Baby, It’s Sunny Outside

With a last name like “O’Dwyer,” it’s no surprise that I’m a very pale person with skin that blisters and peels. I don’t step outside the house without sunglasses and a hat. Long sleeves? I wear ‘em, even when it’s a hundred degrees. Driving gloves, too, as soon as I buckle my seatbelt. Not because I fancy myself a superb driver, but because on the rare occasions when I don’t, half-a-dozen new freckles appear on the backs of my hands.

May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month, a joint venture of the American Academy of Dermatology and the American Cancer Society. New research suggests that up to 3 million Americans will be diagnosed with skin cancer this year. The most serious form, malignant melanoma, will kill about 8,420 people. Fortunately, malignant melanoma, like most skin cancers, can be cured if detected early.
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All Babies Come With A “Backstory”

Most days, Mateo takes the bus to kindergarten, but sometimes we drive so we can read together in the classroom for 15 minutes before school begins. I chat with the other mothers on the playground as we watch our kids jump and run, their little bodies radiating energy and happiness. At the sound of the bell, the teacher, Ms. S, emerges from the classroom and the kids fall into an orderly line. Ms. S has been teaching kindergarten for more than 20 years. She knows how to set a tone.

This morning, the excitement is especially high. Ms. S’s oldest daughter, a married woman who lives back East, is pregnant, due to deliver any minute. I know this because all week Mateo has been telling me, “Ms. S is about to become a grandma!”

As the kids file into the classroom and Ms. S is telling us about her daughter’s long and seemingly endless labor, her cell phone rings. “Oh, oh, oh!” Ms. S spins in a circle as she flips open her phone. “It might be news!”

Another false alarm. Continue… »

Biological is Not the Definition of Family

It happened again on Saturday morning after Olivia’s ballet class. A woman I have never met before, the mother of another dance student, saw me with Olivia and Mateo and out of nowhere asked, “Are they really brother and sister?”

I gulped and took a deep breath, after which I smiled and replied, “They are now.”

This particular question is the one I get asked most often by all kinds of people—from strangers in the grocery store to teachers in my children’s classrooms—and the one to which I still haven’t found the correct answer. I’ve heard other adoptive parents recommend saying, “Why do you ask?” or “They’re not biologically, but otherwise, yes.” Although both of those options seem like good answers, I haven’t yet found a way to make them roll off my tongue. Continue… »

Swimming Back to Myself

Whenever my husband, Tim, and I reminisce about activities we used to do B.C. (before children), one of the first to come up is swimming. I don’t mean splashing around in the shallow end playing “motorboat, motorboat,” or sitting on the pool deck and clapping during our kids’ swimming lessons (as much as I relish both of those activities). I mean getting in the water and swimming laps hard enough that you elevate your heart rate and get that longed-for endorphin hit, the one that leaves you a much calmer and happier person than when you started.

I grew up around water, in an old stucco house in New Jersey a block from the Atlantic Ocean. Summers, I spent every day fully immersed, riding waves for so many hours that when I finally emerged late in the afternoon, the tips of my fingers were shriveled and my throat was raw from swallowing so much salt.

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The Skinny Girl

I first noticed the girl because unlike every other teenager in our Marin neighborhood, she walked everywhere. I’d be washing dishes at my kitchen sink and see her through the window, coming down from one of the houses at the very top of the hill, the ones my husband Tim calls McMansions.

She always walked with her head down, her pale face framed with curly brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, earphones stuck into her ears; and she always wore the same outfit: gigantic over-sized gray sweatshirt printed with the name of a fancy private high school, black leggings, and red running shoes.

And she was skinny. Too skinny. “See that girl?” I said to Tim one day as we stood by the kitchen window and she passed by. “That girl is borderline anorexic.”

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Blog news

For the next few months, we’re trying something new at the Writing Mamas website. Our founder, Dawn Yun, will hand off the duties of editing and posting blogs to three salon members. I’ll serve in the position in January, Claire Hennessey in February, and Li Miao Lovett in March.

I’m pleased to be able to give back something to the group that has given so much to me. When I joined some five years ago, I knew that I had a story to tell—a behind-the-scenes account of my daughter’s adoption from Guatemala—but I lacked the discipline and skill to tell it. Where to start?

“Just write 250 words,” Dawn said at the first Sunday night meeting I attended. “One page.”

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When Will People See?

Recently, I was at Home Depot when a white man came up to me in the aisle and jerked his chin in the direction of my shopping cart where my two children, ages 7 and 4, sat chomping on hot pretzels.

“Where are they from?” the man asked. “Mexico?”

“Guatemala,” I said uncertain where the conversation was headed.

“Well,” said the man, folding his arms. “Let’s hope they bring something good to this country, instead of just taking everything.”

When I told this story to a friend in my neighborhood, another adoptive mom with a daughter from Guatemala in addition to two blonde-haired biological kids, she nodded.

“I was at Walgreen’s with the girls, and Maria wandered down the aisle with a candy bar in her hand. A man came up to her and said ‘You know you have to pay for that, missy.’” My friend shook her head. “Mind you, Maria’s two blonde-haired sisters were walking around with candy bars in their hands, too, but he didn’t say a word to them. Only to Maria.”

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A Mother’s Rights

For three years I’ve been petitioning the Department of Homeland Security for the return of my daughter Olivia’s sealed adoption file. First, with forms to Immigration in Los Angeles, then with letters to Immigration in San Francisco, and finally, with appeals to the behemoth keeper-of-all-records in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Access to that file is my right as a United States citizen, guaranteed under the Freedom of Information Act. Which doesn’t mean they make it easy.

Parents like us who adopt children from Guatemala are handed a sealed envelope at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City and instructed to surrender it sealed and intact at the first point of entry, which for us was L.A. The temptation is to steam the envelope open and make copies of everything in it: original photographs, birth certificates, foster care facts, birth mother information. But who would dare take that risk? It took almost two years to get our daughter home, and that only happened after I moved there for six months and learned enough Spanish to plead our case myself.

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I’m an Artist — PLEASE Let My Daughter Be Something Else

Whenever people tell me how artistic my four-year-old daughter, Olivia, is, I instinctively think, “Anything but that.”

Maybe during the Renaissance, when artists had patrons and kings commissioned portraits; cathedral ceilings were blank canvases, literally, and manor houses had wall space to spare. Or even during the WPA: Sure it was a Depression and everyone was hungry, but at least the government was keeping a handful of muralists and photographers gainfully employed.

But to be an artist today is to suffer.

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Too Damn Cold!

The way other people hate food poisoning or a bad case of the flu, I hate being cold.

I can’t function cold, at all, and by cold I mean any temperature that dips below fifty degrees. My teeth chatter, my lips turn blue and my toes go numb. All I want to do is wrap myself in a wool blanket, huddle in front of a roaring fire and eat large amounts of high-fat carbohydrates. My husband sleeps in shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton bedspread we brought home from Guatemala; beside him, I sleep in flannel pajamas and a fleece sweatshirt under a layer of comforters so thick he calls it the “iron lung.”

Cold is the reason I moved to California, so that I wouldn’t have to be. Like Scarlett O’Hara raising her fist to defy hunger at the end of the first reel of Gone With the Wind, I vowed, growing up in a one-hundred year old house in New Jersey that lacked insulation, that as soon as I had a choice, I would never be cold again.

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