AN: This is barely fanfiction anymore. It's mostly just me futzing around.
Nobody took my parents seriously when they announced that they were going to adopt a child. To be honest, I'm not even sure if my parents took themselves seriously. As with all the other important decisions they had made so far, welcoming a child into their lives was not something they had planned, but rather, something they looked back on later and said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
My parents hadn't really told anybody other than a few close friends and neighbors, who were surprised by the sudden appearance of furniture in their apartment (apparently, the adoption agency frowns upon living conditions akin to those in a Dorothea Lange photograph). In a mad scramble for references, they'd ended up telling Joan, who laughed so hard she had to put the phone down.
"I just can't see you with a kid," she said when she finally regained composure. "Luke, sure, he's stupid about babies, but you having a baby, Grace?"
"Get with the program, Girardi," my mother said crossly, "I'm not having a baby. God, I hate babies. They're stupid and boring."
"See? That is exactly what I'm talking about."
"Yeah, Grace," said my father, overhearing the last part of the conversation, "you can't actually say that when the social worker comes for the homestudy."
The idea of my parents having a child was so unfathomable that Joan could scarcely believe it, even as they finally prepared to fly halfway across the world to get me. "You do realize what you're getting into, right?" Joan asked as she saw them off at the airport. "You're going to be with this kid for the rest of your life. You can't send her back when she pisses you off. You can't get rid of her even if you don't agree with her politics, or if she doesn't laugh at your non-funny science jokes. We're talking about forever here. Wait, maybe I should stop talking now. Am I scaring you guys?"
As my aunt had correctly pointed out, forever is indeed a very long time, made even longer when you are spending it with someone who acted more like a manic-depressive prisoner of war than a three-year-old. Many times during my first few months of living with my parents, my mother had been on the verge of stuffing me into a FedEx box and shipping me off to live with Joan. The number of air holes punched into the box would correspond to how much I was vexing her.
In hindsight, it's a miracle that my parents and I managed to survived each other at all. I suppose some part of Joan's airport speech stayed with them, and they were fully aware that I wasn't going anywhere until I could drive. As a result, during the tenuous first few weeks, my parents regarded me not as a child, but rather a foreign-exchange student, a tenant they couldn't evict.
Somehow, my father, who had enough determination to weather igneous rocks, remained optimistic that he could wear me down and convince me to like him enough so that I would stop behaving like my mother when she was sixteen.
Playing with children requires losing a lot of your dignity. To win me over, my dad had to chase me around on all fours, recite Harold and the Purple Crayon sixty-five times a day, and accompany me in watching the mind-numbing travesty known as children's television ("How is it possible that a brontosaurus is living in the same era as a saber-tooth tiger?" he'd complain, and my mom would say, "Dude, the dinosaurs talk. You have a problem with the paleontology?")
My father did such an excellent job of reducing himself into a bumbling idiot that I soon came to idolize him with the doe-eyed affection of a lovelorn teenager. My mother, however, was unwilling to sink to such lows, and so our relationship remained volatile and prone to Tourettic outbursts.
My already strenuous relationship with my mother was compounded by the fact that, given six months of paid leave by the firm she was working for, we had ten hours alone with each other every single day, from the minute my father left for his thankless job of teaching hungover college students until his return in late afternoon. During these ten hours, we went to great lengths to drive each other insane. She gave up bribery and resorted to bullying when I wouldn't give her back the control for the TiVo, and if she tried to make me wear a hat when it was raining outside, I considered that a clear violation of the Geneva convention.
The minute the sun set, however, I would cling to my parents with a death grip that almost left bruises. I was deathly afraid of the dark, and getting me to sleep each night was the equivalent of invading Normandy. I refused to get into bed unless all the lights were turned on, and even then, I would not go to sleep unless my mother was holding my hand. Even at the age of three, I realized that my father might be useful when building a DNA strand out of tinkertoys, but defending me against night demons was indisputably out of his league. Any ass-kicking of monsters, imagined or otherwise, I counted on my mother to take care of.
And so my mother learned to sleep while sitting upright and clutching my hand. If she woke up in the middle of the night, she would shove me against the wall and crawl under the covers with me. But more often than not, she ended up sprawled on the floor of my bedroom, and my father would have to drape a blanket over her and then shake his head at the sudden, weird turn his life had taken.
If you really think about it, the reason why my mother and I fought so hard against each other was that we were fundamentally the same. Even now, we need to test people, slam them up against walls and make their lives difficult until they are proved to be trustworthy. We are not like Joan, who wears her emotions on her sleeves, to whom love comes easily and in abundance, like loaves and fishes. My mother and I have to be careful; we love too hard.
Once my mom and I resolved our initial differences, we got along fine. On good days, we went on excursions to the nearby park and she would name, in a less than enthused voice, everything I pointed to ("Duck. Flower. Bench. Disenchanted Harvard students smoking pot."). On days with crappy weather, we stayed inside and chilled out in front of the television, enjoying documentaries about student uprisings. I would lay my head on my mother's knee and she would scratch my back, and when Joan nagged my mom for warping my psyche by treating me like the cat, my mother would point out that she was much nicer to me than she was to the cat. (This is true. My mother hated Rasputin, and the only interaction she had with him was throwing him out of the apartment after calling him a useless bag of fleas.)
My mother's return to work coincided with summer vacation at my dad's college, and since he did not have to teach a class that year, he was given the job of being my primary caretaker while my mother wrangled with her imbecilic colleagues. At the time, she was working as a civil rights lawyer at a non-profit law firm, and while this sounded tolerable in theory, in actuality my mother found herself surrounded by incompetent morons, and very often she wanted to deport her own clients.
On her second day back after six months of battling wits with a three-year-old, she discovered that the people at her office were possibly even more insufferable than I. When my dad called that afternoon, informing her of our plans for the day, my mother was almost envious.
"We're at the zoo," my dad said gleefully.
"Yeah, well, so am I," said my mom. "Hang on --- Marshall, did you make the copies yet? I don't care if the photocopier is broken, figure a way to do what I told you or go work at Domino's. God, I have to teach these people to blow their own noses. What were you saying?"
"We're at the zoo. Well, we're not actually at the zoo. We're stuck in the pet store because of the rain, but I told her it was the zoo."
"Already lying to the kid on the second day. You learn fast, rocket scientist."
"Tomorrow, I'm taking her to a museum and telling her it's Disneyland."
By the time school resumed in September, I was well-adjusted and thriving in the anarchic environment of Montessori preschool. Still, I had the biggest abandonment complex since Adam Rove, and I spent the first hour of school everyday wailing by the door. Even when I was left with people I trusted, my regular babysitters and my crazy aunt, I made it obvious that I preferred my parents and their no-bullshit, kick-'em-in-the-head style of parenting.
One evening, my parents left me with Joan while they went out to have dinner at a place where the entrees didn't come with a toy. I adored Joan --- everybody adores Joan, she has a way of making you like her even when she irks the shit out of you --- and saw her as a large, moving toy that made a lot of noise, but nevertheless, the minute my parents walked in through the door, I bounded toward them, consumed by a pure, unsullied baby love whose sheer force was so large enough to overwhelm me.
I head-butted my parents in welcome and when they picked me up, I covered them with sloppy, open-mouthed kisses. "Dude, chill out," my mother said. "We've only been gone for an hour."
Joan was slightly hurt by my sudden rejection of her. After all, she had spent the last hour putting on a puppet show for me, the main characters of which were a muffin tin, an empty Starbucks cup, and two oranges. "You know," she said to my parents, who were still staring in awe at this small creature who couldn't bear to be separated from them even for sixty minutes, "in ten years, she won't want anything to do with you. Enjoy it while it lasts."
"Your sister's right," my mother told my father that night, as he sat down to watch Mulan with me for the five hundredth time (it was one of the few Disney movies my mother approved due to its uplifting message of female empowerment).
"Huh?" My dad was busy stealing chunks of apple from my bowl and giving me a running-track commentary as he ate them ("Hmm, it's crunchy. You know why it's crunchy? Because of cellulose. Do you remember the molecular formula for cellulose?").
"She'll turn on us some day," my mom said.
"You're paranoid," said my dad. He continued his sermon on polysaccharides and my mother watched as I listened on, enraptured.
She tried to imagine me in ten or twenty years, grown up and rebelling against all the values she'd tried to instill in me. She pictured me as a varsity jock, a slave to corporate America, or worse yet, a Republican. She wondered, when that day finally came, if I would still remember riding on my father's shoulders on pretend journeys to glamorous destinations, the countless nights I fell asleep knowing my mother would be holding my hand.
For some reason, even the most well-meaning friends and relatives didn't quite grasp the concept that my parents weren't actually having an infant . When the news of my adoption spread through the grapevine, one of Dad's distant cousins from Chicago sent us a large, pink monstrosity which some refer to as a baby book. My parents appreciated the thought, but couldn't help but question, "What don't these people understand about our kid being way past the baby stage?" I had, by then, taken my first step, spoken my first word, and was way past my first birthday. My mother and father had no use for the book, which ended up on top of one of our many bookcases, gathering dust.
Somehow, it inspired my mother, and during a sale at the drugstore, she purchased three composition notebooks, the kind with gray and white marble covers that students use in junior high.
The first book she used to write down all the stupid things people have said to her in the name of parenting advice. They ranged from the bizarre (Mrs. Wong, whose restaurant was number three on our speed dial, taught my mother how to perform an exorcism in case I was ever possessed by demons) to simply ignorant babble that came out of random people's mouths ("How much did you buy her for?").
The second book contained a series of undelivered correspondence from my mother to me, which I've never been allowed to read. When I was younger, Mom told me that I would be allowed to read it when I was sixteen. A few years later, she changed her mind and said I could read it when I turned twenty-one. She kept moving back the date, and the last time I checked, I'm not allowed to read it until after she died. "What if you outlive me, huh? What if I get killed during field hockey practice?" I once asked, to which she replied, "Sucks to be you." I don't have a clue as to what are in those letters, but I suspect that my mother, never the one censor herself, must have called me a couple of names that would have put seasoned truckers to shame.
The third book is my Book of Firsts. In it, my mother has recorded the highlights of my life until I entered adolescence, at which point I refused to let my parents know anything anyway. Normal parents record things like "First Day of School" or "First Piano Recital," but my parents documented events such as "First Science Fair" and "First Anarchist Meeting."
First Complete Sentence in English was directed to the Queen Bee of the popular clique in my kindergarten class. "You shut up," I told her when she interrupted my turn for Show and Tell.
The honors of First Time Getting the Crap Beaten Out of Me was done by Elizabeth Rove, who, at five, was a year older than me and two heads taller, so it wasn't much of a fight. And in her defense, I started it --- I'd pushed her onto the ground when she wouldn't let me have a turn on her trampoline. In the following years, it would become nothing more than a running joke between the two of us.
First Parent-Inflicted Injury, however, remains as something that carries too much weight to be tossed around as an amusing anecdote.
My mother does not believe that I don't remember any of this, but the truth is, I really don't. As with all the other stories about my parents' lives, I've learned about it from various sources, including my parents themselves. I've also read the entry about it in my Book of Firsts, which is quite unhelpful, as it mostly says, "Ohmygod, what fucking moron thought it would be a good idea to give us a kid? Did they actually think we weren't going to accidentally kill her or something?"
(My parents bought What to Expect in the Toddler Years so that they could read it and do the polar opposite of everything it suggested. They were the type of people who would look completely befuddled if asked what method of parenting they were planning to employ. "What do you mean there are methods? She eats what we eat and sometimes we let her watch C-SPAN. We're not going by anything Dr. Phil says." To them, raising a child was a time-consuming and physically- and emotionally-draining activity, but it was one that did not require a high IQ. They were quite confident about their abilities, and it wasn't until this incident that my mother started doubting her competence as a parent and my father got all nervous and sweaty.)
The way the story goes, it was my mother's day off and we were folding and putting the laundry back into my parents' dresser. I've always had a strange, inexplicable fondness for laundry, one of the few things my grandma Helen and I have in common. My mother was glad to have somebody to do her work for her, but I was overly meticulous, and it could take me up to two hours to match stray socks to their mates. I wouldn't let her help me, squawking whenever she tried to hurry me along.
Between waiting for me to finish and wondering whether water would boil before I completed my task, my mom's state of mind was in a Friday-afternoon haze as she piled my dad's socks into the bottom drawer. Distracted by further concerns about her parents' impending visit, she slammed the drawer shut on my right hand. "Shit," she breathed as I let out a high-pitched scream. "Oh, God."
She picked me up and ran around in circles, completely at a loss as to how to get me to stop shrieking. The most she could think to do was call my father on his cell and cry into the voicemail, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." (My poor father was most baffled when he heard this message upon returning from his 3 PM class.)
Next, she phoned my aunt Joan, who was amazingly poised in comparison. Then again, Joan was experienced in getting injured in the most absurd ways. "Don't panic," Joan said. "Do you have ice?"
My mother ransacked the freezer for ice and came back with a package of frozen French fries and a box of Fudgsicles. She wrapped the frozen entree around my hand and shoved an ice cream bar into my mouth, as per Joan's instructions.
Ten minutes later, I had calmed down and was cheerfully sucking on the chocolate through hiccupped sobs. My mother, however, remained an emotional wreck. She took me to our neighbor, a professor emeritus of Harvard Medical School, who assured her that nothing was broken. "The bruises will fade in a few days," he bolstered, "but you're going to feel like a jackass for a long time."
I was not at all traumatized by the experience, and I only cried again when I discovered I could not hold my crayons with my swollen fingers. My father volunteered to color on my behalf, and held his tongue when I insisted that my trees must be purple and lacking in chlorophyll.
By the time my mother's parents showed up several days later, we had put the incident behind us. My grandparents had brought a gift, a giant Noah's Ark which my dad happily pointed out to me. "Look, Darwin's boat!" he exclaimed, and my grandparents had no idea how to respond to him. My mom, however, was charmed by his unintentional attempt at making them squirm. (For the record, I seriously thought that thing was called Darwin's Boat until I was in first grade. Thanks a lot for that, Dad. Thanks a whole lot.)
For dinner we went to an expensive kosher restaurant, with which I was not too impressed once I realized that the placemats were not for coloring. I voiced my displeasure regarding that and wriggled about until the food arrived.
My grandmother noticed when I had difficulty maneuvering the soup spoon with my good hand. "Is she left-handed?" she asked my mother.
It took a minute before my mom realized what my grandmother was talking about. "Oh, no. She just can't hold the spoon with her right hand right now."
The whole story came out. My parents told it carefully, toning the language down to a PG-13 level. The little details, the bag of French fries and the frantic phone calls, suddenly struck my parents as morbidly hilarious, the way some things have to be, or otherwise, they would eviscerate you with fear.
My mom ended by saying, "It was an accident, okay? And I still feel like absolute shit about it, which makes me wonder about the people who hurt their kids on purpose. What the hell is wrong with them?"
An uncomfortable silence came over the table, and the combination of what had been said and to whom it had been spoken made it unbearable for my mother to continue sitting at the table and pretending we were just another normal family, three generations blithely enjoying their dinner. Memories are strange little vermin; they allow you to relive simple pleasures, like flying a kite on a clear autumn night, but they also remind you that those who love you best are able to hurt you most.
My mother excused herself and grabbed me from my seat, mumbling something about going to the bathroom. We ended up sitting outside the back exit, where I pranced around and tried to grab at the falling snowflakes. My mother watched sullenly, and when I caught on to her distress, I climbed into her lap, as if I were hoping I might make her feel better by simply existing. She put my fingers to her eyes, and between the hitches of her breathing, she murmured an apology.
My father found us a few minutes later. He didn't ask what had happened, why she had run off. He didn't need to. He took off his jacket and wrapped it around my mother, and waited until she was ready before he took both me and Mom by our hands and led us back inside to face the rest of the world.