Family Family

by Laurie Frankel

For my daughter, her birth mother, her foster mother, and every other member of an adoptive family all over the whole entire damn wide world. We are multitudes.

And before she could get her breath back from that, he put his hands back on her shoulders and said, “I have to ask you a question.” “Okay.” “But I’m embarrassed.” “Okay.” “But it’s important.” “You’re making me nervous,” she said. “I’m thinking of kissing you,” he confessed. She actually felt this sentence in her chest. With his hands on her shoulders, she wondered if he could feel the reverb. “That’s not a question,” she managed. “I’m getting there, I’m getting there. Don’t rush me.” He smiled his lopsided smile at her. “Will you be happy if I kiss you?”

“What?” You could almost hear Evelyn Esponson rubbing her hands together. “Boring. Reductive. Repetitive. AHAM is right that people don’t get over a lifetime of trauma in ten minutes, but at least the trauma part gets told. What about adoption stories that aren’t tragedies? Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?”

She was smaller than the idea of her, which was huge, the fact of her, which was also huge, the implications of her, even though they’d taken pains, painful pains, arduous, onerous, soul-flaming pains to keep those as small as possible.

Maybe it wasn’t quite the miraculous intervention she’d suggested to her mother, but for sure she owed her life—the one she had now, the tremendous life where she got cast in every show she auditioned for and landed the lead more often than not—to Rebecca and Robbie. They had taught her, simply, everything she knew about being a human in the wide world. For a while, even, she thought they’d taught her all there was to know, all that was knowable, for what else was there besides love and birth and endings that were also beginnings? It was a lot. It was everything.

But India did not look like she thought it was weird. “Regardless of how they get made, family is a force to be reckoned with.”

who you are than anyone else I know is who they are. You are so totally, thoroughly unique in the world.” “Everyone is unique in the world.” “Not like you are. In every way I can think of, you, India Allwood, are a star. I’m just lucky I’m nearby enough to catch your light.” “It’s not luck.”

He smiled a smile she remembered in her chest.

It was a dream part. She knew that. And she was great. She knew that, too. But she was so tired. Huge. Heartbroken. And right on the cusp. Which was also the edge.

The sun shone in a world-continuing-on way, and everything was glittering and hot and changing forever.

It was in the held breath between previews and opening night that India understood at last what it meant to be a parent. She had created this child, loved and nurtured it, coaxed its development, strengthened its heart, and ironed its core. Served as its center and also built her life around it. And now, now she had no choice but to send it into a cruel, unsafe world where she could neither control nor protect it.

let him live his life unencumbered and unrestrained, love him enough to let him be, grant him his every wish but one.

she had had two babies so her stomach didn’t flatten all the way anymore, like when you tried to get an air mattress back in the box it came in

Unfortunately, parenting quickly proved itself unindexcardable.

It involved saying, “Not perfect, but good enough.” It involved saying, “Not good, but good enough.” It involved saying, “Well, that sucks shit, but whatever, good enough.” Sometimes it involved saying, “That’s not good enough, but I’m going to have a glass of wine and go to bed anyway.”

Whereas Fig had trouble staying awake until bedtime. She would fall asleep during dinner. She would fall asleep in the bath, her brain too tired from flitting from worry to worry during the day to keep her eyes open by dark.

“This is what parenting is, India. Solving impossible-to-solve problems while also experiencing deep crises of faith while also being kind of annoyed while also never getting enough rest. These problems only ever go away by changing into different equally impossible problems. This is how it always is for all parents, no matter how you came by your children.”

He couldn’t call him Dad because it was confusing enough already. Plus, his dads were his dads in at least hundreds and possibly thousands of ways, whereas Davis was his dad only in one way. His dads had chosen to be his dads and had worked very hard to become his dads, whereas Davis had not chosen to become his dad and then, after that, had worked at least a little hard not to be his dad.

So India had to have a job to be a parent, but she couldn’t parent because of her job. She didn’t understand why she was the only one who saw the impossibility of this.

But Jack and Fig were trying to learn that it was okay if your family came to you not moments but years after you were born, if being a carefree little kid came after being a tortured old soul, if first you got a sad ending and then you got to start again.

But love did not preclude strife. It did not erase sorrows. It did not detangle complication. In the case of families, uncomplicated wasn’t really the goal anyway.

“But kids are also exhausting, often frustrating, sometimes infuriating. Always time- and energy- and soul-consuming, all-consuming really. That’s what’s supposed to happen, but let’s not pretend there aren’t going to be tears.”