Course Correction (33 page)

Gilder was an articulate, active two-year-old when we adopted round-faced, pudgy Max from an agency in Philadelphia that was committed to giving children of color the same access to a life of opportunity that Caucasian and foreign-born babies enjoyed. As I sat with my second child that first day we met, he was all of six days old. I stroked his soft, chubby cheeks and let him grasp my fingers. He was nearly ten pounds, almost twice Gilder's birth weight, which gave me instant confidence. He was solid, my own little Buddha.

Nearly two months passed, while I held my breath and tried not to fall in love with Max, before a Pennsylvania court finalized the adoption on what would have been Liala's fifth birthday. By then, Max was a cheerful, active baby. He was on the go as soon as he learned to crawl, difficult to keep track of, and impossible to stop. Early on I could tell he would be a handful, strong willed and independent. When he woke in the morning, he switched on—there was no halfway with him—and he stayed in motion until he went to bed, when he switched off and fell asleep nearly instantly. Whereas Gilder took over eighteen months to sleep through the night, within six weeks of his arrival, Max slept like the dead.

I loved my boys, the observant towhead who was fascinated by shapes and loved to read, and the brown-haired barrel of energy who explored everywhere with a wriggling physicality. Already one-year-old Max wanted to wrestle with Gilder, who preferred calmer engagements. The pair often ran in opposite directions, one pulling pots out of the kitchen drawers to bang, the other pulling books off the living room shelf to devour.

Six weeks after Max's first birthday, a friend called with the news that she was pregnant. I took a deep breath. “What are you going to do?”

“Come on. I'm close to forty. I have two teenagers. I can't afford another child.”

As we sorted through the options for an abortion, I heard the call-waiting signal sound on my phone line. I ignored it and kept talking with my friend until we worked through the details of what lay ahead for her.

We said goodbye and hung up. Another pregnancy would end at the wrong time, again.

I sat on a kitchen stool, thoughts of the unfairness of life pattering around me, soft raindrops of sadness.

Remembering I had missed a phone call, I picked up the phone and dialed my voice mail. The voice of the director of our adoption agency in Philadelphia spoke to me out of the blue. “Ginny, it's Chuck, from Option of Adoption. Would you please call me back as soon as you get this message? Don't worry, it's not about Max.”

Of course it's about Max! I'm not going to give him up. I'll fight for him. Why do they want him back, after all this time?

Nerves jangling, hands shaking, I dialed. Chuck was waiting for my call and picked up the phone immediately, sparing me further agony.

“Ginny, I've spent the morning with Max's birth mother.”

“What did she want?” I braced myself.

“She came in with another baby this morning.”

“What?!” Is this for real?

“Look, we need to find a home for this baby quickly. I want to give you and Josh first choice. It's much better for Max if his sibling grows up with him, and I'm sure I can convince the birth mother to agree. You can have the weekend to decide, but we need to know by Monday morning.”

And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “By the way, it's a girl.”

I had always wanted a daughter, maybe for the wrong reasons, but I couldn't lie to myself. Yes, I absolutely adored my two boys, but their presence in my life had not closed the gap I felt without a baby girl. I wanted to prove that a mother didn't have to raise a daughter the way my mom had, breaking my heart midstream. I wanted to validate my belief that, despite my mother's apparent experience with me, mothering a daughter, along with the inevitable hurts and upsets, could be filled with unquenchable love and a deep, unbreakable connection.
I dreamed of holding my daughter's hand and absorbing her experience, even if only vicariously and a generation removed, as I clasped her fingers and cupped her palm in mine: knowing she was lovable and belonged, trusting that, despite my own internal havoc, she could count on me, in good times and bad. Raising a daughter, I believed, would help heal the wounds my own mother had inflicted on me, unintentionally I knew by now, but still devastating.

My daughter finally arrived. Josh stepped off the plane a week later at 1 a.m., bringing her with him. I took my baby girl into my arms, our first embrace missed what would have been her older sister's sixth birthday by an hour. The moment I cradled Sierra, gazed into her brown eyes, and absorbed her serious expression as she examined my features, I knew she belonged to me, and I to her. I could tell we would forge our own bond, based on mutual trust and deep affection, and I would accompany her as she discovered the world and herself. From that day forward, I marveled at the universe's reversal of my daughter fortunes.

Josh and I ended up with three children less than forty months apart in age, all younger than age four, and life progressed from there. Outnumbered, often outwitted, we raised our three in a raucous household filled with music and sports. Two violinists, Gilder and Sierra, combined with Max the cellist. T-ball, soccer, and swimming filled afternoons, early evenings, and weekends.

Raising them took most of my energy and usurped all my patience. I never loved anybody the way I loved my trio. Snuggling together in the morning as they pounced on me, lying in their beds at night, reading, cuddling, talking, dozing off. Listening to their deep breathing at night and their chattering during the day, I felt the fullness of their presence in my life.

The memory of my first child made me grateful for all the moments the next three gave me, hard and easy. I rarely bypassed a chance to grab them for a hug or a kiss, and nestled them close when they sought me out for solace. They reawakened me to the little things, examining an ant on the sidewalk, discovering a turtle buried in the dirt, riding in the car with the wind blowing through our hair.

I convinced Josh to buy an eight-acre piece of high-bank, west-facing waterfront property on Lopez Island, one of the San Juan Islands
that lies seventy-five miles northwest of Seattle, accessible only by private boat or ferry. We built our own summer cabin, raised a handmade flagpole with a tree cut from our property, fenced a square of land for a deer-free garden, carved out a baseball diamond, cobbled together a swing set and jungle gym, tucked a wood-burning hot tub at the edge of the woods, and constructed a fire pit at the far end of the wide front lawn where it sloped down to the high-banked shore. I convinced my big sister Peggy to come there, too, and she found a sprawling property less than two miles away where she brought her family for the summers. We even enticed our diehard East Coast siblings—the grown-up Littles, Miss Muffet, now Britt-Louise, and Richard III, whose only response to his old nickname “Dixie” was stone-cold, disgusted silence—to trek across the country now and then to our West Coast version of East Hampton, minus the warm ocean and wide sandy beaches. There we launched the next generation's accumulation of their own sweet memories of lazy summer days filled with nothing but exploration and pleasure.

The years ticked by. I poured myself into creating the happy family I had missed out on as a teenager and did my best to ignore the knot of tension that settled low in my belly. After a while I couldn't remember its absence and accepted my constant low-grade anxiety as part of me. If I could just maintain my focus on my children, I told myself, I'd be fine. I did my best to ignore the internal ache from building pressure and the accompanying refrain, “Is that all there is?” that I found myself humming in odd moments.

18

Rowing is fraught with the potential for disaster. For a sport so focused on command and control, it's really quite impressive how suddenly and completely a perfectly good row can go wrong. Little things happen, imperceptible to the casual observer, and all of a sudden, it's crisis. An oar digs into the water at the wrong angle, jerking the boat to port. You overcorrect and suddenly your shell is fighting a losing battle with physics and gravity. Unprepared and unprotected, far from shore, your options may be limited and extremely unsavory.

Imagine falling in love with someone else right before your husband's eyes. The irony is that my intentions were pure: I was trying to enliven my marriage, not kill it.

After fifteen years, our relationship had devolved to a framework for raising children, with nothing beyond it to bolster or inspire our interest in each other. I wanted more, but the odds were long. Although I wanted to want Josh, I didn't, and hadn't for a long, long time. Lack of desire was never a problem for me. But now my customary inner fire had lost its burn. As much as I knew I should want closeness with my husband, I couldn't go there. It was embarrassing.

I had made a promise when I married Josh, and I intended to keep it. What secret formula could I devise to awaken desire? Something new to give us a united focus, something to tussle with, discuss, care about, and share.

Predictably, I turned to sports.

We both liked tennis, regardless of our low skill levels. We played every summer when we gathered with Josh's family for a week of vacation by Bantam Lake in Connecticut. Something good seemed to happen when we stepped on a court together, a lot of positive energy. Whacking ground strokes and chasing after winners was fun. Even just playing against family, my competitive juices started oozing, and so did Josh's: with a racquet in his hand, he came alive. Maybe that was a place to begin. Maybe we could take lessons and get good together.

We showed up at the indoor tennis center in South Seattle on a day in late September. Dressed in ill-fitting, raggedy workout shorts and holey T-shirts, grayish white socks, and scuffed tennis shoes, Josh and I wielded racquets whose strings were more dead than alive.

The instructor walked in carrying a red-and-white tennis bag that looked big enough to hold half a dozen racquets, wearing a precisely color-coordinated outfit and pristine white tennis shoes. She had short, wavy, blondish-brown hair and freckles scattered across her cheeks.

Her name was Lynn.

She set us up on the court to attempt the first drill: standing half-court, tap the ball over the net to your opponent diagonally across from you at least a dozen times without a miss. I was instantly engaged. There were challenges to tackle, skills to master, asses to kick. Lynn got in the groove with us immediately, figuring out what to focus on and how to nudge our skill levels forward.

We had lucked into a good teacher. She knew the game and could translate her knowledge into beginner's language. She corrected our technique without offering criticism and was upbeat and enthusiastic without going overboard. She talked strategy, too, discussed the mental challenge of the game, and taught us to think about concepts like time and spacing. There was no hyperbole or false praise. She was matter-of-fact without being blunt. I liked that.

Lynn clearly loved the game. I could tell by watching her demonstrations, which she performed with alacrity and finesse. I was struck by her smooth movements and her easy, graceful ability to cover the court. She showed us how to move from serving at the baseline swiftly up to the net without losing control of our feet or our racquets. She looked completely comfortable tossing the ball in the air to serve and
had no trouble demonstrating a spin serve, or a slice, or a flat hard ace. She could hit with top spin from baseline to baseline, or rush the net and slice a blooper that rebounded from her opponent's reach and died after a single, sorry half-bounce.

She counseled us not to play it safe at the baseline by whacking ground strokes ad infinitum, but to live dangerously and try something new. She encouraged us to work our way to the net so we could take control of a point and enjoy the satisfaction of slamming winners out of the air at our opponents' feet. She quoted statistics to cajole us out of our comfort zones, assuring us that our winners would more than compensate for our inevitable errors. She cheered us with her ready smile and positive feedback, noting our progress in attacking the ball, asserting control of the game, and diminishing focus on our mistakes.

Every lesson found Lynn weaving stories. She regaled her students with vignettes of matches she had played with her husband—usually to make a point of what not to do, laughing at herself and her own foibles. A good sense of humor loosens up any environment; she removed fear from the equation of learning before it snuck onto the court. She sounded as if her life worked off the court, too. I wondered about that, what it would be like to tell stories of a happy marriage.

The six weeks of lessons flew by. Josh and I had enjoyed ourselves and signed up for another series. Learning felt good, even though improvement seemed to come slowly. Josh was satisfied with the pace and didn't want to do more. But I was impatient: I wanted to be good, so I asked Lynn if she offered private lessons.

I didn't realize where I was headed.

After our first private lesson, Lynn and I left the tennis center together. We chatted as we walked to our cars and paused to finish our conversation before saying goodbye. That's when I first noticed her blue eyes and the shyness behind her smile.

Our twice-weekly meetings expanded beyond the seventy-five minutes of lessons. We followed Lynn's rigorous on-court instruction with meandering off-court conversation, which progressed into e-mails and phone calls. Starting with a sketch of our family lives—she was married eighteen years and counting, had a fifteen-year-old daughter and a twelve-year-old son—we branched into other topics. We covered a
lot of ground quickly: family histories (her mom dead of bone cancer, three years past; her dad a retired engineer and sculptor, still living in the house she grew up in; from Houston; three much older sisters—she was a “mistake”); life stories (a settled housewife who liked vibrant colors, no pastels, enjoyed needlepoint, and played football with her son; UW graduate, psychology major); religious denomination and political preferences (avowed atheist, not overly liberal Democrat). The kind of details that new friends usually share in dribs and drabs tumbled out easily, a rivulet gathering force as it moved downstream.