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  “You have always been so good with metaphors!”

  Oh, my God! Were we even having the same conversation?

  “I never got you very many Christmas presents,” she said, ridiculously veering off, as a mother does, to mother-guilt. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you kids to grow up thinking that material goods were the answer.”

  “I always wanted more Christmas presents,” I told her. “I always wanted more.”

  “But look at you now!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Why do you have to take the Lord’s name in vain?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I gave up. Because there’s no sense arguing with your own mother over the point that you are not quite as swell as she has you made out to be. It would be like your dog trying to convince you that it’s not the most adorable little pooch to walk the face of this earth—a waste of that dog’s slobber.

  This, I think, might be the main communication breakdown between mothers and daughters. The mother is programmed to see the kid as wonderful. She cannot hear the other stuff. It’s not her fault. You, as kid, are her accomplishment. You are the product of all those years and years of her hard labor. You are her best work of art.

  And if you love her, really love her, you’ll give her this. You may not see the beauty. You may feel like hell. But if you love her, really love her, you’ll give her this. “Yay, me.” You’ll keep your problems to yourself. You won’t show doubt or fear or, Lord knows, any of the anger you feel for not finding your voice with her, for not being known.

  And now here I sit. Here I sit wanting to be one of those mothers who have “good communication” with their daughters. I want my girls to be able to ask me anything, to wonder aloud with me about their own adoption stories, to ask me to simply sit with them while they howl in pain. And where in the world do I suppose I’ll find the strength to become one of those mothers? Where in the world?

  “Well, you sure did a good job raising me,” I said to my mom that day, hoping to wrap this one up.

  “I could have gotten you more Christmas presents,” she said. “Really, what would have been the harm?”

  “Oh my God, Mom, let it go! You did a great job.”

  “Thank you. But you really shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, sweetie.”

  Offers to Adopt Baby Rescued by Stray Dog

  HOSPITAL OFFICIALS SAY PEOPLE EAGER TO HELP ABANDONED NEWBORN

  The Associated Press

  Updated: 3:21 p.m. ET, May 10, 2005

  NAIROBI, Kenya—Offers to adopt a newborn girl found among a litter of puppies after being abandoned are pouring in to the Kenyan hospital where she is being treated, and the stray dog credited with her rescue has a home and a name—“Mkombozi” or “savior”.

  As police searched for the Infant’s mother, a government spokesman expressed some skepticism Tuesday about the story of the dog’s role in saving the child, dubbed “Angel” by hospital workers, and said authorities were Investigating.

  “I saw a dog carrying a baby wrapped in a black dirty cloth as it crossed the road,” witness Stephen Thoya was quoted by the independent Daily Nation newspaper as saying. “I was shocked at first, and when I tried to get a closer look, the dog ran through the fence and disappeared along a dirt road.”

  The infant was discovered after two children alerted adults that they heard the sound of a baby crying near their wooden and corrugated-iron shack. Residents found the baby lying next to the dog and her own pup.

  “One of those amazing things”

  Government spokesman Alfred Mutua said authorities were investigating the rescue story.

  “This is a very interesting development and the government is looking into it because if it happened the way it has been relayed, it is one of those amazing things that happens in life that defies human explanation,” he said. “It indicates that there is somebody out there watching over us.”

  Well-wishers from Kenya and as far as the United States have sent e-mails to the Associated Press and called the country’s main hospital to inquire about adopting the child.

  Dog gets a new home

  The stray dog that saved the child also was being cared for Tuesday, a day after its last surviving puppy died for unknown reasons, said Jean Gilchrist of the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals.

  “She looks a bit depressed so we’d like to examine her to see if she has a temperature or any other problem,” Gilchrist said of the dog.

  Felix Omondi, 11, and his family, who live in the compound, have taken the dog in.

  The dog, a tan short-haired mixed breed who was heavy with milk from nursing, was possibly trying to care for the child because most of her puppies had died, Gilchrist said.

  She looks a bit depressed? She’s full of milk, aching to be a mom. All her puppies have died and now they’ve taken away her one last hope.

  “She looks a bit depressed?” I’m saying to Betty, who is lying at my feet, curled up like a perfectly sturdy footstool. “They think she might have a … temperature?” I’m saying, irate and out of breath. “Can you believe this?”

  “I can’t believe it!” Betty says. “It’s an outrage! It defies explanation! That poor lonely dog!”

  Exactly. (And thank God someone around this joint understands me.) Get that dog a puppy A kitten, a baby hamster, a little lizard that needs love, anything.

  I can’t, I suppose, help but see the world this way. Something magnificent happens in your life, and pretty soon you think it is the answer to every aching heart. You start seeing it here and there, repeating itself, you see it in the news stories you read and in the vacant eyes of some old chicken walking by. It becomes a song you’ll never get out of your head so you might as well sing it.

  Motherhood was my rescue. Motherhood.

  acknowledgments

  I wish to thank Alex and Anna and Sasha, my beloved little family, for providing me with more material than any author could ever hope for.

  As always I am grateful to my agent, Andrew Blauner, for his tireless friendship and support, and to Kate Miciak, my editor at Bantam, for her patience, enthusiasm, and the trust with which she gives me such glorious room to roam. My thanks to the people of the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, for the formative and essential part they’ve played all these years.

  I wish to thank my sisters, Kristin, Claire, and Eileen, for all the lessons on how to be a mom. Finally, and once again, I thank my mother, whose example finds its way onto each page I write.

  about the author

  JEANNE MARIE LASKAS is a columnist for the Washington Post Magazine, where her “Significant Others” essays appear weekly. A GQ correspondent, she writes for numerous national magazines. She is the author of The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know; We Remember; Fifty Acres and a Poodle; and the award-winning The Exact Same Moon. A professor in the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, she also writes the “My Life as a Mom” column for Ladies’ Home Journal. She lives with her husband and two daughters at Sweetwater Farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania.

  GROWING GIRLS

  A Bantam Book

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2006 by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006041701

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42069-5

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