Jessica
About this author:
Jessica O’Dwyer worked for 20 years in magazine publishing, art museums, and as a high-school English teacher. After she and her husband adopted their daughter from Guatemala, she was so moved by the experience she felt compelled to find a way to share her story. She joined the Writing Mamas in 2004, where she found a supportive community of other mothers with their own stories to tell.
Jessica’s essays have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Adoptive Families, and the Marin Independent Journal; aired on KQED-FM; and won awards from the National League of American Pen Women. She has taken workshops with Joyce Maynard, participated in the Squaw Valley Workshop, and is a dedicated student of classes at Book Passage. Her first book, MAMALITA: AN ADOPTION MEMOIR, was published by Seal Press in November 2010. Visit her at http://www.mamalitathebook.com
My Articles:
An Abundance of Gratitude
I lived in Antigua, Guatemala, for six months while we were adopting our daughter, Olivia, who was born there, and sometimes in the late afternoon she and I would sit on our living room sofa and watch the Teletubbies.
The show was perfect for us because although it was taped in English and dubbed in Spanish, it’s also largely non-verbal, making it one of the few things we could actually understand together.
There’s a section in the show where the tummy of one of the Teletubbies — I forget which one — turns into a kind of rectangular TV set, and leads the viewer into a scene far away.
A Boy Can be Anything He Wants! — Even a Rockette?!?
My son, Mateo, wants to be a Rockette.
When Daddy Comes Home
My husband’s return from work every evening at seven-thirty p.m. infuses our home with new energy.
Olivia needs to eat a second dinner on Daddy’s lap, while Mateo suddenly develops a hankering for cheese sticks. Then, everyone needs a Popsicle, followed by a tickle session, and, often as not, some kind of group dance performance that involves music, the louder the better.
This frustrates me because I’ve spent the previous three hours wrangling my children through the dinner, bath, pajamas, tooth-brushing routine. My goal is to settle them down, not rev them up.
Big Ride
In the spring of 2001, a few months before our wedding, my soon-to-be husband Tim and I rode our bicycles to San Diego. The trip took nine days. We started from our house in Tiburon, rolled over the Golden Gate Bridge, and skirted San Francisco to pick up Highway One. We pedaled through Half Moon Bay and down the coast along Big Sur, where the road has no shoulder and the cliffs dropped off inches from our wheels, straight down. We passed Moss Landing, Monterey, Cambria. Santa Barbara, Malibu, L.A.
The final leg of the trip we took the ferry to Coronado, fitter and leaner than we’d been in our lives. I was so infused with endorphins that I shouted to the other waiting passengers: “We just rode our bikes from San Francisco!”
One shouted back: “What did you eat?”
Time Change
We have twelve clocks in our house and each one says a different time.
The big, round one that hangs on the wall in the kitchen reads 8:02. But the one on the microwave, directly across from it, claims it’s 8:13. The clocks on the coffeemaker and the oven hover around 7:56. A few feet away, in the garage, the timer on the automatic watering system says 9:07.
My husband sets the digital clock beside our bed 20 minutes earlier than something, but I don’t know what. When I open one eye to look at in the morning, I wonder: Have I overslept? Why is it so dark outside?
Olivia’s clock has stopped completely. Mateo’s ticks under his bed. My travel alarm is set to Guatemala time — two hours before us when it’s Standard Time, one hour before us when it’s not. I synchronize it with the clock that tolls in the church tower on Fifth Avenida in Antigua. One of the reasons I love Guatemala so much is nobody cares if I’m late.
Crust
Five minutes before we dash out the door to catch the school bus to kindergarten, my daughter, Olivia, announces that she wants me to stop eating crust.
“Grandma said crust makes your hair curly,” she says.
“If only it were that simple,” I say, scavenging through the pile of shoes at the back door for her left sneaker. “I would stop eating crust this instant.” My curly, frizzy, untamed mop for a hairdo has been the bane of my existence my entire life.
A Baby in My Tummy
Mateo walks into the kitchen as I’m unloading the dishwasher wearing his red pajamas with the fire engines on them. He turns to the side so I can see his profile, and from that angle he looks like an extremely short, three-year-old Jackie Gleason: all stomach.
“Look, Mommy,” he says. “I have a baby in my tummy.”
He lifts up his fire engine top and there, tucked inside his undershirt, is his stuffed green sea turtle, Tortuga.
Car Line
It wouldn’t be so bad if Olivia wasn’t enrolled in a kindergarten with a Car Line policy. That is, you drive up, unlock the minivan door, and a parent volunteer unbuckles the child’s car seat and off she runs.
And it wouldn’t be so terrible if it were the same parent volunteer each day.
But the volunteer position rotates among the parents of students in the three primary grades, twice a day, morning and afternoon.
Dance at the Gym
I hadn’t been in a dance studio since I left New York almost twenty years ago, when I was about to turn thirty years old and finally admitted to myself I would never make it as a professional.
This was after a nearly a decade of legal proofreading on the night shift to support myself — sometimes full-time and sometimes as a temp when it became too depressing to admit I was a full-time proofreader on the night shift. Not that anything’s wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I moved to Manhattan to do.
But lately my left shoulder has been bothering me, due, I’m sure, to the fast exit my two children and I made at Target last Friday night. We often land at Target when my husband is away on business and I’m losing my mind: We wander the aisles like disoriented space travelers, Olivia and Mateo studying Michael Graves ice-cream scoops as if they’re tools from an exotic people, then the three of us shuffling into the gardening section to study that tribe’s artifacts.
The Harvest
The harvest is in! Peaches, plums, strawberries, nectarines! Raspberries, apricots, mandarin oranges! Ripe and juicy, plump and sweet. Hanging like Christmas ornaments, gleaming in the morning sun.
We grab our wicker baskets and hats, and pull on our long-sleeved shirts. We tromp down the stone steps to the garden beds at the bottom of our back slope. The branches are loaded!
“Lizard!” Mateo calls out, as a gecko scurries across our path and scoots into a dark space between the stones. My son crouches down to lizard level, eyeball to eyeball with the prehistoric thing. “Green!”
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