... and Baby Makes Two (10 page)

Mary Kate & Ashley Do Ibsen!

Made me think fondly of that bout with salmonella. Good times.

Theater as only Helen Keller could have appreciated it.

He had the clap. We had to clap. The end.

And then they got silly. Ray called a halt to the process when they started to write the entire review in Dr. Seuss rhymes. That's never a good sign.

He prodded her for details about her date and heard enough about Dick-Richard's career to know that he didn't really have one. Clearly, he was not worthy of our Jane. He ordered her another.

“Ray. You're making me drink martinis, but, hello, what are you drinking?”

“Celery soda.”

Ray explained that he was abstaining from alcohol, carbs, red meat, sugar, fat, dairy, radio, and television.

“What does that leave you?”

“Ibsen and celery soda. I didn't know being beautiful was going to be so dull. No wonder models all look so vacant. They live in a bubble. A quiet, flavorless bubble. But I'm not complaining. I want to make a real choice here. My body is a temple and yeah, okay, whatever. I was thinking that it might be great to grow up to be that guy who eats tree bark, never catches a cold, and has perfect, glowing skin. Does that sound realistic?”

Jane sipped her martini. Ray had gone through several romantic crises before, and even the occasional career crisis. But Jane couldn't remember any previous identity crisis. Ray was always Ray. A human collage of good qualities plus a bitchy sense of humor.

“Wait.” Jane worried about how worried she sounded. “Does this mean you're not allowed to mock bad actors, crappy writers, and pretentious directors anymore? Because I need you to do that for me. I need you to be mean about these glamorous, beautiful people. Please promise me that you'll never get so healthy that you'll be all serene and generous to them.”

“Never. It purges toxins.”

…

Ray walked her home because he wanted to be sure that no Dick-Richard-Actor was waiting for her. He wasn't. Ray often thought
that Jane was a perfect candidate for a stalker: kind, bighearted, pretty, and lacking in peripheral vision.

“Are you disappointed that this guy was such a disappointment?” “No. The heart, she is intact. I was just sort of hoping.” Ray groaned. “Oh. Hope. That's the worst. You bruised?” She wasn't. She hadn't raised her hopes about this one date. Okay it was the first one in a long while, but she was sailing along.

“I just keep looking for signs, you know? About the baby. About whether or not I should really be doing it. Meeting a nice potential-daddy would have been a good sign, don't you think?”

“You know, I've been thinking a lot about this whole baby thing too. And I have to ask you: Does the whole universe have to put up big, flashing neon signs saying, Jane, go ahead and have a baby? I mean, is that necessary?” “Absolutely”

“Here's my sign to you: Do it. I really hope you go through with it. And I hope … Can you include me too?” Jane hugged and hugged and hugged him.

…

Jane took a break from work to look through the notes she had taken at the CSM meeting. Maria had given her a document entitled, “So You Want to Adopt From China.” Karen had given her details about a Families with Children from China meeting that would take place tonight, on the Upper West Side. If she rushed out of work on time, she would make it.

Jane walked past the community center three times before she saw the dripping sign announcing an FCC meeting. Jane shook off the rain and located Karen by her red hair. She was sitting in the front, perched at the edge of her seat. She had a small, pastel notebook and pen. The meeting hadn't started yet, but she was ready to write down anything interesting or useful. She was jumpy.

Jane sat down next to her and wondered about Karen's caffeine
intake when she leaned over and whispered, “Hey! Jane! So glad you're here! They'll be starting soon! I'm so jazzed!”

Jane didn't see Teresa step in late, and slip into the seat directly behind her. Despite the rain and wind, Teresa looked perfect. Her hair never frizzed, her lipstick in place. Teresa had control. She tapped Jane on the shoulder and mouthed “Hello.”

The demographics for this meeting included married men and women, and some children. During the welcome speech, someone passed around (hooray) brochures, literature, and fun fact sheets. There was a duplicate of Maria's “So You Want to Adopt From China” document. The place felt chaotic and warm. Jane took it all in.

Tonight, there would be two speakers, both women. One was a married woman with two bio(logical) kids and a little girl she had adopted from China. The other was a single woman who had just recently returned from China with her baby.

Married Mom spoke first. Her baby ignored the small audience and climbed all over her mother. She pulled at Mom's ears, clothes, and noisy necklace. Mom multitasked.

“I take it some of you are thinking about adopting from China, and—”

Karen piped up, “I'm not thinking. I'm decided. I'm definitely doing this.”

“Oh. Kay”

Jane missed the next few sentences. She studied Karen, but then looked away when her staring became obvious. Married Mom was relating her adoption experience:

“We had a great adoption agency. They really held our hands and made everything easier. And the whole process is so regulated. You assemble this series of documents, called your dossier. If you're a reasonably organized person, you can do it. Then you get all your— honey, don't pull Mommy's earring—all your documents notarized and certified and authenticated. You send it off to China. You wait. You wait and wait and wait, and then you get a referral. That's when
your agency calls you and tells you that China has matched you with a baby. They send you a picture and a medical report. You make travel arrangements, you go—you pick up your daughter, get her a visa, and fly home. And that's when the real fun begins.”

Jane wanted the meeting to stop so that she could think about this for a minute. She wanted to stand up and say, Oh, come on! Does anyone honestly think that it's this easy to get a baby? If it were this easy, people would be doing it all the time.

“Any questions?”

Karen shuffled through her notes, almost frantic but not quite. She mustn't let this golden opportunity for questions pass her by.

“Yes? In the back?”

It was Teresa.

“I'm new to the whole China adoption world, so please forgive my ignorance. Why are there so many babies? And why does it sound like they're all girls?”

Karen's hand shot up. She was the girl in the front row at school and she had the answer. Married Mom smiled and let Karen take the floor.

“It's an overpopulation thing. See, Chairman Mao told everyone to have big families—seven kids was the ideal. But China couldn't feed that many people, or house them or anything. Big overpopulation problem. So then they started the one-child policy. You're only allowed to have one child. That's the policy”

“Okay. But why are all the girls up for adoption? It doesn't sound like they're planning ahead. Aren't they going to need some girls eventually?”

Karen had no answer. She deferred to Married Mom.

“It's mostly girls who are put up for adoption. In China, boys marry but stay with their parents and support them. Girls marry and move in with the husband's family. If you need someone to take care of you in your old age, you need a son.”

You need a Sheila, actually. A Sheila would be better than any son because she was so obedient, and such a good cook. But then,

China probably didn't have any Sheilas. They're very rare. This was not a good time to be thinking about Sheila.

“It's almost unheard of for a woman to remain single in China,” Married Mom continued.

“Not here!” Karen snorted.

And then Married Mom described the act of abandonment.

“The girls are left in public places, so that they will be found quickly, and then they're brought to an orphanage. Sometimes, they are newborn, umbilical cord still attached. Sometimes, they are weeks or months old. You hear stories about older girls left in a market or near a police station. But it's usually an infant that's found. It happens a lot. China doesn't tell us just how many babies are abandoned.”

Jane pictured swaddling babes, like the Christ Child, nestled in a big box of ginger.

“It is illegal to abandon a baby. So the government runs an ad in the paper, searching for the baby's parents. Are they ever found? Who knows. If they were found, they'd be treated as criminals. The women who do this, the men and women who give up their children, they're brave. They're risking a lot, they're facing heartbreak, all so that the child can have a life. A better life. Does anyone have any questions about the adoption process?”

Some audience members started throwing around acronyms and terminology that Jane didn't understand. Even Karen seemed puzzled. She stopped taking notes. She had a glassy, overwhelmed look that Jane found comforting. Maybe glassy and overwhelmed is an appropriate response to so much emotional information.

Single Mom spoke up. She was a very large woman who had some trouble making her way to the front of the room. She settled into a chair with her sleeping baby in a stroller nearby.

“I've only been home for a month. This is my little treasure, Kaitlyn.”

Sleeping children rarely appreciate the oohs and aahs that they
generate. Single Mom's style was much tougher, much more direct than Married Mom had been.

“First of all, you have to have a great agency. Ask them questions. You've got to really work with these people, so you have to trust them. You have to know who you're getting into this with, right? Am I right?”

Karen nodded. Jane blinked a lot.

“Second of all, like she said, if you're reasonably organized with paperwork, you can put together your dossier, no problem. The waiting is the hardest part, like the song says. I chose China because it was so clear and straightforward. And Korea doesn't let fat ladies adopt. That's right, I'm too fat for Korea. But anyway …”

It should have been comforting to hear the tale of Single Mom. After all, she adopted this beautiful baby didn't she? Success, right? Jane struggled to keep up as Single Mom reeled off the list of documents that are contained in a dossier, as if everyone in the room were familiar with the list. Wait. What was that fourth one? How do you get it? She kept talking. She described a celebrity sighting that occurred when she was fingerprinted. Hold on. Who fingerprints you? How do you get that done? She made the audience gasp out loud when she told them that she lost her job a month after submitting her dossier to China. And finally, she described that day in China when her baby wasn't there.

“They brought the crib in to our hotel room and told us that the babies would arrive that afternoon. Everyone in my group got ready. And then our facilitator came around and said that the babies weren't coming til tomorrow. I thought I'd die. I took pictures of the empty crib. I told my sister, I said, ‘Kaitlyn's never going to get here! I'm never going to be a mama!' But the next day, she was there, and she was so beautiful. Of course, she was totally freaked out, but we bonded eventually. So don't worry about that part.”

This led to a series of questions about children and their bonding habits: what to expect when the child is first placed in your
arms, various reactions from children of different ages, and some disturbing health questions.

“Look. Let me be the crude one in the room,” said Single Mom. “I chose China adoption because I knew that at the end of it, I would have a healthy baby girl. I didn't know how long it would take, exactly, but I knew—guaranteed—how it was going to end. That helped my stress levels a lot.
A lot.
And when I had trouble finding a job after I was DTC, I knew I could just pull the plug on this and do it again later. I could. I didn't want to, but I knew I could.”

Jane was recording it all in her head. Later, when she understood more about China adoption, she'd play it back and say, “Oh, DTC means Dossier to China. So that's what she meant. She lost her job after she had sent her Dossier to China. What's a dossier?”

If she had stopped there, Jane would have gone home happy and serene that night. But Single Mom had one more thing to say.

“The paper chase may get complicated for some of you, but it's nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to motherhood. And I want to aim this at the women who are thinking about becoming single mothers. It's not about being organized or keeping track of lists of documents.”

Jane wondered if there was a spotlight on her. Single Mother continued.

“It's about being a superhero, every day of your life. And it's forever. If you think you can't do it, you're probably right.”

She may have said more, but Jane missed it. This was a sign, just for her: Don't do this.

“Questions?”

It was Karen, asking, “What's step one?”

All heads turned, tennis match style, to Single Mom.

“Call the INS and get an appointment for fingerprinting. Step two: find an agency, a good one. No, a great one. They'll hook you up with a social worker who'll do step three: your homestudy so you can get started on your I-
171
H. Then start working on your dossier and get it out there. And then, bring your daughter home.”

“Bring your daughter home” was a loaded sentence for people who were experiencing baby hunger. And she said it with an angelic infant sleeping by her side. Karen continued her note taking through loud sniffling.

If she had had time for it, Jane might have wondered how the Infertile Career Women group might have responded to that sentence. Jane was still stuck, however, at the way Single Mother seemed to know that Jane was simply not up to the task of single motherhood.

“Here's the number,” said Single Mom, and she read out the
800
number for the INS. Karen wrote it down. Everyone wrote it down, except for Jane. She seemed to be the only one not writing the ten digits. She noticed Karen noticing her not writing it down.