Adoption: Thinking about my daughter’s first mother

I do fantasize about Simone’s first mother.

She is the woman who joins our Curves workout around 9:40, about 10 minutes before we wrap up. Asian, small, slim, in her 40s and you could bounce the proverbial coin off her. It’s more what she projects mentally. Her hair is neat, chin length, and she always wears a cool T-shirt in a cool colour.

At our location, we’re now supposed do extra moves at the mats. A piece of paper in front of each mat has a drawing on it and some instructions. A punch here, a kick there. She does all the moves and more. I believe she makes up her own moves too. If my daughter saw her on TV, she would immediately label her “feisty-tush”–her newly minted word for somebody old (25 and up) who still has brisk locomotion.

When I mumble to my Curves buddy about life, work, or H1N1, this woman often looks over at us and grins.

I know she has nothing to do with me or with my daughter. She is little more than condensation on a window, something breathed out of my own longings and fears.

But that must be how it starts, right?

How you form the picture of someone who might be connected to you?

You look first at the people you’d like to be connected with.

Tradition and demographics suggest that S’s first family is likely to live in a rural area, as this is the largest group that surrenders girls. Then again, they might not; my daughter was found outside a police station in a city with a population of 3,700,000. There may be an older sister, or possibly a younger boy. Or multiple daughters ferried away through international adoption to different families. The fact is, you can’t predict any of this stuff. You can only look at what’s most likely and you could still be dead wrong.

If farmers, her parents could be comfortably well-off or extremely poor—the distance between those two possibilities hard to fathom. The poorest areas of the countryside are places where it’s harder to grow food and people have literally nothing. From a 1999 New York Times article:

In a crumbling mud-brick house, nestled against the untidy heap that holds her family’s entire wardrobe, Zheng Xingrong defines her life with a series of emphatic negatives.

How often do your children eat eggs or meat? ”Never!” Do you have a radio or television? ”No!” Is your 14-year-old daughter in school? ”No!” Does your 8-year-old boy have any toys? ”None!”

Stops your heart, doesn’t it? And yet, that is exactly how this could end. What would any of us do, I wonder, after coming face-to-face with poverty this complete. I hang my head as Zheng Xingrong has a way of waving my own fantasies in my face and saying one more time,“No!”

Why should any of this be easy? It didn’t start out that way.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life, solo life , adoption, China, city, Curves, first mother, H1N1, rural life