after-breakfast mint

and so yesterday
i tried to push the snow off the walkway
with a broom and we got into the car
and saw each other’s breath inside it
and drove to the courthouse.

—–

leanne hates me.

she hates that i’m so bad at things.

while i bring home pomelos for her from the grocery store
and tickle her back in the middle of the night
and remember to always get her red lentils at the
ethiopian restaurant…

i forget our anniversary.
or don’t think about her birthday until the afternoon of.

i forget everything i’m supposed to remember.

but i just realized that three weeks ago i forgot
the three-year mark of leanne getting cancer.

totally slipped my mind.

january 11th.

just another day.

a couple days after, the photographer who came when leanne was sick
showed up again.

i love this shot particularly:

us below the former versions of us.

—–

how are you physically?  mentally?  the judge asks….judge judith,
magistrate actually.

excellent, i say, and…..pretty good.

she laughs.

and what do you think makes you a good big sister, she asks lydia.

i like gymnastics, lydia says.

perfect.

and then asks leanne something about adopting rena
and leanne tears up.

i don’t remember what she says,
i just remember the leanne in the chair
at the PETscan facility, slumped,
with the cancer everywhere.

and the leanne in the chair now,
crying and happy and ready to hear
that rena is ours forever.

magistrate judith smiles and says
we have another daughter
three years after we had one taken away
and we hug and shake hands and take a picture
and walk out.

—–

later, after beignets and buttermilk biscuits
with rhubarb jam and chicory coffee
and a waitress who just happened to be adopted,

we go to the denver mint….
just one wafer-thin mint…

and see money being made
and think about making value
and copper and zinc and steel
and dies and scrap and conveyor belts

and go to the gift shop
because lydia is collecting the state quarters

and i see a commemorative silver spoon that i would’ve bought as a child,
but instead i want a sacajawea dollar now,
and my father buys it,
and gives it to me,
and later i will give it
to her.

rena.

the boat launcher,
the bird come back.

halfway to what

there was a holiday party at our adoption agency,
so we went.

lydia ignored the carolers and ate caramel corn,
pushed buttons in the elevator.

leanne and i looked around the room at all the other
families with their adopted kids.

we met our caseworker in the hallway.

“i saw tina,” she said.

“where?”

“i took her out after she called me from the halfway house”

(she was in jail for a week or two and now is in the halfway house,
trying to get her life in order.)

“but when we were in the car, she said ‘guess what?’ and i said ‘no’.”

we waited.

“she’s pregnant,” said our caseworker.  “again.”

there was a big part of me that thought that maybe this decision,
to place rena in an adoption, was to be the first in a long line
of good, or at least better, decisions by her.

i thought that about her turning herself in too.

the first being an admittance of her inability to parent.

the second being an admittance of her inability to run forever or avoid or deny.

and yet here we are again.

or, here she is.

and soon, here another baby will be.

—–

but for now, i concentrate on rena.

and she concentrates on trying not to puke

and on keeping our head up,

no matter what.

signed, sealed, delivered

she’s ours.

return to sender

when leanne was pregnant with our second child,
before the lumps on her neck and everywhere else and
before the dirty mri and before
before the winter with too much cold
leanne went out and bought one thing
for the baby, a pair of these:

she put them in the closet or down in the basement
with all of lydia’s old baby clothes, just waiting
for life to happen.

but a different kind of life happened,
and they took the baby out.

some people don’t have the energy
to get out of bed during chemo,
but somehow leanne had the ability
to find them and put them in a box
and send them to our friend out in baltimore
who had just given birth to a daughter of her own,
and along with it, she slipped in a card that said:

“every girl needs a pair of red boots”.

and that was that.

—–

a few days ago there was a box on the porch.
it was from leanne’s friend in baltimore.
inside were the boots and a card that read:

“i think you said that every girl needed a pair of red boots”

—–

two weeks ago the phone rang.
i was away teaching.  it was rena’s birthmom.
she said she was homeless
and could we give her some money,
could she stay at our house?

leanne called the agency
and the owner picked up tina.

the owner said she spent the two hours driving
her to wherever she needed to go to remind her of a few things.

tina, listen to me and listen to me good, she said,
daniel and leanne adopted rena……not you.

still, it was hard for me to not open our door to her.
after all, she had given us her baby.
and to complicate things more, we still hadn’t had our court date.
technically, rena still wasn’t ours.

tomorrow is the court date.

we got a call tonight that tina won’t go.
she doesn’t want the baby back,
she just doesn’t want to get arrested.

and so we wait
or we ask people in her family to turn her in
or we do nothing
or we sit on the purple couch
and slip the red boots on rena’s feet.

first one,
then the other.

at 3am, you can usually hear sprinklers

spinning themselves around and releasing water.
you can usually hear
the train and the crickets
and the hot water heater clicking on and off.

but last night i didn’t hear any of those things
because lydia was crying.

a nightmare.

what is it, leanne asked.

still half her body submerged in the dream,
lydia sobs -
you were supposed to not draw it that way.

leanne, it seems drew outside the lines.

and if i didn’t do it out loud,
at least i did it in my own dream:

i laughed.

i laughed because i was so overjoyed
that lydia wasn’t having nightmares
about her mother being sick or bald
or in the hospital
or dead.

i laughed that maybe the thing that lydia
is most afraid of right now in her life
is that someone isn’t drawing
inside the lines.

and as disturbing and perfectionistic as that may be,
it’s still a million times better
than worrying that you’ll be
alone in this world
forever.

two arms

on saturday, i woke up at 5:30am.
leanne said i looked old.
i felt old.

i took a sharpie and wrote a name on each forearm.

pumped up my bike tires and ate three bananas
and slipped on my purple and green jersey
and sat on a hard, hard seat
and rode 100 miles
again.
for cancer.
or in hatred of cancer.

with two women on my arms.
my wife, leanne, and my friend dan’s sister, suzy.

one alive and one not.

suzy died this summer
from a cancer, quickly, leaving
her husband and three young kids behind,
and a brother, who has always had a perfect
beard and a decent backhand, and
who is my friend.

(i wrote about him slipping and shattering himself
months ago on his way out to take care of her)

there’s a hill on the ride in moab called the big nasty.
3000 vertical feet in 7 miles.
not nice.  not nice at all.

every time i thought about getting off my bike and walking,
which was often,
i looked over at my arms.
i looked over at leanne and suzy.
and i kept pedaling.

on the drive from colorado with lydia
in the back of the minivan, we talked about canyons,
about how they used to not be there,
about how water and persistence
can eat through anything.

how water and persistence ate through thousands of feet of red rock
to sit at the bottom, finally, and be able to look up at what it had made,
the way we’ll look back at cancer someday.

and i just wanted suzy to know that she was with me for a day.
and that i took her to some beautiful places,
and that she kind of took me to some beautiful places too.

like the top.

like the top.

at the end of the ride, lydia was there blowing a noisemaker
so hard that she blew a hole in it.

rena was impossibly asleep.

and leanne was standing, cheering,
impossibly alive.

—–

it’s been two days

and i still can see the names,
fading a bit and purpling.

so the last

comment on the last
post was this:

“Congrats on your new daughter. I am an adoptive mother. When my son came home to us we gave out very few details about his birth family and the circumstances surrounding his adoption. My husband and I felt very strongly that this is our son’s story to tell, not ours. He can share whatever information he likes with people he feels comfortable with but we did not feel it was our place to do so. I was also very uncomfortable with the thought that someone – friend, aunt, older cousin – might accidentally reveal something to him or within his earshot that we had not shared with him yet. I understand that when the adoption happening it is exciting and you want to share your story with everyone. But it is not your story alone, but your daughter’s as well. Not trying to be judgemental at all, hope it doesn’t come off that way. Just sharing one adoptive couple’s opinion.”

and it got me thinking about ownership, in a way.

when does lived experience not become ours?

and when does a story not become ours?

and what if it is shared, the ownership and the story itself?

just wondering where you all stand on this.

i think in the case of the comment above,
there would never be anything that a friend, uncle, cousin would know about our daughter
that we hadn’t already told her ourselves.
she’s going to know the story from day one.

there is never a reveal.
never the prestige.

at the same time, i could see if, hypothetically,
our daughter was born with three penises
and i had chosen to blog about it…
how she may at some point be angry that people know.

and i would have to deal with that anger and justify
my need for telling the story.

could i?

i think i could.

could you?

leave the smiling

to the ladies:

leanne’s been sporting extra cleavage
to distract away from her chemo port scar.

it seems to be working.

rena is 13 days old today.

i fed her in a parking lot.
it was glorious.
a glorious parking lot
with a dad
and a baby
and spaces waiting
for cars.

—–

last week leanne took rena down
to meet tina for lunch.
mario came too.

she gave them a computer that a friend gave us
so that we could email them pictures.

she said it was nice….and strange.
(that pretty much sums up this whole experience).

at one point leanne handed rena over to her
and tina took her at the table.

the waitress came by and started asking tina
questions about the baby, and tina paused and then answered.

after the waitress left, she looked at leanne and said sorry.

what else was she supposed to do?

when rena started spitting up a bit, tina held her out.
take her, she said.  it was as if she didn’t know what to do.

her face and body has said this to us before.

—–

i don’t think i said this before,
but i felt great distance when rena was born.

tina and mario had asked me to videotape the birth
at the last minute.

i hate cameras.
would much rather take my journal in (which i also did),
but did it anyway.

and so…as she was pushing rena out of her
i stood there with this machine
in between me and everything that was happening.

it was enough that there were two aunts and mario
and tina and leanne and doctors and nurses and lights
and iv tubes….without sticking the camera in there too.

maybe that’s why i didn’t cry when she was born.

i just wasn’t there.

—–

liddy told me the other day that she’s never seen me cry.

it’s not true…but it feels that way to her.

i don’t want to be that father.

—–

last week we broke out the video that i took of the birth
so that i could put it on a dvd for tina.

and i forgot.

i forgot that after the birth, tina wanted to take the baby
back into her room for a bit.

and she wanted the camera,
so i gave it to her.

later she brought rena back to our room
and left the camera on the counter.

but i forgot.

i forgot until i started capturing the video
and came across some shots i didn’t remember
recording – first mario holding her and saying
that her lips looked like her mommy’s…

and tina saying that she has mario’s chin.

then tina sighing.  the biggest sigh.

they tell her that they love her.

and mario puts her hat back on.

and then tina holding her in a chair,
another sigh, her eyes shifting from looking down at rena
then back at the camera, the distance between them greater
than the distance i probably had felt
during the birth.

a weak, forced smile.
the video feels desaturated even though it’s in color.

she holds her,
says nothing for a long time,
then says i love you,
and rena opens her eyes a bit.

she heard you say that, momma.  says mario.

ok, tina says.

ok, in the way that ok can mean goodbye,
ok, in the way that ok can mean that it’s over.

bye, says mario from behind the camera.

tina’s blurry hand reaches towards the camera
and then nothing.

did i mention

that tina (the birthmom)
refused an epidural?

she wanted to feel it, she said.

leanne said (to me):
what a time to decide to say no to drugs.

tina said (to leanne):
this is a way to show the baby that i care.

i said (to tina):
you’re a rockstar.

rena’s meconium came back clean today.
no trace of drugs, no trace of nothing.

—

two hours after she birthed rena,
tina walked into our room.
i offered to get her dinner.

she wanted a quarter pounder with cheese, fries and a coke
and The Haunting in Connecticut to watch that night.

and so i went.

a friend of mine makes movies with at risk youth.

you can make any kind of movie you want, he says.

they all make horror movies.

the rules are this:

no blood, no violence.

and so they have a talk about what’s really scary.
truly scary.

decomposition, abandonment, decay, lonliness.

and they make movies about that.

he and i joke.

he says:  the kids you work with lie under the guise of authenticity.
and i say: the kids you work with tell the truth under the guise of fiction.

we’re both right.

and so tina watches horror movies.
long live relative deprivation.

—–

tina left the hospital yesterday.
we gave her cards and a big bag of gifts
and hugged her before she left and made a plan to see her
next week.

later her aunt called us and told us that she took her to the pharmacy
and that tina didn’t even have enough money to buy hemorrhoid cream.

she said that tina was sad, but not about the decision.
just that her life is what it is.

and today we left the hospital -
leanne and me and rena.

we figured out how to use one of those car seats again
and we drove home and sat on the grass and looked up at the clouds.

yes.

i love the picture of leanne and rena -
how rena’s face is right next to leanne’s chemo port scar.

a sound place to suckle.

and then

at 5:25pm, after 9 strange hours and 3 strange pushes,
rena rose
came out.

four parents, standing there,
passing her from love to love
almost two years to the day
when we thought the baby
would come out of leanne.

a slightly different route.

—-

just now, tina’s mom stopped by with tina’s two daughters.

they wanted some alone time with rena.

when we came in to get her, tina’s mom started weeping.
she held me the way that the woman held me in the airport
in washington dc, crying, trying to get home to my wife
who had cancer.

it was that kind of hug.

she didn’t let go for a long time.

thank you for taking her, she said.

we have a lot of love in us, we said,
and then we left the room.