Growing Girls Page 20

  I’m jaded. Who gave birth to whom, which is raising what, who killed what and how. I’m glad the dog in Nairobi found that baby. Sure, I am. And I think it’s great she was evolved enough to know to do the right thing. For her sake I do sort of wish she had been allowed a little more time with the infant, that she got more of a chance to wow us with her intraspecies mothering skills. But, hey, happily-ever-after is happily-ever-after, so of course I’m glad Angel got the antibiotics.

  I’m jaded. And I’m upset about the chickens. That was so depressing. All that was left of Penelope were a few buff-colored feathers, and all that was left of Magenta was a leg. The raccoon was still up in the maple tree. Apparently, Marley had been let out before daybreak and heard the raccoon before it had a chance to return to the woods, and he chased it up the tree. John, the guy who sometimes comes to cut our grass, and his nephew, Mike, who was repairing our roof, said we had to shoot the raccoon.

  “We?” I said.

  And soon enough John went home to get the rifles and then he and Mike stood under the tree and aimed up while I covered my ears.

  Death, birth, joy, abandonment, adoption, rescue, hunt, blood, guts, corpse, chicken leg on the patio. Nothing surprises me anymore. All of this stuff is pretty normal. Back where I grew up, in the suburbs, it wasn’t normal. At the Babies “R” Us baby store, and Pottery Barn Kids, it still isn’t normal. In the typical modern mind, babies are born and mothers are happy and girlfriends bring presents and everyone sits around marveling at adorable tiny outfits until they get on to the business of building toy wagons and, later, bikes. Parenting is a wonderful thing and a surprisingly difficult thing but it is always more or less, in our minds, linear.

  The farm has taught me differently. It has taught my daughters differently. It is, at least, one explanation as to why my girls seem so thoroughly uninterested in their own adoption stories. Who gave birth to whom, which is raising what. They’re jaded. I read all the time of adoptive moms having all sorts of elaborate and philosophical discussions with their kids about the adoption experience. These conversations are said to begin as early as age three. I am wide open to these discussions. I have rehearsed them in my mind countless times. When the time is right I will plunge right in. I keep thinking there will be a question, some curiosity, some … anxiety or some need to know something. Since the beginning we’ve talked about them being born in China, then adopted by us. The bare bones story is part of their basic memory. Over time I’ve cleared up the misconception that China is, simply, where babies come from. No, I tell them, babies come from women’s bellies. And the women with the bellies live all over the world. Big? Yes, honey, the bellies are big. Big like the belly on the sheep with the crooked neck? Yes, honey, as big as that and sometimes even bigger.

  We watched the sheep with the crooked neck give birth on Mother’s Day, of all days. That was a gift. Or, it started out as one. She was our last sheep to deliver, having gone into labor, finally, and several weeks after the others, most probably late because of all she had been through. On a brutally cold February night, that poor girl had found herself in the teeth of coyotes. She nearly died, and would have if Luna, our livestock guardian dog, hadn’t done what her breed had been bred for thousands of years to do: save its charges from the jaws of predators. Luna had been out there barking since dawn. From the window we could see the sheep, and so we counted, as we usually do. There were six instead of seven. Alex climbed onto his ATV and went charging. He found that ewe there, a bloody lump, still breathing. Without intervention, a coyote would have finished the job. A coyote would have dragged her kill back to the pack and the feast would have happened and then they all would have slept peacefully with their satisfied stomachs.

  Even George had to admit it, when Alex called him and he came over to help get the sheep down off the hill and into a pen in the barn. George didn’t believe in livestock guardian dogs but now he believed in Luna. She had scared the coyote off; it had to have happened that way. There would have been no other reason for the coyote to leave.

  For days the sheep lay in the pen, motionless but still breathing. We shot her up with antibiotics. The wounds were all around her neck, deep in the muscles. She never acquired an infection. In a few weeks she stood. We were all there when she took her first bite of grain, and we clapped and sang songs. We kept her in the pen all winter. In the spring she got her own private outdoor pen. We kept watch over her. Amazingly, she seemed to have kept the baby growing inside her; all signs showed that she was just as pregnant as the other ewes. The wounds around her neck healed, but the neck itself wasn’t quite right. She held her head low and crooked, as if the ligaments were too short on one side, or as if she didn’t quite know what to make of life, having suffered her near-death experience.

  She became “the sheep with the crooked neck.”

  So, finally, on Mother’s Day she was out in the pen, pacing, pawing at the ground, and soon enough we saw a little lamb hoof sticking out. We pulled up some bricks, all four of us, each with our own little brick to sit on, and watched. “What a thrill!” I said to the girls. I told them it was my first time ever seeing anything being born and this was a special day indeed. We sat there waiting. And waiting. Skippy came over and stood with us. And then an hour went by and still there was just the foot and so the girls got bored so they fed Skippy some apple treats. Another hour went by and even Skippy got bored. Sasha went and got her new pink beach ball and we started kicking and soon enough I was teaching the girls everything I knew about soccer, which wasn’t much. We kicked and kicked and the sun was going down and Alex never left the sheep.

  It was after eight and getting dark and all that was sticking out was a leg, so I took the girls in for dinner. Alex came in about a half hour later and said the lamb was born, that all at once it was born, a perfect little lamb, fully formed and adorable as any baby animal God ever invented, except it was dead.

  There it was. Expectation, birth, death. All in one tidy little package with a game of soccer thrown in, not to mention a coyote attack and a heroic dog rescue.

  The girls were more confused than upset. Why was the lamb dead? What would we do with it? Would it go to heaven and join all of our other dead animals, and how would it get there?

  I was glad they were asking. I don’t know if my answers were any good, but the fact that they were asking gave me hope. I want to be one of those mothers who have “good communication” with her daughters. I want them to be able to ask me anything, to share fear and doubt and anger and joy. The fact that they never ask about their own adoption stories has me concerned on this front.

  On the night of the stillborn lamb, there was disappointment, the emptiness of failure, but no tears were shed for the lamb that never got a chance at life. It was, simply, the cycle of life, and this one never quite got spinning. My girls were fine with that. They had seen enough of death and life to be fine with that. All babies come out of women’s bellies. Some of them make it out alive and some of them don’t and some of them stay from day one with the one who gave birth to them, and some go on to be raised by other moms, goats and sister ducks and dogs. My girls know this as well as they know that chickens lay eggs and sometimes we eat the eggs and sometimes the hens sit on the eggs until they hatch into chicks.

  Sometimes, when I’m driving, I hear them in the back discussing the subject.

  “Ladies have babies in she bellies,” Sasha said one day, in her Sasha-speak.

  “Their bellies,” Anna said, “and it’s not all ladies. Some do, and some don’t.”

  “They come out the poop,” Sasha said.

  “That’s disgusting. It’s not in the poop, Sasha.”

  “They come out she bummy,” Sasha said.

  “Her bummy,” Anna said. “And not all ladies have babies in them anyway.”

  “That’s true,” I said, chiming in. “I never had a baby in my belly.”

  “You never had one?” Anna said.

  “Nope.”


  Now we were getting somewhere. I felt the tiniest twinge of excitement. Maybe we were going to do the full adoption talk now. Maybe they were ready with their questions.

  “We came from China,” Sasha said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And not out of my belly.”

  “That’s right,” Sasha said.

  And why weren’t they asking who, exactly, gave birth to them? Why had this question not yet occurred to them? It’s the question adoptive parents like me figure will be the central issue of our kids’ lives. It’s the question our kids will spend their lives wondering about. Isn’t it? And it’s my duty to prepare them. Isn’t it? I’m supposed to feed them all the information I have now, early on, so when the questions really start firing, the doubt and the fear, they’ll have a good leg up on making sense of the trauma. Aren’t I? This is how the moms in my adoption magazines seem to have it worked out. Only, they seem to have kids who ask, who are curious, who have by age three already mastered the word “birth-mother” and the concept of a mother who came before.

  What was wrong with my kids? Why weren’t they asking the question?

  “Girls, you both came out of bellies,” I said, as if to gently fuel the fire. “Just not out of mine.”

  “Well, who did you come out of?” Anna asked.

  Who did I come out of? Oh, for heaven’s sakes. That wasn’t the way this was supposed to go. I wanted to talk about their “birth-mothers.” It’s not a term I would choose, but I know it will be one they’ll hear in school, so they might as well have it as part of their vocabulary.

  “Honey, you know Grandmom was my birth-mother,” I said. “And she raised me. But not all birth-mothers raise their kids. Sometimes babies are adopted, like you girls were.”

  “Was Grandmom really fat?” Anna asked.

  “Huh?”

  “When you were in her belly.”

  “Sure, sweetie. I mean, I don’t remember, but I think so.”

  Then finally I just forced the issue. “I don’t know the ladies who gave birth to you girls,” I said. “Do you understand that? I never met either of your birth-mothers and I don’t think we ever will.”

  “Well, do you know if mine was fat?” Anna said.

  I was getting a headache. I actually had to take my finger and push that spot on my right temple that I could feel throbbing, diffusing the pain through my hand and down my arm where it eventually got absorbed. I was not one of those mothers who had “good communication” with her daughters. I just wasn’t, although it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  “She was probably fat,” I said. “At least right before she had you. Most ladies with babies in them are.”

  “My lady was fat, too?” Sasha said.

  “Probably.”

  That was it. The conversation drifted almost immediately over to a discussion of where, exactly, Care Bears come from. I didn’t know the answer. “The sky, Mommy,” Anna said. Duh. “That’s why they have the rainbow sliding board?”

  Duh.

  I drove around thinking how complicated stories of birth can be. Who gave birth to whom, which is raising what. This is what my girls are used to. This is where they start. To make their own stories stand out would be to deny a complexity they have come to depend on.

  As for the sheep with the crooked neck, she survived her tragedy, more or less. On the night she gave birth to her failed promise, I went out to visit her before I went to bed. Alex had already taken the stillborn lamb away. The mom was standing in the pen, her head to one side, and she was hollering for her lamb; instinct tells her to holler “Meeeh!” until the baby answers.

  “I’m sorry, girl,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” Not a personal sorry but certainly a compassionate one. “You did a good job,” I assured her. “You did all you could do.”

  “Meeeh!”

  I had no idea how to console a sheep, with or without a crooked neck, and I stood there under the moonlight thinking, stupidly, that I probably shouldn’t say anything to her at all about it being Mother’s Day.

  Now, dogs, as anyone knows, are about a million times more evolved than sheep. I keep thinking about that dog in Nairobi. I keep insisting that I’m not impressed by the rescue, and yet I can’t stop thinking about that dog.

  Now, dogs, if they are so highly evolved, should be able to talk. I’ve held this belief for a long time, especially in regard to Betty, my twelve-year-old mutt. Whole days go by with her at my feet, underneath my desk, or beside me snoring, and we have long conversations with one another until I realize, wait a second, she isn’t actually talking, is she? No, she is not. Although of course she is speaking. I mean, I can hear her. The speaking is through her eyes and her expressions and the tilting of her chin and the sigh she has always been famous for. Or, before a storm, long before I can hear the thunder, the jiggle of her nervous little body, aquiver with fear over the arrival of some monster she can’t otherwise articulate.

  “It’s okay, girly,” I’ll say.

  Sometimes, of course, no storm comes and Betty continues her quivering and I’ll have no idea what the problem is.

  “What? What?”

  But she responds with just more of the same, a lot of jiggling and words I can only imagine. I don’t think it’s fair. Dogs have so much going for them, they should have words. If they had words they could tell stories. They could sing. They could paint pictures and have art shows. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if just one other species besides us had the gift of self-expression?

  There are those who think animals do, or imagine they do, or hope. You read all the time of people holding out for the real story of all that dolphin chatter. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking jokes. I’m talking Broadway shows written by and starring dogs. I’m talking art shows with dog art critics who aren’t super dogs, just regular dogs. Homeless dogs at the pound and Park Avenue poodles who go about their days chowing down on Alpo in their stainless steel bowls, but they also use the phone and call their friends and schedule outings.

  But maybe I’m just elevating the spoken word to a status it doesn’t deserve. Millions of species have probably a million ways of communicating that we’ll never understand.

  I knew two old lady identical twins who lived together and one did the shopping and if the other needed chicken soup while the sister was already at the store, all she would have to do was think chicken soup, chicken soup and sure enough the sister would throw a few cans in the cart.

  Skeptics doubt me when I tell them about those twins, but it’s usually an easier sell than explaining the communication I have with my dog. One night, seemingly out of nowhere, I got the sense that something was wrong with Betty. I was just sitting there watching Jeopardy! and I thought, Where’s Betty? I stood out on the porch and called her. Usually one “Betty!” followed by a high-pitched “Weee-oooo!” will yield the sound of her dog tag clanking and soon enough I’ll see her little blonde self come prancing up the path.

  But not this time. Maybe she was just busy sniffing in the woods or wasn’t quite finished chewing a stick—these things happened. But I couldn’t let go of the sense that something was wrong with her.

  “Betty!” I yelled. I could see all the way down to the barn. The moon was out by then, bright as a spotlight. This was one of those amazing facts of country life: You could do needlepoint under a moon like that.

  “Betty!” I walked up our road, then down the path to the small pond in our back field.

  “Betty!”

  This was crazy. Why wasn’t she answering? This was not like her. I continued walking and then, in the stillness, I heard something. A kind of chirp.

  “Betty?”

  “Eeet!”

  I walked in the direction of the chirp. It was in the woods? Or back up on the road? On such a still night, echoes play tricks. “Beeetty!”

  “Eeet!”

  She was calling me. Why was it such a pathetically weak call?

  “Beeeettty!”

  “Eeet!�
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  The sound was coming from the top of our steep hill. Walking up that hill, you usually have to take breaks to catch your breath. But this time I ran straight up, like a lady lifting a car off her kid. “I’m coming, girly! I’m coming!”

  I found her under a naked maple tree, her little body vibrating crazily. “What? What?” I ran to her and threw my arms around her and saw that her leg was caught in the jaws of a coyote trap that some idiot had taken the liberty of setting on our property.

  “Oh, girly!” I had no idea how to release a coyote trap. I used my fingernails to try and dig its anchor out of the ground, and then I got a stick. “How long have you been up here? How did this happen? Oh, sweetie.”

  Of course, I got her out. I hugged her and carried her down the hill. Her leg was bruised and cut, but it would heal just fine. Had I not found her and freed her, I don’t know what would have happened. Would she have been easy bait for a pack of coyotes? Would she have chewed her own leg off to get free? You hear about that sort of thing. You hear about men trapped under fallen trees and cutting off their own feet. “Oh, girly.” All night long and forever after that I wondered how Betty was able to get my attention, get me outside there looking for her. How? How in the name of Alex Trebek did she let me know? It was a feeling in my skin, a smell, or maybe something in the wind. The only thing I’m sure it wasn’t was the spoken word.

  Fortunately, that was the last in a long line of mishaps for Betty. The bee stings that nearly killed her, the time she cut her paw on a chunk of glass and nearly bled to death in the creek. On average, Betty has suffered through two traumatic events per year for most of her life. The coyote trap might have been her swan song. After that she stuck closer to home, most days under my desk, where we have our conversations, discuss current events, and sometimes get into debates. But usually we agree. Really, we see the world remarkably similarly.

  I was just talking to her about that dog in Nairobi who found the baby.