From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(35)

As we drove home, exhausted and spent, I thought of Zoela there waiting for us. Everything that would pass between Nonna and me in the coming weeks would determine whether Sicily remained part of Zoela’s past or could also be part of her future. Anyone could see that the three of us—mother, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter—formed a grief triad, that we were swimming on dry land. It was a dangerous place to start from. I hoped that spending a month together would forge a closeness, that the loss would not drive us apart from one another. Our future felt tenuous. But on the drive from the cemetery it was too soon to tell. Right then, all I wanted to do was put a kilometer of cobblestoned street between me and the cemetery and get back to my child. She was the person who gave me a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Because even in grief, motherhood made me show up. It was my salvation then and had been from day one.





SOMETHING GREAT




I had always wanted to be a mother. Always. In elementary school, Attica and I had played together, dreaming up elaborate story lines wherein each of us had six kids—three boys and three girls. Their names all began with the same initials or had to rhyme. Our play was high in drama and full of sitcom plots we borrowed liberally from Good Times and The Brady Bunch.

I saw my role as “mother” as a series of clear-cut tasks: running the house; making elaborate meals; orchestrating frenzied trips to the pretend shopping market where Attica and I took turns playing cashier in my grandmother’s living room using an upturned dining room chair as the checkout stand. We’d pull all the canned goods from the pantry and place them around the living room. I insisted that they be grouped according to food type: bread, crackers, and cookies together; canned peaches, canned meat, and canned string beans on the windowsill near the TV.

Saro and I had been married two years when I went off birth control and let fate roll the dice. One year later, I wasn’t worried so much as I was curious. And I thought it was divine timing since trying to get my career off the ground would have been harder with pregnancy and a child.

By the fourth year, we were concerned enough that we decided to each get a fertility test. The results were neither definitive nor remarkable: my tilted pelvis and his low sperm motility, likely due to his work standing near searing heat eight-plus hours a day, made for challenges. We weren’t excessively disappointed. We had plenty of time. I wasn’t even thirty. We could also go the route of the turkey baster, if needed. But privately, I started learning more about adoption as well, an idea that had always been close to my heart.

With a little research, I found an adoption agency started by two moms in northern California that specialized in the placement of children of color, specifically transracial adoption. Every time I got one of their newsletters in the mail, my heart leapt at the family photos inside. I saw children of all backgrounds being parented by families of all backgrounds and configurations. I saw children being raised in a “forever home” with people who seemed brave enough to risk loving big and embracing the unknown. People like I imagined myself to be. They saw something more salient than blood when they saw family. The people on those pages also looked like the family I came from, a variety of shades and hues. They looked like the world I knew and the family I hoped to create.

My family had welcomed my cousin into our kin by way of international adoption just one year before Saro and I had walked down the aisle. I was watching her grow up from a distance, seeing her at holidays and family gatherings. I saw the joy in her parents’ eyes. I saw the love. I saw the way adoption was deeply intentional and expanding. I saw another way a family could be formed, and I was hooked.



* * *



“Are we really doing this?” I asked Saro as I handed him a stack of forms. Two years after his diagnosis, he was in remission. The prospect of starting a family, the hope of life in the face of illness, was exhilarating and humbling.

“Of course we’re doing this. This might be the best thing we ever do.” He took the application, gave it the once-over, and then looked at me. “Do I have to type this?”

“No, write out your responses. Then I’ll take care of it,” I said.

“How are we handling the medical history?” he asked, peering up from the papers. A look crept across his face. I was just getting used to having his olive skin and flushed cheeks back again since he had stopped the harshest drugs. But the vulnerability on his face and the nature of the dangling question at the center of our lives were something I could never get used to. It struck fear in me.

“Truth. Always. We just tell the truth.” I grabbed him and kissed his forehead.

If we were to become parents through adoption, everything would have to be predicated on truth. We hoped we might match with a birth mother who was equally willing to disclose her truths. We were taking a risk. A big risk. We wanted her to see us for who we were, illness notwithstanding. That we were people deeply in love, people who had seen pain, who had survived it, and who would parent from a place of knowing what really mattered.

“You have to answer the question ‘Why will Tembi be a great mom?’ What are you going to say?” I pressed him to get started as we sat at the dining room table with a stack of adoption information laid out before us.

“I’ll say you’re perfect.” How he could be both flippant and charming, I still didn’t get. I was always one thing or the other. His duality was still the sexiest thing in the room.