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I would love for our child to keep his or her Ethiopian name. I also daydream about other names, of course, but even I know they are mostly impossible for a little Ethiopian boy or girl in Indiana. Or I just can’t imagine my wife going along with them.
I remember when my friend Liz was pregnant. She asked for name ideas. When I only had a couple to offer, she laughed and said, “I know you’re holding back on all the good ones. You’re saving them for yourself, aren’t you?”
Here are some of my favorite names that I know I’ll never be able to use.
For a boy:
Cloud
Crockett
Clayton
Gael
Lancelot
Skyler
Valentine
and, of course, Joe or Zhou.
For a girl:
Morgan LeFey
Do you have any good names you are not using?
Tonight, Gretchen and Brandon are bringing Jayden home from Guatemala.
S. and I met Gretchen and Brandon—what, a year ago? A while back. I’ve eaten half a pizza and two steaks with them and they, in fact, were with us when S. and I saw Juno. As a couple, they are quietly glamorous –Gretchen with a huge smile and lovely self-mocking way (as you can see in her blog) and Brandon handling everything with a quiet masculine grace. S. and I plan to hit the gym (Gretchen emailed Shasta to encourage her to start working out because apparently Jayden already weighs twenty pounds) and then get some Mexican food before coming home to make hot chocolate and stand in the back yard beneath the ruddy orange lunar eclipse. Then, midnight and the plane from Guatemala. Up at four-forty tomorrow morning so I can go to work in the prison. Teach my night class tomorrow night (building up our nest egg) so I can possibly take some unpaid leave when we bring the baby home.
I expect that when they get off the plane tonight, Gretchen and Brandon will be even more tired than I am. But they will be twice as happy.
One other thing –I said so elsewhere on this blog, but I doubt many people saw it—after my long Genghis Khan meditation the other day, I wrote a short letter to Jack Weatherford, the author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. He wrote back and wished us well with the adoption. So it is all a circle, isn’t it?
Sometimes we feel so separate, and other times, everything is connected.
Three hours later . . . S. did not get home from work until after seven; I still had more preparation to do for my classes, so, of course, we did NOT go to the gym. We did eat some enchiladas verdes and on the way home saw a great, half-eaten, mud-colored moon. We had wanted to meet up with my parents tonight too, but they wisely said we were taking on too much in the middle of the week and they may have been right. We suffer from life-gluttony, sometimes.
It’s not wrong to love life.
Q: Are you excited?
A: I’m so excited that sometimes I feel like a human gumball machine –a goofy little pole with my big head all fragile and see-through. No secrets these days. And all my thoughts are made of candy, not really good for anything except giving to a little boy or girl. A little boy or girl being born in Ethiopia right now.
Q: No, I mean, aren’t you happy?
A: I am happy.
Q: I always talk about Genghis Khan and pan-Asian genocide when I’m happy. What is wrong with you, man?
A: Some kinds of happiness are hard to put into words.
Q: Are you excited about going to Ethiopia?
A: I can’t even begin to say how much I’m looking forward to it. To Africa. The wide, magical sky. A feeling like you’re suspended in mystery. To the familiar and unfamiliar. And the reason we’re going. The happy and frightened walk to the orphanage door. I am looking forward to holding this baby. My son. Or daughter. One time when I was in Central Park, I saw two little kids running as fast as they could toward the carousel. One boy hollered: “I can’t wait! I can’t wait!” I feel the same way.
Q: Are you going to keep the baby’s Ethiopian name?
A: Of course. Well, I want to. If Shasta lets me.
Q: Are you sure?
A: I want to learn how to say and write our child’s name in Amharic. I imagine us sitting in the sun room, where we have the English alphabet stenciled in red letters above the windows, but this child and I will sit there with our journals and my books and I will teach him or her how to write a secret alphabet, in the language of his ancestors, the name he or she has inside. This will be a name not for babysitters or for parent-teacher conferences, but the name between loved ones, the one that will open the universe like a giant door.
Today I was listening to an NPR story about some Oxford scientists who were studying genealogy. Apparently the Y-chromosome passed on in males is completely identical from father to son except in the case of mutation. Because of this, in Europe, scientists had been able to identify a large number of “family groups” that reflected the diversity of cultures and populations there. The scientists took the study to Asia and obtained thousands of blood samples from all across the continent, from Tajikistan through China, etc. only to discover that millions of people were descended from the same man, who had lived about a thousand years ago. The best explanation that 25 scientists could come up with was that it was Genghis Khan. The Mongol empire covered the same area, the existing population was smaller in his day, Genghis Khan was responsible for the mass murder of competing men, and he famously lay with the women of the conquered lands.
I heard this story and a part of me wondered if I, as a Yium and part-Chinese, might be in some way descended from Genghis Khan. I had read a terrific book called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, and, goofily, was hoping that I might have some windswept conquering magic inside me. Then a part of me was suddenly sad because whether I was or wasn’t a child of the Great Khan, I wouldn’t be able to pass this on to my son (if we do, indeed, have a son). I won’t be a part of this Y-chromosome delivery service; the thousand year chain-letter stops with me. But then I thought: who cares? There’s nothing precious about my %$#% biology. Everything good about me is something I learned in a book. Or from someone I loved. Everything good about me is something I can give my son or daughter.
And then I remembered and went home and got out out my Jack Weatherford book and found the passage:
he took the unprecedented step of occupying the Jurkin lands and redistributing the remaining members of their group among the households of his own clan. Though some among both clans apparently interpreted this as the Jurkin being taken as slaves, as would have been more in keeping with steppe custom, according to the Secret History, Temujin took them into his tribe not as slaves but as members of the tribe in good standing. He symbolized this by adopting an orphan boy from the Jurkin camp and presenting them to Hoelun to raise in her ger not as a slave boy but as her son. By having his mother adopt the Jurkin boy, as he had her previously adopt one each from the defeated Merkid, Tayichiud, and Tatars, Temujin was accepting the boys as his younger brothers. Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts in uniting his followers through this usage of fictive kinship. In the same way he took these children into his own family, he accepted the conquered people into his tribe with the possibility that they would share fairly in the future conquests and prosperity of his army.
pp.44-45, the paperback edition
I realized another reason I like Juno.
You watch the movie and you think, no matter how much older or how different you are, you feel like you and Juno should have been friends. You just like her that much. And that’s really powerful for me, I think, because adoptive parents face a lot of mixed feelings about the birth mother . . . We feel gratitude and a kind of helpless tenderness. But we can feel jealous too. And we’re afraid this woman will change her mind. Maybe we’re afraid that someday this person will reappear and confuse or threaten our family. Or we’re afraid this child we love will love this woman more than us. Maybe we’re afraid, too, that this woman herself will hate us. Maybe we feel guilt or that we are bad people because our happiness is based, inevitably, on a tragedy. Sometimes, I feel rotten about things I don’t even believe –like that “Americans think they can buy anything, including other people’s children.” I get sad that people think like this, that people will try to attach ugliness to the most beautiful moments of my life.
How great it is, to meet the character of Juno and feel like we’d be friends. I know she’s imaginary, but to me she represents a woman who will be a great mom someday but needs someone else to love this baby right now. She’s not ready. She’s not able. There are no hard feelings. Some things hurt, it’s true, but nobody loses. There’s mutual gratitude– not mutual resentment—at the heart of this mother handing her baby over. I love seeing trust. And hope.
Some people think life is all about winners and losers, that there is a kind of emotional capitalism at work, only so much happiness to go around, and that we’re all separate.
But life is bigger than that. It’s not about taking, but about living. We share, don’t we? We share everything. Good and bad. That’s what I believe. I’m an emotional Communist.
It was good to see this in a movie, for once.
And that’s all I have to say about Juno.
There have only been a couple times in my life when I was watching a movie and felt: there, that scene, I know exactly how that feels. That’s me. But this morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts (www.creativescreenwriting.com) and was reminded of how much I liked the movie Juno.
There are a lot great moments, but the one that really gets me is when Jennifer Garner’s character is waiting for the teenage mother (Juno) to arrive. She’s straightening pictures and the couch, etc. I think maybe a normal reaction is, “Oh, she’s a neat freak. She’s not flexible. She’s a perfectionist. She’s unimaginative, uncreative, the opposite of Juno . . .”
But anyone who has gone through a home visit –seeking approval for an adoption– knows how much you want it and how helpless you are. How much you want to be let into the parent club, and how humbled you are. You try so hard to make everything perfect. You are completely powerless. You are going to be judged. You will do anything. You invite a stranger into your home. You really want this person to like you. You want so much, and the only thing you can do is make some coffee and smile.
During this scene, I had to look away. I looked at the bright green EXIT sign in the corner of the theater. Because I felt myself remembering Shasta the day our social worker came to see the house and it was all just quietly heartbreaking in a good way.
I won’t put my political thoughts on this blog; I see that as a separate conversation. After today. I found this when I was web-surfing, tracking Super-Tuesday. I think it is just, absolutely, completely, great.
I left out so many good ones! I will make a new list at some point down the road.
Superman is still my favorite –because he was from a completely different culture, a planet, even –and, quite frankly, he was a million times closer to perfect than his adopted family was (he could fly and lift tractors, etc.)(they were simple Kansans) but you never read a story where Superman wishes he were back on Krypton. He’s happy. He grows up to be great. And Ma Kent keeps a secret scrapbook full of all Superman’s adventures, even though she can never show anybody who only knows her as “Clarks’ mom.”
Now, if only Superman wasn’t so white.
I’ve been thinking a lot about books, of course, because that’s how my brain works. Sometimes even Sunday morning with the windows and grass all dark and my wife asleep, I’m mentally in Broadripple, walking through Big Hat Books.
S. is going to decorate our child’s room, of course. It makes her happy to think about cribs and curtains,wallpaper, etc. (I wish I’d saved the New Yorker cartoon of the man and woman walking in the street, her glaring at him: “Sometimes I feel like you don’t want to talk about baby strollers.”) In any case, after years of it being impossible, it’s exciting to think we might actually need a room. Pregnant women have a whole different ritual of preparing for a baby, I suspect, but adopting parents build a nest.
Anyway, I’m thinking about books that will eventually go into this room. When other kids say, “Why don’t your parents look like you?” I want our child’s forehead to wrinkle up because it’s so obvious, really, that children (or at least great characters) often have no idea who their birth parents are and are raised by kindly and loving people (or animals) who love them. 
So here are some books I like:
Babar by Brunhoff (Babar and the little old lady)Curious George by H.A. Rey (George and the man in the yellow hat)The Jungle Book by Ruyard Kipling (wild Mowgli, raised by wolves)Tarzan of the Apes by E.R. BurroughsSuperman (who never knew his birth parents at all, but was raised by a Kansas farm couple)Spider-man (Raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben)
What am I forgetting?
My wife and I are adopting from Ethiopia, and she’s started a blog about it. She asked me to write a few pieces in it and of course I wanted to, because the whole adventure is very exciting and I want to do all of it together (except for the paperwork, where she outdoes me on every level). On the other hand, as soon as I saw the blog, it was happily her voice and I didn’t want to interrupt it. I thought: just make your own, and you can loop them together in the months to come.
So here it is. My male perspective of our adventure. I would say, a father’s point of view, but it still seems hard to believe that I am finally going to be a father.
My wife is thirty-two; I’m forty. Last February (2007), after we entered our adoption dossier with the Chinese government, our agency informed us that China had not finished processing dossiers received in November of 2005, so on a day-for-day basis, we were still 14+ months from hearing from them. Twelve months later, the Chinese government is only mid-way through December 2005. That’s fine, of course. Apparently, there aren’t as many abandoned Chinese girls as we were led to believe and that’s a good thing. I would have liked to adopt from China because I am half-Chinese and my lovely Uncle Thom, before he died, asked my cousins and myself to remember China and who we are.
My wife, who is from New Hampshire, is the kind of white that only long winters and cold mountains can create. She’s a kind of Tolstoy character –big-hearted and numinous– married to me, an aging half-Chinese Huckleberry Finn. When we met, I’d spent most of my adult life in a kind of half-planned wandering around the world, trying to articulate this unspoken crush I had on everything. When we first started talking about our family, my wife asked me if I could imagine adopting from Africa, and I said, yes, of course. She started thinking. My wife was reading Melissa Fay Greene’s terrific book, There Is No Me Without You. I was reading Dave Eggers’ What Is the What and we were both somewhat paralyzed by need and big feelings as we finished our books. When our Chinese adoption began to look more and more imaginary, we looked again at Africa and I read Greene’s book. One of my wife’s childhood friends had adopted from Ethiopia and we looked at their photos and it slowly came together: maybe life is like this. Maybe this is what our life is.
And so it begins.
We were officially put on the waiting list February 1st.
My wife’s blog is found here.
