6/04/10
About this time five years ago, we received an email from our adoption agency with two photos of a round-faced baby, then 7 months old, with bow-shaped lips and a thin patch of dark hair, stuffed into seemingly many layers of thick clothing, standing in a yellow exer-saucer in front of a plastic play house dotted with purple hearts.
That’s our baby!
When I told my older sister, who has two now-grown children, that we were adopting, she said, “Oh! I guess I’d be worried about what you’d get. I mean, you can’t know about the family background.” We were out running at the time, plodding along side by side, which, much like driving in a car, is a good way to have difficult conversations, because you can say things without seeing the other person’s horrified reaction. Then my sister said, “Of course, you don’t know with biological kids either, do you? I mean, there are all those alcoholics in our family tree.”
True enough. Picture your biological offspring, and you imagine all your best traits weaving together in a magically perfect DNA combination. When Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley had children (I’m dating myself), you hoped they got his musical talents and her looks, not the other way around--kids who looked like frogs and croaked like them too.
Our biological kids would have my husband’s height, full head of hair, good cheer, and patience, and my love of words and unerring sense of a good deal. What they would not get is diabetes, high-blood pressure, heart disease, male-pattern baldness, eczema, paunchy guts, saddlebags, impatience, a hot temper, a tendency toward depression, obesity, or indebtedness, never mind the aforementioned alcoholism.
The degree of information you receive from birth parents varies from copious to nada depending on the circumstances, and ours was of the latter. Since the heart-stopping day five years ago when we first saw our baby’s picture, we have watched her big personality unfurl, with no frame of reference. She isn’t like my mom, or his aunt, or someone’s cousin once removed. She is who she is.
When the child was about 2, she pitched an intense and blood-curdling fit over something extremely important that escapes me now, like the color of her sippy cup, and my mother watched in bemused amazement and said with a laugh and a harrumph, “Willful. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was exactly like you.”
I was thinking about all this on Memorial Day as the child, now age 5.75, played at the town pool with a changing assortment of friends over the course of an afternoon. She is very democratic about whom she’ll befriend, which is utterly charming, as she plays so nicely with a chubby boy a year younger (“Mom! Mom! I remember him from last year!”) who is far less confident in the water than she. But she’s aggressive, too, literally getting in other kids’ faces, which is a little worrying and heartbreaking as she tries to assert herself with a particular pair of Mean Girls from kindergarten who whisper “Let’s not let her play with us,” and run away from her - with her in hot pursuit.
Is her intense interest in other kids just her nature? Is it “normal” kid behavior? Is it because she’s an only child? Is it survival skills ingrained from her early years in group care? Something she picked up from my husband and me? All I can do is shrug, and like any parent, try to guide her the best I can.
If you are pregnant, or thinking about it, or you have a small baby at home, or are waiting with a dossier logged into China’s slow-moving adoption bureaucracy, you can’t know what will happen. You don’t get a postcard from the future saying, "Everything turns out fine, she goes to Princeton and secures a seat on the Supreme Court."
You never know.
You know what the kindergarten teacher would say: "You get what you get, and you don’t get upset."
Ha!