All families are word problems. This seems especially true when you drift into the exurbs of kinship: those cousins once or twice "removed," or "step" grandparents. There's an odd arithmetic to it: siblings come in halves or steps, some parents are single, while couples come intact (addition) or as exes (subtraction). And there's the difficulty of blood, so often presumed to denote "fullness," and adoption, considered a different kind of addition, post-subtraction. There's the birth father who is more a telephone buddy than a dad, and the dad who married into parenthood. The math is emotional, but we often repress our emotions into number and portion. The "closed" adoption is not a simple equation. Nor is the "open" one. Family is one math problem to which there's no solution, only remainder and--too often--division.
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Math was always painful for me, but not for my father, who enjoyed helping me with my homework. He loved word problems. When I took the GREs the first time--before I decided to skip the math section altogether--I spent at least half the time allotted for the math section sussing out a word problem about baseball. Because I love baseball, I enjoyed this problem, was patient with it, so patient that I had hardly any time left for the rest of the test. My scores came out exceedingly low, but I was proud to tell my father the story of how I figured out that word problem. I no longer remember the content of that problem, only the joy I felt at solving it.
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Here's one of the word problems I live with: what do I call the mother of my daughter's sister?
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One reason I love this problem is that there is no answer to it in our language, or any I can imagine. She is not sister, not in-law. While she's "aunty" to my daughter, she isn't to me. She's fallen between the dictionary's alphabetical cracks. When I state the problem to friends, their brows furrow and they come up with possible nomenclature, but these are words already used for other relations. For now, she's the "other mother" in a family whose bonds are genetic and adopted. My friend, Dennis Etzel, Jr., whose mother "came out" in the 1980s in Topeka, Kansas, has "another mother," but she's different again.
When we arrived in Kathmandu in December, 2004 to adopt our daughter, we were told by the local facilitator that she had a sister. He informed us one hour before we drove to the orphanage to meet our daughter, who'd appeared to us in a tiny photograph, dressed in red, stern, looking away from the camera. Her sister, we learned, was one year older, and was being adopted by a woman in Miami. I remember the pit-fall of that moment of recognition. It would not have mattered to know earlier, because Nepalese law forbids the adoption of two children of the same gender, but that hardly made the news easier to absorb. The US embassy asked after our daughter's sister, too; when they saw the report of two girls found together, two girls whose photos resembled one another, they'd put two and two together. The report was as detailed as it was almost certainly fictional. Found by a road. Taken to the orphanage by the authorities. The facilitator seemed to know more, and what he seemed to know was disturbing, but he never filled out the impressionist picture.
On our second trip to the orphanage, which was bursting with children (Nepal was in the midst of a civil war), we met our daughter's sister, briefly, in a stone courtyard. She had big dark eyes and wore a dirty frock. Her name then was Nirmala. It had been Rita, and would be L. Radhika's name had been Sarmilla, L would later tell her mother. We gave her something, I don't remember what, and I tried to let her know that we would see her again, that Radhika would be ok with us. Did I say all that? Who knows. I only remember the intensity of the effort to express something, anything, in the face of this little girl's loss of her sister. I'm the only one of us who remembers this moment. Was I the only one there? Where was my husband? What memory withholds bears affect, though sometimes we can't locate its particular name.
And so these two little girls (then 3 and 4) from Nepal ended up in Hawai`i and in Miami (and from there to Walla Walla, then Seattle, and now Chicago). We heard from L's mother V that her daughter was very worried about Radhika; as her older sister, she felt responsible for the fate of her younger sister. So my husband made a video: here is Radhika on her tricycle; here is Radhika kicking a ball; here is Radhika's room; here is Radhika's brother; here are her parents. We sent the video off. And then they came to Hawai`i' another year we met in San Francisco, then in Walla Walla, and for the last two summers, south of Chicago. The intensity of coming together, sandwiched in time by months of infrequent contact.
If "does she know you?" is THE question to someone whose parent has Alzheimer's, then "do they look alike?" is the first question everyone asks me about the sisters. Definition 12 of the word "family" in the OED reads: "A category or group of musical instruments which share the same basic method of sound production." When my daughter asks her dad if the purple flower is a daisy and he responds that it's "in the same family," we're talking about similarities. While I realize the inevitability of this question--the nicest thing anyone says about family on facebook is "you so look alike"--I don't find it very interesting. Our culture has institutionalized family into likeness, both where it exists and where it does not. Yes, there's the family nose and even a family sense of humor. But only the first is genetic, especially when my son's jokes are so like my husband's, and my daughter's sarcasm reminds me of my mother's acerbic wit. Then again, the first definition of family in the OED has to do with servants. Go figure.
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I look like my father and his sister, Gretchen; increasingly, I see my mother's features in my face, as well, and hear her laughter when I talk to our kittens. Sometimes I even make what my grad school boyfriend called her "mother noises." Her sense of humor became mine, though perhaps it softened a a bit in me. I acquired her anxiety, though hers was constant, mine explosive and intermittent. She became depressed, but denied it. I couldn't deny it, because mine was worse. But growing up I felt alienated from my parents, not like them in any way. My mother was too insistently practical and rigid, my dad too quiet and detached. Where the puzzle comes together in my middle age, it was in my younger years a jigsaw scattered over a large floor, with little hope of solution, fitting together.
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And so there are two girls, one now 13 and the other 14. They are both short and in constant motion. Radhika plays soccer, her sister volleyball (despite her size). They are both spirited. They play like puppies. They play with their brother and without him. When I came into the room the other day, he was leaning over to pull out a thorn from L's foot. Gently, slowly. He also pokes his sisters, teases them. She was leaning over to make his hair into a crazy pig tail the day before in the park. L rebels against school; Radhika adores it. L warmly offers hugs to everyone; Radhika does not. Radhika can be sardonic; L is softer, more distractable. Neither one of them likes to read. They are both fierce, in their own ways. "Description" is also a word problem: how to get it all right. Bryant says he hates that the girls are separated; I say it's good they're in touch. Those are the scales we work with. Imbalanced, but. (In Hawai`i we end sentences with but.)
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After a couple of early visits from my father's sister's family to spend time with us in St. Louis and in Alexandria, Virginia, we saw them at only the longest of intervals. My mother distrusted family, spoke critically of my father's sister (a very kind woman), didn't get along with her parents or her brother (there was also a short early visit from his family, which included an adopted daughter). Later, my aunt told me that my father had come to see her and said, "I'm ok, I'm ok," then disappeared for some time. It was my mother's doing, of that she was certain. My aunt forgave my mother, but she didn't refrain from telling my mother's daughter the story.
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To the extent that international adoption is an oft-maligned institution, it's due to trauma. That trauma exists before the adoption, when children lose their parents and extended families, and are placed in other institutions--the third world orphanages our kids spent months in--and then moved across the world into new cultures and languages and families. But the critiques often devolve on those who adopt these children, and are made easier by the frequent corruption involved in such adoptions. Our children don't suffer the kind of racial trauma than many international adoptees do: we live in Hawai'i, which is predominantly Asian, and L lives in Chicago with a family of Indian Guyanese origin. But clearly, it's not easy to get your feet underneath you when so many questions hover over your history, questions that are likely never to be answered. Denise Riley, with whom I once shared lunch in London, said she found her birth mother not because she wanted to find her genetic origins, but to learn more about her history. The irony was that her mother then expected her to care for her, based on that problematic origin. Word problems are also a hermeneutics. Genetics is as much a mode of interpretation as it is our make-up. In other words, it's as made up as it is determinative. But made up things--fictions, interpretations, desires--do often determine us.
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I moved five thousand miles away from my parents. I'd gotten to know my dad better, and discovered in him the kindness that my mother had always spoken of. "He's a saint," my mother would say, but like many saints, he had seemed far away. He came closer in his later years. Before he died, he made sure to close his accounts lovingly. My mother grew ever more difficult, tried to "disown" me at least once or twice, then succumbed to the long forgetting of Alzheimer's. That disease oddly brought us closer. If "closure" is indeed to be desired in our emotional lives, then she and I closed our accounts without too many losses. The difficult story had a happy ending. Or that chapter of it. Time feels different now, more enclosed. Family deaths do that; they alter time. Our maps shrink. We stop getting lost and turn to a GPS. It talks to us in a funny accent, but gets us where we're going. We hope.
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We've taken this word problem and created of it a family. This "other mother" and I have become friends and--during our brief weeks together--co-parents of a kind. While we work at this, the kids slip into family mode seemingly without effort. The first time L and V came to visit and I took them and our kids to the airport, we were heading back over H3 when Radhika started crying. She stopped, and then Sangha started weeping. They only stopped sobbing woefully when I got them home. There's less weeping now, but I have little access to the questions the girls ask each other, or those Sangha asks about his birth family in Cambodia. On occasion, over dinner as we did recently in Chicago, we start talking about what we remember and what has been forgotten. That's a genetic thread of its own. History, and its ruptures, take the place of the supposed truth of origins. The adoption story is a different genre from the biological (or "natural") one. It's hard to tell because one's audience so often doesn't get it. The visa problems, the travel plans, the delays, the coming into a large room in an old palace and seeing your daughter holding the hand of her didi and then taking her into your arms, a smelly child in dirty blue jacket, her sandals broken in winter. How she became sister to her sister, who also became sister to a brother.
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We tell such stories to make them inevitable. And ordinary, as love is.
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