It is so urgent to write when you feel things. Maybe it's just my limited skill as a writer, but I feel I can only write well when my emotions are strong. It's a real shame because there are events I'd like to record. Like when it finally sunk in that Janet was a girl.
Actually, let's back up a few years. When I was pregnant with Ted, Matt and I sat in the exam room waiting for my sonogram. The tech was late, and Matt had to run across the street for an eye appointment. We wanted to learn the gender at the same time, so the doctor wrote it on a piece of paper and folded it up.
I found Matt in the doctor's office. His eye was swollen and weeping heavily. The doctor had gone off to find the head doctor so the two could ooh and ah at how terrible Matt's eye looked. Matt and I had a moment alone. We opened the paper, and started crying. With twin boys, we both had been hoping our third child would be a girl. No such luck.
Now that we had three sons, who could believe that when we started discussing adoption that we were considering a boy? Actually I'd been looking at photos of boys and girls, but was really looking for a specific age. When I found L, I saw a photo of a boy, just one year older than Ted, with a birthday only 2 days apart from him. He hailed from a city I'd visited and somehow all these factors seemed like an omen. Even his name--Ru--sounded like Matt's grandfather's--Rudolph. This from a woman who swears by rationality and the non-existence of gods and omens and fate. When Matt said, "Yeah, let's look into it" I couldn't believe it. For some inexplicable reason I'd been thinking about adoption for years. I'm still not sure why, but I was always drawn to adoption. Also, I was convinced Ted needed a playmate, somebody to draw him away from perpetually pestering his older twin brothers. (Yeah that worked. Now he unceasingly annoys Janet.)
We both decided that having a boy was more rational. He'd share a room with Ted, we'd get bunk beds. Aiden and Kyle had more than enough hand-me-downs for Ted, now we could save some more for their new brother. Yes, a girl would be sweet, but what did we know from girls? More to worry when they hit high school. At least that's what I talked myself into.
Flash forward to the day I really realized our adopted child was a girl. My heart did a little flip. All the anxiety and fear of what it would mean to raise a gender variant child, I momentarily put aside. Why, we had our little girl after all! We could go shopping, get our ears pierced, do each others' hair. Not many days after that period of euphoria I was met with the reality of trying to deal with Matt's almost insurmountable grief at the same news. My happy feelings were pushed aside. With more recent days of an eye rolling, scowling, hair flipping tween, it's even harder to bring back that moment. Oh, had I written about it then...
Yet authors do it all the time. Memoir writers, or fiction writers, they recreate a moment of time for others. They have to make you believe it. This will be a short post. I'll be working on that moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment