God and Jetfire by Amy Seek

Author:Amy Seek
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713829
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TWENTY-ONE

In April, Jonathan was nine months old. The colic had subsided, and he was practicing language that Paula described as “the funniest little combination of mumbling and humming.” She said his voice was very much a little boy’s voice. He was beginning to balance on wobbly legs and had a full head of bright white hair and a mouthful of baby teeth. She sent pictures of him proudly pouring a pitcher of water over Sarah’s head in the tub, Sarah’s eyes shut tight, laughing. He smiles like the sun, I thought—like the happiness is coming from within him. I realized I had thought of him like the moon.

Paula said that when Sarah turned nine months old, she realized she’d been Sarah’s mother for as long as her birth mother had, and that felt significant. People would sometimes ask about Sarah’s real mother, and although comments like that bothered her, having had her own nine-month gestation she found herself feeling a little more like a real mother. Now that Jonathan was nine months old, I hoped she’d feel more like his real mother, too, and that I might experience some kind of positive inverse: my son would feel to me more hers, and my loss, less.

We talked about these things like we weren’t right in the middle of them. We were always lightening our relationship by exposing it to air: the fraught and complex aspects of our joint/mutual/exclusive motherhoods. She was the person who came closest to being able to understand. I’d tell her really hard things—like the feelings of regret I’d unearthed at the birth mothers’ retreat—and she’d describe her own ambivalence as an adoptive mother. She said because she’d seen the strength of my bond with Jonathan, her motherhood could never be simple. Openness didn’t make anything easier, but she said it at least gave her the assurance I was busy with school and not plotting to steal my son back. I laughed at that, but it was important—being able to share some of what we were each going through was heartening. Whatever the animal complexity of what we’d done, ethically and intellectually, we were solidly on the same side.

* * *

And at nine months, Jonathan was doing his own kind of sophisticated thinking. Paula said he was now able to recognize and remember people. When he saw someone he knew, he’d smile and his face would light up. But I didn’t expect him to remember me. I might not even recognize him, he was growing so fast. On my way to see him, I reminded myself that much as he might have grown, he was still just a baby; I’d try not to expect anything at all. When I arrived, he crawled furtively behind a chair, and when Paula picked him up, he buried himself in her chest, glancing at me from the safety of her arms. Sarah made it easier by leaping into mine, but squeezing her I wondered, If he does recognize me, what does he

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