"It's not the same."

Maybe every adoptive parent recognizes this sentence. It's all over the internet. It's a quotation from Rebecca Walker's book, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. I should come clean and say that I know Walker a bit from our overlapping days in college (hers) and graduate school (mine).

One day, Miranda and I were talking about the girls, and she mentioned Walker's book. She summarized the part where Walker writes: "I don't care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn't the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood." I felt a little fire get lit in me. The fire was made of anger and fear. I googled the book, and found that this passage had ignited the rage of many others, as well.

Like many people, I resent being told how I feel. My reaction to her words would have been different if Walker had characterized them as her own feelings, and not mine, or yours. But maybe this is the danger of such a young person authoring memoir after memoir, particularly someone who has been labeled, by her publisher and fans, as the voice of third-wave feminism. Maybe she has come to believe she is an ultimate authority. But this is an inherent failing in Baby Love. Because the projection of this kind authority works as a shield, a protection against vulnerability, which makes her seem more unsure than not. And it turns her subjective experience into something generic, which is not what I want from a memoir. How about you?

I don't buy her subsequent backpedaling. She says now that she only meant to suggest that there are different kinds of love a parent experiences for each child. On her blog, however, she writes that she felt she had a right to celebrate the absence of certain hardships that biological families don't have to confront. But isn't this like a rich person saying, "I have a right to celebrate my wealth because my life is free of the hardships that poor people face?" Maybe you'll balk at this analogy. I think it fits.

Here's where I remove my own shield. The point is, for me, that the passage inspires my anger because it goes right to the heart of the vulnerability that is part of my experience, so far, as an adoptive parent. The point is that, while I believe Walker is wrong, I will never know for sure. My girls are my only children. It's true that Walker has no adopted children, so she can't know, either. Still, I wonder, would my girls and I be closer, would they be more mine, if they had come out of my own body?

At the same time, I shake my head at myself when my mind starts wandering down this particular path. After all, if they had come out of my body, they would be different people, and I love them as they are. I love and honor their origins as they are. These "what if" thoughts lead nowhere, but they do provide good excuses for procrastination, however, as well as an exquisite means of self-torture.

Will they accept this love, this whole mother on earth thing? Eager to put off writing again, and seek out more anguish, I followed Google around to various anti-adoption discussions. I found one angry adoptee who takes Walker's critique to a new level. Her rants against adoption are born, if you will, of personal experience. Like Walker, she speaks generically. True to form, I took her words in. But I didn't feel the anger I felt when I read Walker's passage. Instead I felt sadness, worry, and guilt. Does every parent, biological and non-biological, feel guilt about their spectacular children, like they somehow got away with something?

The angry girl blames adoptive parents, it seems to me, for somehow capitalizing on the tragedy and pain of others in order to fulfill their selfish desires to create an "artificial" family. I hate the convervatism, the condemnation, the joylessness, and hopelessness in her beliefs. But the real question is, what will my girls feel? And yet, even at this point, just ten months in, I know that even if they become angry adoptees who blast adoption on the web and elswhere, the pleasure, the honor, of having loved and cared for them will be something I will never regret.

"Step away from the keyboard," my husband poked his head into my office to say. And, somehow, I wrenched myself away from the screen. "I feel guilty," I confessed to him when I turned around. "You should feel guilty for spending so much time googling when you are supposed to be writing," he said. "That girl is so angry," I said. "There are angry people all over," he said.

The truth is, no memoir, no blog, not even my own, can capture the deep, daily pleasure I feel in loving these bright, laughing sprits: my girls. In the end, we're only human beings, here on this earth to care for each other. I have always believed this. And when I turn away from the screen, my job, my joy, is simple and clear.

"You're f*%ked"

Almost one year ago exactly, John and I were in Quebec. For months, we had been enduring the broken promises made by our American liaisons, all those "hurry up and wait" phone calls that left us feeling frustrated and helpless. We needed a break. We left the day before my birthday.

Before we left, our friend Hilary reminded us that, three years before, while she was vacationing with her husband in Quebec, she got a phone call alerting her to the fact that she was going to have twins. And the next day, the morning of my birthday, our liaison called us to tell us that twin girls, "seven or eight months old," were waiting to be adopted. She sent us a picture via my computer. As soon as I saw their eyes, I knew I would never forget them. Still, twins. We talked about it, and agreed to take some individual time to think. John went for a run. I got on the phone with Miranda.

Miranda and I talked about the pros and cons while I simultaneously stared at the picture, and then forwarded it to her. She stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence. "Oh, you're f*%ked," she said, and I knew she was looking at the picture, too.

John came back and we went for a walk. "What do you want to do?" I asked him. "I want those girls," he said. Then, he talked about twins in terms of "economies of scale." Our liaison asked us to name them since they had no formal names. We walked through a beautiful garden that reminded me of the beautiful girls on my computer screen. I knew that, someday, I would walk with them through such a garden. We named the girls. There was no turning back.

"The only thing harder than writing...

Is not writing," my husband reminds me. He sits beside me now. "Who said that? 'The only thing harder than writing is not writing?'" I ask him. "Me," he says.

Blogging is a way of both writing and not writing, at least for me. In other words, this blog is as much about what I am not writing as what I am writing. I am not writing, at least at this moment, a book I have been struggling with for years. The struggle has everything to do with the fact that the book is one I am not sure I want to write. Yet, I am sure that I need to write it. If I don't write it, the psychological consequences will be staggering. I must confess that the last part of that sentence I borrowed from my husband, as well. (It occurs to me now that maybe the fact that I feel the continous need to borrow words from my husband is at least part of my problem.)

"The way I write is the way I am," Joan Didion writes in the The Year of Magical Thinking. I love that sentiment. I would like to contrbute my own version of it, which is, The way I don't write is also the way I am. I don't write one thing by writing something else.

Back to this book--I think it is meaningful. I used to think it was meaningful. I have believed in its meaningfulness, even as recently as two months ago. I blame the kids. Now that I have children, it's simply harder to force myself into writing that I feel ambivalent about. My ambivalence: the book represents a part, a very hard part, of my past. The kids are the present and the future. The book represents a nightmare, I write with only a bit of exaggeration. The kids are, without exaggeration, a dream come true. How do you say goodbye, literally, every morning to the dream so that you can face down the nightmare? And the nightmare has to be wrestled anew every morning, it never seems to get easier.

I fantasize about life on the other side of this book. I imagine I will have the pleasure of that test taking dream I used to have when I was younger. You know the one. You toss and turn as you struggle unconsciously to get to the room for the exam which, you realize gradually, you will never reach in time. Then, you wake up and realize that, in real life, you actually graduated two months ago. The delight you inevitably feel upon waking from that dream is, I have found, incomparable. I want that dream. Sometimes I think I am dragging myself through this book in order to have that dream again.

The blog is different. The blog is part of the present, the deliciously child-filled present. It is truly a way of living life right now. It is, like writing that feels truest, a way of being. I wake up and immediately start thinking about what I will write next. I experience the day through the blog, and vice versa. And yet, I know this writing is mostly about the freedom it represents. Which is to say that if this blog was somehow mandatory, if it represented need instead of desire (that word again), I wouldn't be able to write it, either.

Goodbye Anisa (for now)

We said goodbye to Anisa today. Sort of. She is coming tomorrow morning to pick up one of the girls while I take the other one on an errand. And then we have tentative plans for next week. After that, she leaves the country for three years.

I wrote in an earlier post that Anisa had become "like a sister" to me. It has since come to my attention that one of the terrible society women in The Nanny Diaries refers to her daycare provider cum indentured servant in exactly the same way. I could exhaust you with a torrent of words about how my relationship with Anisa is "real," but you're just going to have to take my word for it. Yes, there are gaps between us, those human gaps, plus the inevitable gaps between employer and employee. Around, above, and between those gaps, however, something grew, something bigger than what we had as teacher and student.

Anisa, John, and I ran into each other in Starbuck's one day, maybe three weeks before we went to Ethiopia to bring the girls back. She was excited for us, and told us about her extensive babysitting experience. "Give me a call if you need me," she said. Great. In the meantime, we anguished about the daily "hurry up and wait" news we were getting from our liaison about the girls. I was so afraid to make plans and thereby jinx the whole thing that I made no daycare arrangements before we left. When we came back, we arranged an interview with an Eritrean woman who was interested in doing some babysitting. She was very nice, but it didn't feel right. Impulsively, instinctively, I called Anisa. Within minutes, we had a babysitting schedule that would see us through the rest of the semester.

She was a wonder. Among her other qualifications was her role in nearly raising teenage twins in her own family. "Remember, you're the one who is new to this, not me," she would assure me. At the same time, she always respected my role as the mother, even as she grew close to the girls, and spend substantial time caring for them. "How are the girls sure that Anisa is not their parent?" John and I would joke. She knew more than we did; I lapped up all of her advice. I had a class to teach that semester, and I couldn't have concentrated on anything at all if I hadn't been sure that the girls were in safe and loving hands at home. For months, Anisa was responsible for whatever peace of mind I experienced.

She was heroic. She weathered all manner of snotty noses and vomiting spells. She listened, with apparent interest, to my detailed theories about their bowel movements. She did laundry and mopped the floor. She consulted with her mother when I wrung my hands over the girls' nap schedule. I would come home to a sparkling kitchen and a tidy play area. She shared her favorite CDs. Once, during a veritable blizzard, she trudged to our house on foot. Mostly, however, she was, heroically, just plain excellent company, for the girls, and for me. To my mind, all of this falls under the category of "miracle."

And now, this miraculous young woman is leaving us. She's young, with a whole litany of adventures waiting to claim her. I am thrilled about her plans for the next few years. Thrilled and wistful, too. Such adventures are part of my past life, not my present one.

In the present, I wonder what will happen on the morning when my girls discover that their Anisa won't be coming today. I am almost more worried that they won't be sad than I am that they will. I want them to miss her; she has loved them so well. And sadness is part of life, sometimes an exquisitely important part. At the same time, of course, I want to shield my daughters from this and every other pain that life will put in front of them.

I expect I will be living with this contradiction for a long time.

Discovery (Fear and Desire) 2

So, I got over the fear part of discovery about ten minutes after I signed off on my last post, and simultaneously succumbed to a fever of desire. Nothing could have made me happier than reading a comment from Natasha this morning. What she writes is wonderful, and so is the larger fact of having a reader, at all. Writing this blog so far feels like tapping a microphone--"Is this thing on?"

Anyway, I got over the fear and got into the desire. What is this desire about? I think it's about wanting to make connection, to be in conversation, to reveal and discover. In writing personal essays, I think always about the delicate dance between revelation and restraint that I try to achieve with every piece. It's a dance I experience as essential, not only to how I want to write, but to how I want to live. It's possible for me to live this way in writing, but hardly possible at all in daily life. In the everyday, I feel I am always tipping over too far on the scale somehow. In the classroom, well, the image I will offer is me gripping the podium until my fingers go numb. This is, of course, an exaggeration. But it does describe something of my internal experience. Ten years into a teaching career, and I still haven't really figured out if I want my students to know anything about what's going on behind my professorly armor.

On the other hand, making connections with civilians sometimes proves to be just as challenging. You take a risk, multiple risks, with someone, and then, suddenly, or so it seems, that person is no longer part of your life. What happened? There are reunions I long for, even as I know they may never happen. This is the case with the older friend I wrote about in my first post.

I edited that post, by the way. In the first version, I described him in a way that later made me worry. I did that less to protect his privacy than to protect my own freedom.

The general dinner party scene, however, I feel I must preserve, for it provided the impetus for this blog. I told my husband, John, after we got home, about my uncomfortable feelings of exposure during the dinner. "This is something for you to write about," said John. It makes sense to me, countering those feelings of expsoure with my own, deliberate, exposure. It's a way of "owning," the story, even though the story belongs to me only partially. Still, I believe that telling it, sharing it, is a way, somehow, of protecting it. Revealing it on this blog is a way of keeping it mine.

Yes, I am aware that I have yet to reveal the "story" in question. I'm gearing up to that, but I must warn you-- it may take a while.

Discovery (Fear and Desire) 1

"So, when do all of the people you are writing about find out about this blog and charge you with libel?"

My husband asked me this question last night, after I finished my first blog post.

"No one will ever read this," I answered, dodging the question, but articulating both my deepest hope and fear about this blog.

Like many people, I have long been fascinated by blogs, bloggers, the whole culture of internet storytelling. Last year, an old college friend came to give a paper at a conference at the university where I teach. He told me about his blog. I typed in the address about ten minutes after he gave it to me, and spent a full day riveted by his life as it unfolded on the screen. I will include his blog address here, as soon as I figure out how to do stuff like that.

In the last few years, I've taken to writing personal essays. I love the thrill of confession, the surprise that is a part of every line, once you get to that kernel of heretofore undiscovered, unfaced truth. I love the process, and I've been proud of some of the results. And yet, I cringe with embarassment when people let me know that they've read my writing, even when they like it. It's crazy, I know, and yet this is my consistent reaction, particularly when it comes to people I know. "I write for strangers and myself," Gertrude Stein said. I like this sentiment, and use it to guide me in my writing. And, in fact, I feel something besides embarassment only when I hear from strangers about something I've written. Then, I feel that deeply satisfying feeling of having made a connection through language across time, space, and other, more material, boundaries. I wrote an essay once that caused a stranger--a white man thirty years my senior-- to write me a letter that read, "When I read your words, it felt as if you were writing just to me." I put down that letter and thought, Now, I can die. I don't plan to die anytime soon, but maybe you can understand what I mean.

But to write about your own life is necessarily to write about the lives of others, as well. Where does my story end and the stories of others begin? To me, writing memoir is exciting precisely because it provides a portal onto these questions, which I find endlessly interesting. I write what I write because I am ambivalent about privacy. One on hand, I am intensely private. On the other, I never feel like my experiences are real unless I articulate them somehow, turn them into some kind of narrative. Writing is the way I make sense of the things I see, hear, and feel. So far, I have been relatively lucky in that the people who turn up in my essays have been tolerant, even empathetic, about this ambivalence. But, sooner or later, there will be people who will feel no such muddiness around their own sense of privacy. What happens then?

I have a friend who wrote a memoir about his family. He took pains to portray them warmly, generously, and everyone in the story seemed happy that he was writing about them. When the book came out, however, it was a different story. He described a family gathering where relatives literally turned their backs when he entered the room. The fact that he had had no prior warning that he might be greeted with such coldness made his experience seem all the worse. But when I asked him if, in the end, the book was worth it, he didn't miss a beat. "Absolutely," he said.

I didn't start this blog out of meanness. I didn't start this blog to expose other people. But my personal story leans over into other personal stories, including those of my daughters. When they get older, they will surely feel that I made public some of the stories they would rather have remained private. What happens then?

Yet these questions aren't enough to stop me. I feel, in the end, that I must continue, if only because I believe that it is only through the writing itself that questions like these can be answered.

Mother on Earth

Two nights ago, my husband and I went out to dinner with two couples. Before the dinner, one of the couples came over to our house to meet our daughters for the first time. Our daughters are twins. They are also adopted, born in Ethiopia.

At dinner, my mind was on the scene back at home. Sarah, the babysitter, had stayed with the kids once before. But it wasn't like the girls were with their regular babysitter, Anisa, a former student of ours who had miraculously re-emerged in our lives weeks before we came back from Ethiopia with the girls. Anisa, who had appeared in a Starbucks after four years of absence, had become like a sister to me over the past seven months. I had no family in spitting distance, so it was to Anisa that I turned to share daily details of the girls' lives. Anisa knew what they liked at bedtime. Would Sarah remember what we told her? Would they be scared to close their eyes with a near stranger hovering over them? My girls are resilient, I told myself. Look at what they've been through already in their short lives? They are eighteen months old.

"What I really want is for you and John to tell your adoption story again, from start to finish," said M. somewhat abruptly, soon after our meals were placed in front of us. Maybe he was bored. Or maybe he was nervous because he and I were barely on speaking terms. In fact, this was our first social outing in over a year. We had graduated to civil exchanges when exchanges were necessary. These were painful compared to the intimate friendship we had enjoyed for over four years. Our bond was strong--or fragile, depending on how you looked at it. Anyway, that's another story for another time, as another former friend used to say.

"Do you want to change seats?" My friend offered. He was serious. There would be no getting out of this without some serious social awkwardness. "Okay," I said. And I got up and moved. In spite of the fact that this--offering up this story--was one of the few things I had sworn to my friend Miranda I would not do tonight. But here I was, prepraing to spill my guts, even rearranging myself so that everyone could get a better view.

John and I told the whole story, dutifully, eagerly, passionately, timidly. I love to tell this story. I hate to tell this story. I will tell it, reader, to you, too. If you're interested.

The story, the whole story, involves a couple's anguish over not being able to conceive, and then their feeling liberation about deciding to adopt over other choices. It involves heroes--us, our American liaison, our Ethiopian liaison, the girls' biological family--and villains--us, our American liaison, our Ethiopian liaison, the girls' biological family. It includes tales of naivete and bravery, selfishness and insanity, love and despair. It features months of the runaround in America and weeks of red tape in Africa. Our story has an ending (our girls sleep comfortably in their cribs as I write) and it is incomplete (they have siblings, a grandmother, and an extended family in Ethiopia that they are too young to know about). It is a typical adoption story. Maybe. Maybe not.

Our story is also a story about a family. "The girls are babies," my husband said today. "They have anuses. We are concerned about what comes out of them. Doesn't she realize that?" He was talking about a older woman who called today, an Ethiopia "expert." She wanted to know how the babies were adjusting. She wanted to know what we were planning to do in order to re-connect them with their culture. She calls sometimes. She means well. I resent the hell out of her. Sometimes. Particularly on a day like today, when we are more concerned about the girls' bowel movements than their culture.

My daughters are Ethiopian. I am American. No amount of culture classes, cooking classes, language classes, or trips abroad, will change this. It is a gap between us, one of many. I love the gaps, believe in them. The gaps between us make us human.

To my friends, new and estranged, around the dinner table, however, I didn't talk about the gaps. I talked about unity, community, Africa, love, and family. I meant every word, and yet, I'm never sure what the words, themselves, really mean.

"I am your mother on earth," I whisper to my girls in the dark. Until very recently, my husband put one girl to sleep while I took the other one. Somehow, his baby always went to sleep faster than mine. I can admit here that I kept my baby up deliberately. I loved the private night hours; I loved all the small things that would happen. Often, my baby would stare up at the ceiling and chatter. I believed--still believe--she was conversing with the spirit of her biological mother, who died in childbirth. Whatever baby I had would point her finger at the ceiling, and then, eventually, look over at me. I would feel a hand on my cheek in the dark. "I am your mother on earth," I said, every time. "That's who I am."

Mother on earth. I thought it to myself as I finished my part of our story at the restaurant. We got the questions and the looks. The patronizing reassurances that, I imagine, all adoptive parents receive from even well-meaning friends. Mother on earth. It makes sense to me. It is the truest, clearest identity I have discovered on all my years on this earth.

Over the course of this blog, I hope it will make sense to you, too.