Certain rites of passage you expect to experience—and even enjoy. Take Friday, for example. The dear husband and I walked the few blocks to Northampton High School where we met with the gregarious guidance counselor to go over choices for our eldest son’s freshman year of high school. You can insert some exclamation here of how cute or how did that happen or you remember the same. This wasn’t the big day, the one when he sets off with binder and lunch in tow to walk through those doors himself. This was the prelude to something bigger, and in that way, it wasn’t a moment, capital M, I’d envisioned, yet it was its own wowza.
Saturday, I’ll admit, I was terribly disappointed not to be in Oregon, where a young man—let’s get it out there, once a little boy I took care of, whose parents are dear friends of mine—was getting married. As this small and twinkly-eyed boy elongated into manhood—as they do—and ventured from home to a career in restaurant management and from single young man status to young man in love status—and truly all points in between—I’ve watched in awe. I took care of the little guy back when he wore pajamas with feet.
If you cared for a lot of children, as was the case for me, then you know that they do indeed grow up. And when they do, it’s this endearing mixture of remembering them as the fuzzy-eyed creatures in footed pajamas possibly refusing to go to bed (one lovely declaration never forgotten by another child-forever-in-my-heart in bedtime protestation, “I sleep with my eyes open!”). Who’d want to forget such gems? In turn, they remember things, too. Another of my formerly small friends is now married and finishing grad school and still she calls me Butten-Butten. In turn, I truly can see in my memory-mind’s eye all those legs and feet—hers, mine, and her sister’s—dancing in the wonderful empty space—empty for just this purpose, dancing—that was her family’s living room (there was some living room furniture in a small alcove-like room just off the large space). We might not think about these moments daily, but when they rise up, they are like parts of ourselves recognized again, greeted with a particular warmth.
I wish that the wedding were the only event related to a young person I retain fondness for on Saturday. Sadly, I found myself driving through the rain to a funeral home that morning where there were calling hours for another young man, one I’d logged some many hours caring for and about, one whose birth I attended. There really aren’t words for the horrific sadness that comes with losing a child so I won’t attempt them. I can say that when I found his mama, a friend I hadn’t seen in years, but a woman I’d shared a lot of time and experience with over a period of years—tender and tough ones for her, the ones during which she raised two young boys on her own—and we reached for each other, because words are almost meaningless, and embraced, I knew I was in the exact right place. Life might throw you unexpected. Life might throw you beyond sad. For those people who can’t express and can’t know the pain inside you, showing up is all we have. The less expected, the less comprehensible the tragedy, the less gracefully we know how to do this. I think I’ve come to see nothing of grace matters, exactly. Showing up does. Even if you fall short in the execution, even if you miss at successful comfort in an inconsolable situation, showing up in whatever way and signaling that you care, that’s all you got.
**
Meanwhile, at our house, we enjoyed two, somewhat last minute visits. First, Saskia’s uncle Doug and cousin Matthew, age almosttwo, came to hang out while mother/grandmother Carolyn and her friend went to look at lace fibers under a strong microscope at Smith College (and how cool is that?). Next round, a little later in the afternoon, her aunt Margery and uncle Eric swung by before going to the Iron Horse to see a band (Low Anthem). Saskia brought a whole family into our lives, itself a full and complex creation. You just can’t argue with two toddlers in a room, especially when the chatty one—that’d be Saskia—is determined to share the best of her world with the quieter one—that’d be Matthew. She brought Matthew her baby dolls and pulled him to the trampoline. She offered him raisins. At other moments, she ignored him, but when she was focused upon him, she pretty much could talk his ear off. By the way, he did not know exactly what to make of the baby dolls nor the yammering girl, but he seemed to enjoy himself. He loved the little tractor (as he called it, “truck,” and a couple of train cars, don’t you know also, “truck”).
My life plan didn’t explicitly include adoption of a newborn girl. Actually, I most certainly did not foresee having four children. What’s more I couldn’t have engineered an open adoption within the same state, necessarily, and I certainly couldn’t have imagined that we’d end up feeling not only that we’d welcomed the most delicious, delightful and chatty girl into our hearts, but that she’d bring along so many lovely, loving people.
I know that she’s more than very likely assured of having to reckon with the incalculably hard feeling of wondering why things turned out as they did, as in, why did this first mother not keep me? That’s a natural question, a facet to adoption that exemplifies its shortcomings or less-than-perfectness (easy for me to say, as the very fortunate adoptive parent). You can’t argue that adoption is imperfect even in the best of circumstances, although in the best of circumstances you can talk about all this with more ease, because you’ve made the absolute best out of the fact that life itself isn’t perfect. And for Saskia, there will never be, with her mom’s side of the family, a sense that she was not welcomed and loved.
**
Because I do not have a wise conclusion or answer to all I’ve stirred up here, I can really only end this essay with a moment. Here’s the one I’m choosing: as I drove through the rainy dark morning, the yellow-green leaves and the pink and white flowering trees festooning the grey rainy scene with an overwhelming sense of beauty and hope and all the fortitude spring carries to remind us that we carry on, that new life pushes on, I was listening to the radio, my friend Bill’s wonderful indie-music-for-kids show called Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child. A favorite song of mine, one kind of like those memories of my favorite kids, not thought about often but so visceral, Dar Williams’ Babysitter’s Here was playing. It’s a gorgeous, sad, happy, bittersweet song about a child’s adoration for the babysitter and the babysitter’s being on the precipice of leaving home, and in it all the tenderness of loving and letting go is contained. It played like an anthem at the very moment.
