Two Brothers, Three Mothers

When we began to think about adoption we did a lot of research and reading. We went to agency information nights at first and then, once we began the process, we embraced all the many steps – the fingerprints, background checks, driving records, inspections, intense meetings with our social worker and many trips to the notary public. One part we didn’t pay much attention to, because we couldn’t, really, was the birth mother. Having already settled on adopting from Korea we knew that some of our fees would go to Korean programs that worked with birth mothers and also that we would not know much about our future child’s mom.

When his dossier came with his cute picture and the limited information about his mother and her pregnancy we went over the scant details with our social worker. Other than her height, weight and age, most of the other comments had to do with how she met the birth father and general lifestyle information. In response to our avalanche of questions our social worker told us that a lot of the information was nearly boilerplate. She’d seen the same comments in many other dossiers. Whether they were translator’s shorthand or the product of some bureaucrat’s typing we will never know.

And then he arrived. The first three months with him were absolutely wonderful. Having only one easy baby was so nice. We introduced him, joyfully, to our families and friends. We went places and walked around with him strapped to back or belly. We were enveloped in a happy little cocoon, imagining the world from his perspective, delighting in every coo and smile.

Then there was September 11, and the big unwelcome dose of reality. Pain, uncertainty, smoke and the never ending white noise of the scrambled fighter jets making their giant circles above DC, all day and all night, for weeks. I started looking at our boy differently. What had we done? What was this world we were raising him in? I still didn’t give much thought, though, to the world he’d come from.

Another few months and we found out that our assumption of infertility was wrong and by next September the twins came. Now life was more surreal than magical. Our little house got smaller and our time, money and energy evaporated. But as the twins approached four months and older boy was coming up on his second birthday we began to emerge from this fog, at least a little.

Then one evening we got a call from our social worker. That was unexpected, as at this point we’d done everything with the agency we needed to do, although we hadn’t completed all of the paperwork for finalizing the adoption.

She asked if we were sitting down. Using her measured mental health professional voice she explained that our older boy’s mother had just had another son, almost two years to the day from the birth of our boy. This new boy had immediately gone into the Korean adoption system where the records flagged him as having a sibling, our son. Korea contacted our agency and strongly suggested we adopt this boy to keep the siblings together. Neither the Korean adoption system nor our agency was aware that we had twins now. Surreality returned.

The few close family members and friends we confided this news to all shared the same opinion. We could not be considering adopting this boy, our fourth child two or under. All of these people had experienced our family, our harried existence, up close. They were not without compassion; we just seemed so over our heads already.

But this was our son’s brother. He was, in the strange and rubbery way adoption makes this, family. How could we not adopt him? But we could not. We had to. We couldn’t. We didn’t.

Our agency was understanding. Our social worker let us know that the Korean system would probably not even allow it once they found out about the twins as it violated certain regulations about number of children within number of months, let alone the number of square feet in which we were all crammed. This mitigated the grief and guilt for me, somewhat. Our agency was also willing to place our boy’s brother with a family that was nearby and would be interested in having a relationship with us.

Little brother arrived and we met him and his family, all of us trying to be happy and playful while being near tears. And soon after we made the decision to move down here, away from little brother and his family. We saw them again, shortly after we moved. The boys were about three and one and, although curious, really didn’t have any way to understand who they were to each other. Then too much time went by until we finally went back to visit and stayed with little brother and his family, and then again too much time went by.

I found myself getting mad. We kept going up there – why weren’t they coming here? Why were they always gone when we made our summer trip to DC for camp and visiting? But the anger wasn’t really about them. I know I felt, feel, guilt and anger about not stepping up to adopt little brother when we had the chance. And then moving away. Even though it truly was the right thing that we did, or rather didn’t. I know we would have coped somehow but it would not have been a good thing for our kids, for our marriage, for us, to have brought in another baby at that point.

And so we went up there and visited little brother and his family this fall. The boys are old enough now to know exactly who they are, at least in relation to each other. And little brother is so obviously and beautifully in his family, where he is loved, cherished and nurtured. I still feel some sadness and regret but I am also feeling the wonder of it all. How strange these families work! Siblings that share no blood and friends that do. Strange interrelationships like little brother’s friend from down the street who came over to meet our older boy because he couldn’t wait to meet his pal’s brother. Marvelous. Mindboggling. Magical. So there it is. Our family has three kids, and our older boy has two brothers and a sister. New math at its crazy best.

Kodak Moments

Since he first learned to ask to see them, our older boy has been enthralled, possibly obsessed, with pictures and videos. He has watched the video of his own arrival (at the airport, not the hospital) dozens of times and has spent many happy hours looking through stacks of pictures, remembering old neighbors, special days and places.

Somewhere along the way he also became enthralled with the envelopes the pictures used to come in. He considers which is finer: the envelope with the picture of the over-exposed little girl or the boy blowing a bubble. He spends long minutes trying to decide whether the picture with the patented photo correction treatment is better than the one without, and he asks me and M over and over which one we like better.

And the name: Kodak. So bizarre, so made up. He loves it.

This is an obsession I can relate to. Kodak and I share a hometown, and when I began to explore the many thrift-stores of Rochester I found lots and lots of Kodak cameras which I started to buy, quite inexpensively. As my collection grew, friends and family began to pick up cameras for me and I began to amass variations: the same camera but one made in Rochester, another in England and still another in Canada. Or different years with different lenses. Or special cameras made for dentistry, that were basic snapshot cameras but with focal distances of nine inches to one foot, with a little string measuring tape attached so that the hygienist could hold the string against the patient's gum and then pull the camera back until the string was taut to get the picture perfectly in focus. Those cameras had special flash covers so if the bulb exploded, as they sometimes did, they wouldn’t burn the patient’s face.

When I was only a little older than our older boy is now I had a Kodak Instamatic that took film that came in black plastic cartridges and used Flashcubes that had four bulbs in each cube and would pivot 90 degrees every time a picture was taken. Film was expensive and I hoarded my pictures, passing up many opportunities to snap so that I’d still have a couple pictures left when an even better thing to photograph would come along. I never had as many flashcubes as pictures so I would ration my indoor shots. Pressing the shutter was always a leap of faith because it could be weeks or even months before I’d ever see the picture. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what the picture was of, when I’d finally get the roll developed.

So when he asked if he could take some pictures of flowers on a grey day last week, I gave him a brief lesson on the digital camera and turned him loose while I did some chores. Fifteen or twenty minutes later he was eager to download the pictures to the computer so I plugged the camera in expecting to find four or five and HOLY COW he took TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN PICTURES! Actually, somewhere in the twenty minutes he gave the camera to his brother so he only took 201. The following pictures are all by the artist, exactly as he took them. But not all 201. No way.

Riding in 2008 and before

I started working on this entry a while ago and got waylaid, by the holidays and life, yes, but more by a growing feeling like I wasn’t getting at the real deal. At the time I thought I was going to write about a neat ride that I took part in – I can’t say I rode it because I only rode a little of it but I helped crew it and was there, at least in body, for almost all of it.

It isn’t found on our local bike club calendar. There is no food or water at the rest stops and the route isn’t marked on anything but the maps handed out at the ride start. No patch for participating but someone did make up stickers this year. The attitude is pretty much keep an eye out for others and take care of yourself.

The ride is called the Dynamo, named after a similar ride in England, and our version starts out on pavement but pretty quickly moves onto dirt and continues to go back and forth, with quite a bit of dirt, for the rest of the 130 or so miles. A fair bit of the route is through land as desolate as can be while still having some road through it, and it has a major dirt climb at about mile 105, along with regular rolling terrain. Everyone needs to bring anything and everything they may need for the ride but thanks to our generous friend Basil we did have a support vehicle to carry all the tools, clothes, spares, pretzels, Sparks, Clif bars and everything else we brought.

The kicker, of course, is that the ride starts at 10:00 on Saturday night. PM. Here we are at the start: This ride is problematic in a number of ways: 130 miles is a long hard weekend for me, not one ride. The ride left at 10, got back to town about 9:30AM, had eight planned rest stops plus breakdowns, peeing, etc which ate up at least two hours of the elapsed time, so these guys were hauling acre through the night, which is not my specialty. And most of all, I like to sleep at night.

When I was the age of a lot of these guys I would have shown up and tried to do the whole ride, suffered mightily, maybe even cracked and took the sag the rest of the way but I would have gone for it. Why not? Back then I lived in drafty apartments with nobody depending on me in the morning and nobody making the bed all cozy. But now I’m closer to 65 than 21 and I have needy little morning people and a cozy bedmate so why bother? Haven’t I grown up and come to my senses?

Apparently not.

As I tried to noodle through the question of why I was there I kept coming back to a story that my father told me many times. He would have been maybe 16, which means it took place in 1934. On summer evenings, as often as possible, he and his two best friends would oil up and adjust their bikes and cruise all over town. These are my personal pep boys, Marty, Milt and Jack. Dad talked about going through Durand Eastman park and how wonderful and fragrant that was, and maybe they’d stop and sit at the beach for a while. Back then, Rochester was a beautiful and prosperous city with Lake Ontario beaches and plenty of glacial rises to sprint up and glide down. He and his buddies would ride all over town, checking out girls, laughing and racing each other when the moment seemed right. And they would always end up at his uncle Henry’s sandwich shop. Henry and his wife and daughter lived behind the shop and he would let the boys have anything they wanted – homemade ice cream, cookies, candy, corned beef sandwiches, whatever. And then, full and happy, the boys would cruise home a little more slowly because it was dark now, and get ready for bed dreaming about when they would be able to do this again.

So maybe I’m hoping to get a little bit of that warm, ‘riding with the guys’ feeling as I lined up with Kyle, who is a joy to watch ride a bike and boy can he ride, and Blake who rode the whole thing on an old cheap bike converted to a single speed, and Kurt who generated the electricity for his lights (instead of using those wussy battery lights like everyone else) and Mike who brought a small consignment store’s worth of clothing from multiple decades and sports, and Jonathan who rode the team issue race bike right down to his name and country flag on the top tube and who was so grateful when Mike dug into his duffel bag and pulled out a down jacket for him at one particularly cold time of the night, and Marshall who is definitely old enough to know better but doesn’t act or ride like it, and Johnny who rode his 29er mountain bike with disk brakes, shock fork and smooth tires and it didn’t slow him down a bit, and all the rest who, when it got really cold in the dead of night would turn towards the sag car when it showed up like zombies in a horror movie and shuffle over with blank eyes and drape themselves over the hood or press hands, feet or cheeks to the lights or hug the wheels to get at whatever warmth could be had. And when the ride was finished, tired, happy, starved, they went to the Little Grill for breakfast. Nothing like riding with your friends and then grabbing a bite afterwards.

I never rode a bicycle with my dad, but once, when I was in high school, I found a matching his-and-hers pair of old balloon tire bikes in the trash, which I took home and completely went over, polished and tuned them and gave them to my parents as gifts. When I unveiled them on our driveway, my mom looked at hers like she was wondering what in the world she would ever do with this. Dad, however, got on his and rode down the driveway, turned left and went to the stop sign, kept going and rode out of sight, eventually coming back to the stop sign from a different direction and glided back to our driveway with a smile of pure delight. It had probably been 30 years since he was last on a bike and I don’t think he ever rode one again. Maybe that’s why I ride, too. Milt - May 18, 1918 --- January 3, 2005