Salon.com > Janis Cooke Newman

Not in my family

Thu, 18 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Three years ago, at a dinner party, Susan Scarf Merrell, the author of a book on sibling relationships, heard about a Romanian boy who was so destructive he had to be given up by his adoptive parents. Intrigued by the story, she decided to write a fictional version. The result is the recently published "A Member of the Family," a first novel about a Romanian child who hits his sister with a rock, spreads feces over himself and the cabin of his godparents' boat, tells his kindergarten class that he wants to cut off his mother's head and is finally given away by his adoptive parents.

Merrell doesn't have an adopted child. But I do. My son, Alex, was adopted from a Russian orphanage at 16 months -- nearly the same age as Michael Latham, the Romanian boy in Merrell's book. Like Michael, my son is now 5 years old. Unlike Michael, he has never hit another child with a rock or spread feces over anything. He has, on occasion, offered to kill me with his Qui-Gon Jinn lightsaber, but I suspect that has less to do with his months in the orphanage than with his being a normal 5-year-old boy.

Minor saints

Fri, 07 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In the nursing home where my grandmother lives, there's a sign that's meant to help the residents locate themselves in time and space. Today is March
3, it says. The next holiday is Easter. The next meal is lunch. You are in New Milford, N.J.

Few of the residents pay much attention to the sign. Their bodies, which have grown old and unpredictable, may be located in early spring in New Jersey, but their minds have become more flexible with regard to time and space.

My brother cannot find my grandmother's room. He walks us around a circular hallway several times, past an ancient man caved into his
wheelchair who keeps shouting, "Meh! Meh!" at my brother, as if he recognizes him. My 4-year-old son, Alex, sticks close to my legs, and I
worry he will be afraid of these old people who look at him so covetously.

When we find her, my grandmother is lying on a bed, her body barely
asserting its shape on her housedress. I think that if we'd come much later all we would have found would be the dress flat on the bed. Coarse gray hairs grow from her upper lip and her nose is bent to one side, as if the bone has gone back to cartilage. I have to remind my grandmother several times who I am, and at first I think it's because it's been more than a year since I've traveled across the country to see her. But 10 minutes later, she refers to me as her dear Polish friend and I understand that her lack of recognition has nothing to do with absence.

Original sin

Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

There were Weedwhackers leaning against perfect rounds of pecorino cheese, Leonardo DiCaprio T-shirts hanging over still warm loaves of focaccia, rubber girdles like the ones my grandmother used to wear surrounding sweet green plums. I stood in front of a cardboard box filled with Nivea skin cream and clutched my copy of "A Food Lover's Companion to Tuscany," trying to draw strength from its descriptions of homemade salami and baby artichokes. I had come to this market in the small Tuscan town of Panzano planning to worship at the shrine of Cucina Italiana. What I'd found instead was desecration.

I averted my eyes from the cellophane packages of men's briefs, the display of chainsaws shining in the sun, remembering how I'd prepared for this journey. Like a child preparing for her first communion, I'd spent hours memorizing the Italian for tomato (pomodoro), basil (basilico), and garlic (aglio) -- the holy trinity of Italian cooking. I'd repeated hallowed expressions over and over like a catechism: Come si fa questa piatto? (How does one make this dish?) and E possibile prepare le salse prima? (Is it possible to prepare the sauce first?).

Red square

Sat, 05 Sep 1998 13:51:00 +0000

The guards outside Lenin's tomb have little puffs of steam coming out of their nostrils -- like dragons. In the building behind them, the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, dead since 1924 and preserved with formaldehyde, lies in a glass sarcophagus. I am standing in the frigid air of February in Russia, reading to my husband, Ken, from a guidebook called "Moscow: Soul of the Country."

"For a quarter of a million dollars," I tell him, "you too can get the Eternal Lenin Deluxe package."

"You made that up," he says.

I hold up my guidebook. "It's right here."

The guidebook also contains several "Traveler's Tips" for avoiding the "inevitable long lines to view the dead leader," but besides the two cold-looking guards and us, no one else appears to be interested in the father of the Soviet Union.

"I don't think it's open," Ken says.

"It's supposed to be," I tell him.

We walk back and forth in front of the low black building, but can find no entrance, not even a sign. The guards do not seem approachable, in spite of the wide-brimmed Russian military hats that make them look like children playing dress-up.

Someone to watch over me

Tue, 09 Jun 1998 16:30:00 +0000

My best friend, Meg, is afraid she's letting her 6-month-old son
spend too much time in the Johnny Jump-up.

"I feel so guilty," she tells me. "We should be playing with the
Gymini, developing his gross motor skills."

I know what she means. The other day, I watched several Babar
cartoons with my 2-year-old son, Alex, trying to see if I could justify it
as a tool for language acquisition.

Like most parents, I've become an expert on child development. I
know that playing peekaboo establishes object permanence, that the Legos
all over my kitchen floor will help Alex develop his fine motor
skills and that the squeaking rubber ducky that's starting to grow mold
shouldn't be thrown out because it teaches cause and effect. I have read
that the first three years are the most important time in a child's life
for learning, so I try to give Alex as much educational stimulation as I
can, before he turns 3 and it's too late.

The downside to having all this expertise is that I'm terrified I'm
not doing enough. I think that if I let Alex watch the cartoon elephant in
the green suit instead of the real elephants in the National Geographic
special I'm sentencing him to a lifetime of summer school.