Bread and Bread

You are not from my body, but I gave you my body because it was all I had  those lean first months (and by lean I mean I gorged myself late at night when the Bad News Factory had shut down for the day, I hoped; I breathed in quesadillas and breathed out fear). My mind was stuck in a sandy ditch, somewhere between 2011 and our last failed adoption that spring: We skipped stones in a manmade lake and left Reno without a baby. When you arrived, somehow too early and too late,  I was a sad spinning tire, a clock missing half my cogs, but still right twice a day. You: a 32-weeker, a four-pounder, quick to shake off your rocky entry into this world: You arrived breech but righted yourself, right as my world turned upside down, again. I fussed and projected, wondered if I wanted any of this. But your name means baby kangaroo and I pocketed you, like something coveted and stolen. My hold was not sweet, but it was steadfast. When you slept on my chest, our hearts were inches apart. Yo...

You never told me I was anything but beautiful so this feeling—that maybe I'm made of oil instead of breast milk— is a betrayal of what you gave me. I've been obsessing over the contents of the diaper of the second grandchild you never met: the shit, the lack of it, the holding back of something ugly. Was that slick brown thread mucous, a red flag according to the nice lady on the nurse line? Was it me, a sort of gollum, a mirror in a diaper, a monster, but tiny and powerless? Photo by Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash The second child in our family— my first family, I mean, of origin, as they say— is the only person who holds a mirror up to your ghost, the only person who could say "Oh honey" the way you did. Her curly hair, her kindness. But I hated her at first.  Another firstborn might declare the baby to be the monster, the interloper, but I stepped into that role myself just like I stepped into the baby sweater  I'd long outgrown. The yellow acrylic yarn was itchy,...

Eventually there's only a riddle, the old one about the ax— its head and handle replaced a thousand times. Are you steel, once sharp, now dull? Or are you the thing it splits? Are you the swinging or the replacing? What is the trigger and what is the tragedy? What is the doctor visit and what is the disease? Is the fourth baby you almost adopt an echo of the first three or of the two you never birthed, who would be ten and a half now, but who is counting? Every sad thing deserves its own museum, but every museum has the same glass case, the same new paint smell, the same paper towel vendor Did 13 people die in a mass shooting or were there 13 mass shootings last year or last weekend? Eventually your body becomes a museum of everything that happened and everything that didn't: the sturdy handle of your spine the ghosts of your ovaries the holes filled the way the ocean consumes volcanoes with flat glittering blue Eventually there are no more words or there are only words, it...

"Go big or go home" is a phrase befitting reality shows more than reality. (Prototyping innovations on a small scale and growing gradually usually works better.) But when it comes to adoption, it's fair to say that this year we went big. We signed on with as many attorneys and agencies as we could afford. We had three matches with expectant moms, none of which led to an adoption.  The last disruption, less than two weeks ago, took us to Reno for three days (more about that at some point). And then we went home. Since our disruption in the fall , we've been working toward becoming a licensed resource family in the foster care system. In addition to a hell of a lot of paper work, it's meant asking myself what it will look like to parent a child I probably won't get to keep. It's meant leaning into being Trauma-Informed, a Helpful Member Of My Community, and a bit of a Badass (resource parents: I think of you as badasses). It's meant leaning away from my ...

1. The peaches this summer were inexplicably good. The ones from Trader Joe's, I mean. Trader Joe's —known for all those plastic clamshells and sad hard oranges. But there they were, better than we deserved: ombre globes the size of tennis balls, the big soft ones that our son keeps hitting over the fence. Run-down-your-chin juicy, though I always cut them up, because why ruin something exquisite with a sticky face?  I tried to eat them all. I did. I bought them in cardboard pallets and by the bag. Accuse me of all the contemporary sins: working too much, planning and fretting, checking pandemic stats like the weather. Bending my head toward my phone until my spine is a floor lamp, an inverted J. Despairing because we might not, in fact, upgrade our wonderful lives to extra wonderful in the space of a month.  But who is here, like a motherfucking Zen master, enjoying seasonal fruit? Photo by Vlad Deep on Unsplash And now it's almost gone. Now pears are populating the shelv...

A couple of years ago, the amazing writer-moms of the IKEA Writers Collective started wishing each other "Happy Fucking Mother's Day" because it's such a strange, fraught holiday (though, really, is there any other kind?). In recent months, we've tried to inject some new strategies into our adoption attempts. So far that's meant a lot of paperwork and frustration. I'm frustrated for many reasons, including old boring feelings of maternal unworthiness, but also because one reason I hesitated about trying to adopt again was that I didn't want to dump all that longing onto the kid I was so, so happy to have. He didn't deserve it. C.C. didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve it. I don't know how to live in the present—a present that, in these sweet, tentatively sunny, vaccinated days, I am grateful for deep in my bones—while still planning for the future. Maybe there is some super balanced Zen person out there who does. But until I become her, ...

I understand a little better this year, when the air is thick with phlegm and desperation, the impulse to look up and ask for a miracle. Urgent case in California, begins the email from the adoption agency. A woman due two days before Christmas. I picture us racing up the coast guided by starlight playing the song our son danced to  last December, parents packed shoulder to shoulder in the auditorium. He'll nod along and then he'll nod off.  His eyes look more like his birthmom's  when he's sleepy. We'll talk giddily about TV shows, high on gas station coffee. None of this comes true.  Like the Christmas story, it has been tainted  by the teller. The woman chooses  different parents for her baby. Photo by Magnus Östberg on Unsplash This year our son is obsessed with his Christmas list: night vision goggles, L.O.L. dolls, a plastic waffle maker. He has discovered the power of wishing but not, yet, its limitations, which lurk at the edge of the frame. When h...

As soon as various hot takes on Myka Stauffer started creeping into my feed, my stomach twisted into a knot. I'd never heard of her before yesterday, but apparently she is a very pretty person (even when crying!) with a YouTube channel, who adopted an autistic toddler from China and announced recently that her family has placed him for adoption again. The judgment dripped off posts about how she exploited her children and what a hypocritical Christian she (possibly?) was-- ostensibly promoting adoption as a solution to abortion, then aborting her adoption mission (the latter was from Sarah Schaefer , a writer and comic I love). And yes, that would be hypocritical. And no, I am generally not a fan of people who monetize their photogenic lifestyle. But as someone who believes it's okay to abort a pregnancy, my conflicted take--which is not about Myka Stauffer at all--is that it's acceptable to abort one's parenting duties. Not great . But human, and possible. Adop...

Sometimes moms post pictures of their nine-month-olds to celebrate "nine months in, nine months out." I've never been sure whether to count Dash's gestation in our lives as two weeks or four and a half years, but here he is, four and a half years out, about to start elementary school (technically "extended transitional kindergarten," but it's part of LAUSD and there is a principal and we downloaded an app, so). It's late summer--finally hot after months of mild weather, strangely balmy in a way that stirs my sense of possibility. New life phase? I wonder. I'm always a sucker for new starts, even though much is not new: Dash, a veteran daycare kid, will still be away from me for the same number of hours each week. "Mommy, draw me a Southwest airplane." My sister got married two weeks ago. Dash cried through the ceremony and acted like a crazy drunk throughout the reception. Her husband is kind and clever and has the kind of dark...

All week, I've had a tightness in my chest and stomach. I tried to breathe like that chiropractor taught me in 2011, a year that was essentially a slow-motion panic attack. I thought it was about work, which has been a little bit intense. I felt frustrated with myself for letting something so banal--something that on balance is a positive in my life--get to me on such a visceral level. Then, yesterday, I had a great day at work, chatting with our spirited new intern and leading a writing prompt for our Summer Writers' Workshop. During my nightly plummet into social media, I soaked per usual in the day's headlines and outrage, and my stomach clenched again. It finally dawned on me. On Tuesday night, Dash woke up around 3 am, and I dragged him into bed with AK and me. He promptly fell back asleep while I tossed and turned and chased the blue light of my phone for hours. I kept thinking about what everyone not wearing a jacket announcing their lack of empathy is thinki...