I’m nine months pregnant, sitting in Dr. Addis’s office listening to him make arrangements with Cedars-Sinai to do an emergency C-section for seven thirty tonight.
According to Dr. Addis I have a medical condition that pregnant ladies can get called “preeclampsia,” which means I have crazy-high blood pressure, and if the baby doesn’t get out of me soon awful things could happen. I could have a seizure. Or explode. That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that Dr. Addis is insisting we “call a mother” to set up some help for after we get home with the baby.
“You’ll be recovering from a major surgery; you’re going to need help,” Dr. Addis tells us as he’s writing down instructions to get to the hospital. “I’d offer to come over and help but I’m playing golf next week with one of my patients’ husbands.”
No, no, no. We don’t need any help. David and I are old; we can handle it. I don’t want any family members around those first few days we’re back home. Not even my favorite ones. Those first few days at home as a new little family are going to be so intimate.
There’s going to be a lot of snuggling on the couch with baby Leo, taking turns singing “You Are My Sunshine” to him, and kissing each other as tears of joy rain down on Leo’s new little mushy head. As a Glamour-magazine-diagnosed codependent, I’m not a good host in the best of circumstances. You throw a baby in the mix and the first time one of our mothers is wading around in ankle-deep dirty bathwater because our drain doesn’t work, I’ll be a wreck.
To be honest, I’m not convinced that I even have preeclampsia. I don’t feel sick at all. It is true that when I take my socks off it looks like the bottom part of my leg has been sewn on. I like to say I look swollen up like an abandoned dead body, but that bothers most people and I’m trying to replace it with “bloated with the blessing of a baby.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if what I was really suffering from was a condition called “My Beverly Hills gyno has a dinner reservation at Nobu for eight P.M. so let’s get this going.” On the bright side, I’m going to have a baby tonight. David grabs my hand and I try to smile at him, but my face is so bloated I have to put my fingers in the sides of my mouth and pull up.
Nobody is more excited about my C-section than Ronda, my surgery prep nurse from Saint Louis. “You are going to love a C-section. Keeps your vagina nice and tight.” I love Ronda. She’s an older African American lady with long gray braids who laughs without smiling and walks so slowly it’s like she’s standing still. Ronda’s hooking me up to a magnesium drip telling me a story about how she walked in on her aunt giving her uncle a blow job when she was a little kid. “It really messed me up for a long time. She was the churchgoing auntie, you know what I’m saying?” Sure, I know what she’s saying, but what’s the magnesium for?
“So you don’t have a seizure, honey.”
Oh god, this birth is all medical-emergency-like. I really was hoping for it to be more born-in-a-tub-with-dolphins-like. At first I’d been high-fiving Ronda about getting to skip out on missing labor—but now as my insides are starting to feel like they are on fire from the magnesium, I can’t believe I’m never going to experience what it’s like to go through labor. If I don’t go through the excruciating pain of childbirth, how will I increase my capacity for suffering? Labor serves a purpose. It’s nature’s way of preparing you for motherhood and learning how to shit the bed in front of people.
Rhonda thinks I’m crazy for feeling this. “How you get that baby here has nothing to do with the kind of mother you’re going to be—and I’m telling you, you’re gonna be cracking walnuts with that vagina.”
At seven thirty P.M., curtain time for theater lovers, Dr. Addis sliced me open, and a license plate, a stripper shoe, and a baby boy fell out. Leo is here. The bliss I feel is unreal and perfect.
I’m no longer in the cute little maternity recovery room with rocking chairs and comfy flowered-print couches for the visiting family members. I’m in a straight-up hospital room with Leo lying in an Ikea-looking container next to me and David sitting on the single metal chair in the corner. A nurse who looks like she’s fourteen years old but is wearing a lot of makeup to pass as nineteen walks in and mumbles something about “getting me to the bathroom.”
This getting-to-the-bathroom thing is not as much fun as she made it sound. I try to stand up but I can’t remain on my feet without holding on to her for dear life. In the bathroom she lowers me down onto the toilet, tells me to “let her know when I’m all done,” and turns around and faces the bathroom wall to give me a sense of privacy even though she is standing right next to me.
I pretend to knock on an imaginary door to alert the nurse that I’m done peeing. “Knock-knock-knock!” She grabs a spray bottle that’s on the sink, turns around, and without any warning she aims it between my legs and starts aggressively squirting at me with this “I’m gonna get it!” focus. Like it was bug spray and she’d just seen a wolf spider.
She pulls a pair of gauze medical underwear on me, and I start crying for all the people in the world who have to have their crotches spray-bottled clean. For the morbidly obese, Thai sex workers, and the elderly.
She drags me back to the bed and I start sobbing on her shoulder.
Back in my bed with Leo finally on my chest, there’s one thing I am certain of—there’s no way David and I will be able to handle taking care of Leo with just the two of us. Dr. Addis was right. We are going to have to ask one of our mothers to fly out and help us before David’s milk starts coming in.
The problem is that I’m adopted, so I have two mothers and that means I have to choose which one to ask. If I ask my birth mother first, and she says yes, which she may, I worry that my adopted mother will think that I asked my birth mother first—because I will have. I’ve known Diane, my birth mother, since I was nineteen years old. My adopted mother actually did the search to find her, yet I still find myself trying not to show too much enthusiasm for Diane. Whenever my mother asks me how Diane is doing, I say something like, “Well, you know, give that lady a baked good, a Long Island iced tea, and a dog pillow to pass out on, and she’s happy.” And my mom will laugh and shake her head, like, “Oh, that’s Diane.”
Diane helped take care of three of her grandchildren who were born this year. Or maybe she just brought Chanel lipstick to the mothers right after they had their babies. I can’t remember what form her post-birth care took.
But I can’t ask Diane because my mother is the first mother, like Queen Elizabeth, and must be consulted first.
I make the call to tell my mother that she won the help-me-to-the-bathroom sweepstakes, but it turns out that she can’t come because, sadly, she hurt her knee. I’m fairly certain that after I’ve regaled her with tales of medical underwear, spray-bottle cleaning, and the challenge of inverted-nipple breastfeedings, she picked up a letter opener and stabbed herself in the kneecap.
So, the real winner is Diane, who might turn out to be the better match anyway. Once she gets past her maternal urge to shove the baby in a pile of dirty laundry and go out dancing (I assume that’s what she did the day after I was born), she’ll have a much easier time staying in our tiny apartment because she, unlike mother number one, doesn’t mind sleeping on couches. Actually, she’s probably the best choice since her other three are grown and have all been having babies recently.
David wants to know why we’re not even considering his mother, who lives in Brooklyn, but then agrees that she tends to choke a lot and that could be nerve-racking. Whenever I bring up her choking habit, David tells me how beautiful she used to be and how refined and well-bred she is, as if this explains it, like she was bred with a small, ladylike esophagus that makes eating a whole lamb chop unimaginable. Besides, the F train doesn’t stop in LA so she’s off the list.
One call to Diane and it’s set; she’s going to fly out and help us for a week after we get home. “I vacuum and I do laundry,” she said. I didn’t care if all she did was fluff pillows. I needed her to spritz me clean once in a while and give me her emotional support. I wanted someone I didn’t have to fake new parental bliss around, and Diane was perfect; she didn’t fake anything. In fact, the last time she flew across the country to see one of my solo shows, she came backstage afterward, walked right past me, collapsed on a couch, and announced, “Man, that was tough to stay awake through.” Later she apologized and blamed the pitcher of margaritas she’d had before the show.
• • •
My friend Gay Jay (I don’t actually call him Gay Jay anymore after Chinese Lesbian Kristin yelled at me to stop) has stopped by the hospital under the guise of seeing the new baby, but I’ve known him since seventh grade. What’s really brought him here is the opportunity to see me vulnerable. He would have paid good money to catch the breakdown-in-the-bathroom scene. He’s being patient, though, and diligently oohing and aahing over Leo, though I can tell it’s boring for him. He tries to get some action started by poking me about motherhood (“Are you excited about being humorless, sincere, and chasing cars you think drive too fast with a rolling pin?”), but I’m too worn-out to take the bait. He asks me to save my Percocets and is about to leave when I mention Diane’s visit.
“Oh my god! You are going to ask the woman who gave you up as a baby to come and help you with your baby? When she sees Leo she’s going to see the face of the baby she gave away and have a major flashback. This is beyond profound.”
“Should I hire a documentary film crew?” I ask, knowing that Diane is not going to have painful emotional flashbacks about my birth.
She’s a probation officer by trade, and though she tends to talk in a baby voice, say words like “otay,” and dress in pink overalls and bright purple clogs like a giant toddler or Rosie O’Donnell playing a handi-capable adult, she’s tough. She’s moved past the moments of my birth and giving me up long ago. She’s not what I would call unemotional. She’s empathetic, easy to talk to—has all the traits of a good person—but she doesn’t indulge emotions or wallow in regrets. Years after we first met we were picking up some dinner, a box of white zin and American cheese, at a Denver Safeway when she spotted a giant salami in the meat section. She picked it up, waved it wistfully in front of her face—“Oh man, I knew this guy. I miss him”—and threw it back on the stack. That was as close to expressing regret as I ever saw her.
The lactation specialist shows up. Jay can’t get out of the room fast enough. He tells me how he hopes I don’t plan on losing the eighty pounds I’ve gained because he’s never seen me looking so radiant and dewy, shields his eyes, and runs out, but not before letting me know that he thinks I’m being incredibly naïve about Diane. “Just get ready.”
• • •
Diane and I have known each other since I was nineteen. Our reunion, though life changing, wasn’t the hysterical emotional scene I’d been led to believe it would be from all the dramatic reunions I’d been watching on Oprah since seventh grade. When there is a reunion on the talk shows, adults run to their long-lost mothers or grandmothers or kindergarten teachers like they are hostages that have just been freed after thirty years of captivity.
There was one Oprah where a middle-aged, somewhat odd woman—let’s just call her “Florida Cracky”—had been separated from her twin sister through the magic of the Florida foster care system and hadn’t seen her since she was three years old. I didn’t even like the woman. But when her sister came onstage and they saw each other for the first time I was howling with sobs on the couch. It turned out, of course, that even though they hadn’t been raised with each other, they were exactly alike, the only difference being one drew her eyebrows on with a Sharpie and the other one went natural. It didn’t matter what the details were about the people or the situations—it could be a father meeting a daughter for the first time, a fireman meeting the toddler he freed from a sewer, or the cast of Happy Days—any reunion of any type left me sobbing.
Yet when it came time for me to meet Diane, the last thing I wanted was a big dramatic scene. On the plane from Indianapolis to Denver, sitting next to my mother, Sharon, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a show where the long-lost child calmly walked up to his or her birth parent and just shook hands. “Hello.” “Hello.”
I knew that when it came to life’s big moments you could never predict how you were going to act, much less how others would. My adoptive mother is an ex-ballerina who is obsessed with table manners and tucked-in shirts. She’s not one for big displays of emotion. My worry was that she would think that Diane expected a big show and she’d turn all Liza Minnelli on me, with manic hand gestures, tears, and fake laughter.
The entire flight I was shoving doughnuts in my mouth but was completely unable to swallow them. Crumbs just went flying out of my mouth like I was Cookie Monster. Right before we landed, I was complaining of starving and then I threw up. At nineteen years old I couldn’t identify that I was overwhelmed with nerves. When I couldn’t find my seat belt and my mother pointed out that I was sitting on it, I screamed, “No, you are!”
My biggest fear had been that Diane would be a seven-hundred-pound shut-in covered in dirty washcloths who collected Cabbage Patch dolls that she gave the same name she’d given me after I was born—Tammy Lisa. Now that I was walking off the airplane about to see for the first time the woman who birthed me, my fear was that she’d sob into my hair or give me a long, lingering hug. And it would be in front of my mother and all the strangers in the airport and I was sure that everyone would be watching to see how I reacted, waiting for me to crumble. Thanks to the Thorazine that my body seems to naturally produce to help me survive, I shuffled off the plane and then stood there, stone-faced, as my mother and Diane hugged and cried.
Diane was nothing like I’d pictured. Five foot three inches. Short brown shiny hair, sparkly green eyes, and a huge toothy grin. I watched her and my mother whisper to each other, both giddy with nerves but without any big hand gestures or fainting spells, and I realized that I’d never expected her to be so young, pretty, and happy looking. I guess I’d thought that the loss of me would have left her blind in one eye or at least a little grumpy. After Diane and my mother had their moment, Diane turned to me, smiled, and with a quick squeeze of my arm, said, “We’ll have a lot of time to catch up.” Then she turned around, and I watched my butt walk to the baggage claim.
Since the big reunion, I’d visited Diane every year or so and even went so far as moving to Colorado to be closer to her for a time. Diane seemed to instinctually get who I was and how I was feeling without any words being exchanged. She always happened to be there for major life events. Well, she missed that one, but otherwise. We went through 9/11 together. She was in New York for the September 10 Off-Broadway premiere of Homecoming, the play I wrote about my mom’s search for Diane after she had adopted me. “Kind of makes you want to drop acid and have sex with strangers” was the first thing she said after we found each other the afternoon of 9/11 on the Upper West Side. I saw Diane and her kids every year and sometimes more if she flew out to see me in New York or Los Angeles. In the final moment of Homecoming, the Lauren character hears the sound of her birth mother’s voice on the phone for the first time, Aretha Franklin’s “Think” fades up, and the lights go to black. Audiences would leave the theater happy that I’d found my African American mother. The reason I didn’t bring Diane into the play as a character was because she was so perfect and fun it didn’t seem fair to other adopted folks whose reunions ended in tears and gunshots in front of Cinnabon. Over the years, I’ve seen her foibles, but ultimately she’s been my Aretha Franklin fantasy birth mama.
David has just arrived at our apartment with Diane after picking her up from the airport.
Diane flops down on the couch next to me.
“Man, those C-sections are the way to go,” she says, looking at Leo’s head. “He’s not as ugly as some of my other grandkids were when they were first born. Don’t tell the others I said that.”
Diane has decided that her grandma name is going to be Bubs. “He’s a heroin addict turned police informant on The Wire. He’s my favorite character. Full disclosure, his real name is Bubbles but that sounds like a stripper name. And since my breast reduction surgery I can’t in good conscience call myself that.”
She leans over Leo’s face and shouts at him like he’s deaf.
“Hey, Buddy! Check it out! Bubs is here! I’m your Bubs!”
David laughs and I nod and open my mouth like I’m laughing, but no sound comes out.
I am trying to hide my tears. She’s the first family member to meet Leo. She didn’t have to run in slow motion with her arms outstretched and tears streaming down her face, but I would have liked the moment to have a teeny bit more emotional weight to it.
Now Diane’s wandering around the apartment in a flowing paisley print dress and a cheerful pair of ankle socks covered in rainbow horses that she loves but rarely gets to wear because her judge won’t let her wear them in court. She’s “here to help” and is looking for any cloth surface that can be vacuumed or laundered as she tells me stories about her job.
“Well, my murderer is having a hard time because he murdered again.”
As a probation officer, Diane can’t walk through a Walmart in southern Indiana without having to nod at someone or give a little shout of encouragement. “Hey, Jeanie, you’re not getting your foot caught in air-conditioner vents anymore, I hope. Watch out for those.”
I love her probation stories and I’m listening, but I’m also struggling to get Leo latched on to breastfeed.
Diane notices this, stops for a second, gives me a “You’re a natural” thumbs-up, and keeps talking.
“So, his cellmate offered to help him kill his stepmother and his grandmother. Now, my murderer at least has some motivation for killing them because they were his family. But the other guy, now, he’s just pure evil.”
She lets out a huge exhausted sigh. “Ahhhh! Oh man, I need a baked good.” She grabs her strawberry-shaped purse and heads out the front door.
“I’ll be right back, honey. And this time I mean it.”
• • •
True to her word, Diane’s been putting her special helping skill to use and doing a lot of laundry. I have to grip on to my pants when she passes by me: “I’m still wearing these . . . they’re not dirty.”
David has confessed that he thinks that Diane is more worried about her baked goods and getting to bed early than helping us. Maybe after three babies and four grandkids, babies can’t compete with turtle brownies. No, she’s had four babies. I’m always forgetting to include myself.
Diane’s three little “ones she kept” from another marriage didn’t know anything about me. They were six, nine, and eleven. To break it to them, Diane took them out to Chuck E. Cheese’s and told them they were celebrating and that she had a big surprise for them. At the end of the night, she had a cake and balloons brought out. “Okay, guess what we’re celebrating!” Before they could start throwing out ideas, she made the big announcement: “You have an older sister! And she’s coming to visit! On Wednesday at four P.M.!” They had no idea how this was possible; they just thought, “Cake . . . balloons . . . good,” and they celebrated.
On the day we met, they ran up the driveway after their bus dropped them off like they were being chased. They were pushing each other out of the way, dropping their school papers as they ran. And then, when they got to the door, they all just stopped and stared at me. Saying nothing. They surrounded me and looked at my toes for an hour. They marveled at the skills I’d picked up during my nineteen-year adventure away from them—“She’s going to brush her teeth! Mom, get in here. You got to see this.”
My birth father, Rob, had a harder time with my adoption and felt a lot more shame around the whole thing. After Diane got pregnant, he was kicked off his high school baseball team and sent back to the hills of West Virginia, where he could get away with that sort of thing. When Rob broke the news to his kids, who, like Diane’s, were little and had no idea about me, he sat them down in their bedroom and shut the door. “A long time ago, I made a mistake,” he said. “Well, that mistake is back. She’ll be here next Thursday.” For years after we first met, I’d sit on the couch and wave to them. “Hi, I’m the mistake.”
Diane’s positive PR campaign has played a large part in why I’ve felt a part of her family from the very beginning. They are the only humans I’ve been around where I don’t feel a separate “me,” just a clump of “us.”
Having Diane around gets me thinking about family. I realize that I’ve been telling this dreary little story to myself for all these years about how I’ve never really had my own family. I’ve been a visitor in all sorts of families but never felt like I had my own. Now that Leo is born, I see how untrue that is. All of those families are his families. And they were mine, too. Are mine. How amazing to go from “I have no family” to “Wake the fuck up—you have five! Six if you count the gay boys.” I don’t care if she never vacuums another napkin; I’m so grateful she’s here.
• • •
It’s four A.M. Leo and I are the only ones awake. Oh my god, there’s a baby in my arms. How do any babies survive for more than a week? They’re so frail and helpless. Look at him. I need to shove him back in so he’s safe in my belly again. Or buy him a shell. Leo’s squirms are familiar to me; he moves the same way in my arms as he did in my stomach. How on earth did my mother jump right into taking care of an eight-day-old newborn she’d just met? I can’t imagine. I’ve asked her what those first few days were like and she told me, “Oh, fine. You ate and slept and went to the bathroom. Like a baby.” This was the same sort of midwestern pragmatic answer she used when I asked her why after having two daughters of her own already she’d chosen to adopt me: “Well, I had so many girl clothes . . .” Apparently Goodwill didn’t do home pickups at that time and it was just as easy for her to adopt a baby.
I’m sure my mom wasn’t up in the middle of the night, like I am, feeling terrible that she’d invited a sweet tiny baby to an awkward party with shitty parking where everyone’s parting gift is some form of cancer.
The next morning, Diane goes to pick up twelve-dollar scones for everybody at our local coffee shop, which, after two days in town, she refers to as her coffee shop. She shows up three hours later with a bag of dried-out scones and a giant green leaf that she claims to have found on the sidewalk but later confesses to ripping off a tree in our neighbor’s yard. She says it looks like the kind of leaf you could put a baby on and float him down a river. “Not that I ever thought of that before,” she cracks, and then says she wants to take a picture of Leo lying on the leaf.
Normally, I love her abandonment jokes, but I’m still queasy from last night. I don’t want to tell David about it because I don’t want him to lose his mind in the nothingness and the terror since he still gets so much joy from online Scrabble. Diane, on the other hand, has been through a lot in her life. Divorce, death, and murdering murderers—she can handle it.
As Diane rummages through our toxic cleaning agents to find something to clean the leaf off, I share with her all the graphic images of reality that I, thanks to being a new mother, now understand—the cycle of suffering, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane going down, and the end of time as we know it.
Diane thinks she remembers that Danza, my half sister, had something like this happen to her after her first baby was born. “You should ask her. I’m just not as deep as you guys. Parenting wasn’t that heavy for me. Maybe because I had no idea what the hell I was doing.”
I reminded Diane about the reunion story as evidence of how untrue that is.
Diane smiles and gives me a little loving squirt with the Windex she’s holding in her hand. “That’s sweet, honey, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s really my favorite story.”
“What is?”
“How you took Danza, Justin, and Kenneth to Chuck E. Cheese’s. There were balloons tied to all their chairs and a big cake comes out. You were like, ‘Okay, guess what we’re celebrating! You have a big sister and she’s back! She’ll be here on Wednesday!’ If you had done things any differently it would have changed everything. It’s all about the spin you put on things.”
Diane is scowling. It’s the scowl she has on her face when she’s thinking. Or hungry.
“I hate to tell you this, but that never happened. I’m not sure where you got that from. Listen, what’s going to stress you out more: if I lay him on a dirty leaf or one covered in Windex?”
I’ve told that story since the day I met Diane. It’s how I describe the essence of who she is to people. She’s just forgotten.
“No way have I made up that entire story. Where would I have gotten that from?”
“I don’t know, sweetie, but it’s a wonderful story, so I think you should keep telling it.”
“Is any of it true?”
“I don’t think so. I think what I did was just tell the kids that I’d gotten pregnant in high school and that I’d given up the baby for adoption and now that baby was nineteen and she found us and was coming to visit. See, your story is better.” Diane walks over and takes Leo out of my arms. “Okay, race fans; let’s go put this baby on a leaf.”
• • •
Two years later, Leo and I are in Bloomington, Indiana, visiting family while David is away working for the summer, trying to make big money as a salmon fisherman in Alaska. We’re staying with my half sister, Danza, who was named for the great Tony Danza, not because Diane was particularly fond of his Who’s the Boss? work, but because she just liked how it sounded. “Or maybe I was a big fan of his. I can’t remember. Who cares? Just be glad you don’t have a brother named Fonzie.”
All of Diane’s kids live in the Bloomington area, and when there’s a big event, like our visit, Diane shoves her third husband into their little sports car and drives the hour from their house to see the family.
Since (one of the twelve of my avid followers) Diane’s trip right after Leo was born, she’s been an avid follower of my baby blog, Wigs on a Baby. Once in a while we’ll talk on the phone for a quick check-in. I still had this feeling that I’d been blinded by who I needed her to be and had no idea who she really was.
All the things that I’d loved about her suddenly seemed suspect. For instance, over the years I’ve watched Diane chat up people who most of society would run from. You could wheel up a headless torso on a gurney and Diane would chat away with it like they were old school buddies. Adults with severe cerebral palsy who can communicate only by blinking can chat for hours with Diane simply because she isn’t scared of humanity in all its forms. I’ve always loved this about her, but it leaves me with a “well, she likes everybody” insecurity. In fact, if she was due for a coffee and a baked good, she might not have been able to determine who was standing in front of her, much less cared. We were making plans for my upcoming visit over the phone and I tried to share this fear with her. Her response was “What are you, adopted or something?” That was it.
People talk about genetics versus nurturing, but within six weeks of being Leo’s mother I realized that what makes a mother is being there. The hours alone with him in the middle of the night. Feeding him. Loving him. Feeling that old “you and me against the world” Helen Reddy bond. The hell of knowing I will worry about his safety for the rest of his life. That is a mother.
All these years I’ve had an ongoing “it’s a hard-knock life in the orphanage” shtick about how my mother didn’t get me. How Sharon didn’t understand who I really was. “I can’t laugh without her screaming ‘Seizure!’ at me and shoving a stick in my mouth.” I’d tell my friends that the picnic table in our backyard was “the adopted table,” where my family had requested I take all my meals.
Now that I’m a mother, it makes perfect sense how my mother worried that a note in my adoption file had fallen out that had warned, “At age twelve her arms will fall off due to a rare West Virginia genetic mutation,” and she’d never know for sure if there was something seriously wrong with me. Leo’s my biological son, I knew my medical history, and I still worried after he was born that he was blind in one eye and had half a kidney.
Right after Diane arrives at Danza’s she announces that her cat, Tiny Tim, is sick.
“We’re putting him to sleep before I go to England. It would cost a lot of money to keep him alive, and I don’t want to be worried about him on my trip, so I’m just gonna get rid of him and get a new one when I get back. Kind of like I did with you.”
A dry smile is on my face and I give her a “good one” slow nod. Diane once told me that the reason she was able to hand me over after I was born was because they drugged her up. “It’s what they did back then so girls could go through with it. I’ve had haircuts that were more stressful.”
What if all those adoption extremists are right and I’ll never be able to attach to another human being? If my dad put his arm around me in front of other people—or in private, for that matter—I thought he was just trying to hold me still so someone could punch me in the stomach. Not that he’d ever done anything like that, but sometimes physical contact with people made me fear the worst. When the Snuggle fabric softener commercial came on, the giggly baby voice of Snuggle Bear was too vulnerable and needy and it would make me punch the couch pillows. That may not have been specific to an abandonment issue. The sound of that bear’s voice made most non–mentally ill people want to blame everything that was wrong in their lives on him.
I’d hoped all of my misgivings about Diane had more to do with hormones than with Diane herself, but if anything she’s gone from “casual I don’t give a shit” land to “aggressive I don’t give a shit” land.
I don’t hate her; I just see her more clearly now that I’ve been a mother for two years.
Danza and Diane are upstairs plugging in curling irons, getting ready to go to a Paul Simon concert. It’s one P.M. Danza feels horrible that the only person who isn’t going is “the adopted one.” The whole clan is going and they don’t have a ticket for me. When I made my plans to visit, Danza had asked me if she should buy me one, and I’d said I’d rather save my money for wine and online gambling. I’d imagined that I’d use the free night to visit with one of my brothers or cousins in the area whom I don’t always get time with, but it turned out that everyone in the family was going. I’m wandering around Danza’s big house enjoying her homemaking skills, making mental notes on how to best organize batteries and ribbons, trying to fight back a little of the “which one of these is not like the other” feelings. I stop in the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and hear the familiar sound of Diane’s husband, Randy, snapping photos of me.
Randy is a photographer for an Indiana paper and has the photojournalist’s gift of not being at all affected by people not wanting their picture taken. He instructs me to “get that coffee mug like you were just doing. That was pretty funny. You have a funny way of doing it,” and stands an inch away from me snapping my picture.
During my visits, Randy will always take the opportunity to ask me a series of questions about Hollywood. Things he assumes I must know about, like, “Is Lindsay Lohan starting to regret doing some of that stupid stuff she’s done?” Or, “Why does Pamela Anderson like looking like that?” It can be endearing, how he thinks there are twenty people in Hollywood and I know all of them, but then, in the next breath, he’ll ask me, “Lauren, can you understand anything those black people are saying on The Wire? CAN YOU, Lauren?”
“Hey, Lauren, how do you deal with paparazzi always chasing you and taking your picture without you knowing it? That’s gotta be tough.”
“I hate to break it to you, Randy; nobody wants my picture but you.”
This kills him and he collapses into laughter and then pops right up and starts to take more photos.
Right as I’m thinking how wonderful it would be to be upstairs with Diane and Danza getting ready for the concert, Randy offers me his ticket.
“Come on, Lauren. How many times will you get to sit by your foster mom at a Paul Simon concert? I mean, come on.”
The whole family has tried to explain to Randy that Diane is not my foster mom or half mom or stepmother; she is my birth mom. Randy married Diane only ten years ago and has a hard time keeping it all straight. In the end, I just tell him that Diane is my Guatemalan plumber.
“Listen, I don’t care about Paul Simon and honestly I don’t want to go,” he says. “I’d rather stay here and read and watch some basketball.”
“Are you sure, Randy?” I ask his camera lens. He puts it down so I can see his face.
“Oh yeah, it’s the chance of a lifetime—see Paul Simon with your stepmom, come on.”
I run upstairs to announce the good news.
“Randy just gave me his ticket! I’m going!”
“He did what?”
“He gave me his ticket . . .”
Danza looks like she’s going to cry and yells to Diane, who is lying down in the next room.
“Why is he doing that, Mom? He’s the one who said it was his dream to go, and I got it all arranged and— Mom, Randy gave Lauren his ticket!”
“He did what?”
It turns out that the Paul Simon ticket was Randy’s birthday present. The family chipped in and bought the ticket and were going to take him to dinner beforehand. The entire evening was to be his birthday celebration.
“He offered it to me . . . I swear.” This is the sentence I have to repeat all night long every time a new family member or close family friend joins up with us. It’s like I stole a birthday present from a sweet, confused man. I’m an entitled selfish monster . . . who’s been a lifelong fan of Paul Simon and is going to his concert!
• • •
Diane and I sit down in our seats. We are in the last row of the concert hall. The very last row. We turn around and there’s a wall behind us.
Paul is pretty great. He looks exactly the same as he did when he was banging Garfunkel, I mean playing with Garfunkel, but with white hair, like he’d gone to makeup and told them, “Make me look like an old-man version of Paul Simon.”
He plays the first few notes of “Kodachrome” and Diane is up on her feet, dancing. The entire theater is seated politely. Nobody is moving, much less dancing. “All right, this is cool! We can do whatever we want!” Diane says and waves her hand in the air and shouts out a woooo.
She’s the only one in the entire place besides Paul’s band who is standing. Even the ushers are sitting on the steps. I try to make her sit down and she turns around and asks the wall if we’re blocking its view and keeps going. “We’re in the back row so who gives a shit!”
Diane starts dancing with her arms above her head, swinging her hips like the child of the sixties she is. She gets worn out before the song is over and sits back down, grabs my head, brings my ear to her mouth, and yells over the music, “Man, how much am I wishing I’d worn a bra right now.”
Paul, I call him, now that we’ve spent a couple of hours together, is playing what he claims is going to be the last song of the night, “Mother and Child Reunion.”
“On this strange and mournful day . . . Is only a motion away.”
Diane reaches over and grabs my hand. It’s nice for a moment, but then my hand gets sweaty, so I wriggle free. She grabs me back. We repeat this until finally I’m full-on struggling to get my hand away.
Nobody ever holds my hand. David will grab my hand for a moment and then immediately get exhausted and let go.
Diane pins my hand down and won’t let me pull away, like an orderly in a hospital trying to calm a mental patient. By the time the song is over, all the struggle stops and now I’m just holding hands with her.
Holding hands is good shit. I will hold hands with my son longer than he wants me to. I will hold on because it feels so good to have someone hold you longer than you want. You let go but they still have you. It’s why you hold someone’s hand when they are dying. No words, just a presence. I start crying and this time I know it’s not hormonal. Thank god for Randy’s birthday present.
The topic in Danza’s minivan after the concert is which song was everyone’s favorite.
“Lauren and I vote for ‘Mother and Child Reunion,’” Diane yells from the back of the van, where we’re sitting.
“Little known fact: People think that that song is about a dog he loved but it’s actually about his favorite dish at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn that closed down.” Thank you, Justin. Justin’s my half brother, Diane’s oldest son. When I first met him he had a mullet and a rattail. Of course, I had blue eye shadow up to my eyebrows and a bad perm, so who I am to talk? Nowadays he’s a disgruntled lawyer.
Danza’s father-in-law, who is also a lawyer, jumps right in. “Actually, Justin, it was the restaurant itself that added the dish to their menu in honor of Paul, their favorite customer. The song itself is about the death of a dog.”
Don, Diane’s second husband, is in the van too. He insists that the song is about the Korean War.
By the time we’ve dropped everyone off at his or her car or home, the song might as well have been about a meatball finding tomato sauce.
The next morning Diane knocks on my bedroom door and asks me if I want to go with her to her coffee shop.
“I thought your coffee shop was the one by me,” I say.
“That’s my coffee shop in Santa Monica. This is my one in Bloomington. You coming or not?”
We pull into the parking lot and I’m about to jump out when she stops me.
“There is something I was thinking that maybe would be good for you to hear. Since you and your mother found me, I’ve never wanted you to think that the moment that you were born was in any way horrible or that your adoption was an awful ordeal. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel burdened or worried about me. But you know what? Maybe you need to know how painful it was. I’m realizing as you get older that maybe it would have helped you to know that giving you up for adoption was the most painful thing I’ve gone through in my life. Maybe the one thing I kept from you was the exact thing you needed to know—that you were not an easy baby to give up. Anyway, I just thought it would be nice for you to know that and I wish I’d told you earlier.”
If anyone would have asked me if I needed to hear what she just told me I would have said no, but that’s because my need to hear it was so completely buried. Before I met Diane, I’d thought that out of necessity for my birth mother to move on, I’d been born unloved. Adopted by a family that had to love me but didn’t know what exactly they were getting. I didn’t feel incredibly valued, but everyone I knew felt that way, so why make a big Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade out of it? But if I were really honest, I had to admit that there were times I felt like a random clump of a human that had to be assigned to someone in order to be cared about. When awful things happened to me, I never thought anyone would care all that much.
It mattered to me more than I could have imagined to know that I wasn’t an easy baby to dump.
She rummages around in her purse and pulls out an old wadded-up Starbucks napkin and offers it to me to wipe my tears off my face and blow my nose.
Diane reaches over and grabs my hand. “And hey, kid, I need to tell you something else.”
By the way she’s staring out the window at the coffee shop, I take a guess that what she wants to tell me is something about how if they only have one piece of lemon pound cake, she’s not sharing. But I’m wrong.
“I don’t give a shit about the pound cake; it’s all about the coffee cake at this place. If there’s only one piece of that left, hands off. It’s mine.”