa Etheridge is Melissa Etheridge.”

  “No, probably not,” I said. Fear isn’t something people flaunt.

  Even Melissa Etheridge isn’t Melissa Etheridge. It was a good line. We used it as a mantra for much of the rest of that day, and beyond.

  The thing that gets me still is how easy this is to fall into, all this vicarious living. We pick people to act out our fantasies, and we demand a certain standard. The roles are usually those of heroes or villains. (Why bother imagining anything but the good parts?) So we all wanted BK to be a tough girl rock star shouting away her cancer—and a colleague of mine at the university wanted me to be a hapless participant in some white supremacy machine. I’m sure I made for that woman the perfect idiot, a paper doll to hang horrible clothes on and watch bend and go limp under the weight of my own ignorance. And BK made for us the perfect hero, a paper doll to hang cool clothes on and watch on the stadium Jumbotron singing and writhing and sweating and believing.

  Oh, well. So she wasn’t that.

  Oh, well.

  Theory is luxury. Analysis is a dance. Survival—whether it’s a cancer victim, a baby abandoned on a street corner, or a woman desperate to become a mom—isn’t fancy or stylish, political or hypothetical.

  BK and I agreed she should go ahead and do her cancer the BK way, and we wondered together what that way was. “There’s a lot of funny stuff that happens,” she said. “I haven’t really allowed myself to laugh yet.”

  “That’s a great start,” I said.

  We wondered together about Buffy, her wig. Was that really the BK way to do cancer? I told her I figured her as someone who would just go on ahead and be bald. “Or maybe as the baseball cap type.”

  “Yeah, that would be more like me,” she said, and she considered whipping that wig off right then and there at the mall.

  “But Buffy does look good on you,” I said. “That bob is the perfect hairdo for your head.”

  “I know,” she said. “I love this stupid wig. Who would have guessed?”

  “I know”! said.

  “Buffy stays,” she said.

  “You go, girl.”

  Transracial Abductees and friends will be presenting a workshop at the bi-annual Incite! Color of Violence Conference III, in New Orleans. The Color of Violence Conference is a gathering and action of women of color workers, organizers, artists, students, and activists organizing to stop the war on women of color. Our workshop, entitled Abduction Politicks: Exposing Racism in the Transnational Adoption Industry, will be on Saturday, March 12, 2005, 11:30-1:30p.m. And we will naturally focus on Militarism, Racism, and Imperialism in the Abduction Industry. Propaganda will be given out on a first come first served basis so don’t miss your chance to get your official Spring 2005 Transracial Abductee Gear!

  I found this announcement on a website run by and for internationally adopted kids now all grown-up and unhappy, or, as they identify themselves, “angry pissed ungrateful little trans-racially abducted motherfuckers from hell.” The group rejects the term International adoption in favor of transracial abduction, a slight compromise, for the sake of attracting a wider audience, over its preferred transraclst abduction. The site offers numerous links to “abduction literature,” and discussions of the ways in which the U.S. State Department is aiding abductions, as well as recommended outlets for “Resources & Revenge.”

  I spent a few days clicking, and reading, and clicking, exploring a way of thinking I could have never imagined on my own. It was like lifting a log in the woods and finding a whole new and strange colony of bugs; you stand there marveling at the oddly iridescent colors of those squirming insects, oohing and ahhing and saying, “Good Lord!”

  I found an essay by Kim So Yung, a young woman who was born in Korea and adopted as an infant by an American couple doomed, in her eyes, by their whiteness. Her complaints were loud, angry, and numerous. She thought of her parents as racists who had abducted her, and herself as innocently and horribly complicit in their crime. “I didn’t really enjoy being the object of their humanitarian efforts, and what amounted to some really twisted racist love, but that didn’t matter. I was supposed to appreciate it.”

  The essay went on for pages in what felt to me like machine-gun fire, an attack that was brutal and unrelenting against virtually anyone who might see international adoption as anything but a crime against humanity. “Transracial abduction is a selfish ‘easy out’ for white people who feel upset and guilty over the effects of racism on communities of color and try to assuage their guilt by opening up their ‘loving homes’ to children of color ‘waiting’ to be abducted. This is just really pathetic.”

  I felt sick when I read all of this. Of course. Any mom who watches her sweet angel asleep in a bed overcrowded with Care Bears and My Little Pony paraphernalia and various stuffed creatures decorated with rainbows and sparkles—any mom sitting there and imagining her baby turning into a young woman with such rage would get sick.

  I am trying to be bigger than that. I am trying to prepare. One day Anna could come to me with anger like this, and one day Sasha could scream at me for being guilty of a sin I don’t even understand. It doesn’t appear in the essay that Kim So Yung’s mother was an evil character, or a person determined to promote one political point of view or another. I sit here thinking, Oh, honey, what could you have done differently? What could you possibly have done? I sit here with compassion I should probably feel for Kim So Yung, but I feel it for her mother.

  I find myself doing what my mother did, when I came at her with some crisis that didn’t fit into her scheme of knowing me, didn’t meet her
expectations of who I should be: I belittle that girl. I think: this is just a stage. I think: it’s kind of cute, when you think about it. Good for Kim So Yung, whose name may be real or may be the play on words that neatly fits my theory. Youth is all about rage. Good for her for articulating it. You should do something with your rage, channel it into something productive.

  I hope by the time I am the mother of young adults, of women with wild thoughts all their own, I hope by then I have turned into a mother with more skills and more depth than this. Mothers grow, or at least they can. Mothers can grow, too.

  Right now I can’t imagine my Care Bear girls growing up to be young women with Kim So Yung’s anger. I can’t imagine who I’ll be in the face of daughters who find themselves mired in that sort of mud. I certainly can’t imagine myself heroic and tolerant, applauding, a mom cheering on her children for growing into fully independent, free-thinking adults.

  I can’t imagine any of it because I can’t see past my nose. My story is all immediate foreground, the business of motherhood yanking me this way and that, over and over again until I flop into bed each night. The backdrop is a simple sketch I drew long ago and have little time or need to revisit. I adopted my girls because I was a mom in need of children, and they were children in need of a mom. My story is about family and fulfillment. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.

  When I adopted my girls, I became a part of their history, and they became a part of mine. We inhabit this story together, hapless citizens muddling through. We go about our days bumping into people who may or may not have something to say about us, a manicurist, a lady at a mailbox, an angry teenager online; anybody can talk, anybody can theorize, anybody can argue. But in the end it’s just us. A mom and two girls getting their nails polished, making jokes about underpants. The personal is political, I know, but that doesn’t mean every onlooker gets a vote.

  Listen, girls: for now, at least, its just us. I’m your mother and I make the rules and this is how I do things. So say your prayers, thank God for now, and put away the chickens.

  nights at the opera

  And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,

  if you look deep enough you can still see, today,

  where the Lorax once stood

  just as long as it could

  before somebody lifted the Lorax away.

  He’s at it again, reading a bedtime story to the girls. He sits on the flowered couch, Anna curled up on one side of him and Sasha on the other. Mr. Popular. For weeks now the featured performance has been Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. His voice goes from smooth and sweet, to geeky and nervous, to an outright bellow that seems to disturb even our fish.

  And so goes the evening noise in our house, every night an opera.

  I do the dishes, trying to feel useful. The last time I tried to read The Lorax (but only because he was out of town), I got corrected a lot. Those little brown guys were Bar-ba-loots, not Bar-ba-loots, my girls assured me. And I used the gluppityglupp sound effect when I should have used schloppity-schlopp. The were all sorts of problems.

  Oh, well. I’ve long since stopped trying to compete. Really, we’re in different leagues. When I first started reading books to my children, I felt I could deliver a very competent, albeit straight-ahead Goodnight Moon. Then Mr. Popular stepped in with his multimedia approach, and story time in our house became something else entirely.

  At the moment, they’re at the page where the Humming-Fish first appear. I know this because all three of them have broken into the “Hmm hmm hmm” song he invented for the occasion.

  Standing here with my dishpan hands, I’m thinking how peculiar it is to watch your husband morph into a father. The man you knew one way becomes bigger, more complicated. Why does my husband put so much of himself into reading to our girls? It’s not even necessary. This is one thing a parent doesn’t have to be all that good at. Most of the time the stories speak for themselves, and any competent narrator will do. In extreme circumstances, you can yawn your way through a story; you can even cheat and skip pages; you don’t have a boss over you to impress or a ticket-paying audience that might give you bad reviews, no, the audience you have is completely fulfilled just in your act of showing up. I suppose the only reason to give reading a book your all, to give it the old operatic effect, is: love.

  “Mister!” he said with a sawdusty sneeze,

  “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.”

  The Lorax is an unabashed environmentalist’s plea; the bad guy (who redeems himself with regret) keeps cutting down Truffula Trees and keeps “biggering” his factory until there’s nothing left at all on the far end of town except some old Grickle-grass. I’ve heard educators say it’s a good way to introduce kids to the value of protecting nature. But in my house, I’m sure that’s not the only seed that’s getting planted.

  A father’s time with a daughter is different from that with a son, or a mom’s with a daughter, or any other combination. Out of nowhere, I’ll hear Alex turn to one of our girls and say, “You’re pretty.” Or, “You’re smart.” Or, “You have a kind heart.” There is nothing so spectacular or original in these observations, I suppose. A person can likely grow into a healthy adult without hearing them very often, from anyone. But a girl who gets this information, over and over again, from her father? I think he’s planting seeds.

  Washing dishes to the rhythm of Dr. Seuss can get my imagination working overtime. (Sometimes the bubbles reveal themselves to be elephant-like characters I try to name.) Right now I’m thinking of the seeds, and, in the spirit of things, I imagine them blooming twenty years from now into clanging echoes: “My dad thinks I’m smart. My dad thinks I’m pretty. My dad thinks I’m a good person.” You walk around as a grown woman with those messages rattling around in your brain as you brave the world, and you walk around tall, protected, unfettered by the preoccupations of wondering if you’re lovable.

  Does he know he’s doing this? Is he working hard at it, or is this just who he is without thinking? Sometimes I think I’m just getting to know this man, Mr. Popular. The stories he reads at night, his operatic performances, I suppose those are more of the same, more of the messages that say: “You’re the most important audience I could ever have.”

  “Come on, Mom,” Anna calls. “Hurry!”

  Already? It’s already time for moi? I wipe my hands on a towel and trot with importance into the family room. They’re just at the scene with the Super-Axe-Hacker, which whacked off four Truffula Trees with one smacker, and I happen to have a small speaking role.

  Ahem.

  all pumped up

  Zooming into the gas station for a fill-up, I’m feeling smug and sassy. I am so prepared for this, the dawning of multitasking season. This year, as the calendar clogs with to-do lists cross-referenced with bus schedules and school lunch menus and work deadlines and football tickets and power-suit shopping and Halloween costume commitments, and all the systematizing of the working mother’s life—this year I am prepared.

  Put it this way: I just got my eyelashes dyed. Yep, I am mascara-free for four weeks, according to Tatiana, the woman who put on the magic gook. With this act, I’ve just shaved seconds of precious prep time off the docket each morning, not to mention all those glances in mirrors to check for smudges. No more! Not only that, but I’ve got my calendar computerized. I figured out how to sync my Outlook calendar with my Black Berry so I can walk around mascara-free and at a glance know where I have to be at any given moment.

  In a few moments, I have to be at school to pick up Sasha from preschool. But first I’m filling up my car, because I am a handy two minutes early. This is one of my favorite gas stations because it has the kind of pumps that you can set to automatically fill and shut off—meaning you can leave the pump and multitask. I just multitasked the garbage out of the backseat, and now I’m sitting in the driver’s seat checking my BlackBerry.

  My in-box shows an e-mail message from my friend Sara, who writes under the subj
ect line “Wee-hoo!” I remember that she went to the outlet mall, where I plan to go this weekend to stock up on school socks and maybe underwear. She is writing with her report of the outlet mall, and with this news: “I just finished my Christmas shopping!!!”

  Her what? She finished her what? I have to keep rereading the e-mail to fully comprehend the information. But comprehend I do, and as I do I feel my shoulders slump and my neck go wobbly and my head begin to descend into the hell of dismal wretched uselessness.

  Christmas shopping? Chaaaaristmas shopping? Who has time to even remember Santa, let alone write to him, let alone become him and complete his work? Sara does, apparently, and I realize I must dump her as a friend immediately. But I have more e-mail to read, so I click on it, but now I can’t concentrate on anything except Sara and her stupid perfect Christmas, and then out of nowhere I remember I forgot to stop at the store to get those little Tupperware sandwich containers I need because Anna has been complaining about spillage from thermos to bread.

  (Inhale. Exhale. Stay with it, sister. Multitasking season is here and you will survive.)

  I zoom onward toward preschool, cursing Sara and Santa for ruining my mood. I pass a woman flailing her arms. She is jumping up and down near the gas station exit sign, trying to get my attention. Do I know her? Does she need something? I roll down my window.

  “The tube!” she is saying. “The, um, the hose!” She is pointing in the direction of my gas tank. Oh. My. God. And didn’t you always wonder if anybody ever did this? I forgot to take the nozzle out of my car and put it back on the pump. I am driving away with the nozzle and the hose still attached to my car.

  “It ripped right out of the pump!” the woman is saying, in awe. “It just ripped right out!”

  “Oh, dear …” I say, hopping out. “Oh my dear, oh dear …” I must have a stricken look upon my eyelash-dyed face, because the woman goes into immediate compassion mode.