Last week, I realized the twins have an opportunity to meet Kat, their birth mother, over Halloween weekend.
I asked the kids. All three said no. It was quick, decisive and resonant.
Laddu, I understood. Halloween as an inflatable unicorn with her bestie beats a trip to NYC to watch a film. Fair enough!
“Our final Halloween with friends as seniors,” the older two qualified their refusal.
Parenting is walking a tightrope any given day. I mulled over enticements I could use. Ammu wants to be a filmmaker. In New York. So, in my head, a few evenings surrounded by people who make films, consume films and critique films was a no-brainer.
Even so, the refusal was just as quick. I stepped back having learnt the hard way that pushing gets me nowhere with any of my kids.
With Pattu, my hope was different. I thought a room full of people who have lived adoption might give her somewhere to set down some of what she carries, to hear her questions asked by strangers. That was my hope.
Pattu’s answer was the same.
So I tried once more.
“But Kat will be there. Don’t you want to be there?”
They both thought about it for a moment.
“Nah, not really. Maybe another time.”
That was it. They went back to what they were doing. I did not. The line stayed with me. Nah, not really. Maybe another time.
Seventeen years ago I was a different mother. A nervous one. Six months in, I wrote my girls a letter after a sleepless night and admitted, “There are times when I wonder if the word ‘adoptive’ will define our relationship rather than mom and daughters.” I was so afraid of that word.
Kat aka Mommy B, in those years, was a woman I ached for and barely knew. The night we met the twins, as I held my arms out for one of them to crawl to me, I thought of her. Sometime that week she had stretched out her arms to hand that same baby to strangers. My happiest moment and her worst one, in the same week. I wrote that pain and loss were tied up in our happiness, and they were. They still are.
That first Mother’s Day I felt like a fraud. I typed out a wish to Kat and dithered over it for ages before I hit send. Her reply came days later, a short note thanking me, and I read it over and over, turning each word around, hunting for hidden meanings. Did the pictures I sent reassure her? Did they remind her of all she was missing? Was I sharing or was I gloating? There was no rule book. Aiyo, how I wanted a rule book.
And the birth family’s letters! I saved every scrap. Every envelope with a return address. Every card from their great-grandparents. I kept it all because I was insecure, unsure of my place in this triad, unsure how long this thin thread to their first family would hold.
People asked me, all the time, “Aren’t you afraid?” Afraid they would leave. Afraid they would love her more. Afraid they would go back. I would say “not really” and change the subject, and then lie awake asking myself what I was supposed to be afraid of. Was something wrong with me? Was I not bonded enough to feel the fear everyone expected?
It took me years, and a lot of listening to adoptees who had every reason to be angry with people like me, to understand that fear came from insecurity, from fearing that the phantom family in your home could someday usurp your real, living presence.
Making the phantom real eased those fears for me.
So we made room at the table.
In 2015 Saathi and I drove the kids back to the town where the twins were born. I looked up from picking Laddu off the carpet and saw Kat braiding the twins’ hair, three blonde heads bent together, all of them alike. That summer I put it down in three words: Identity. Family. Belonging.
The kids made birthday cards. “To Mommy B, With Love.” Kat came and stayed with us for a week, and the two of us danced around each other in my kitchen, slow, delicate steps, and then out on the evening walks we talked about everything except the children. Laddu, who has no blood tie to her at all, made her a card with spiky hair “because it looks funny. I want her to laugh,” and when Ammu told her, “She is not your mommy!” Laddu shot back, “Yes! she is!“
And somewhere in there my fist came unclenched.
The ring Kat gave the girls used to live locked up with my jewelry, safe from careless baby hands. One day they said, “It is ours,” and I let them have it. By 2019 I was finding it on a side table. By 2022, on the ledge in the shower. Cards from the birth family stayed in the girls’ rooms instead of in my safekeeping. I wrote then that I no longer guarded those things, not because they were any less dear, but because I knew the people were not going anywhere.
That is how gifts from my own family live in my house. Whatever Amma hands me ends up on a shelf, in a drawer, wherever I set it down. Of course it does. Amma is not going anywhere.
Cat memes. Filters with whiskers. A video of all five of us singing off-key happy birthday over a pan of brownies, and Kat writing back before the brownies were cool. A framed photo of our family on her side table, sent to me in a text. Seventeen years of our ordinary.
And now my twins say, Nah. Maybe another time.
Because there will be another time. There has always been another time.
In 2015, my first Adoption Awareness Month post, I wrote that my children “should never have to choose.” I meant between families. This October they did choose. They chose Halloween. Plain old Halloween, over a weekend with me and Kat and a room full of people asking about them. They did not have to choose between families at all. Maybe, to them, there is nothing to choose between.
I won’t pretend I didn’t feel a small pang for the doors Ammu won’t walk through this weekend, and for the community I had hoped Pattu would find. That is my wish, not theirs. They will find their own tribe, on their time, of their own accord.
As I look at the next phase of parenting, the hands-off years, where I stand on the sidelines and cheer, where they decide which rooms are theirs, I find myself looking forward to it, to knowing the adults my children become.
But I know what I saw this week. Two teenagers who could shrug off a weekend with their birth mother, easy and unbothered, as if she were a Chithi they will see at the next visit.
Whatever else happens, I got something right.
Maybe another time, because there will be one.
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