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T A B L E_T A L K Octuplets: Is it irresponsible to have eight kids at once? Discuss the new fertility treatments in the Mothers area of Table Talk ___________________ Find books about adoption at barnesandnoble.com
R E C E N T L Y The baby girl I gave away Millennial family values The last waltz Forever young Star quality BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | M Y__M O T H E R ' S_daughter
_______[ READ PART ONE ]
BY KRISTINA ZARLENGO Editor's Note: This is the second in a trilogy of stories by three women whose lives were changed forever by adoption -- a teenager who gave birth alone in a home for unwed mothers in 1967, the baby girl who grew up to wonder who her birth parents were and the woman who became a mother when that baby girl was placed in her arms. Point: We are born with our future selves intact -- I am but the extrapolation of my genetic helix. Like an unconscious at the wheel of a conscious mind, my genes drive what I appear to freely choose. My inklings are no more a product of my will or my experience than light is a product of the moon. When I went to meet my biological father, a man I wished to meet in order to gain a sense of my medical history and dispose of a sense ofcuriosity about the man who sired me, I was dropped off at our train station rendezvous by my groovy boyfriend. A European, my boyfriend had a goatee and great, crazy hair that stood in tufts. I think he waswearing a purple shirt under striped overalls. I myself was dressed out of character, wearing something I don't remember because the whole point of my attire that day was that it not offend my father or betray me by giving away the details of who I am. I wanted clothing that would allow me a reporter's distance. I wanted objectivity and freedom from the consequences of this father man. My idea of neutral clothing is black everything, head to toe, but I already knew this father was a rancher and that to a Colorado rancher black is funereal. I wore something else. When my boyfriend dropped me off, he shook my hand as if we had just closed a business deal. No kiss. A firm handshake. It came out later that my prescient boyfriend had pretended we were friends at that moment because he wanted to prevent my father's condemnation of me by virtue of my association with a man who wears purple and fails to comb his hair. But I guess my new father was disenchanted with him all the same. After an hour and a half of iced tea, coffee, conversation and staring during slow afternoon hours at a Denver hotel bar, Harry -- the man my birth mother, Ceil, had identified as my biological father -- got simultaneously personal and paternal with me. "Stay away from the cupcakes," he said, and he said it strongly, with emphatic eye contact and nods. Now, "cupcakes" still means to me little frosted things in paper holders. To the extent that I can identify cupcakes with deviants, which is what Harry meant by the term, I am sort of a champion of cupcakes. But Harry was quite poignant in his effort for family-type interaction, and so I tried responding with a laugh and a "Yeah, sure, but I don't think I can identify a cupcake" comment meant to deflect his line of commentary. He switched confections, told me not to hang out with fruitcakes. Then he switched analogies. He explained to me that some people are weeds. They are parasitic, they eke important resources away from where they belong, they suck dry and contribute nothing. Cupcakes are weeds, he was saying, and he went onto say that he himself had been a weed, in particular during his college days, before he settled down, married, held his ranch together and raised two children. When he had begotten me, Harry explained, he had been a weed. I grew up amid the vast rows of suburban homes on the plains of south Denver, so I know about weeds from a lawn perspective. Weekends where I grew up were spotted with moms and dads on their hands and knees in their gardens and on their lawns, pulling weeds, especially dandelions. When I was 8, I had my first dandelion salad when my adoptive father picked a bowl's worth of tender, preflower dandelions and dressed them with olive oil and lots of vinegar. That dandelion salad was memorable, delicious, and it started me wondering about why we suburbanites preferred sod to dandelions, why the green symmetrical crewcuts of lawn were my neighbors' pride when we all could have had lawns of dandelions that would provide delicious salads, then bloom into those charming yellow flowers, then puff into white seed balloons, all without needing constant attending or mowing or even sowing. N E X T_ P A G E: I'm a weed - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. - - - - - - - - - - - - |
