Will You Still Like Me if Write about Adoption for the Rest of My Life?

One time I was driving at night, and, in the headlights, I saw a kitten on the side of the road. I parked the car and walked back in the dewy grass, following the squeaky cries to where the handful of bones and fur was going in circles. “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?” If animals got drunk, I would have thought this kitten had just tied one on. I bent over and hoped I wouldn’t get some sort of crazy animal bite requiring a tetanus shot as I scooped up the circling kitten.

Something was wrong. I don’t know how else to say it except that the tiny body felt electrocuted, too shot full of energy for its almost weightless being. Part of me wanted to put it down and run away, but most of me wanted to take it home and love it to quiet.

I drove home with it circling on the passenger seat because it would not stay in my lap. My mom was out, but my dad was home, and he came into my bedroom and saw me sitting on the floor, trying to cradle the baby cat. My dad stood in the doorway and watched it claw its way up my sweatered arm, up my chest, anywhere but the supposedly safe haven of my arms.

“That kitten was probably taken from its mother too early,” my dad said. “We can’t keep it.”

I was twenty-two years old and living with my parents because I had dropped out of college twice and had finally moved back in with them to finish my last year of school. When I was a child, I would have fought to keep the cat because I loved animals—I was an animal person, but apparently I had changed. That year my parents had taken me back despite all the times I’d lied, stolen, driven across the country in an effort to find who I was. I had to behave, not bring more problems into their house.

If this little animal didn’t deserve protection, maybe I didn’t either.

I put the kitten on the floor. It was a calico, splotched with orange and brown and black. Its tail was about as long as my pinkie finger, and its nose was a dot of pink on its face. Its eyes were round and dark, and I had the feeling that the eyes did not see me, that the eyes of this creature were looking inward, deep inside to something private and terrifying.

The other day I decided I was done writing about adoption, and then the very next day I realized the truth was I felt like I should be done writing about adoption, that I was pushing the limits of people’s patience, and that people around me were just waiting for me to move on and start focusing on something else, something less…emotional, repetitive, self-focused. I realized I was embarrassed that I was still so interested in how being relinquished and adopted had affected not just my brain and body but those of every adopted person I had met so far—not to mention the effects on the bodies and minds of the mothers of loss.

What if I have to write about adoption forever? What if I’m a horn that blows one note, and I’m just going to keep my finger on one subject and write about it and write about it and write about it until I die? Is that a good use of my time? Will everyone run out when I walk into a room? Will I say anything new? Will anything change if I keep writing about mothers and children?

I’m sorry. I’m sorry I struggle so much with this whole thing. I’m sorry I can’t be easier, more fun, less complicated.

Okay?

I didn’t fight my father. I put the kitten back in the car where it made little crying sounds as it spun once again on the passenger seat until I drove us to the same place where I had stopped to pick it up. I walked it farther away from the quiet road this time, and put it back on the grass. I did not kiss it on the head or say goodbye. This kitten was beyond help. I felt sick and quiet. I had not known I could do something like this.

I was leaving a baby out in the cold of night. There was something wrong with me, but I kept moving. I didn’t value life in the same way most of the people around me did. Any of my friends would at least have taken this kitten to an animal shelter, but I was trying to pretend that I’d never seen it, never tried to rescue it.

A few weeks before the morphine and hospice care had started, my mom asked me to teach her leg-strengthening exercises. I imagined her getting just strong enough to continue to call my father’s name hour after hour, asking for ice chips, toast, medicine. I thought about my dad, going up and down the stairs from their bedroom to the kitchen in his effort to keep his wife happy, and alive.

My mother was asking too much of my father. It wasn’t kind. You can only ask so much of a person and then you have to put their needs before yours. This was one of the lessons I had learned as a child who had come into a family through adoption. I inherently knew that I needed to try to contain my needs so I would not be too much of a burden, because burdens got given away by their moms.

I told my mom it was not about getting stronger any more, I told her she was dying and that she was missing what was happening because she was determined to fight the fact that she was not stronger than the cancer.

My mother was not pleased. She turned away from me and closed her eyes.

About an hour after I had returned the kitten, years and years before the cancer destroyed her pancreas, my mom came home. Neither my dad nor I said a word about what had happened.

What was there to say?