Like it is a Rare Thing
One of Ellie’s favourite stories as a small child had been “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. She’d loved the way the Emperor had been tricked into believing his nakedness was clothed in splendid garments, and the fact that it had been a child who had told the truth, a child who’d encouraged the townspeople to see he had no clothes on. The story fulfilled her five-year-old requirement of being both rude and funny. She determined she would be that audacious one day.
The women got together, shared stories and ate. Every fourth Tuesday as grownup Ellie’s fingers pressed on the doorbell of the house where the support group was held, and she walked through to the lounge room, there was a marvellous flaring of her nostrils and the anticipatory saliva pooled in her mouth. She couldn’t think about anything else until she had eaten. The food was splendid. Like funeral food. There were bright mustardy-yellow egg sandwiches on soft white bread with sprigs of parsley, trios of dips and biscuits, quiches, plates of chocolate brownies that melted in your mouth, homemade slices, and tim-tams. Her hands reached for the food and shoved it in her mouth. It was the rule of three. She needed to get at least three things into her before she could begin the engagement with the other women and their stories. So, three sandwiches in a row, or two sandwiches and a brownie? A piece of quiche and two tim-tams or three biscuits with hummus, French onion dip and taramasalata respectively? It was important to get the order right. It would enable her to bear the listening. She would wash it down with a cup of fair trade tea or International roast coffee.
Ellie recognized that she and the other women ate their way through their fear, their disappointment, their puzzlement, and a rage that they could not nor would not articulate. Not finding a suitable receptacle for their feelings, they stored them in their bodies. They grew and grew. In time it looked as if some of them were connected to a pneumatic pump, which had blown them up. Nearly all became fatter - except for Ellie. It was as if her fear, it was mainly fear, had drained the fat out of her. Her fear came through a pipeline from a huge reservoir. Even when the tap was off, it leaked, drip drip drip. She couldn't put on weight and became proud of the slender angularity of her body.
Several of the women had gotten cancer and died, the cancer seeming to devour the parts of them that the children had left. Others of them lost their men. It was tough of course; these were the men that were bewildered, baffled by the fierceness of their wives' desire to have one of these kids and by the disorder the children brought with them like part of their clothing. The disorder seeped through the bonhomie; the fatherly toleration that they thought was expected of them was now an acid. Those men had to leave.
One of the women, Darlene, had brown eyes, under a fringe of brown hair from which she blinked a lot, as if the light were far too bright. Dark rings around the eyes asked you to love her and believe her. You did of course. She had a little boy, then a little girl. They were both from Thailand, though from different orphanages than Ellie’s daughter. Apparently, those were better quality orphanages than Maengmoom’s.
Every meeting, Darlene insisted that the two children were the best of friends; the boy's 'big brown eyes looking adoringly at his baby sister's as she lay there, kicking contentedly.’ This was what she had written in the newsletter that the support organization produced. Parents were encouraged to share experiences in this newsletter; to tell each other their ‘triumphs and trials’ of recreating a family nest with the fledgling member with a broken wing. Each time the missive landed in Ellie’s letterbox, she searched it to see if there were others who would say something to show that they also were now aliens in their own lives. With difficulty it dawned on her, that she too had to maintain the silent conspiracy. That things were good, challenging but good. And that love flowed automatically, obstacles giving way to epiphanies if only one employed the right combination of humour, patience and faith.
There it was. The sticking point. Faith. Many of the kids were abused. One woman's child seemed not to have abuse symptoms. That woman had told Ellie that as soon as she had been allocated the child, while the family was waiting for the child to come to Australia, she had prayed for him, every day, that he would be protected from this. God had answered her prayers. That child fitted deftly into his high functioning family. Ellie recalled that she too had prayed for her child, but that it had been sporadic, piecemeal and non- specific prayer. If she had only been more intentional, more faithful, the indignities that her child had undergone would never have happened. God was pretty particular. She knew it was her fault. She knew she had never prayed hard enough; had enough faith, thought enough positive things about her girl before she came, and that the horror might well have been avoided.
As it turned out, Darlene’s boy (the boy of the big brown eyes tale) had tried to burn his sister. He’d taken his father’s lighter, and had wanted to see what his sister’s flesh would look like if he only could keep the heat concentrated on her golden, smooth skin for long enough. Red and pulpy, as it turned out. Ellie figured, in a schadenfreude kind of way, that Darlene mustn’t have had the requisite faith either.
The women had to keep all the shame of the struggle from outsiders, but could never keep the shame from themselves. After all, people had told them that they were good. “You’re so good, I could never do a thing like that!” But Ellie knew that she wasn’t. ’Good’ that is. She wasn’t sure that she could do ‘a thing like that’ either.
With each other, the women were nearly safe. They could almost be honest. But then, it all had to be seen to be worthwhile. It went against the code to suggest that adoption had been anything other than redemptive for all concerned. They talked a lot about ‘these kids’. These kids wet their beds, shat in corners, hoarded food in their cupboards and backpacks. These kids spat their food at siblings and knew how to regurgitate at will. These kids screamed for hours without ceasing or shut their mouths and refused to speak to their family for days at a stretch. The mantra, that dear Lizzie, (one of the plucky, good-hearted sort) often repeated, was “these kids are resilient”. The secret shame for Ellie was not that her daughter wasn’t resilient, but that she herself was not. Some kids were seen to be geniuses of kinds. An almost savant like ability with maths perhaps, or a real prodigy on the violin. This appeared to redeem the decision to have adopted the child. Therefore, the trick was really tuning in to what one’s child’s special ability was. Would that make it more bearable, wondered Ellie, and therefore make one more resilient? After all resilience was easier if one saw the light at the end of the tunnel…
And twenty years later, she sees that there have been glimmers, but no one steady light. What she had thought was the light had often flickered and gone out. It seems that it is a bloody long tunnel. Ellie is learning to manoeuvre in the dark. Her daughter; the girl of the soft sweet smelling skin, black waterfall hair, pliant body and presence that agitates all atoms around her, is still alive.
Once whilst playing scrabble with friends, someone had used the word ‘resilient’ on a triple word score. Aside from pretending that she was impressed by her friend’s cleverness, that word made Ellie’s chest heavy and her teeth grate against each other. At home, she looks up the dictionary definition. What is it with this word? ‘The ability to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching or being compressed’. None of her is the same shape. She realises that she has been twisted, rolled out, flattened, stretched. That bits have broken off her. That there are holes in her being. That her thinking has become either flabby and confused, or harsh and single focussed. That she is not sure where she begins, and where she ends. That she had said often “I am at the end of my self”, but there had been more of her. That she says often “I am scraping the bottom of the barrel” and has seen her lack, but she is still dipped into, and there is still more of her. And as she speaks of these things, she is told that she is So Honest. Like it is a rare thing, like it is a virtue, or a slightly amusing quirk.
She is the child looking at the Emperor. There is no other way to navigate.
Next time she’s playing scrabble, she will get that triple word score too. Because the day has now come; resilient or not, she is audacious.