Salon.com > Theresa Pinto Sherer

A lost soul

Mon, 07 Jan 2002 20:35:00 +0000

The Estates of Ft. Lauderdale aren't really estates, nor are they in Ft. Lauderdale. They are a neatly plotted collection of well-maintained mobile homes that were recently annexed into the city of Dania Beach, Fla. It is where I grew up, with my mother, my two sisters and, just one block away, my maternal grandparents.

My son and I enter the only home I have ever known, the one I remember clearly from my childhood, and my grandmother is walking down the hallway in two shirts and no pants. She looks slightly disoriented, but you can tell she is in a good mood today. Her legs look boneless and all wrinkled skin, hanging loosely from the skin at her hips which hangs loosely from the skin above that. We tell her to go put some pants on, and she reemerges 15 minutes later, with a different shirt on over the ones she was already wearing, but still no pants. Eventually, she will get them on and we will go for our daily breakfast.

When we return, my grandmother drifts slowly down to her bedroom, where she does mysterious things that I can only guess at, moving objects from here to there, folding and refolding her sweaters, moving her money from one hiding spot to another. Today, she comes back holding a full bottle of small white prescription pills, a rubber band and her toothbrush.

Identity crisis

Thu, 29 Nov 2001 20:16:00 +0000

Memory is so indelibly bound up in words, the symbols that stand for the objects that make up remembrance. Twenty-five years ago, I spoke a different language in a different country and lived a different life. Yet I have no memory of it. I was just 3 and by the time I was 4, I had been adopted by an Italian-American family living in South Florida, I spoke flawless English and I had neatly forgotten my past. I began rebuilding my identity from scratch.

Twenty-two years later, my mother revealed to me that just before I was adopted, I had been found on the streets, wandering alone with a note pinned to my shirt that read, "Kim, Won-Hee. August 20, 1972." It was handwritten, not in the letters of the English alphabet, but in the calligraphy of Korea, the country where I was born.

Upon hearing this news, the writer in me immediately snatched it up as something to develop and spread around like so much confessional compost. But the little girl in me was scared and a bit sad. Up until the age of 3, I lived with someone -- a guardian? a parent? -- who cared for me. Then, for some reason, I was abandoned.

Baby loves me, baby loves me not

Tue, 03 Apr 2001 20:30:00 +0000

Get ready for battle. That's what friends and family, and all those concerned strangers, should have told me. Not about the sleep deprivation or the Moro reflex or the funny breathing. The first few months of caring for a baby are like being under attack: Pitched fevers of hyperactivity require your constant attention; then sudden moments of edgy silence ensue as the baby sleeps and you gather your strength for the next onslaught.

Most of us will admit, however, that it is worth it. A great passion overwhelms us and grows for our children as they grow up. We simply take the emotional steps necessary to do this and never turn back. We begin to utter those words and we wait for the moment when they will say them back to us. The smiles and coos work for a while, but eventually we need a bigger return on our investment. We need to hear those words. I love you.

But this is a dubious event, with no prescript guiding our children to it, no law stating that a child must declare love for his or her mother or father or anyone else -- with or without conditions. What if Murphy's law ruled, and all the diapering, bathing, feeding and playing led to just a sort of mild appreciation?

Can two men make a baby?

Wed, 31 Jan 2001 20:19:00 +0000

It has been close to four years since the replication of Dolly the sheep -- not a very long time considering the lumbering progress of science. Still, cloning now seems like an old, tired subject that pops up periodically in the media, a run-of-the-mill hot-button topic that has become a part of the American glossary of debatable issues, like gay rights or abortion.

Not coincidentally, each of these issues is inherently tied to the other: All involve life choices that revolve around sex, our national obsession. Of course, humanity's preoccupation with sex is just a cloak for its true obsession with reproduction or, more precisely, immortality.

Most evolutionary biologists will tell you that all organisms are obsessed with reproduction and passing on DNA; yet I doubt the road to procreation for other sentient beings that may exist in the universe, regardless of their sophistication or culture, is as littered with condoms, sex toys, birth control pills, test tubes, child support payments and abortion clinics as our own.