SARAH WERTHAN BUTTENWIESER
sOMEONE AT THE CAFÉ ASKS me how many children I have. “Four,” I answer. “The oldest is sixteen and the youngest, my daughter, is just four.”
The woman raises her eyes. I get this look often, the four-is-double-two look.
I nod. “I know. Four.” And then I offer, “The last one we adopted. I didn’t mean to have four children, but it wasn’t exactly accidental.”
“Oh,” the woman I’ve never met—a friend of a friend—exclaims, just a bit too loudly. “Where is she from?” This next question is rapid fire, an autopilot follow up to the “your child is adopted” revelation.
“Worcester,” I answer. No tales of China or Guatemala or Vietnam here. “I was at her birth,” I offer. “It’s an open adoption.”
“That’s so good of you,” the woman says, as if adoptive parenthood is some sort of volunteer activity. On the list of things I never attempted to be by adopting a baby, good is at the top. If I were to spill the whole story then and there, with my iced tea sweating on the rickety outdoor two-top, I’d begin this way: I did not know my daughter’s birth mother before her pregnancy, and as a result, much as I love her—and I do—I did not adopt a baby to help another woman out. I did so because my husband and I decided we wanted one more baby, our little girl.
The woman’s friend, my friend, interjects, “She’s so cute, that little girl.”
I smile, as does the friend I’m sitting with, and we all agree she’s adorable. When the inquisitor goes inside to grab her iced drink, my friend leans over, “Exotic Worcester,” she says wryly. I am so used to this, I almost forget how many what-not-to-say things people actually say to me.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about those moments when someone praises me for adopting my own child or asks something intrusive about the adoption or misuses the word real to refer to biological ties. It’s not that praise or questions or even vocabulary upend me; I’m pretty matter-of-fact about adoption. What I find hard is the underlying assumption in the praise or questions or language—that “adoptive” makes the mother or the father of the child a little less than.
Less than a straight shot from egg and sperm, to uterus to arms.
For a society that will tinker with any “natural” process—birth, death, aging, noses, or chicken pox—this clinging to the old-fashioned “man and woman make a baby” mode as the truest path to motherhood is, when you think about it, rather odd. Witnessing my daughter’s birth as, essentially, a bystander, I promise I’m not less of a mother to her. I’m not like her mother; I am her mother.
That doesn’t mean it was easy to stand in the hospital room through the early hours on a winter’s morning and wait for the teeny, tiny girl to emerge from her mother’s body. Her mother, Caroline, was afraid of childbirth, the physical pain compiled by the impossible task on the other side of that physical feat—to let go of her daughter’s tiny fingers, the ones that would naturally grasp her finger. Short version: It was the most excruciatingly joyous moment I’ve ever experienced. My daughter’s birth, our daughter’s—ours, being Caroline’s, mine, my husband Hosea’s—was, as birth really always is, beautiful and filled with possibility and hope, but the loss hung in the room as well, thick enough to breathe in, loud as Caroline’s sobs after Saskia arrived.
The hospital was not accommodating. Hospital policy didn’t let anyone into the nursery, and though Hosea and I were promised a room beforehand, we were refused that courtesy once the day came, so the only place we could hold the baby was in Caroline’s room. The upside was that we got to know Caroline’s family better—which now, in its way, is our family too—and we met her friends, and her friends and family met Saskia, and we all bonded—the group of us—against the evil behemoth that was Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and most especially its judgmental nursing staff.
I never expected to leave a newborn in a nursery overnight an hour from home, but that turned out to be the best thing to do for everyone involved. To stay with the baby meant that we’d be in Caroline’s room with her and we understood that she needed the rest and the break. She had to find her maternal resolve to stick to her decision, one complicated by a tiny, mewing, perfect creature she couldn’t ignore all day long, even if she wasn’t changing her diapers, or feeding her, or holding her nonstop (though she held her as much as she asked to).
I never expected that taking the curves in the parking garage from the backseat of our station wagon beside a newborn in an infant bucket seat would feel like riding in a getaway car from a bank heist, or that this would be a sensation of parenthood, but there you go.
Once home, I switched formulas and found breast milk from women who had too much, and put my baby to my bare chest without fear a nurse would happen in while Caroline was outside having a smoke. I started to calm down a little bit. I started to feel like Saskia’s mother.
Although I couldn’t wholly comprehend it yet, those hospital days were being her mother, too. Motherhood could be defined like this: You discover your willingness to do for your child things you never imagined yourself capable of doing.
Nor was it easy not to be able to make the milk that would sustain her, having breastfed her three older brothers. Early on in the process, I took fifteen-minute chunks away from everyone to sit with the breast pump, hoping the sucking action would stimulate milk production. To no avail.
Day after day in those first weeks home, my husband would tape the Supplemental Nursing System (SNS) tubes to my breasts, the ends just at my nipples, a bottle of milk around my neck. The idea of the SNS is that a baby will get milk while at the breast, and that at best, this may stimulate production, too. In any case, the baby gets milk and breast together, even if not from one source.
Still, those good intentions were met with reality. She was tiny—well under six pounds—and she wasn’t yet a strong sucker. Trying to get the tube into her tiny mouth along with my massive nipple was quite challenging. I couldn’t manipulate the parts alone—the parts being breast, tube, and baby—with just two hands, since one was busy cradling her. Even with my husband’s assistance, she really couldn’t figure out how to extricate the milk from the thin tube, let alone effectively suckle at the breast. Meantime, there were three more kids in the house. Those precious fifteen-minute chunks of time at the pump, and more at the breast, took me away from them. And they needed our attention as we transitioned from a family of five to a family of six. For everyone’s sake, the bottle made much more sense.
The bottle meant I wasn’t the only one to feed her, the way I had done for her brothers. Instead, she was held and nurtured by her papa and each of her brothers—who at the time of her arrival were five, nine, and twelve. It took work on my part to feel okay about not being the only one to feed her. Rather than feel inadequate about what I wasn’t able to provide—my breasts—instead I felt supremely grateful for what I could provide: a loving family with plenty of arms (mine included) that loved to hold and nurture her while she fed, which is ultimately the reason we moms breastfeed. We want to nurture our babies well beyond nutritional concerns. I had to grow my definition of mother, to push myself to cede something in order to gain more.
Meantime, I had to hold tight to that feeling—mother—because the whole question of telling came up almost immediately, and comes up frequently with an adopted infant. Saskia has dark hair and dark eyes, and her skin is on the pale side for a biracial child. For a white gal, I have pretty dark skin, along with dark hair that’s going grey and dark eyes. My boys, by comparison, are relatively fair: one has green eyes and dark hair, the second is dirty-blonde with brown eyes, and the third boy has blond hair and blue eyes. Go figure. So this girl, she happens to resemble me. People think she does, and indeed, when I imagined her before she was born, she looked exactly like this—like me. I was rounder than her, with bigger cheeks, mistaken for Asian and Inuit and Mexican and just about everything else. No one said Jamaican of me, but that’s what she is on her father’s side.
Almost as soon as I started to go places—the grocery store, for example—people voiced their assumptions. I carried her in a fleece sling and so they peeked in. “When did you have her?” someone might ask.
I didn’t, I wanted to say. I didn’t look postpartum, and so I got stares of the how-did-she-do-it variety. The answer was that I hadn’t, and we were in the process of adopting her, and it was open, and I was at her birth, but how many times are you supposed to share that story—and with strangers?
And sometimes, when people said to me, “She’s beautiful,” I felt bad accepting the compliment. I wanted to tell Caroline about each admirer. I wanted her to experience the part of that flattery that comes when your genetic material rearranges itself with someone else’s to give you a gorgeous baby. But she knew how beautiful Saskia was, and she shared pictures, and people affirmed this to her.
When I ran into someone I knew, the other person would inevitably say, “I didn’t know you were pregnant.” In those instances, it was easy to tell the short version of how she came into our lives. I’d skip the sadness in the labor room, the tension in the hospital, and the near-thievery in the parking garage. I’d share just the highlights as I stood in the market aisle, doing the tell-tale mama-jostle as my daughter rustled in the carrier: all unconscious knee bends and side-to-side swaying that one does as a primitive response to soothe babies.
Sometimes, though, when a stranger asks about her, I do tell the whole story. And if it takes place at Whole Foods, the chances are very high that the person I have told will tell me, “I’m an adoptive parent, too. Biggest gift in my whole life.” I can’t say why this happens so frequently at Whole Foods, but it does, and I soon became convinced that if you are considering adoption and want to talk about it with experienced people, all you have to do is roam the aisles there.
Being an adoptive parent is being a parent. I wipe noses, bottoms, and tears; I endure late bedtimes, early wakeups, throw-ups, and My Little Pony. I am The Mom; I make my daughter safe. Like every mom, I hold my children’s stories with them. With this child, I hold another mom, too, and aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and a father we’ve never met. Her story will feel to her simple or complicated, I can’t say or know or even guess. Sometimes it feels simple and other times complicated to hold this story with her.
Before we adopted a baby, I had no idea that within the parent universe I’d find a whole other tribe, the adoptive mothers, who share in this particular complexity, the one in which another woman entrusts her most precious creation to you. In a way, you’re mothering on behalf of yourself and another mother. It’s an added responsibility, and it’s an honor.
When people first told me, “My child, my adopted child, is the biggest gift in my whole life,” I got it. I get it. It’s just the case. In the midst of daily life, I don’t always think about the big words and the big concepts. The day-to-day is family life. Adoption is absolutely part of our family’s fabric, not at the outskirts. When I do think about it, I realize it’s so woven into our cloth now that we don’t necessarily have to tease the threads out all the time. Because of that solid weave, I don’t question some of the things I did early on. By now I know that as a mom, I’m not less than; I’m not more than; I’m not altruistic. I’m living my life. We’re living our lives. This is our family.