Growing Girls Read online

  Women who have babies early in life often think of motherhood as a rut, as if there’s a great world beyond they’re somehow missing out on. But I remember wishing for babies as a young woman, feeling my life of adventure was a rut. I try not to make too much of this. Mostly, I just think life is full of ruts. There’s the rut of putting the coffee on the exact same way you did the night before, first the water, then the filter, then eight scoops, then the button setting the timer so that at 6 a.m. you’ll smell it brewing. The rut of waking up to your same radio station, same announcer, same robe, same slippers, same dogs to let out, vitamins, cat snaking between your legs. The rut of the same bowl of Kix for your kid, same yogurt, same highchair, Elmo. The rut of eating a banana at your desk while checking your e-mail. The rut of: Aren’t I getting boring? Shouldn’t I perk this life up?

  Did I want a second kid simply to get out of a rut? Is that why I wanted the first one? Where would this method of family planning end up?

  When we got to Guangzhou the next day, it was even hotter than Beijing and the smog was so bad our guides told us to try to stay in the hotel from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. We boarded a bus to the place where Sasha was said to be waiting for us. We entered an office building and all you heard were babies crying, it sounded like a thousand of them. We waited in a room and Alex held the video camera and his shirt was completely wet with sweat. One by one they brought the babies in and yelled out their names. It was all so hot and chaotic and I wondered where Miss Peng was. A woman was wandering around with a baby in her arms and she was saying, “Ji Hong Bin? Ji Hong Bin?” And at first I shook my head no. Then I heard her say it again and I looked at the baby.

  I recognized her eyes. Nothing else. Her hair had been shaved off and she was so tiny she did not look entirely real. Her eyes, just her eyes were huge. They were dark as crude oil and pleading. I held out my arms and when she fell inside it was nothing like it was with Anna. Anna had been a bowl of Jell-O, an armful of peace.

  Sasha was a solid jangle of bones, stiff as sticks. I knew she was sick. At that moment I thought: cerebral palsy. Anna reached up to her with a toy but Sasha didn’t take it.

  I wondered again where Miss Peng was. Everyone had said she was an angel and yet she wasn’t even here to deliver this group of children. She had something better to do?

  I wondered what these monsters had done to this child.

  I looked at Alex as I fell into tears. He turned off the camera and came running and when he took Sasha in his arms she clung to him like a starving monkey. She did not let go.

  Ten million people live in Guangzhou and yet it’s only China’s fifth-largest city. We rode back to the hotel in the bus and I held Anna and smelled her hair and Sasha was still clinging to Alex. I was sick of all those ten million people. I was missing my rut back home. It was all so circular, so Dorothy, so Auntie Em. You could write an ode to your own backyard if so many people hadn’t already thought of it.

  Our room was on the twenty-second floor of the hotel and Anna loved running down the long hallway. It was exactly as it was the day before, when we checked in, except now Alex had a little monkey stuck to him.

  In our room we peeled off Sasha’s clothes, a light jumpsuit two sizes too big. She did not mind this or anything else. Her legs were twigs. She seemed profoundly malnourished. She was silent and tight, holding her arms to her chest. We sat her on the floor and surrounded her with toys. She looked but did not reach for any of them, despite Anna’s repeated attempts to offer them. “Why won’t my sister play with me?” Anna asked. I told her to wait. I told myself to wait. But worry had already swept in and through me and now sat on my chest like a stone. What was wrong with her? What was wrong with my baby? Was the treatment she received at the orphanage so poor that she was somehow shell-shocked? Had she ever been loved at all? Had she ever been held? Had she ever played with a toy?

  I tried to sympathize, to understand the ghost-mother and all the ghost-nannies. But forgiveness was so far away now.

  I tried to empathize, to put myself in Sasha’s heart. She had just been yanked away from the only family she’d ever known: on the one hand an orphanage, but on the other hand a home. There is a level of comfort in any rut—any.

  But Anna hadn’t been like this. In her first day with us, Anna was already a playful girl who could play peekaboo and who giggled with abandon.

  Sasha sat on that spot on the floor and followed us with eyes that seemed to drink. All my hope was in those eyes. She was in there. There was a person inside that stone child. At one point, and not by design, Alex and Anna and I were all in the bathroom, leaving Sasha alone. We heard a noise. A moan that sounded not quite human. We rushed back into the room and found her there, doubled over, her head bent to her feet.

  It was a howl of abandonment we would hear again and again, if even for a moment she was left alone. She was in there. There was a person inside that stone child.

  We tried to feed her but she wouldn’t eat.

  We tickled her but she wouldn’t smile.

  I didn’t sleep at all those first nights. I wanted her to be different. I wanted her to be healthy and happy and easy. I prayed to God and promised I would care for her. It was more will than honor speaking.

  The next day I broke down and let everything out, falling into heavy sobs of grief. “What are we going to do?” I said to Alex.

  He wasn’t sure what I meant. That was interesting. Alex held none of my same worry. I told him what I meant. There was something wrong with our baby. Those monsters had done something to our baby. “What are we going to do?” I said, pleading.

  “I think you should start believing in her,” he answered.

  Those words formed an echo in my head that would come back at me again and again for days until I didn’t need them anymore. I think you should start believing in her.

  We went to the pool. The air was so thick with smog everything was yellow and my contact lenses were so foggy I saw rainbows. A woman from our group was in the pool with her baby. The child seemed, to me, even worse off than Sasha. She was a few months older and just as thin and just as stone-faced and she didn’t even have eyes that followed. And yet that woman cooed at her baby and told her how beautiful she was and she went on bragging about her to the rest of us.

  I never told her this, but that woman became my model and my champion. I watched her the next day in the pool and I watched her on the bus and in the hotel restaurant and I watched her in the gift shop. I tried her on as you would a costume.

  At first it was hard squeezing belief out of air. But the belief enabled me to coo with Sasha and cuddle with her as you would a two-day-old infant. I whispered in her ear about her pretty bald head. “You know, a lot of girls can’t get away with a look like this, but you’re so pretty you pull it off!” I clapped when she ate a spoonful of rice and I bought her pretty outfits in the gift shop and I tried them on her. Anna and I stuck bows on her head with tape and applauded.

  One morning I took her for a walk, just the two of us. We strolled through the small park outside our hotel where a few hundred people would cram each morning to practice tai chi on the bank of the Pearl River. They dressed in loose clothes and sandals and the women hung their handbags off the branches of the sycamore trees. One group brandished swords, another danced with giant red fans, but most just had liquid arms and legs and backs and necks, their moves as fluid as the river carrying too many barges behind them. It seemed an exhausted river, an exhausted city, polluted and crowded and yet somehow finding the energy to keep going on like this, day after day, and I held Sasha and promised to bring her back here someday.

  When we got back to the room, Anna was on the bed playing with Cheerios, dumping them into and out of cups. I sat Sasha next to her and she watched with those eyes that held so much. Anna saw her watching and paused. She took a Cheerio and held it out to her sister.

  Sasha unfolded one arm, and reached out for the Cheerio. She took it and examined it.

  �
�Look! Look! Look what she did!” Anna said. It was as if Sasha had reached through a thousand centuries. It was a gesture that said, “Yeah, okay, I’m in.” Or, “Hello, family, and thanks for waiting.” It was her first real act of acknowledgment.

  I went to my computer and wrote to everyone back home, “Sasha took a Cheerio! Sasha took a Cheerio!” wondering how to fully convey the implications. Later that day, Anna put on her purple tutu and ran in circles around the room while Sasha watched. When Anna leapt on the bed with a great flourish, Sasha turned to me as if to make sure I had seen that terrific move. I nodded with a smile. And that was when Sasha did it. It seemed painful, as if these muscles were put to use for the first time, so naturally they were stiff. But there it was. Sasha’s first smile.

  We got out the camera and tried to get her to do it again. We spent most of our time in China this way, succeeding in fits and starts until pretty soon the smiles came all on their own. Her body relaxed, her arms came away from her chest, and by the time we returned to the farm the person who is Sasha began to emerge.

  One morning at the farm I was pouring her a bowl of Kix and the cat was snaking between my legs and Anna was using her pink yogurt as finger paint. I told Sasha, I said, “Welcome to our rut.”

  She had sprouted two teeth on the bottom and some of her hair was coming in, taking the shine off her bald head.

  a cold front

  “We’re going to lose our light,” the small man said to the tall man. They were from the city. The tall man was the apprentice. He had to carry all the equipment, and I remember thinking how strong he was, how he didn’t complain, how in so many ways he made a good mule.

  They were taking pictures of the area for a magazine and they wanted me to tell them how the sun went. They were standing on my front porch. I said, well, you see how this house sits at the bottom of a bowl? If we climbed the eastern ridge, to the lip of the bowl, we’d be able to watch the sun make its slow crimson descent. We headed up the path. They said what many people from the city say when they get off concrete. They said it’s colder here. They said the air is clean. They said it’s so quiet.

  We heard something by the pond. We heard an animal crying. But we were in a hurry to catch the sun, so at first we ignored it. The noise got louder. “What is that sound?” the tall man said, finally. The question had to be asked, and once it was asked we had to look. Just off the main path, in a tumble of leaves, we saw an orange kitten, almost big enough to be called a cat, a teenage cat.

  “It’s stuck in the brambles,” I told them, going over to free the cat. It was twisting and turning in the oddest way. It didn’t look crazy sick. I didn’t fear it exactly. I’ve met so many cats in these woods.

  I picked up the cat. It wasn’t stuck on anything. I put it down on the path and said, “Go on, now.” The cat tried to go on. The front of it twisted and struggled to free itself from the back of it, which didn’t work.

  “Looks like maybe the back legs are broken,” the small man said.

  The small man and the tall man looked at me.

  I said, “Well, wait a second, I can’t take any more cats.”

  I wanted to explain to them, but I didn’t want to explain to them, how it works. I didn’t want to spoil the clean air. People drop off kittens. People can’t figure out what to do with them, so they drop them in the woods. The animal shelters can’t take any more kittens. My own rescues have produced mixed results. The last time was a year ago, a litter of two. My daughter named one Elmo and the other one Elmo. We put them in the barn for the night. In the morning we came out and found that our poodle had killed Elmo. He does this. He does this with a passion that is half savage and half casual. Fifty-fifty. He just does this. We buried Elmo by the apple tree, and then I took Elmo up to my office and kept him in there until he became a full-grown cat. It took months of convincing. Finally, the dog seems to understand that Elmo is a part of the family, and not a potential trophy.

  I didn’t want to explain this. I didn’t want to even think what my dog would do to a disabled cat. And, anyway, we were losing our light. In the country you build up calluses. There is so much to save. You can’t save everything. The fact becomes a plain, hard shell.

  “When you see something like this,” the tall man said, looking at the cat, “you have two choices. You put it out of its misery, or you find help.” It seemed such an obvious statement and yet courageous all the same. We agreed. We talked about ways of killing it. I said there was no way. The small man shook his head. The tall man said, “Then it’s up to me.” It seemed we were characters in a parable, something in the Bible or a children’s book. You read those things and imagine yourself the good one, the smart one, the hero. Only when you’re actually in the story do you find all the reasons for being the one who just stood by. It doesn’t excuse you. It doesn’t really help at all. The tall man stared and thought and in the end said he’d take the cat away and figure something out. We brought it to his car, put it inside, then raced to the top of the ridge to capture the sun.

  That was a Saturday. Weeks went by and I heard nothing. Pretty soon the cat and the tall man and the small man would be just another few characters I once met, characters you hold out hope for while busily denying this and that.

  Then one day I got a fax. It was a report from a veterinarian’s office. Spot is four-pound tabby, does not appear to be in pain, legs severely damaged beyond repair. Probably hit by a car at just weeks old. Severely malnourished. Spot may still have a good-quality life. I would try to find her a home before more drastic measures are taken. The fax was followed by a call from the tall man. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment and often had trouble just making the rent. “I hate to ask you this, but any amount would help …” I said, of course! He said Spot could get around fine now, dragging her back legs behind her. He said he never wanted a cat. He said looking at that cat was like looking at happiness.

  speechless

  We took a family vacation to Aruba because John Daller, our accountant, has a time share there and one year he couldn’t use it. We saw the poster when we were in his office getting our taxes done and I happened to mention motherhood’s attendant exhaustion and the fact that I was having prison fantasies. “I was thinking how it really wouldn’t be so bad, just for a little while.” I’d actually caught myself having a daydream of a most pleasant afternoon in a place where there’s nothing to do but sit and stare at a cinderblock wall.

  Ask any mother just what, exactly, is so exhausting about motherhood and she will likely have a hard time pinpointing it. The problem is, you block it out. The minute you get a break from motherhood, all those details of what, exactly, was wearing you out are … gone. Poof! Disappeared. This is an evolutionary phenomenon, away the species protects itself. Any mother who can’t get rid of the memories of how exhausting mothering is would have to kill herself, leaving all those half-grown kids to fend for themselves.

  One thing I know is that it’s really not just the lack of sleep. It’s really not just the fact that Sasha wakes up several times a night because she kicked her blanket off and somehow I’m the only one with the skills to get it back on right—must-be-Mommy—oh, Daddy’s blanket-covering prowess is just not up to snuff according to the little snit of a kid who has you awake again, and there you stand knowing you’ll never get back to sleep now because now you just remembered that Anna grew out of her sneakers and so what the heck is she going to wear on her feet when she goes on the pony ride at the birthday party that you can’t believe you have to go to, and hang on, did you buy wrapping paper? No, you most certainly did not. So, think, think! Well, you can have the girls make homemade wrapping paper out of old grocery bags and markers and stickers and make it look like you planned it, oh my God, it will be so cute, and speaking of cute, what is the matter with you that you are not the kind of mother who sews, you have yet to make your kids one outfit and you never even tried to crochet either of them an afghan. Dud! Dud! Shame on you! You’re a dud of a mother�
�.

  No, the no-sleep issue is not the meat of the problem, I don’t think. Exhaustion as it pertains to motherhood is more specifically related to the fact that it’s so damn constant. As mother, you are the sergeant of an army and most of the time your soldiers don’t do what you tell them to, and not only that but they fight, pick at each other, a flick of a pea, a stolen potato chip, and then they want more juice, even though you said no more juice they want more juice, so you offer milk because their teeth are going to fall out from all that juice, and then they cry and the negotiations continue and you dig your heels in because your job is to build character, and the only way to build character is to set boundaries, and enforce them. Then one of them has to go potty, and the other one has you looking under the sofa for a lost teapot that goes with the little mouse tea party set you knew had too many parts, and so you put your hand under the couch and you find a half-eaten Pop-Tart, which enrages you far more than it should. And so you yell and they cry and you would cry, too, if you stopped to think about how the only hope you have for sanity is a Barney video. You put the Barney video in and they ask for more juice.

  Anybody can survive a day of this, of course; anyone can survive a week. But the thing about child rearing is, those children who grow up so fast don’t really, not when you break it down hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute. They don’t stop being children, not even for a day, not even for a weekend, while they are busily growing up so fast, and sooner or later you ask yourself: How is it that I’ve turned into such a cranky foam-at-the-mouth bitch when I was always the fun one, the fun aunt, the lady who would visit my nieces and nephews and be welcomed like a reprieve from the monster my sister somehow turned into? “You’re funny! I wish you were my mom!” That’s what they said and so you always thought, Wow, I’m going to be a great mom. And now here you are an actual mom with your very own kids and they are finding someone else to say it to—“You’re funny! I wish you were my mom!”—maybe a babysitter, or one of your good friends from college; the thing of it is, you don’t even care. Whatever, so your kids think you’re a horrible grouch of a mom and they’d rather have a fun mom, uh-huh, whatever, can we just wrap this up and get on with the business of baths?