Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers

Does she look like you?

Does she look like you?

It’s the number one question people asked me. It was the number one question I was asking myself as I followed her across the LaGuardia airport parking lot, she in her mink, me carrying my one year old on my back, plus the duffle bag of diapers, the lamby and skunk, the bouquet of cellophane wrapped carnations. If you had seen us you probably would have automatically assumed we were a family, mother, daughter, granddaughter, and that I was home for the holiday. If you had heard snippets of our conversation, you probably would have thought she was filling me in on what I’d missed since the last time I was home: the circus, Margo back from hospital, endless vacuuming, and, yes, so-in-so was coming to dinner, after all. You would never have guessed that there was 33 years of missing between us.

Nor would you have known that the little duckling in me was on high alert, that the need to imprint, even after all these years, was still very much alive.

Does she look like me?

What really strikes me about this moment is my willingness. My generosity. And, okay, my courage. I could have opted for the much safer, ever popular, let’s-meet-for-coffee-or-lunch reunion. We could have chosen a neutral spot in between Boston and New York, like a HoJos in Hartford! We could have met face-to-face for a finite amount of time, filled our coffee cups with the effluence of our conflicting emotions, swallowed them all in one gulp or sipped away the afternoon, parting with promises, Let’s do it again soon! Instead, my Birth Mother and I decided on the 4-day-sleepover reunion. At her apartment. Granted, I knew New York. I’d lived there for almost 10 years. I had friends I could call in an emergency. I knew how to hail a cab, find my way to Penn Station and escape, if need be. Were those thoughts even running through my head? Probably not.

Nobody tells you how much you will need to give up, in order to find what you are looking for.

Let’s start with the body.

You put your body in the back seat of the car, keeping it as close to your baby’s body and as far from your Birth Mother’s body as possible. Your alliances are clear. Your baby might need you to comfort her, you say, but in truth it’s you who will need the comfort.

Via the rear view mirror, you spy on your Birth Mother, who drives and talks. Does she look like me? The eyebrow? Cheek? Earlobe? (Nice earrings!) What about the hairline? Mama? You hold onto your baby’s foot and sift through the timbre of your Birth Mother’s voice as it washes back over you, sift for the chords of lost time and forgotten wells of resonance.

Mama?

They say that a newborn can pick her mom’s face out of a crowd, sense the biome of her tribe. It's a matter of survival to know who your people are, who will take care of you and who won’t. Apparently after 33 years, though, we lose that skill. All the little tendrils that would have grown into a thicker, deeper kind of belonging have withered and gone to seed. Buried under the desert, they wait for the rain.

Does she look like you? Does she?

Certainly now is the time when the rain comes, you think with out thinking, now is the time of blooming.

What do you look like anyway? How will you know when you see it?

It wasn’t until we arrived at her apartment building on Central Park West, and I’d basically resigned myself to the fact that, no, not really, we didn’t look like each other at all, that I got a glimpse of her hands turning the wheel, one way, then the other, as she parallel parked, and what I noticed shocked me, made me recoil, like when you suddenly see a snake, or a mouse, hidden in plain sight. Look! Watch out! What I saw on her hands were my thumbs. Listen, I’d never given my thumbs a second glance. I would never have recognized them on their own, separate from the rest of me, under normal circumstances. Although, they were good thumbs, yes, useful, no doubt, all part of the grand apparatus that makes us human, enables us to carry things like babies, and tools, pens, forks, paintbrushes, and by extension ideas and symbols, sentences and language, but had I ever wandered the moonlit gardens of my youth marveling at the mystery of my thumbs, wondering if there was a pair out there somewhere that matched mine? Had I ever considered my thumbs as a potential gateway to my identity? No, of course not.

God is, indeed, a trickster.

I’d always imagined that finding my Birth Mother would feel more….comprehensive. I’ll take my gown, crown, and coach, now, thank you, like slipping into a ready made silhouette, silky smooth and just my size! But thumbs? It was as if the fairy godmother had given me the pumpkin and said, Here you go, Hon, YOU do the magic.

As I untangled my daughter from the carseat, I held her tight to my hip and kissed the top of her head, protecting her, from what, I wasn’t sure.

The threshold loomed before us.

What I’m about to learn is that we are, each of us, just a hodgepodge bag of oddities and quirks of nature. Strange, misshapen, unpleasant and regretful. I could already feel the twinges of my body falling apart. The discomfort of being re-membered.

Those are my thumbs. MINE! give them back!

But it was too late. They were already gone.

We were greeted in the lobby by Bernie, my Birth Mother’s doorman of many, many years, who’d come in especially on Christmas Day to meet me. With tears in his eyes he placed one hand on my baby’s back and one hand on my shoulder, encircling us for a moment. Bless you, bless you, was all he said, but it was all I needed to hear, and despite my sudden lack of thumbs, I followed my Birth Mother up to her apartment.

What else did I have to lose?

Camille Claudel, Étude de Main..

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