Growing Pains
OUR Forestville house was uncomfortably overcrowded. We were too many fish for the fish bowl when we moved there; with Timmy and baby Alex added to the family, there wasn’t room to flip around. So Donny had the perfect solution.
“What we need around here,” he began, “is a boy—”
“We have a boy,” Carl interrupted. “As a matter of fact, at my last count we had four boys, to say nothing of three girls.”
“I’m not talking about girls,” Donny protested. “What we need is a boy—”
“The RIGHT SIZE OF ME!” Teddy, Laura, Susan, and Rita shouted, as they stood on the stairs in their pajamas.
“No,” Donny said, tears misting his blue eyes. “You all got each other the size of, but it’s me who needs somebody the size of.”
“Alex hasn’t got nobody,” Teddy said.
“Alex is too young to care.” Donny turned his head and his voice choked. “But me, I’m lonesome, and I care.”
“You’ve found a lot of friends in the second grade,” Carl pointed out. “And I’ll bet none of the boys you know has a brother just his exact size.”
“One boy is twins, and he’s the happiest boys I know,” Donny said. “Besides, nobody my size lives close enough to play with.”
I kissed all the children and started them up the stairs. “Bedtime, now. We can talk about this another night.”
“We got room,” Donny said. “I could squeeze over and let him have half my bed.”
“You go off to sleep,” I said, “and forget it for now. Mother and Daddy will talk about it later.”
When the children were all tucked in, Carl said, “What’s there to talk about? It’s out of the question, and you know it.”
“Getting another boy? When you first told me about Alex, I thought another baby was out of the question. See how wrong I was?” I grinned and chucked him under the chin. “Now maybe you could be wrong.”
“Sure,” Carl hollered. “Just ask anybody, and they’d tell you I was a piker with only seven children. Get eight children, and then I can do a good job in the church—make more calls—preach better sermons—get more adult discussion groups going—”
“Now that you bring it up,” I agreed, “it might help a little that way, too. Donny’s at loose ends, always keeping the household in an uproar with his mischief. If he had a boy his size, like when we had Taro—”
Carl went through the motions of tearing his hair, which wasn’t long enough to tear. “Oh, fine,” he raved. “I’m already swamped with responsibilities, so you know how to lighten the load. Just take on another responsibility. That makes sense.”
“People need more than just sense,” I said indignantly. “They need hearts, loving hearts. And it isn’t just our welfare I’m thinking about, or Donny’s. Somewhere there’s a lonely kid whom nobody wants. I’ve got a feeling he’s somewhere, just waiting for our letter to come, saying we want him.”
Carl pulled me down on the couch beside him. “I like your enthusiasm, Helen, and your big, unsensible, loving heart. But you’ll have to face facts.”
“When I die,” I said clenching my fists, “I want to feel that the world is even a slightly better place, because I lived in it. Is that conceited?”
“Not particularly. That’s the way I feel, the way most people feel.”
“Well, why should I even bother to clutter up the earth, unless I intend to do everything I can, within my ability? I don’t mean just to do a few things that I can do without any sacrifice or trouble to myself, but everything—”
“Christian living takes on another dimension, besides just the quantity of things done,” Carl said, unfolding my tense fingers. “There’s a quality dimension, too. We might adopt twenty children, and then not have the time or money to really help any of them. I feel a tremendous responsibility toward the seven we have.”
“Heavens, not twenty!” I said. “Only eight, that’s plenty. One more, the size of Donny. We could manage one more if we wanted to—you know we could.”
“I don’t want to,” Carl sighed, “but I will. This one, last time, I will.”
I wrote letters again. We didn’t hear of any children needing adoption, but we were told about two little Indian children in a nearby town, who needed a boarding home immediately. It was arranged that they would come to our house for a week end visit, first.
Toby, the little boy, was the same age as Rita; his cousin, Rose-Marie, was almost as old as Donny. When they arrived, with pajamas and extra clothes in paper sacks, Donny was so delighted he bounced all over the house like a slap-happy kangaroo. When he calmed down long enough to tell Rose-Marie his plans for the week end, he discovered she had disappeared. He found her under the walnut tree in the side yard playing dolls with Laura and Susan. Toby had joined Rita and Timmy in a game of blocks in the living room.
Donny drifted disconsolately back to the yard, lonely as a cloud. He picked up a feather by the chicken pen and stuck it in his blond hair. His second grade was studying Indians at school, so his mental image of a teepee was undoubtedly more authentic than the shaky structure he decided to build of sticks and old canvas. He fastened his feather more securely with a red strip of cloth around his head, and began whooping around a make-believe council fire. The girls left their dolls and came over to investigate the racket.
“This is my teepee,” Donny explained, blue eyes earnest. He touched his makeshift war-bonnet. “I’m an Indian, an honest-to-gosh Indian.”
“Oh,” the Indian girl said, fascinated. She ran into the house, her jet-black pigtails and ruffled gingham dress flying behind her. She came back, pulling her little copperfaced cousin by the sleeve of his cowboy shirt. “Hurry up, Toby,” she hollered. “Come on out and see an Indian, a real, live, honest-to-gosh Indian.”
Even Carl was won over by Toby and Rose-Marie. Although red tape kept them as county wards at present, they might in the near future be legally free for permanent adoption. In the meantime, they needed a home which would care for them. Before we could do this, our home had to be licensed by the county as a foster boarding home. Having your own children, either natural or adopted, didn’t automatically qualify you to be foster parents, also.
When the county welfare worker came to inspect our house, she didn’t have to bother with a tape measure. She merely handed us a mimeographed list of requirements for a county boarding-home license, specifying the number of cubic feet of air space needed in each child’s bedroom, the number of square feet of window space in proportion to floor space, and other miscellaneous rules such as single beds for each child, only two children to the room, the type of plumbing and heating required, and so forth, for three closely typed pages.
“We can easily see,” she told us, “your house does not have even adequate bedroom space for the seven children you already have, much less for the two more you want.”
“If we could add on another room somewhere,” I pleaded, “would our house pass inspection?”
“It would depend on the size of the room. You could fill out a new application, after making any changes.” She shrugged. “There’s the matter of bathrooms, too. You should have at least two baths, with a proposed family of eleven. I couldn’t be happy about your present situation of only one bathroom, and so far away from the bedrooms.”
I couldn’t be happy about our present situation of only one bathroom, and so far away from the bedrooms, either; but there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was a long trek downstairs, and through many dark rooms, with sleepy children at night. The location was embarrassing, too—right off the kitchen and but one short step from the back door which received all our visitors.
One afternoon, after a hard workout in the garden, I was taking a blissful soak in the tub when Timmy flung open the door.
“Here she is,” he said over his shoulder, “in here.”
I couldn’t blame Timmy. After all, the man had knocked on the back door and been quite specific when he asked, “Where is your mother, sonny?”
Another time Carl had forgotten that a church committee was meeting at our house. I was taking a bath when I heard people start knocking at the back door. There I was, trapped with nothing but a sheer nightgown at hand. I should have tapped on the door right then and shouted, “Hey, Carl, will you get me my bathrobe?” I didn’t, because I didn’t know it was a meeting and I thought the visitors would soon be gone. When the minutes had dragged into an hour, I was too embarrassed to make my predicament known. The men in the committee had parked around the kitchen table, right outside the bathroom door, and I was trapped like a coon in a tree.
Carl got caught once, too. There was a middle-aged spinster in our parish who had taken a great fancy to Alex. I couldn’t blame her for that, as Alex was both handsome and lovable. He was like an Oriental doll, with a cheerful round face that was almost more concave than convex, ivory-tan skin, and intriguing black eyes that crinkled into slits when he laughed. Alex’s friend began dropping in regularly about ten every morning, to watch Alex splash and chortle in the tub.
At this time of day, Carl usually was busy in his church office. One morning our whole family got a late start. We had been up until midnight with a young-adult discussion group the night before; Carl continued to stay up until the wee hours of two or three, to make out some church reports. At ten in the morning, I was still upstairs making beds. Carl was in his shorts, shaving, when the bathroom door flew open.
“Yoo-hooo! Is my favorite boy in here?” our daily visitor caroled out, as usual.
“Try another door,” Carl said, his face as red as his beard gets to be, when it grows out, and shut the door firmly in her face.
An extra bathroom upstairs would have been a blessing, but there was absolutely no extra room up there.
“Besides, this house isn’t worth adding on to,” Carl said, working his foot out of a hole where the front porch had just given way beneath him. We were out there trying to figure how we might add another bedroom to the house.
“Couldn’t we at least enclose this with some of that plastic screening?” I asked. “You know, like they use to let sunshine into chicken houses?”
Carl took two more steps and another dry-rotted board gave way. He pulled his shoe from the hole and moved gingerly around the porch. “It’s a good thing nobody uses the front door, here. I suppose the floor might stay in one piece, if I covered it with the linoleum rug from the dining-room floor. . . .”
After two months of sparetime work, using plastic screen and scrap lumber from the pile behind the garage, Carl had a new front entrance and an extra bedroom built from the old front porch. I papered the room with some cowboy paper found at a paint-store remnant sale, and finally the room was ready to show the county welfare worker.
She checked the area of bedroom space and shook her head. “Your house still has a long way to go, to reach even minimum standards, and there’s also the lack of adequate bathroom facilities.”
After she left, I threw up my hands. “All I wanted to do was to help two little kids. With all these investigations, I begin to feel as if I were wanted by the FBI.”
“You’d better start worrying about the seven children you’ve already got,” Carl said. “Leave well enough alone. And leave me alone, too, so I can get more church work done.”
In June, Carl attended the annual conference at Stockton. When he returned, he threw his arms around me. “Start packing, Helen. At least your housing worries are solved. The bishop has sent us to Boonville. It’s supposed to have one of the few big country parsonages in the California-Nevada Conference!”
Our new church was in an isolated valley, not far from Forestville, but accessible only by a narrow, winding road through unspoiled and almost uninhabited mountain scenery. Originally an area of pioneer sheep ranches that sprawled up into the hills and mountainous hinterland, it was now equally dependent upon lumbering as a local industry. After a recent boom, sawmills had sprung up around Boonville like toadstools after a rain.
Our new parish was a remnant out of the Old West, with dates on the gravestones going back to the gold-rush days. You never saw high-heeled shoes, fancy hats, or gloves worn on the street, unless by someone who had just come into the valley—or who was on the way out. As a matter of fact, there was only one main street, with partial sidewalks, and a general store which sold everything from woodsmen’s tin helmets to cheese, yard goods, and fish hooks. Most of the women who had the figure for it, and some who didn’t, wore jeans as the traditional shopping costume. It was friendly and informal, and I loved it.
I loved our new parsonage, too. There were only two bedrooms downstairs, but there was a large, unfinished area with a half-bath upstairs, and there was a back porch big enough to divide into two extra bedrooms. I did a twirl around our new living room and landed in Carl’s arms.
“They can’t object to our taking those two little Indians now,” I said.
But the two little Indians had already found a temporary home with an Indian family. This family was also interested in adopting the children, if they should become free. Since Carl had already given the go-ahead on Toby and Rose-Marie, I decided I had better get some letters out immediately and find a substitute child, before he changed his mind about a family increase.
A week later an air-mail letter arrived from Hawaii.
“We are sorry we do not have an older boy to be your eighth child,” the agency wrote. “However we do have two little half-sisters who badly need an adoptive home. Even here in liberal Hawaii, it is quite difficult to find homes for children of mixed race. Elaine, five years old, is Japanese and Balinese on her father’s side, and her mother was French-Irish. Diane, a year and a half younger, has the same French-Irish mother, but is Chinese, Hawaiian, East Indian, and Malayan on her father’s side. Although they are lovable youngsters, they have been up for adoption ever since the younger one was born.”
I showed Carl the letter. “It seems as if God meant for us to take both of them.”
“All right,” Carl said. “Shove the responsibility for this off onto God.”
“You were willing to take two Indian children. What’s wrong with taking in two little Hawaiian children? They need a home just as much. Even more, now.”
“I don’t know where we’re going to sleep nine children, even in this house,” Carl said. “I suppose we could divide up the upstairs and the back porch. Maybe I can get Dad to help.”
It was lucky that Carl was the son of a carpenter. His folks stopped work on their new home in Santa Rosa, to come up and help with our remodeling. They were staying with us when the agency sent photographs of our daughters-to-be, so we could recognize them when we met them at the plane.
“Aren’t they pretty?” I said to Carl. “Look at those lovely Balinese eyes Elaine has. And Diane looks like a Hawaiian doll.”
Carl nodded, and passed the pictures on to his father. “They look like Dosses, too. What do you know!”
“And just what does a Doss look like, any more?” his father wanted to know.
When we finished the remodeling, we had four small bedrooms upstairs, papered in blue for the girls, with bunk beds built in under the eaves. Alex had a circus-patterned nursery at one end of the back porch. The larger addition to the back porch was transformed into a double-bunk room for Donny, with cowboy and Indian wallpaper.
The children were bursting with excitement on the morning we were to leave for San Francisco, to meet Diane’s and Elaine’s plane from Hawaii. We planned on an early start, so we might spend a few hours at the zoo in Golden Gate park; but by the time we finished breakfast, made the beds, did the dishes, hurriedly swept up the last of the lumber scraps and sawdust, and gathered together the hundred and one odds and ends needed for a trip with small children, it was almost lunchtime.
“Won’t it be easier,” I suggested, “to eat our picnic lunch right here at home, and let the children have short naps before we leave? Then they wouldn’t be so cross by late tonight.”
By the time naps were over, and everyone was washed and dressed again, it was midafternoon. We piled into our station wagon and headed down the road toward San Francisco.
“When we had just one, it took us an hour to get ready to go anywhere,” Carl said. “Now with seven children, it takes us seven hours. How long will it take when we have nine?”
“Just be glad you don’t have a dozen,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Carl said. “We won’t.”
We arrived at the airport with an hour to spare, so we took our time, escorting the children to the rest rooms, watching people buy tickets, savoring the excitement and bustle of arrivals and departures. Two minutes before plane time, we showed the number of the plane to a guard, asking at which gate we should wait.
“You’ve got the wrong airport, folks,” he told us. “That there plane arrives at the other one, two miles up the road.”
We streaked out of there, Carl carrying Alex and holding Timmy by one hand, Teddy hanging on his coattails. I ran after them, holding Rita and Susie by their hands, Laura holding fast to Susie. We whizzed up to the door of the other airport building, and the girls tumbled out of the car with me; Carl and the boys drove on to park. The girls panting behind, I charged up the steps, through the glass doors, across the circular waiting room, and out the glass doors to the back. I prayed we would not be too late, so the girls would not be even more alone and frightened than they must already be.
First I saw the travelers swarming down the ramp from the alighted silver plane. Then I saw our girls.
I recognized them right away. Elaine, with her silky-straight brown hair swinging, looked around and around with expressive brown eyes that slanted up at the corners. Little Diane, who had wavy brown hair and olive skin, hung to Elaine’s hand as someone adrift at sea might clutch a life raft. Even without the pictures, I would have known them, in their spanking-new matched coats, garlanded with leis. I would have known them by the way they stood so lonely and lost in the crowd, their dark eyes searching, searching.
I knelt to their level. “Hello, Diane. Hello, Elaine. I’m your new mother.”
They hesitated, their eyes meeting like two startled fawns. Then Elaine smiled shyly and dimples flashed in her cheeks as she said, “Hello, Mommy. I’m Elaine.”
Diane threw her arms around me, and the searching look was gone from her eyes. “Are you really our very own Mommy?” she asked, with a slight lisp. “Really and always?”
“Really and always,” I assured them both with a big hug. “Now would you like to meet your new sisters?”
I had just introduced Laura, Susan, and Rita, when Carl and the boys rushed up. After another exchange of names, the children stood back and studied each other, with the frank, unabashed stares of childhood.
Some of the other lei-decked passengers came by, and Elaine called out excitedly, “We’ve got a Mommy and a Daddy now!”
“Plenty sisters, too,” Diane added. “And plenty brothers!”
Falling asleep in the car with the rest of the children on the way home, the two new girls were too tired to be homesick that night. The next day, as long as the sun was up, they were too busy getting acquainted with their new house and family for nostalgia to knock them low; but when dark and bedtime came, tears flooded in a wild hurricane. Hysterical, they screamed for their “Other-Mother,” the elderly lady who had boarded them during their long orphan years while the agency was seeking an adoptive home.
“We’ll take turns,” Carl said. “You rock one, and I’ll rock the other.”
Finally they cried themselves to sleep. The next day they settled into the routine of our family life, apparently content; but that night, after going off to sleep peacefully, Diane awoke sobbing, “Mommy, Mommy!” When I hurried to her side and gathered her into my arms, she explained tearfully, “I was crying for my Other-Mother.”
The next week she awoke in the middle of the night again, crying out, “Mommy, Mommy!” as before. I went to her, took her into my arms, and she smiled at me through her tears. “I wanted you, Mommy. I got scared, and I wanted you to come hug me some more.”
There was one unexpected complication to the adjustment of the two girls to our family. Laura, always a bit jealous of newcomers, and formerly the undisputed Queen Mother of the younger set, developed a bitter feud with the regal-minded Elaine, who had been the reigning favorite in her Hawaiian boarding home. The two would-be leaders spat and clawed like two fighting cats. They couldn’t meet in a hallway, or eat across the table from each other, without drawing sparks. Each kept running to Carl and me, bearing tall and spiteful tales against the other.
“That mean old Elaine,” chubby Laura would tattle, huge tears rolling down her face, “she tried to take a great, big bite out of me!”
“She hurt me first!” Elaine would accuse, her dark, up-tilted eyes flashing through her tears. “I don’t like that girl.”
The routine of the medical shots didn’t help. Every time we adopted children, the state welfare department required that we all be X-rayed and have blood tests.
“But surely those little children don’t need to be stuck again?” I asked the social worker. “We just had it done when we got Timmy and Alex. You know our family hasn’t contracted anything since then.”
She checked her case history on our family, a folder that was beginning to bulge. “I’m afraid we must. See, it’s been over a year since the last record of tests, and according to law, there must be new tests within the year the children are adopted.”
We made an appointment with our doctor. Psychologists warn that such trips must not be sprung upon innocent children without due advance preparation; this works well for all our children except Laura.
“Tomorrow is the day we go to the doctor for our blood tests and X rays,” I announced cheerfully one morning.
“Will that doctor stick a needle in us?” Laura asked, instantly suspicious.
“Well, yes, the needle will make a bit of a prick, but—”
“Why do we have to get a needle stuck in us?” Laura wailed, retreating.
“So we won’t get dippy-theria,” Teddy said.
“So your face won’t get locked up if you step onna nail,” Susie added.
“We don’t need that kind of shots,” Donny said warily, joining Laura. “We had that kind this summer already.”
“This isn’t the same thing,” I explained. “This time the doctor just takes out a tiny sample of blood to make a test. This shows that we’re all healthy.”
“Like we all hadda have before we could take Timmy and Teddy to the judge?” Donny asked.
Insight lighted Laura’s round face, then a black curtain came down as she wheeled and pointed an accusing finger at Elaine. “She’s why we have to go to the doctor.” Her chin quivered. “I don’t like that girl. I wish you’d send that girl back on the airplane.”
The rest of the children took the matter philosophically, dismissing it from their minds as they dashed out to play. Not Laura. Like many grownups, she was not one to put off worrying until tomorrow, if she could worry just as well today. She followed me around like a forlorn puppy, sometimes wistful, sometimes defiant.
“Do we really have to ever’body have shots?” she whispered. Then she was shouting. “That old doctor can’t have any of my blood. I need it all myself.”
I took her in my lap again. “Goodness, don’t keep thinking about it,” I smiled, stroking her shining brown hair. “Sure, you’ll get a little prick, but it’s over so soon that you’ll forget it right away. You remember how it was?”
Laura remembered all too well. She couldn’t get it out of her mind. She found a sharp pin and followed Elaine around with a gleam in her eye; when Elaine taunted her and disappeared, Laura decided to play doctor with her dolls, jabbing them all viciously in their rubber arms. Even this was not release enough for her tension. With all her doll clothes packed in a small cardboard suitcase, she put on her coat, tucked her favorite doll under her arm, and announced she was running away.
“I’m going to find a better house, where the doctor won’t stick little girls with needles,” she said. “And where there aren’t any mean old girls getting off airplanes to come live with you.”
The frying hamburgers smelled so good, and we were having tapicoa pudding for dessert, so Laura finally decided to stay and put up with us. But, after dinner she doubled over and held her hand over her stomach, rolling her eyes.
“I think I’m getting sick. I think I’ll just have to stay home in bed all day tomorrow.”
“Maybe some germs ate your healthy up,” Susie said.
“Maybe the doctor will stick a getting-well shot in your bottom,” Elaine said vindictively. “And stick the blood test in your arm, too.”
Laura’s hand flew off her stomach and she straightened up. “Probably just ate too much,” she said with dignity. “I’ve still got my healthy.”
The next morning Laura suggested that she stay home. “I’d probably scream, and it might scare the other children,” she hinted delicately.
At the doctor’s, the waiting room was stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey by the time all of our children climbed into chairs and reached for magazines. Laura, disdaining the diversion of literature or pictures, began to whimper immediately. When the doctor opened the inner door, Rita, encouraged by Laura’s now open sobs, hung back with wide fearful eyes, while the rest marched in. Always curious, Teddy stood with his short-tilted brown nose against the glass case full of shining scissors, knives and gadgets, completely fascinated. We put him on the table first, because he set such a good example. Although we tried to turn his attention away before the prick, with his scientific mind he had to see exactly how it was done; he winced when the needle went in, but didn’t cry. When he was set down, he walked back to continue his study of the instrument cabinet.
We hoped to do Laura last, since she was such a bad example, but her sobs were so loud and poignant, we agreed to get her misery over with quickly. Laura’s reaction was the opposite of the rest. She was howling when she went up on the table, but the minute the needle went into her arm, she stopped. When she was set down, she icily withdrew to a stool in the corner, crossed her chubby legs with a ladylike smoothing of her short skirt over her knees, and sat with the haughty look of a queen whose toes have been trod upon by a commoner.
“This does it,” I sighed to Carl that afternoon. “Before, we did everything possible to break up this feud between Laura and Elaine. Now, with the added fuel of the shots, I wonder how many years it will be before we can even get them to civil speaking terms?”
They fooled us. That night they came to us, arms twined lovingly about each other, asking if they could share the same room and let Diane move in with Rita or Susie.
We were stunned, as if looking at a mirage. Yet it was obviously the real thing. They pressed each other with gifts of their own favorite dolls and possessions, and went everywhere hand in hand. To this day, we have never found out what caused this small miracle. Did ever-sensitive Laura feel sorry for Elaine when she, too, suffered the needle? Did they reach some kind of spontaneous pact? We could only guess, and then give up. At the time, we were too overjoyed to take any chances of destroying this beautiful thing by inquisitive prying.
A long time later, when the friendship was as solid and secure as the mountains rising behind our house, we asked them what made them decide to stop fighting each other, and be friends.
They looked at us as if we were senile, losing mind as well as memory.
“Us fight?” Elaine asked incredulously.
“We’re the best friends in the whole world,” Laura said. “I liked Elaine the minute she got off that airplane.”