Adopting Xu Xiao Yan, Part II

(Non fiction)
The babies didn’t cry. When the new parents—this group was traditional couples, except for one single woman—took their daughters to their hotel rooms and held them, whispered or sang to them, fed them and played with them, you heard the parents but not the babies. We learned that in their first year of life, no one in the orphanage had responded to cries, so now these babies saved their energy.

Janice and other guides from the US and Chinese adoption agencies checked to make sure the parents and babies were in the right hands and getting along. Diapers, cribs, and formula were provided, and any questions answered.

After an hour or so, Mary and I took Xiao to the hotel’s play-room, a carpeted space marked by walls fitted with glass from the waist up. A vast assortment of plastic toys in primary colors littered the floor. The toys were day-care classics: blocks that fit one inside the other, a spectrum of donuts that varied in size and stacked on a spindle, flat boxes with knobs to turn and buttons to push; bells to ring, horns to blow, and small, muted drums.

Xiao was one-year old but looked maybe half that. Her hair was shaved in back and on the sides to avoid unnecessary heat. Most likely, she had spent most of her life in a crib. She couldn’t sit by herself yet and wasn’t crawling or standing. Two or three other new mothers and/or fathers and baby girls were in the room, trying to play with the toys.

A feeling of frustration vying with anxiously-summoned patience filled the air. Mary had invited on me the trip partly for moral support during her first days of motherhood, but also for my experience with babies. And part of the playing in that room was an unofficial assessment of whether the babies were developing normally. Could they turn handles yet; determine big from small, open from shut, a cow from a pig?

We all wish lifelong bonds arrived on cue, but more often than not, they take time. Wanting to love a child you’re unsure of is painful—no way around that. And for each parent there, getting to this moment had involved immeasurable hope and desire and heart-wrenching decisions, not to mention countless interviews and negotiations.

So the playroom was tense. Few babies were strong enough to play with the toys even with help. But I knew a game almost any baby eating solid food likes to play, and I came equipped with a baggie of Cheerios. Setting Xiao so she lay on her bent legs, I played a shell game with the empty blocks. Her eyes stayed on the block covering the Cheerio and, weak as she was, she managed to grab the correct block and eat her prize.

We played for a while and then Mary played the game, hiding the cereal in smaller, similar toys. Xiao’s hunger never failed. “Babies don’t come smarter than that,” I told my sister.

Later that night one baby cried. Soon they all cried, up and down the hotel hallway. That night the mothers and fathers carried their children through the hotel, cooing and comforting them, lulling them to sleep. In the morning, they were still crying but—also laughing.

Adopting Xu Xiao Yan

Usually I write fiction. This story in nonfiction.

This month Hannah, whose Chinese name is Xu Xiao Yan, turns six-years old at almost the same time that my sister Mary and her husband Tom adopted her five years ago. Xiao proved unpronounceable to us, although Mary comes close. My best Xiao sounds like Sh-eow, rhyming with meow.

(Above is Hannah’s baby picture, taken by the XuZhou Social Welfare Institute when she was a newborn, restored or more aptly redrawn as best I could via Photoshop.)

I’ve written about the adoption before, but because the trip remains among the most significant and memorable journeys I’ve had the privilege to take, I’ll attempt to retell it here. How Hannah’s blessed us and opened our lives and continues to fill us with joy far surpasses anything I can write, of course, but I never stop trying.

Following protracted adoption preliminaries, the agencies gave Mary and Tom unusually short notice, partly because the 2002 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in Guangdong province had been contained, and so any pending business was rushed ahead. My unexpected invitation to accompany them came on the heels of that. Tom and Mary brought me along as a mother. I knew something about babies, if practically nothing about China. And with no time to study, I didn’t try.

We flew to Beijing and then Nanjing where we met Janice, a representative from the US adoption agency. Under Janice’s guidance, Mary and Tom and I stayed at Nanjing’s Howard Johnson’s Hotel along with approximately ten other US or Canadian couples ready to adopt baby girls. On the third afternoon, a buzz of excitement zipped through the hallways. As I remember it, those minutes hovering after years of expectation filled the rooms and hallways with great flutters of emotion and hushed, hushed voices. “The babies are here,” whispered a guide. “Come, it’s this way.”

My sister and I grabbed hands and pinched each other’s forearms, too overwhelmed for words. As we got closer, Mary and Tom may have lagged; for soon I was moving fast toward a half-way open door. An older woman wearing a hairnet was holding a baby girl with a tiny green bow tied to a thatch of long dark hair on top,shaved in back and along the sides. I knew instantly. Everyone else dropped from view. A rush of affection and unmistakable recognition—I knew that baby belonged to Mary. “Is this Mary’s daughter?”

The woman was nodding and now Mary was beside me. “That’s her,” I whispered. “That’s your little girl.” As I recall, Mary caught Janice’s eye to be sure. This bright-eyed, tiny, startled baby was Mary’s daughter. Never have I felt surer of anyone’s identity than I did upon first glimpsing Xu Xiao Yan: She belonged to Mary, to us. A few heartbeats later, Mary was cradling Xiao and Tom was lowering his face close to the baby and calling himself Daddy.

Sugar Cookies

by Kathleen Maher

When I was in high school I was a great baker. I baked whenever my parents were home. Usually, if they were home, they occupied the kitchen. And although I mostly hid in my first-floor back bed room, which I’d painted a streaky red, unaware of how the thin, already close walls would move in, I needed to emerge practically every day. Unless I climbed out a window, I needed to pass through the kitchen. My mother and father, sitting across from each other at the table, always wanted me to sit down and talk.

A terrible motor-mouth most of my life, from age thirteen to seventeen, I had nothing to say to my parents. Nothing. In fact, being in the same room with either of them required a good deal of self-control. The secrets among us made me jittery. The Joy of Cooking saved me.

Because, obviously, if I was busy baking, I couldn’t sit down with them. Baking required me to stand at the counter, my back turned. They could see I was laying out the ingredients for bread or cake or puff pastry. The physical activity brought me further relief, really to the point of pleasure. Bread especially: Kneading, pushing, slapping it—and oh, punching it down—felt wonderfully satisfying.

One December I discovered my grandmother’s recipe for sugar cookies. These called for creaming pounds of butter with pounds of sugar; if done without a mixer, which I announced was how these cookies originated and we very much wanted originality, this first step could last a good, strenuous hour. Measuring the flour and baking powder, salt and soda demanded precision and concentration or else all the expensive staples would be wasted.

I folded the dry ingredients into the whipped butter and sugar very slowly, dredging what lay at the bottom of the bowl and tossing it carefully up with a spatula. Altogether the preparation could fill an evening. I scrupulously refrigerated the dough overnight, planning to wile away the weekend rolling it flat, cutting it into the shape of snowmen, bells, trees, wreaths, et cetera. Half a dozen cookies baked in the oven for ten minutes and it was time to set each one to cool before filling the trays again.

What a good girl I was, always making cookies. If my mother or father asked me a question, any question, “Just a minute,” worked as an agreeable answer. If they wanted me to wash the floor or vacuum or do the laundry, I said, “Just a minute,” and they realized they might better ask one of my sisters. Because what I was doing was sweet. Nothing was wrong with me.

What I saw or my friend saw was a sliver of daylight in the bedroom.

They would never think that, though, not in those words. At worst, as they made small talk at the kitchen, a shared pause might arise. But all the sugar and cheerful busyness erased any worries.

After I’d used the dough to make seven dozen—we’d give tins of them to the neighbors—each little reindeer deer and rocking horse would be elaborately decorated with butter cream frosting heavily spiked with food coloring.

The Sick and the Not Sick (Yet)

In honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I would like to submit a piece I wrote about my sister's battle with breast cancer many years ago. Unlike many women, she survived.

My sister and I were born one year apart, me first. Our mother dressed us alike for as long as she could and spoke of us fondly as her Irish Twins, which we loved. She also gave us similar names, both beginning with “K.” (We did not know until I looked up the term on Wikipedia that “Irish Twins,” a shared identity we used so proudly and happily, is considered as an ethnic slur.) Instead we relished how close we were in age, my sister sleeping on the bottom bunk, I on the top, sharing everything we owned and dreamed and feared.

She and I were bookends, for as much as we looked alike, our personalities were opposites. Until we were grown, everyone found this amusing. She was as calm and reassuring as I was fiery and impetuous. To this day, I tell people that she’s “the nice one.” In adolescence I experimented with every limit, knowing I could depend on her to rescue me. More than once my sister dragged me into a cold shower and cleaned up incriminating messes before our parents returned home. She ran down the beach calling for me when I had allowed an older boy we didn’t know to lead me to a secluded perch with a view of the ravine. Her fire rose mostly when people cut me with remarks I had all but asked for. If my sister heard someone say something less than kind about me? Hands on hips, she’d stand up and rebuke them.

While I smoked, ran around on minimal sleep, ate whatever was handy, if it was handy, and joined in any revelry to which I was invited. My sister never smoked anything. Her meals were healthy and regular. All her boyfriends were gentle and decent. She didn’t gamble with fate or race against deadlines, and dressed so modestly one might decide she had a penchant for “old world” decorum.

She may have saved my life more than once. Hers, while we were growing up, never seemed in danger.

Then almost twenty years ago, when she was pregnant with her second child, my sister confided in me that one of her nipples had retracted. Her gynecologist had insisted that it was nothing to worry about, but her intuition told her something was wrong. We agreed that she needed make sure her doctor understood how much this frightened her. For the second time, her doctor told her it was not a reason for any distress and would probably reverse itself as her pregnancy continued. It did not.

My sister was not quite thirty years old and lived in a Midwestern town with a large and excellent state university. Her doctor’s opinion that a retracted nipple should not cause her anxiety was not necessarily wrong. A retracted nipple can indicate a variety of changes underway within a pregnant woman’s breast. Malignancy is one possibility, though not the most likely.

On schedule, she gave birth to a strong healthy little boy. But as her body returned to its non-pregnant state, the nipple remained retracted. Before long, she told me, “Something’s wrong; I can fell it.” The same day when she telephoned her doctor and insisted, “I know something’s not right. Please don’t suggest ‘watchful waiting.’ This needs attention now.”

Today, I believe, doctors will respond to a woman’s strong sense of her own body without prodding. But this was more almost twenty years ago. My sister, calm as ever, matched his ready dismissal of the situation with stubborn persistence; she would not be satisfied until he had prescribed another mammogram for her. He finally did so, letting her know he considered the measure wasteful and frivolous.

Only later did we learn that this mammogram showed unusual calcification. But then as now, mammograms are only as good as the expert reading them. Calcification in a young woman can signal abnormal growth. Some calcification in a forty year old woman, on the other hand, is normal.

Her doctor’s diagnosis reverted back to the maddening, though still prevalent “do nothing yet,” officially termed “watchful waiting.” Her doctor told her, mostly as a precaution (again, experts knew less about breast cancer then, especially in premenopausal women) to schedule another mammogram for the following year, stressing that even this was purely a precaution.

Although she whispered to me how worried she felt, doctors and various non-experts, trying to be helpful, told her not to be silly. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Her three-year-old son and his infant brother kept her busy. Always generous and unselfish (compared to most people, not just me) she probably worried more about her children and their persistent ear aches than she did about herself. Her life’s ambition was to rear a big family. I remember her saying when we were still children ourselves that she thought six kids sounded right to her.

When she tried to get pregnant again, it didn’t happen right away as it had before. She visited her gynecologist and again showed him the retracted nipple. Again she told him that she was convinced something was wrong. She could tell.

When the doctor arranged another mammogram for her, the radiologist discerned a three-dimensional dot, which made a biopsy possible. This was scheduled for the following week.

Many women, some middle-aged and some still in their twenties, undergo biopsies every year. And the great majority of biopsies prove the spot or bump is benign. Either way, however, a breast biopsy requires involves a sonogram, which indicates to a technician where to plunge a wire into the woman’s breast, and how to manipulate it from the outside until the wire forms a loop around the suspect bit inside the breast tissue.

Uninitiated to surgical rules, I’ve never understood why such a tedious and painful procedure must be accomplished without allowing the patient any sedative or analgesic. No doubt there are reasons. But no one has explained them to me, perhaps because I’m too hung up on the deep puncturing, the spurting blood and awful dread of the diagnosis.

Usually in a biopsy, the breast tissue is extracted and sent to a laboratory. The patient then waits anywhere from a few days to week before learning whether the lump is benign or malignant. In either case, though, a delayed report does not portend good news or bad. The verdict of sickness or health remains in darkness.

Every once in a while, however, when the disease is clearly identifiable, the surgeon can make an on-the-spot diagnosis, which prompts the removal of lymph nodes, in order to provide some evidence as to the extent of a malignancy and how far it has likely spread or not.

My mother telephoned at one p.m. My sister, who had never risked her health or dignity, now had breast cancer. Hearing this, I wailed—it just was not possible. And my mother’s voice snapped. K needed my support. For once I must rise to the situation and present her with calm reassurance.

I talked to my sister at three p.m. She was still groggy from the surgery, which had scooped out the abnormal cells, tissue advanced enough to be declared cancer well before any extensive laboratory analysis. She sounded small and innocent, my Irish Twin, and if I were by her bedside, her hand would be cold enough to alarm me, just as it had when we were pre-schoolers waiting to cross the street.

The pathology report had found two out of twenty-one lymph nodes affected, which translated into a fighting chance. My sister’s cancer was not estrogen-related (apparently several, perhaps hundreds of , discrete types of breast cancer can lie dormant—and then one day not dormant—in women’s breasts.) The doctors gave her a choice: lumpectomy or mastectomy and six months of chemotherapy. K chose the latter. Her intuition demanded a mastectomy, and once again her intuition proved correct.

After her breast had been cut off, including lymph nodes and some underarm muscle, the second pathology report revealed two types of cancer: K had had a tumor, which had attached to her nipple, pulling it in. A lumpectomy that left no nipple was not an acceptable option to her aesthetically, though it might have worked had the surgeon managed to cut out every last renegade cell. Further analysis, however, showed that a second kind of cancer had infiltrated every duct and blood vessel. So a lumpectomy would not have sufficed and might even have incited more growth, whose only outcome could be metastasis.

My sister, as I have indicated, is unusually conservative in manner and expression. She also has an extraordinarily high pain threshold. Throughout our childhood, she weathered several (sometimes exceptional) childhood injuries in good spirits and patience. But a mastectomy is radical surgery, and she returned home in great pain. But for some reason which remains a mystery, the doctors had neglected to prescribe any pain killers. By the time she finally requested and got some, she had undergone the worst post-operative pain. (If you or anyone you love must undergo major surgery, demand adequate pain killers. Most doctors, I would think, will prescribe them as a matter of course, but be sure to ask for them anyway.)

This ends part one of a three-part post. To read the rest, please click here.