For a few weeks, I am high.
I’m expecting the official offer for my new job. For a spell, the days aren’t a wait, they are exhilarating momentum towards a new kind of life.
Even a shoulder sore from recent dislocation can’t dampen my spirits.
In all the flux I’ve sent out texts and emails into the world, doling out various pieces of the story. To one friend at Deutsch who’s been on maternity leave I say, Miss you. Want to catch up. Have been interviewing for job in Seattle. Going to adopt a baby. She texts me back OMG OMG must hear all. Congratulations on your pivot.
We arrange a phone date. I hear about her baby. “Honestly, I could have skipped the first three months,” she says with characteristic frankness.
She chronicles the latest with work. She’s been unhappy. The agency has dangled a promotion and raise but has remained vague on when. In final ignominy, she’d come in from maternity leave for her performance review, only to find her boss had forgotten it was happening at all.
“I mean, I showered for that motherfucker,” she emphasizes.
“It just all sounds very disrespectful,” I tell her.
As I’m listening to the saga, I think about who she is in the context of the real world, beyond Deutsch. A pragmatist of the New York City ilk – direct, dry, sarcastic. She founded a magazine and was in the middle of writing a book. In every meeting I had with her, she asked the big question, made the clever observation. To boot, model tall, cheekbones like the wings of a jet.
The agency’s apathy was nonsensical.
“Plus, I’m totally underpaid. Like way underpaid. I did a fee proposal and saw what everybody makes. You would not believe it. By the way, you are one of the only women who is getting hers. Good on you guuurrrl.”
I tell her, “It’s so crazy how no one knows this stuff. How culture and companies have trained us not to talk. But it’s in our interest to share. We’re the ones getting screwed, women and minorities!”
She asks me for thoughts on her current status – she has a few other things in the hopper, which would mean leaving Deutsch. I share what’s been working for me: clarify her brief, what she wants and doesn’t. Don’t look at it in the context of an offer that’s on the table. Look at all she wants.
And then see.
“I’m going to totally do that, I know already what my brief is,” she says. “I always follow your advice.”
When I hang up I am left with a glow of her – sassy and earthy at the same time.
That afternoon, I see how much I am the true beneficiary of this conversation. My recruiter calls about the job. She goes over the title, confirms the four-day-a-week schedule, reconfirms the salary offer. She’s already told me I wont make an LA salary in Seattle, that I was well-paid even for LA, ”because of course they have to,” she had said about Deutsch. For a minute, it made me feel like I was getting away with more than I was worth.
Even before knowing my ranking in the Deutsch money hierarchy, I wasn’t sure about the salary for the job. When I interviewed, it was clear how much they needed someone like me, and how rare it would be to find my resume to come in and do that job. Now, fortified from my morning call, I tell her I’m not sure about the money.
“That’s all the budget they’ve got,” she says flatly. I can hear her reminding me silently that I said I’d do it for that amount. She wants to close the deal.
“I understand,” I say firmly. “I’m just telling you, I’m not happy at the current salary and I’m thinking about it.”
I catch Suzi for 10 minutes on the way to the airport. “It IS about the money and it isn’t,” Suzi says. “Some people have money in their dharmas, other people could care less.”
I get what she means, but it doesn’t feel like clarity.
“Let’s put it this way,” I try, “If I were getting married to this job, I would say no right now, with the current offer.”
“What I would say is to stand in your experience,” Suzi advises.
This makes sense.
When I land in Minneapolis, my recruiter emails me that HR said I’d be eligible for a bonus, depending on how well the agency did that year.
“That would add in another $25K,” she writes.
I call her back.
“I don’t know about a discretionary bonus – it’s not real money. For example, this year, Deutsch didn’t get any bonuses,” I explain.
“I’d be happy with $25K more in the salary,” I say. Its $5K less than my happiest number, but I feel like in the spirit of the negotiation I can let that detail go.
“So you’re saying you want that much. For four. Days. A. Week,” she metes out the syllables.
I can’t tell if I’m imagining disbelief in her voice as she clarifies. For some reason I am confused at the reiteration, the stark punctuation. I think to myself, isn’t she supposed to be on my side?
Then I have a flashback to my first negotiation with Deutsch. Then too I had asked for more money, though only half-heartedly. I thought Juan and I were moving to Hong Kong but the job I had been negotiating for had started to fade, a Polaroid of an exotic trip left too long in the sun. Wanting to get out of Miami, I had resigned myself to Deutsch. Asking for more money was a limp way of making myself feel better. “I can ask,” she had said then, but I knew she wasn’t serious. When she came back to me with a no, I wondered if she’d asked at all.
The point was, she knew I wasn’t serious.
This time, I have conviction: “I feel like I am A-list talent going to a B-minus shop. I think they need to pay for my experience.”
She listens and doesn’t try to persuade.
“So, I feel like you’re not going to take the job at what they offered you,” she posits.
“I don’t think I am,” I say.
“OK,” she says. She’s done selling and back to negotiating.
The offer lingers. I can’t tell if the wait is a sign of yes or no. I keep trying to read the energetic tea leaves – S&C are doing an inspection on their new house, Darek and Amy are waiting to hear on an appraisal for theirs – I wonder if my fate is tied into these real estate dealings, if there is a cosmic moment of completion on the horizon when all the pins will be struck down at once.
Part of me worries they wont come back with the money. Will I take it for less? I quiz myself. I don’t think so. I remind myself that I will be unhappy if I take it for less. It will be a tiny cut that festers and never heals.
Still, the offer lingers.
It is supposed to appear Friday. Then Monday. My recruiter calls to say it’s still moving forward, not to worry. But I have turned a corner on the whole thing. I start to think maybe it’s meant to be that the offer doesn’t come through. I will quit and freelance. It will be even better!
Wednesday morning I’m lying on my bed meditating before work. It’s warm in LA, and the windows are open. I hear the buzzing of the bees in the bougainvillea outside the bedroom window, the mechanical whirring of a garbage truck at the far side of the alley. The light filters in through the bamboo shades. I’m just near the end of my 20 minutes and my phone buzzes.
And I know what it is. I let the knowledge pass and stay relaxed on the bed, breathing steadily, willing my mind empty again. When my timer goes off a few minutes later I sit up and look at my phone. It’s full of thumbs-up emoticons.
I take a deep breath and call her.
We go through the bits and pieces about the offer and what I need to send back. How does it feel, she asks me.
When I hang up I stand on my porch and think about who to call – S&C, Barbie and Brian, Maeve. After such a draining, debilitating year, I can’t even believe how close I am to a new way of being. Instead, I turn my face to the sun.
It is a moment beautifully and wholly my own.
I call Jeffrey from the car.
He’s out of town for a few more days, but I can’t wait to quit.
“JB, I wanted to tell you I have an offer.”
“Do you really,” he says, in a way that is not a question or at all surprised. “Well, I was trying to figure out how we were going to do this transition. You know, I think you’re going to be a lot happier.”
“I think YOU’RE going to be a lot happier,” I counter with a laugh.
“That’s probably true,” he chuckles. “I’m really going to miss you.”
Sweet Jeffrey.
I feel the same way.
I have one final trip to Minneapolis. It is lovely. There are meetings and good-byes from heartfelt (one woman telling me “You always seemed like you had the brand in you”) – to comic (an email stating “This news is very disturbing!”). The women ooh and awww over the adoption. The men aren’t sure what to say about 4 days a week. I can tell it makes them uncomfortable, they’re worried I’m sacrificing rather then saving myself.
Janet, originally client, now friend brings me a card and two polished stones.
“It so funny, I got these from a friend years ago and have been carrying them around from move to move but not really sure why. Suddenly I thought, I think these need to go to Jen.”
She explains one stone is rose quartz, for the heart, and the other is tiger’s eye, for confidence in your path. “I feel like both of these are going to come in handy,” she says, her head bobbing in a sure way.
I’ve always admired her steady, gentle energy which she wields with equal measure in meetings and when she picks up her fussing baby. I hold the stones in my open palm and smile into her freckled face. She is nearing the end of her second pregnancy and I think how we are tied in our change, both of us letting go of the baton that has joined us, both of us moving on to another phase of life.
In LA, no one is surprised that I’m leaving, only that I lasted as long as I did in my bi-state set up. My apartment, which is leased through August, is taken over by a friend of a friend. My office sheds meetings and becomes a hub for people who want to change their lives. I have a moment of realization, that this stream of seekers into my office is my true legacy. After months of fretting about what I hadn’t been able to do, this is a long overdue reframing of my time. It is an exhale.
One creative comes in to give me a hug and say that he’d heard the news. He wants details. I tell him about the adoption and instead of hulking in the doorway he pulls up a chair next to me. He leans forward, his elbows on his thighs, looking out the glass wall to the agency beyond. He starts to talk and the themes are familiar: life has become one-dimensional, it’s become all about work. He misses his family, he wants to have a life, but he’s worried he can’t grow his career and have that too.
For a minute, I think of Juan.
I remember one of our early dates, a day at Seaside on the Oregon Coast. It was sunny but windy. We were with his roommate Alberto, a flaquito in big raver pants and a backpack that sported a series of buttons, including one that said “Ask me how I lost the weight!” Mara was there too, on one of her multi-week visits up to Portland from Berkeley in the months after graduation but before art school. Mara and the boys spoke in Spanish, Juan and Alberto teasing her for her Mexico City accent and old-fashioned turn of phrase.
On the hard sand we walked into the wind. I remember Juan saying he wanted to have four children. “Four!” I exclaimed. “Maybe two,” I conceded, laughing at the excess. He gave me his coat against the wind.
When we got in his car to drive back, Mara told me, “You know, he’s calling you his girlfriend. That’s what mi vieja means.”
As my 30’s unrolled, I started to bring up having a baby. I wanted him to know the real conversation around family was out there, in the near future. He would get muscle flicker at his jaw when I mentioned it. Even at talk of friends being pregnant, he would give a cursory, “Good for them,” in a husky voice.
“Why can’t I even talk about other people without you freaking out!” I yelled at him on multiple occasions.
But I knew why. He was drawing his line now, before I got too close. He wanted me to see it, to hear it in his rumbling growl.
Gradually, I put the conversation away in some back corner of my brain, sealed in a container to be opened when we moved to LA. Of course, when it was finally unpacked, the contents didn’t look the same as they had when they’d been stored. In one of our many conversations about the break-up, I had asked him what he wanted in his life. “To make a name for myself, at work,” he had answered. It was clear that anything else was in the way of that goal.
I had texted Juan saying I had quit Deutsch, was moving back to Seattle to work 4 days a week and adopting a baby holy shit. If he had time it would be nice to see him before I go.
He had texted back Holy shit is right. For sure Mona, let’s get together.
There was something in his text that made me sad.
I hadn’t wanted to call him; I didn’t want to put him on the spot to feel happy for me. But I recognized that pat answer about getting together.
It had been over a year and a half since I’d seen him, even though we worked less than a mile apart.
“Maybe Juan just isn’t ready to see you. Maybe he’s protecting himself,” said Maevey.
“It’s just weird, like I might never see him again. Ever.” I told her. It seemed inconceivable after 13 years together that we could be so absent from each other’s lives.
Absent, yet also still present.
My list of things to do in LA starts checking itself off. Dinner at a friend’s new house. His husband makes us dinner and we sit at their formal cherry dining table, inherited from grandparents. His four-year-old twins, white-blond and bespectacled, push around the rice on their plates, drink their milk with both hands. They are excited for ice cream. I run into another friend, a fellow transformer, at coffee on Abbot Kinney. She is breezy in a sundress and a wide beautiful smile. She has abandoned advertising for gardening. She has moved in with her boyfriend. I squeeze her skinny shoulders, laughing at my luck.
I also have a long overdue sleepover at Carrie’s.
Carrie is friend, pillar of strength, oft partner and mentor as a creative director at Deutsch. She was a rower at UCLA and still has the same fortitude and intensity of a competitive athlete. She is also thoughtful and considerate, a self-described hippie, a lover of Latino men, red wine and weed.
And, an adoptive parent.
Carrie and I had tried dozens of times to have sleepover at her house in Topanga Canyon. For months, we were forever foiled by mercurial travel schedules, last-minute work and family emergencies.
I drive out to her house Friday afternoon. The minute I turn in from the PCH, I see the appeal. I wind up a road straight out of a Steinbeck novel – gnarled almond trees and clapboard houses built into the rock walls that line the road. There are hairpin switchbacks. The sun stretches out low and orange. Many turns on the road are purple with shade as the afternoon wears on.
Even before I was thinking about adoption for myself, I loved Carrie’s intentionally quilted-together family. They decided to adopt when it became clear they couldn’t have their own without medical intervention. By chance, they ended up with siblings from Guatemala. First a baby girl, then her brother.
Carrie and her husband took their kids camping and rock climbing on the weekends. Her office was full of pictures of the kids in full outdoor regalia, her daughter in harness and helmet grinning from a rock face, her son in the woodsy warm light of a morning campsite. They were the anti-LA family, living among wild rocks and trees rather than pools and manicured lawns.
When I get to her house, Luna, Carrie’s daughter is playing at the bottom of a steep driveway. She waves at me tentatively and races up the hill. She’s wearing a Guatemala soccer jersey and shorts.
“Wow, how do you ever leave,” I ask. The house is a more of a cabin, modest with a huge deck that takes up most of the yard. But the view is the hills and depth of the canyon. The boys have gone camping in celebration of the end of the school year. Luna is riding her bike round the deck and listening to Taylor Swift. She is 8, a year younger than Edison, a brown face, bright smile and compact little body of muscled arms and legs.
“She’s super strong because of all the horse-riding,” Carrie says. “She was really into the Kentucky Derby this year because of California Chrome, this horse that wasn’t some fancy breed with one of those big long aristocratic names. When we were watching the race she totally noticed that all the jockeys were indigenous Latin Americans, she was like, ‘Mommy, they look like me.’ I was telling her how her build is good for jockeys because they are little but really strong.”
We eat tacos on the deck. It’s great to see Carrie in her natural habitat. The intensity often exhibited at the office is absent, and in its place a fuzzy, happy-it’s-Friday half smile. Luna is like a little sun, powerful and bright.
“Are you ever scared on your horse,” I ask her. “They’re so big. I’d be scared.”
“No,” she says with a laugh and a little eye roll, like what a silly thought. As a cautious child evolving into less cautious adult, I have a silent hope that she will always keep this fearlessness.
I watch her with Carrie and can’t help but think how like she is to her mom – the intelligence, the physical intensity – the universe could not have put two more like spirits together.
While Carrie puts Luna to bed and I sit on the deck with my feet up on the railing, huddled under a fleece coat and a blanket as the temperature drops. The cicadas trill in a constant ring and there are other night noises, the rustling of dry leaves, the muffled flap of wings. But mostly it’s a black sky beginning to reveal stars.
When Carrie comes back out we talk about my progress on the adoption. I’m still deciding between my path, but I’ve recently found out Ethiopia has put a hold on adoptions by single parents.
“I’m trying not to get caught up by where the baby comes from,” I say. “I just want to lean into the easiest route, the path of least resistance.”
I tell Carrie about a conversation I’d had the week before. A friend had asked, what happens with an inheritance when there are kids related by blood? I had said, “What do you mean? It’s MY child. Raised by me. Why would it be any different, just because it’s not a blood relative?” I’m aware of being protective already of this future child.
“Yeah, there are a lot of trippy thoughts out there around adoption,” says Carrie. “Like people who think you can’t love an adopted child as much as you love your own. But they don’t know, they just don’t get it. You can’t explain it to them.”
She tells me about picking up Luna from the orphanage in Guatemala, then two years later getting a call from the same orphanage saying the biological mother had just brought in another child, a boy.
“When we picked up Sebastian, he was delayed, like he wasn’t walking yet and his teeth hadn’t come in. He was totally undernourished. When we brought him home, within two weeks he was walking and his teeth had come in.”
I can feel the tears in my eyes at this story. A love that filled in a smile. A skinny brown toddler who filled in a family. We are silent for a moment, looking out into the night, each star coming more and more into focus as the evening fades.
On my last day of work I turn in my computer and pack a single bag with my candles, hand lotion and gum from my desk. Maeve walks me to the front door. “Dude, you know I was talking to my mom this morning and I wanted to tell you something. I actually wrote you a long text but then erased it, it felt to sappy.”
“You know I love a sappy text,” I tell her. I am walking on air. Jeffrey and Kim are gone at Cannes, and I’ve said my good-byes to almost everyone else. It’s a Wednesday early afternoon and no one is paying attention to my exit, everyone focused on meetings and emails after lunch. I am happy to slip away.
We get to the front door and I turn for one last look. Suddenly someone shouts, “No you don’t!” from the top of the stairs. Jeff comes running down, his laptop under his arm.
It is a divine synchronicity.
Jeff was my first friend at Deutsch. When I took the job at Deutsch, I spent the first two weeks in New York at the clients. When I finally flew out to LA, HR directed me to an office. Jeff was sitting two doors down and we were put together in a “he’ll tell you what to do,” kind of way. He was upbeat. “Gimme your cell number. I’ll send it out to the team so we can all start calling you!” he said cheerfully.
He had a salesman veneer, perennially cheerful and can-do. “He just seems so cheesy, like he’s not one of my people,” one of my friends told me when I raved about him. But I could tell he was not a salesman. Over the years I got to know him as much more: smart, genuine, amazingly thoughtful.
I still remember the Monday after I found out about Juan. I put on what felt like kabuki makeup and a bright icy blue blouse, armor to cover up a tear-splotched face and bleeding gash in my heart. Jeff walked by my office and popped his head in, saying, “You know, that color looks really great on you. You look really great today.” I almost burst into tears because I knew he was telling the truth, that I had created a tragically effective ruse. In hindsight, I wonder if I did actually look better. If there was a release to that day that showed in my face, a knowing of what had been unknown for the last six months.
As Jeff hustles down the stairs I yell to him, “You’re going to make me cry! My first friend coming and my last friend going!”
Jeff almost picks me up in a bear hug, despite me outweighing him. “You weren’t going to get away like that,” he snaps with a grin.
We chat a minute and then he goes over to the pager. “You’ve got a call?” I ask him, confused. He holds up one finger to me, and then I hear him say, “Anyone who wants a last hug from Jen, come to the lobby.”
About six or seven people come from around corners and down the stairs. It is a motley crew of people I’ve worked with over the years, many of whom I’m surprised to see – we are not close.
But I am touched to have made an impression.
I’m parked out front and Maevey walks me to the car. She’s in a black dress that is stretched across her protruding belly.
“So like I was saying, when I talked to my mom she said, if it wasn’t for Jen you might not be pregnant – you wouldn’t have taken this job, moved to California, met your doctor,” she tears up.
“Oh Maevey, but YOU did all that,” I tell her.
“But I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for you.”
I say thank you, accepting the compliment, hugging her across her belly.
As I pull out of the lot, I don’t look back.
I spend the next day packing and waiting for the movers. They are stuck on the 405 coming up from Irvine. They’ll be there in an hour. Then another hour. It has been a warm day but it’s cooling. The property manager comes by for the final sign off on the apartment and my deposit check. “I assumed you’d have it cleaned,” I mention. “When I moved in this place was spotless!”
“Yes, we’re lucky in LA to have so much cheap help,” she says. She works part time for my landlord, part time for part of the Saudi royal family that travels to LA.
The comment is unsettling somehow, like the emphasis is in the wrong place. I imagine the Latina or Asian cleaning woman, how she would feel being described as cheap help.
I’m supposed to go to dinner with Cyndi, Maeve and Lisa. I’m spending my last night at Cyndi’s (“a tradition!” we laugh because Loli and I stayed at her house on our last move north). They trickle in and we sit at the patio table, under the tree in the shade in the courtyard. The movers finally show and make quick work of the place. I go through a few final things and hand out the detritus to the girls – Lisa takes home eggs; Cyndi, chia seeds; Maevey, coconut-scented body cream. I fill my hands with a few final things and head out front where Cyndi is parked.
And fall in the driveway.
“Oh my god, JenJen, are you okay?” calls Cyndi from ahead of me.
I’ve bumped the same knee, caught myself with the same arm as the fall at my massage. For a second I want to cry, I’m overwhelmed with everything, the fall, the move, the leaving. Instead, I summon a laugh and call back that I’m OK. I pull myself up. My left knee is already swelling but it’s just mildly scraped. I test out my shoulder flexibility.
“Oh my god, it’s the second time I’ve fallen in the last couple months,” I say to Cyndi.
“I fall all the time, like ALL the time,” says Cyndi sympathetically, laughing her deep laugh.
But I don’t.
I look down at the stones of the driveway, wondering what it’s telling me. Maybe it’s just take note of this moment. It is the end of a chapter.
Meanwhile, the movers have cracked off a huge jacaranda branch with their tall truck. They cavalierly open the back and toss the branch inside, Mafioso hiding a body in the trunk. There is a huge ragged scar on the trunk, yellow with the fresh break. They drive off, their secret awaiting anonymous finality in a roadside dumpster.
When the truck is gone, there is a halo of purple petals left on the ground.
In the morning, Cyndi, her chocolate Lab Rumi and I walk to a new bakery in Venice for breakfast. We ogle over the crispy croissants, deep slices of cake and bread pudding. We order eggs and then pause on drinks. The drink menu tops out at a $9 Hazelnut milk latte. “Nine dollars? Really?” we question the guy at the counter. Yes, it surprised him too. They fresh press the hazelnut milk on premise. It goes for $50 a gallon. Cyndi opts for a regular coffee with a free splash of the hazelnut milk.
“I have to get it, it’s my last day in LA.” I say. I’ve only brought $15 so Cyndi pays.
We sit outside and watch the people: willowy blonds with beach-wavy hair and flowy dresses; scruffy young men in straw hats and flip-flops. A tall possible-European in a seersucker suit is accompanied by a much younger woman who we are relieved to pronounce his daughter, not his date. Neighboring dogs on the patio perk their ears and eye Rumi from under their tables. Rumi, normally exuberant, relaxes. He seems uninterested in Lolo’s favorite on-the-town pastime, Hoovering up crumbs. Instead, Rumi succumbs with infectious enthusiasm to our waiter who kneels down to impart a belly rub.
“The boys love a big dog,” I tell Cyndi as the waiter walks back inside.
The waiter is muscular to the point of bursting out of his chambray uniform shirt. He’s wearing a gold chain. “Not from here?” I speculate. “Mid-west,” says Cyndi definitively. “Moved out to chase the waves.”
“Do you think these people ever think about the Mexicans who wash their dishes and clean their homes?” I am thinking about the property manager’s comment. I am thinking how this part of Lincoln used to speak Spanish. It used to be used car lots and obscure repair shops. Now reimagined in latte foam and crusty bread.
Cyndi suggests to not judge it. I’m not sure if she’s talking about the wealth disparity or the willingness of some to see through others. Either way, I let it be.
It is a rarified moment, perfect in its filtered sun, its laid-back lux.
My $9 latte is heavenly.
When we get back to Cyndi’s I jump in the shower and hurry to pack my things. I want to get on the road. As I get in the car, sweat beads on my upper lip. I’m still warm from the walk, the shower. Cyndi leans into my passenger window. “Do you need a water?” she asks and we both laugh because she’s constantly in fear of dehydrating. “I’m only going to the Valley!” I say. I squeeze her hand across the car, a thanks for the hospitality last night and over the past six years I’ve known her.
My last stop on my way out of LA is Suzi’s house.
She lives north, and normally we do our sessions by phone, so in these last six years I’ve never been to her home. We sit in her beige living room on white slipcovered couches and eat a salad her husband has prepared for lunch. We riff on ideas for her growing coaching empire. I have an idea for her, a book based on client notes from sessions. I draw out how I see it looking, it working.
“You are just brilliant!” she says enthusiastically. We beam at each other over our salads, a club of mutual admiration.
When I leave I am humming, the feeling I have after a long swim. It’s still early afternoon and I expect to hop on the freeway and coast out of town but the 101 is blocked solid. I turn off the radio and enjoy the molasses pace of the traffic. It is the last time I will do it for a while.
I stop three days in San Francisco. I stay with Anna and Paul and their dog Uli, Lolo’s BFF from the last trip north three years ago. Lolo had been a much younger dog then and he and Uli, both big dogs, had bumped rears and circled each other constantly, always on the verge of a friendly wrestle. Loli would often wear himself out and flop down on the ground while Uli stood, ears still cocked and hopeful, until he was sure the moment had passed with no other option but to flop onto his bed in the corner with a disappointed sigh.
This time, even without Lolo, Uli keeps me company. At every open-door opportunity he hops on my bed and settles himself, crossing his front paws delicately.
“He’s a FOMO!” says Anna, “He’s got total Fear Of Missing Out. He wants to be with you at all times. He’ll even try and come into the bathroom with me.” We both stand in the bedroom doorway grinning at Uli on the bed.
The night I arrive we go to a local French restaurant on the marina near their house in San Rafael. Anna and I eat steak frites, Paul eats roast chicken. They ask about the adoption and Paul says earnestly, “Any child would be lucky to have you for a parent, with all you’ve done in the world, all you’ve accomplished.” I can tell he’s not just saying it to say it. I can’t help buy think, he’s got it backwards.
It is me that is going to have to live up to this child.
Each day I take the ferry to the city and explore, first the ferry terminal with its scenic foodie vistas: $12 baskets of exotic mushrooms, silver-beaded cupcakes, flour-dusted pain au levain.
Then a modernist show at the DeYoung Museum. I Instagram pictures of people looking at the art. At one piece, a huge El-Anatsui, a docent hops in the photo and throws his arms out. The docent’s exuberance is somehow fitting, like an improvised moment of African dance.
My second day I head to the Mission District. I start at the hipster stores full of modernist furniture, Heath Ceramics and Pendelton Blankets. At one, the counter is occupied by a thin, bearded man in a boat-neck striped shirt. I ask him about lunch and he says, “Are you up for a bit of a walk? There’s a great Mexican place about 8 blocks from here.”
I tell him I’m up for a walk.
“You’ll totally go in there and know you’re not from the neighborhood, “ he says smugly. “Like it’s the real deal. Like, they only have one type of beans.”
I suppress a laugh that one kind of beans is the true indicator for authenticity. I don’t say I’m probably more from the neighborhood than he thinks when it comes to taquerias.
Instead, I walk the 8 long blocks to investigate.
Slowly the neighborhood changes from white to Mexican, from stores selling modern furniture and vintage glasses to bakeries selling pink sugared Mexican pastries and tiendas stacked with sports jerseys and knock off Air Jordans. As I walk by one café a elderly woman is in the door. The TV is on and I realize it is the World Cup. Mexico is playing.
“Que pasa con el partido, senora?” I ask her.
“Bueno, Mexico esta ganando,” she replies. I stay and watch for a minute, but my feet are aching and I still haven’t found the taqueria.
At the famous taqueria, I order a lengua and a carne asada taco. They come like a Japanese hand-roll, rolled up conically and filled with chopped tomatoes, onions and only one kind of beans.
It’s not exactly authentic in my experience (I guess I’m not from the neighborhood after all, touché my bearded friend!). But it is delicious.
I’m clearing my table when the game finishes. Mexico has won. The restaurant goes up in a cheer.
Meanwhile, less politely, the street erupts. Revelers climb on the bike rack of a slow-moving city bus, waving their Mexico scarves. The Asian bus driver looks like he’s seen it all. He pulls up to the stop without so much as a blink about his external passengers. Cars drive by with the music blaring, tubas and accordions pom pom-ing in the banda style. Young men wave from the car windows and others in Mexico jerseys run alongside. The street is a cacophony of whistles, honking and music. I stop to capture the din with my phone, then call Juan and leave him a message.
“No mames, you should be here,” I yell into his voicemail.
Juan texts me, Call you in a bit Mona, I’m in a meeting. For a second, I feel sad for him that he missing his country’s moment for advertising.
I text him back, Don’t worry about calling, I just wanted you to hear the reaction.
Here, among his tribe, it suddenly feels easier to let him go, a sadness dissipating in the happy ruckus, another green, white and red jersey absorbed into the welcoming crowd.
A realization that here, even without him, I am also at home.
My last morning in the Bay Area I have breakfast with Che, an old friend from college. At Berkeley in the 90’s, Che was a pre-med student who played in a classic rock band, often in a custom Prince-inspired purple velvet suit. His room down the hall of our house on Milvia was subsumed by his king sized bed. He was small and lanky with wavy black hair and brown skin. His father was Indian, his mother was American. He grew up in Denver where his father was a professor.
Che offers to pick me up as long as it’s okay that we drop his daughter, Indigo at camp on our way to breakfast. Indigo I recognize from Facebook. She is 7, with hair down to her waist and blue-rimmed glasses.
“Hi Indy, I’ve heard all about you!” I say, kneeling down closer to her height. She has the confidence of an only child. She presents me with a picture she’s drawn, a dragon. We pile into Che’s Mercedes sedan, grown up and substantial – a doctor’s car, I tell him.
“Jen and I used to have lunch together every Friday,” Che tells Indy. I’d forgotten this little ritual. Over the last several years since we’d been back in touch, Che had been inviting me to SF to see his band play, to have dinner. But divorce and middle age had made me shy and apologetic, in constant comparison to a lighter, more attractive former self. Now as we drive towards the marina, I have a flash of regret for all the time we haven’t spent together.
Che tells me they’ve just come back from a surprise weekend at Disneyland.
“I told Indy to pack her bags, we were going to surprise her with where we were going. But somehow she got it in her head we were going swimming with sharks so she started to get all stressed out about the trip.”
“Why did you think you’d be swimming with sharks?” I turn around to ask Indigo. She shrugs from her car seat, like swimming with sharks seemed as plausible as any other surprise for a kid’s vacation.
When we get to cooking camp, Indy unwraps herself from her sweater and scarf and shoves them at her dad, already on her way to be with her friends. A mom, blond in capri pants comes in with her daughter. Che asks no one in particular if the bar’s open yet. I giggle, but his humor is lost on blond mom who chides him with a glance.
We go across the street to the Lighthouse Café. I order eggs, bacon and hashbrowns. Che orders raspberry pancakes, bacon and a Coke. “You never started drinking coffee, did you?” I observe. The Coke has tugged something familiar in the recesses of my memory.
We catch up on the last 15 years of life in broad strokes, then settle on the recent. His brother, who was also in college with us, has recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor. His dad has leukemia.
He tells me a hilarious story about his dad, lost in translation. “You know my dad likes a drink in the evening, like a cocktail. So he goes to his oncologist to get his tests back and things are looking pretty good. So he asks her, ‘So, how about drinks?’” He says it in his dad’s accent. “And she gets all flustered and says, ‘Uh, my schedule is really busy right now.’ I know his doctor really well and she comes to me later and says, ‘I just had a totally awkward moment with your dad.’”
“‘So, how about drinks,’” he repeats in his dad’s voice.
My face hurts from laughing.
We catch up on others from the days of Milvia Street, our ramshackle Berkeley house where we lived with 10 other people and the constant stream of their respective friends:
Micho, Che’s ex-girlfriend who’s dancer limbs were always clothed in leggings and a twilight-toned off-the-shoulder top – lawyer, recently quit to become a yoga instructor.
Chris, lead singer from Che’s college band, Heavy Petting Zoo – “You remember he didn’t have one pectoral muscle? Sometimes he’d wear overalls with no shirt, and you could tell, there’d be like a hole in his chest.” – lawyer.
Alex, devotee of the rocker lifestyle with long black hair, dark glasses and jeans so tight Che used to tease him, “Alex, can I borrow a quarter? I can see you have one.” – lawyer.
(“I keep wanting to look him up but I can’t spell Stoichovycz,” comments Che.)
Arunan, a 6’2” Sri Lankan from Dallas and obsessive drummer, on stage or in our living room where he constantly rat-a-tat on leg or arm or shoulder of his nearest neighbor – “He still has all that hyperactive energy, I ran into him at a gig recently.” – teacher.
Allison and Davis, who were together and broken up and then together – finally together and working in urban planning in LA, although I’d never seen them.
Jim, the senior denizen of the house, affectionately nicknamed “The Dogger” for being an older man surrounded by younger women, famed for falling asleep on the toilet after one particularly rowdy party – recently married, still working at the UC Berkeley Library.
We wonder about people we’ve lost track of: Gwenn, disappeared into PTA stewardship in the South Bay; Cathy, who we speculate is wearing skirt suits and running a luxury hotel in Hong Kong, based on her officious manner and Chinese heritage.
As we talk I have such a fondness for that time of life, the derelict maze of a house with its random assortment of people, its thrift store couches, its ubiquitous perfume of rice cooking. The eclectic mosaic of rock n’ roll, hip hop and hippie values. Lives and people tried on, cast off, reimagined. Possibility constantly reflected with our faces in the mirror.
I ask him about his wife, Kathleen. Che and Kathleen started dating his last year of undergrad. For the years we’d known him, he’d been with a short-haired, magenta-lipsticked, grey-smocked Micho who was often a fixture around the house. After their amicable breakup, Kathleen had been deemed an interloper. In our eyes, Che had quickly disappeared from the house scene, ensconced in his new life with Kathleen.
Twenty years later, I was curious to be disabused of that assumption.
I ask if Kathleen, who I remembered had been a teacher, is still in education. He says she hasn’t done it for years. She does reiki on animals now, has written a book and does talks on reiki all over the world.
“We don’t really see each other that much,” says Che. “She rides her horses and does her reiki. It’s pretty much just Indy and me. Like, I don’t really lean on her for emotional support.” Che continues, “Even from early on, I was taking my board exams and it’s like this three day test that everyone fails. I called Kathleen from the test and I tell her, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to pass,’ and she told me, ‘You’d better, we just bought a horse.’” He chuckles at the absurdity of the whole thing.
It’s enlightening to hear about someone else’s marriage, in the context of my own dissolution. I wonder if he’s thought about leaving. He’s so sweet and funny, it’s heartbreaking to think of him in a relationship that isn’t fulfilling. At the same time I am intrigued by Kathleen’s individualistic reiki-and-horses existence.
I tell Che about the adoption, that I had finally just decided to move forward on my own without waiting for a man. “It’s a little more complicated as a single parent adopting, just fewer options,” I tell him. I go into Ethiopia versus domestic adoption, what I know, what I’m thinking.
“I always wanted to have more kids but Kathleen drew the line at Indy. She didn’t even want to have any kids.”
Then he says, “Do you think you can adopt as a single parent even if you’re married?”
I almost snort out my eggs from laughing.
When Che drops me off at the ferry I don’t want the moment to end, there is something so sweet and melancholy, so past and future at the same time.
On the ferry, I post on his Facebook page, “You still make me laugh!” and he sends me a note saying, “You’re still one of my favorite people, even after all these years.”
From the ferry, I get a note from Barbie saying Loli’s not doing well; he’s lost a lot of weight and can’t keep his food down. “We didn’t want to worry you,” Barbie says in her note. I call the vet who tells me a few things to try. I decide to head to Portland tomorrow and skip the meandering drive up the coast. It’s time to go home.
After 11 hours, when I finally drive into Barbie and Brian’s I hand Brian a peach pie I’ve brought him from a diner in Redding.
“There’s no spot in the house that dog hasn’t thrown up on,” says Brian laughing, taking the pie.
Loli looks bony. His ribs and spine protrude through his fur. But he wags his tail and comes to rub in snout in my hand.
A week later I start work.
It is a different world.
I have a sprawling desk with a view of Lake Union. I have a tiny workroom that I order a couch and two white boards for. I have an executive assistant named Sarah. She is smart as a whip. “We’ve got to decide what to name your room,” she observes. All the rooms at the office are named after Seattle bands.
My team takes me to lunch. It is an awkward affair. We sit at two tables and eat pizza. They are scoping me out as much as I am them. I decide to book coffees with all the senior members of the team, to get to know everyone and start to see what’s going on in the department.
Many coffees and iced teas later, there are clear themes emerging. There is apathy here – people who have lingered too long, treading water and not really interested in change. There is talent too, antsy to get going, racing dogs pacing in their kennels, waiting for permission to change.
I put together a presentation to share what I’ve learned – themes about disempowerment and frustration. I want them to be clear about what country they’re entering. “It’s not going to be me, telling this agency to respect planning. We have to find that respect in ourselves. WE are the ones who can change this. We have to stop pointing fingers at the creative not being good enough, or account services not allowing us space or project management not allowing us the hours. We know what we have to do. We need to tell all of them what we think that is. We have to create that space for ourselves.”
The room is politely quiet after I thunder out all of this self-empowerment talk. I note who has a comment – mostly weak refutations from the water-treaders.
Afterwards, one of my team says, “Great meeting, boss.” We are in the hallway, walking back to our desks. He is a lean, bearded energetic type with a healthy dose of Indiana-nice. I have my eye on him. He is smart, optimistic and hungry, yet refreshingly ego-free.
“Really? I couldn’t tell,” I say honestly. Whereas at Deutsch I was a frustrated change agent, someone with ideas and credibility, but no real power. Here I am a fully empowered change agent, and billed as such. Someone I meet in the halls tells me, “You’re the most anticipated hire this place has ever had!”
But I’m still defining my credibility.
I tell Suzi how I am conscious of my own masculine energy here. I feel it rearing up in me, judging my new team’s output for not being enough, not producing enough. I try to temper myself. I know the way of change is by being it, embodying it, not acting it out.
Suzi notes, “You’ve gone from a very masculine culture that you wanted to feminize, to an un-empowered feminine energy. You’ve been wanting to move into a culture that is feminine, recognize that change.”
“But I love what you said to them,” extols Suzi. “That is the empowered feminine – to be the change from the inside out.” Suzi, always my most vocal believer.
Still, I am continually conscious of being lost in translation. I call Mildred to debrief on LA versus Seattle.
Mildred, my account director on Deutsch Latino had also moved from LA to Seattle. When I interviewed her for Deutsch we met at a coffee shop on Capitol Hill. She’d worked with someone at Deutsch at a previous agency. We talked for almost two hours. Afterwards, I texted her friend at Deutsch saying She is my new BFF!!!
Before leaving LA, Maeve and I sat with Mildred in the shade of my office listening to her recount her move to Seattle about the culture shock she’d had. “My boss used to come by my desk at 5 and say, ‘Time to go home.’ One time I was on the phone with a client and I was like, ‘Sure, we’ll just get the creatives to work the weekend,’ and everybody was like, ‘We don’t do that here.’ It took me awhile to get used to it, I was always driving so hard.”
“The only good thing was I always felt like I had more game in Seattle, like I was more exotic,” she said. Looking at her lush dark hair, her eyes with a tiny bit of an Asian pull I could see what she’s talking about. “In LA, I’m just another brown girl,” she says self-deprecatingly.
At the time, I wondered if I too would feel exotic in Seattle, a product of another place, an import.
I had told Suzi I was feeling more optimistic about meeting my man now that I was in Seattle full time. I told her how I’d noticed a similar theme in my conversations at work. All the men asked me what they can do for me, to help my vision come to fruition. I got follow up emails, reasserting their willingness to help out on anything. One was titled At Your Service.
“No one at Deutsch ever said that to me, in those words,” I told Suzi. I feel like I’ve somehow turned a corner in who I am, and that these offerings are a sign of some kind of elevated posture, flowers at my feet.
“I’m getting chills!” said Suzi. “Because what you’re attracting at work you’re also attracting in your intimate relationship!”
Later, Lenora observed, “Or they may just be coached to say that. You know, Seattle business culture.” She ended with a non-committal shrug.
“I couldn’t help but think of what you said,” I tell Mildred. “When I’m here I feel so LA. Like I don’t speak the language yet. I’m coming in so hot. People here are too polite to say what they don’t like or what they need. Meanwhile, I’m too direct!”
“The Cali’s in you,” she says. I can hear her nodding on the other end of the phone.
We laugh about ourselves, the foreigners in a town of locals. I have a moment of thanks about what LA has done for me, how much more sure of my own voice I am, how unapologetic.
“Seattle needs a little Cali,” ends Mildred. We’re disconnected when I pull into the parking garage. As I pull into a spot and kill the ignition, I remind myself to stay in the air for as long as I can, riding the lasts gasps of helium, acclimating to the elevated view. Opting for the exoticism of the clouds rather than the brown, muddy familiar of the ground.
The adoption conversation finds me again.
I’m at coffee with Jill. Her 11 year-old daughter is getting a massage next door, a treat for some endured misery. Jill buys me coffee and a cupcake, white cake with pink frosting. We sit in the sunny welcome of the window. They’ve just come back from a European vacation – Venice, Paris and London. I ask her about some of my favorite tourist spots – the Tower of London tour (Beefeaters and beheadings – yes), the Tate Modern (no, but they walked by St. Paul’s), Westminster (“The hit list of English literature is buried there!” I prostheyltize to Jill, a fellow Comparative Literature major – they did a walk by).
Jill asks about the move, the road trip and then finally any baby news.
“To be honest I kind of put it on hold while I was moving,” I tell her. “About a month before I left LA I called the international agency her in Seattle and they said that Ethiopia had put single-parent adoptions on hold. “It just became too complicated to worry about at the time. But now that I’m more settled I need to get back to looking into domestic adoption – it may be my way after all!”
I have a little gleam of regret that Ethiopia is gone for now – my fantasy of me and Jen flying to Addis and playing with a beautiful two year old in the Addis Hilton pool, following on Jess’s pre-blazed trail.
As if a reminder to myself I say, “I’m trying not to get fixated on where the child is from. There are so many choices suddenly, like so many things you feel like you have to control or have an opinion about. I just want to know my child is on its way to me, and that I’ll pick the easiest path towards it.”
Jill’s daughter Alice comes in the door, a lanky pre-teen with her mom’s dark curly hair. She melts into her chair.
“I bet that was pretty nice, huh?” says mom. Alice nods an intoxicated smile, wide and lazy across her sweet face.
“Mom, can I get a cupcake?”
“No, I think you’re going to want a treat this afternoon with your brother, so I don’t think we’re going to have any cupcakes right now.”
“Any way I can have both?” asks Alice, her head lolling hopefully to her mom’s shoulder.
“I think you should have some real food,” punctuates Jill.
I watch this little exchange, jotting down notes in my mental book, each moment like this suddenly taking on new meaning as I head down my own path to parenthood.
Alice pads over to the refrigerator to see what real food there is to eat.
“You know Amara is right down the street,” Jill informs me. Amara is a local adoption agency specializing in foster-to-adopt. They have a progressive slant and a website focused on LGBT parents. I know the name from Carina who is pediatrician to many adoptees through Amara.
When we part ways, I walk to my car but instead of heading home I turn around and head back down the street to find Amara.
It’s on the corner, in plain sight from all the other times I’ve been on that block without my radar engaged. There is a parking lot with a happy, colorful mural on it. When I walk in there are two women behind the desk. The waiting room is full of toys and bulletin boards with pictures of happy families.
“Our email and phones are down,” says the woman who offers to help me. She hands me a packet. “We have a seminar tomorrow from 10 to 12 for parents interested in adoption.”
I pause for a nano-second, mostly I can’t believe my luck, the coincidence of timing. “I’m in,” I say. The first woman excuses herself and leaves me to fill out some paperwork.
The pen I’ve chosen is felt-tipped and too bold for the thin lines, like I’m really emphasizing my sign up. After filling in my name I glance at the pen jar for another option, but the black ballpoints have less appeal. I continue my graffiti.
“It’s so funny,” I tell the second woman, still behind the counter. “I was just having a coffee down the street and my friend said you know Amara is right here, and I walk in and your phones and email are down,”
“Isn’t that funny,” she says. She is probably mid-forties, with short black hair and a wide smile. “It was meant to be,” she says, speaking my language.
With the move I now have two couches, two king sized beds, two cars. I spend a day rearranging furniture, trying to incorporate my LA furniture into my Seattle house. My Seattle car I decide to sell. I remember that Bull’s pastime is buying and selling cars, so I make a point to ask him his thoughts at the gym one morning. He’s sitting at his desk in, his glasses down at the tip of his nose, sorting through checks.
“But you’re gonna keep the Audi!” he says confidently, with a grin when I tell him I’m selling my car. Yes, I’m keeping the Audi.
“After that drive up the coast I’m bonded with it!” I tell him. He takes off his glasses and rubs his huge hand from front to back of his head, smiling like he totally understands.
He offers to take care of the listing for the Honda. He’ll take the photos. He’ll pick up my car and have it detailed at his brother’s shop.
“So you’re back, huh, you’re really back?” he says with a smile, leaning back in his chair. I sit down next to him.
“I’m back, I’m working four days a week. And I’m adopting a baby.”
“Really. Really. Well now, that’s all right,” he says. “That’s how to do it.” Bull and his wife have recently brought home two young children, kids of his younger brother’s that needed a family, even though Bull is nearing his late fifties and his five sons are already grown.
We arrange for him to come pick up the car Saturday morning. Barbie and Brian are in town and so I usher Bull and his son Drew inside to say hi. Bull is embarrassed about his clothes and apologizes for the way he’s dressed, in red sweats and a maroon t-shirt. “No one cares how you’re dressed!” I say and wave him in as he hesitates on the walk. I have to smile about how his Southern ways have still not quit him.
Drew hasn’t been to the house so Bull takes him to the living room to see the view. Bull stops at the portrait of a Namibian Herero woman I have on my living room wall. She is standing straight and proud, in a garish pink floral dress, her face strong with years. “Look at those long arms, boy. She must be from West Africa with those arms,” he says. “That’s where a lot of the slaves were from.” He stares another minute, perhaps searching for a connection back to his own plantation roots.
They take the car. I tell him Barbie and I are headed out to the adoption seminar, but we’ll be back around noon.
That afternoon when Bull calls me back, He says Drew will come and drop the car off. Then he says, “You know, I know you’re not really religious and all that, but I’d like to offer to be the godfather to your child. I really feel that is my calling.”
I am touched. Before I can reply, Bull barrels back in, saying: “I mean a child can have tons of godparents. And I have this African blessing I like to do.”
“What a generous offer. Thank you, that would be amazing,” I tell Bull. I hope he hasn’t read my hesitation as anything more than taking in something so beautiful and unexpected.
I think about how easily Bull offers up himself, his easy generosity, his easy connection to the world. I have a moment of self-judgment about my own privacy. I can already feel how the adoption is going to force an opening that wasn’t there before.
Barbie comes with me to the seminar. At the beginning there is a video with two families. I can feel Barbie glancing at me to see if I’m crying, which of course I am. There is a speaker too, a woman named Molly who talks about her experience adopting her three year old daughter. She is raw and honest, all lean arms hunched forward as she talks. She and her partner had adopted together and then split up. I can hear the pain as she tells the story, I recognize it.
Someone asks a question about what she didn’t expect. Molly says, “You’re really not just adopting a child, you’re adopting their family. They come with a history that is different from yours. But you have to honor it, it is theirs.”
“And Band-Aids,” she says. “When you have your old biological child you kind of ease into some of these things. No one tells you when you get a 3 year old they are constantly falling.”
I feel like I might like hanging out with Molly. I appreciate her honesty and connection to her own fears, her willingness to share.
When we leave Barbie says, “I kept looking to see if you were crying!”
“You know I was!” I exclaim. I feel embarrassed for a minute, protective of my own emotion. I’m not ready to go home yet so we go for a coffee, hash through what we heard. Barbie is steady with her comments, as always, tempered and non-judgemental. She is impressed by the organization. For the first time, the process starts to take on the semblance of a shape.
I start to realize how much adoption is a metaphor for my new job and department, people handed to me with their own fully-formed personalities and culture. I want to do some weeding, but I also caution myself about making decisions too quickly. I want to be open talents here that are yet to be revealed.
Including with myself.
One project manager tells me he thinks an Account Director “doesn’t like my assignment on the business.”
“What does that mean?” I ask him. I am lost in the verbiage.
“He’s unhappy with who you’ve assigned to the business,” he says more clearly. It’s like working in the military, where the euphemisms hide the true horror.
“First of all, let’s just be clear the agency made a choice to wait nine months for this position to get filled and leave the current structure in place,” I say firmly. “Second, let’s be clear that hiring takes 6 months. So I hear you, but there’s nothing I can do for this moment on this.”
“I don’t think Ops [the money people] will care much about that,” he replies. I obviously don’t know who’s Sheriff in town.
“Well, I don’t really care about Ops,” I say. I can tell he’s taken aback by this. Despite the question marks I have about my department, I feel protective of them. I want to give them space in this new regime to find their way back to health without additional scrutiny by Operations or anyone else.
I leave the hallway conversation and head into the bathroom. I have a slight annoyance, like a sliver in my finger.
There’s no one to vent to but the sink.
I call Maeve on my way home. She’s in the midst of her own culture shock, two weeks into new motherhood, her life taken over by breast pumps and lactation consultants. “Gentle, dude, be gentle with yourself. That gentleness will pass on to others.”
“Yes, gentle,” I repeat. I hear it but can’t feel it yet.
It’s hot. The blackberries are already ripe. The plum tree sags heavily, the fruit baked nearly into juice in their purple skins.
I try various ways to trick my house into staying cool: leaving the back windows open and closing the front (where the late afternoon sun shines); closing all the windows (a success, although quite doggie-scented by the time I get home). Edison is in Portland for the week seeing her grandparents, so I suggest to Carina that we take Evie swimming at the lake.
Carina picks up snacks from the grocery and we sit on a blanket on the grass. Evie wont share her blueberries, but there’s plenty of crackers and goat’s cheese. Evie wants her mom to come to the lake, but finally I convince her to come with me. The shallow swimming area is packed with kids and inflated floaties. I float on my back and wrap my feet around Evie’s little body. “Uh oh, the octopus is going to get you!” I tell her. At first she scowls, but then sees the situation to her advantage. “Um, I’m going to be the baby octopus and you’re going to be the mama octopus.” Then, in a baby voice, blinking her eyes dramatically, she squeaks, “I’m a baby octopus!”
Carina finally wades in but it’s too cold for her, even with the heat outside.
Out past the swimming platform there is a flash of white. An eagle picks a fish out of the water. “Look, Evie, an eagle,” I point. The eagle flies to its tree and perches at the top. A crow flaps and caws around it.
“Why is the crow doing that?” asks Evie.
“Crows aren’t very nice birds,” says Carina. She’s up to her mid-thighs. In her modest striped one piece, shivering, she is a far cry from the tan, bikini’d, drink in hand Tulum Carina. She wades back out to dry land.
Evie and I float, Evie telling herself a story about the octopus and me watching the eagle calmly sitting on its perch, looking out across the lake. I kiss Evie’s cool wet check again and again and she lets me, engrossed in the tale she’s spinning to herself.
For a second, I have a flash of complete happiness, water, tree, eagle, the long light of the waning summer sun. Cool, loving tentacles wrapped around a baby octopus.
Through a friend I get in contact with another adoption agency. I call to get information and talk to the woman there for about 15 minutes.
The website is full of “waiting families,” smiling couples beaming into the camera. There is one single mother on the website, but no one else. In their stats they say 4% of their children are adopted out to single parents. But this has no context – are there pools of single women who are still waiting? Four percent does not seem like a high number to me, barely past the statistical margin of error.
I ask her about single parent adoptions. She tells me she’s seen it take one month or 52 months. She is cool and neutral, neither encouraging nor discouraging. She says she’s seen the number of single women applicants uptick lately, she’s not sure why.
I try to gage if there is a bias against single parents. I suddenly feel out on a limb, like I’m asking an impossibility. Later, I think about my own feeling of marginalization within this adoption world, and how there is a parallel there with an adopted child, a child come into a family through a different door, trying to gage bias, feeling out on a limb, wondering where it ranks with the biological set. Wondering if there is a difference.
As we are wrapping up, I ask advice she has for me.
“I would suggest you think about the adoption story for your child. You’re already building it. What do you want that story to be?”
When I come into work Monday, my team has taken a picture of Edison from my desktop and made it the image on the door for my little workroom.
“That’s so cute!” I exclaim. Another flower left unexpectedly in tribute.
“Aaaand,” I say, turning to Sarah, “We can call it the Edison after my niece – it’s perfect because she is named after a Seattle musician!”
I look at the picture. It’s black and white, from the summer I lived with S&C. Edison is wearing a bunny mask, her hands bent over like bunny paws. There is something pagan, something fairy tale about the picture. Something fecund.
Sarah starts to schedule meetings with the location as “Edison/formerly Modest Mouse”.
I can’t wait to tell Edison.
Saturday night it is a low-key get-together for Seath’s birthday. Carina makes baked beans and focaccia with ricotta, basil and cherry tomatoes. There is a huge platter of ribs.
There is a two-week old baby there, all tiny fingers and toes and yawns. Her mom is a firecracker, alternately taking a shot of tequila and breast feeling with the laid-back ease of a second-time mother. All the moms gather around and relive the births of their own second children. I stand quietly on the periphery, stroking the little wrinkles in the baby’s arm, watching her toes extend and curl.
It’s been a month since I’ve seen Ben and Lenora. Sweet Ben gives me a hug and says, “It’s great to have you back here full time. You look really relaxed.”
“It’s funny, I’ve had other people tell me that,” I reply. I think of that moment with Jeff, my kabuki makeup and icy blue shirt. What a different face I have today.
Lenora and I end up in a corner together. Her close friend’s mother has died after a drawn out illness. Their interminable remodel is still not finished. They are supposed to go on a family vacation to the Russian River to meet friends from LA and NY but now Ben is going to stay to work on the house.
“It’s just not the vacation I was expecting,” says Lenora. Her blue eyes are set off by copper shadow, her porcelain skin by fuchsia lips. “It’s the longest Ben and I have been apart since we’ve been together. Now knowing this I wish we weren’t going with all these couples. I guess I’ll just be the odd man out all the time.”
“Welcome to my life,” I say gently, with a laugh. In our context together, full of Saturday dinners and weeks in Tulum, I am almost always the odd man out, devoid of partner and child.
She asks about the adoption process and I give her the update. There’s not much real there yet, but as Barbie wisely told me, I’m “still gathering information.”
“I know there must be a point where you just surrender to the process and the timing,” I say. “But I’m not there yet.” Even saying this, I know I have to find a truce with the undefined.
I remember Jessica, my adoption mentor, telling me that at no point did she ever feel totally sure that she was doing the right thing.
Even this early on, it is exactly where I find myself, feeling around to recognize the shapes. A friend reminds me, “There’s no wrong way.” I repeat it back to her, knowing she is right. Reminding myself not to fear the myriad of paths before me.
That weekend I watch a movie, a documentary by Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley. In it, she chronicles her own quest to find her real father, after a family joke about her true parentage starts to take on evidence. In it her father quotes a line from a play he and her mother did together: All children are equal.
At the end, he says he can’t be upset that he isn’t Sarah’s biological father because if he had been her father she would have been a different Sarah. And this particular Sarah was one of the best gifts of his life.
For a second I have a flash, a strobe light that catches the alienation lurking everywhere, between a doctor and reiki practitioner, between a vacation and a home remodel, between a strategist and an agency. Between a would-be mother and a child.
The flash is garish, the lines too stark, the contrasts too defined.
Back in the dark, the lines rejoin together.
Week five of work, I feel a shift.
I’ve alerted the water-treaders that their time is up. I’ve angled to set the racing dogs free.
And I catch a series of crushes.
We’re working on a pitch with a partner agency from Chicago. I’m in, then out for the meeting. The dis-invitation is feebly positioned as a numbers game. “But we’ll still take you through the deck,” says the account lead from Chicago. She is tall and sinewy, in a preppy checked dress with a red sash.
“Don’t do it on my account,” I say cordially. It’s breeziness is easy from the clouds. I’ve been on the other side of this meeting, feeling the impulse to protect rather than collaborate.
When we go through the presentation, it is immediately clear that there are too many words, too many slides. I wait until about ten slides in and then make a suggestion to edit. I tread delicately, paying homage to the work, to the presenter. The minute I point it out, they see it too.
The strategist, mid-thirties, handsome with a kinetic energy, makes his excuses, how it was that he didn’t see the overlap before, how it really takes other people to help clarify. He makes the changes easily. I settle into a float, a neutral, positive state, letting him lead. It is not a choreographed dance, but one where we find steps in common.
At a break, checked dress catches me in the hallway. “You’re so great,” she gushes, relieved. “I’m really sorry about before, but I think you should come to the meeting. You and Matt have a really great chemistry. You could add some of that mom energy in the room.”
“Oh, I’m not a mom,” I correct, but then I see what she means – the supportive, experienced energy I was trying to channel in the review.
At the meeting, when Matt tells the clients about how we all worked together he says, “I met Jen and she was a planner after my own heart.” I feel a flicker in my own heart, a reminder of its precise location, lost for months off the grid.
A candidate comes in to interview.
I start asking him questions but he is vague, non-committal. He sketches, but avoids detail.
“I want to hear more about you,” he says. “Why did you want to come here?”
So I start talking. I tell him how I am choosing to see the job, to do the job. To live in the vision, not the execution. In a former life he’d been an actor, and I say how similar I see the mechanism between strategy and acting, the search for an essence.
He leans forward, hands clasped then open on the table.
“Look, I can’t see you coming here right now,” I tell him. We’ve moved beyond the pretense of an interview. He’s got his own department at a smaller agency. He shrugs, not a no but a maybe.
“But we should like, hang out,” he says.
I leave him in the lobby, he’s heading out to pick up his kids. He has a firm handshake.
When I get back to my desk, Sarah asks how it went.
“I think I have a work crush,” I tell her.
My crush streak continues in its wild path.
Sarah and I see Angels in America on opening night. We’re two rows from the front. The theatre’s new creative director, dashing in a grey fitted suit talks about his vision for the show and the reinvented company. He is young for theatre, 35 but when we break for intermission it is clear from the impeccable performance that he knows what he’s doing.
“I think I have an artistic crush,” I tell Sarah.
We meet him in the aisle and Sarah introduces us.
“You have great hair,” he tells me conspiratorially, his hand on my arm. “I was staring at you from the stage.”
“Leave it to the gays to spot a good hair night,” I laugh with Sarah.
After a busy week, I lay low on the weekend, binge watching The Borgias and obsessing over the lead actor despite his wardrobe of red gowns and Raphaelite hair. For a second I worry my crushing has gone in the wrong direction, starting in real life and spinning out into the fantasy land of Showtime’s Renaissance Vatican.
Then I’m reminded of a friend’s story. She had spent weeks on a project with a co-worker. They were so in-synch that found herself attracted to him. She wondered if she was going to have an affair. Then she realized that the crush wasn’t about him, it was about her.
The crush was a mirror, her likeness caught from a new angle.
The reflection of her own possibility.
jendate 