Worth Remembering

The moment I met and, five days later, brought home adorable 11-month-old Afro-Latina-Hawaiian identical-twin baby girls, I felt myself fill with love for them. It could simply have been a sense of altruism, distress-motivation (I read that’s a thing), or attraction. But they were beautiful and little and bewildered. . .and reaching. However, had anyone shown me a video of how our lives would play out over the next 20 years, I would have brushed their dark curls off their brow, kissed their little cheeks, handed them back to the foster mother, and run. Really fast.

I can project that because I had not yet claimed them. I was in a “They’re adorable; whose are they?” moment. After all, these babies, during their first 11 months of life, had had a Mexican birth mother, their five Anglo, Mexican, and African-American foster mothers, and, now perhaps a Scottish-Irish adoptive mother. Whose were they?

And how does a little one decide who she is and who is safe in all of that?

That evening, in the Marriott Courtyard Hotel room, I spoon-fed mashed bananas into baby-bird mouths as they sat in hotel highchairs. I rocked back and forth on the edge of the bed to simulate a glider chair as I fed each a bottle of warm milk, knowing they’d never had it warmed or held for them before, and trusting the eye contact might come later. And in that moment, I began to feel myself more than a babysitter and something akin to their mother.

This was when I made the decision to bring home these baby girls and raise them in my heart and my home and my family and my community. And hoping that teaching them someone would show up in the night to respond to reaching little arms and gather them into mine so I could rock away the nightmare, would be enough. I wanted them to know they finally had a mother. And it, finally, was me.

But it wasn’t. Not really. Or, perhaps it was, but not for keeps.

Sometimes I wonder, had they remained in the care of their homeless Mexican birth mother, if they would have felt more at home, not in the mean streets of the night, but in her arms. Except, she didn’t extend them.

What I do know is that, until these babies became old enough to understand distinctions, cultural misappropriation, color, and imagine what it would have been like “if only Beyonce, Rhianna, Zoe, or Rosario” had been their mother, I was their mom. The one they reached for.

I remember, about a month into singing my babies to sleep with the lullabies our mom had sung to us, slipping into the nursery to soothe one, who was crying in the night. Yet what I also heard was that her twin sister lay in her adjacent crib, melodically cooing, singing to soothe her sister.

I remember receiving a message one morning that a friend, who had come down our patio stairs to drop off something, had witnessed a scene through the living room window, where I was sitting on the couch, a little girl tucked under each arm, reading to them. She said she had tarried a moment, enchanted by the scene, and had decided not to interrupt it. Sometimes, when other moments went off the rails, I would return to that scene, to remind myself that this, too, had been our truth.

Which has inspired me, on occasion, in the hollows of a household no longer interrupted by moments tender or tormenting or traumatizing, to remember the sweetness, to teach myself that this, too, was true of our lives together.

I remember, every morning, as we drove to Carmel Valley Athletic Club, where I would swim, and the girls would play in the Kids’ Club, that I would sing along to “Dancing Queen” on the car stereo. When the song reached “Feel the beat of the tambourine,” I would flick my hand in the air as if playing the tambourine, and so would the girls from their car seats, having no idea what a tambourine was or why we were flicking our fingers, but delighting in it.

I also pointed to the traffic lights and said, “Red means Stop!” while pushing my palm forward like a traffic cop. And “Yellow means slow down,” while letting my palm fall like a leaf. And “Green means GO!” while rocketing my hand forward. And so would they. Sometimes I forgot about the game and felt myself so startled when they yelled, “Stop!” or “GO!”

I remember how we took a field trip to a stop sign near our home. As we got out of the car and studied the octagon sign, I made a little song about S-T-O-P. Later, the girls would sing it whenever they saw a stop sign.

I remember braiding or candlestick curling long, dark, silky hair, and adding a hint of pink to pouty lips before a ballet recital, school dance, Christmas dinner. I remember hands squeezing mine during booster shots and ear piercing. I remember setting tables for themed birthday parties, assembling Halloween costumes, and making poodle skirts for fifties dance parties.

I remember wandering the aisles of CVS with the girls, and one of them repeating, “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” When we ran into my dad’s 90-year-old cousin who asked them their names, she said, “My name’s Chuck Wood.” I’m not sure whether we were laughing at her humor or the woman’s bewilderment. I know I was leaning into delight.

And I recall, when asked during a writing class, to write a brief story based on something we carry in our purse or briefcase or backpack. I thought for a moment and then remembered.

I had brought 12-year-old Hayley (name change) back from the ER at Community Hospital, where we had left her twin sister, Hilary, who had tried to overdose. Once home, Hayley went into their shared room and slammed the door. After a beat, I opened the door to check on her.

Hayley had pulled her favorite cotton floral dress from the closet and had cut a big hole in the skirt. I stared at it, where she had abandoned it on the floor, an all-too-familiar sadness surfacing, and wondered. Then I looked at Hayley where she sat on her bed with those scissors. She actually had cut two hearts out of her dress, had retrieved cotton balls from her bathroom, and was whipstitching them inside. Then she looked up, extended her little heart pillow to me with both hands and said, “Here, Mommy. You can hold onto this until my sister comes home.”

The importance of that story is that it was such a beautiful counterbalance to a girl who had recently knifed her bed to death and threatened that I was next. The adoption and raising of my twin daughters has been a labyrinth of highs and lows—as most parents can claim, I imagine. What I’m appreciating today is my focus on the sweet, the tender, the funny, and the meaningful moments, which confirm for me, in and through it all, if I had this to do over, I would.