Once upon a time there was a girl. And this girl asked her mother for a bedtime story. Being a Japanese woman, the mother was at a loss for stories to tell her American daughter.
“I don’t know any.” The mother’s thick Japanese inflection seemed to take her self doubt to another height, a morbid fear that her ignorance would lead to some great catastrophe. Like maybe her daughter will give up and stumble out the door, her diapered rear wagging a last farewell. “Okay, okay. Once upon a time there was a couple who loved each other very much. So much so, that they had too much love. This love was filling the house and spilling out the window! So for all the love in the house, this couple decided it was time to find a child. Because a child could eat up all the love and then, as a family, they could share all the love they have, forever. So they went to the baby store and asked for a baby girl who was half Japanese and half white so she could look like the couple. Well, first the baby store gave them a half Korean baby. That's because baby stores are filled with white people who don't understand that Korean and Japanese are very different. So they took it back. Then, the agency gave them a Hawaiian baby. That's closer but hula dancing is not Japanese. Japanese women do tea ceremonies. There's no hip shaking and hand waving. So they took it back. But then the store said the couple was running out of time and they may not get half Japanese girls in stock for years. But the couple had all this love and they knew the perfect baby was out there. So they waited and waited until one day, the phone rang. Guess who it was?”
The little girl, barely able to keep up with the story said, “Baby!”
“That's right. The baby store.” The mother paused. “Not a baby. Baby store.”
The little girl smiled. She had no idea she had the wrong answer. And the Mom was catching up now to correcting her daughter and going back to the story.
Uncomfortable silence.
“Baby!”
“Yes, yes. The baby store said they had one half Japanese girl in stock. The couple had to hurry. So they ran to the store and saw the most beautiful baby in the world. Her eyes were still purple blue and her hair was nothing but a patch of soft fuzz. And she smiled. Like a hundred suns. So the couple took her home and they gave her all the love they had and they will continue to give their love forever.”
The little girl was confused. This was as complicated as the one about the girl and the shoe and the pumpkin car. She was out of her depth. The mother wondered how this child was going to get into college. “How does someone smile like a hundred suns?”
Mom sighed, relieved, “They smile like you.”
The child would not understand until a couple years later that this story was truly about her. But she heard that story every night until the mother could see the recognition in her eyes. When the girl, now out of diapers and in Snoopy pajamas, said “I was in a baby store,” that was when Mom sighed and smiled. Thank God, she may just make it into college.
My story begins in a box. I was a premie, so I spent my first 21 days in an incubator. Three weeks in a box, wearing nothing but a piece of cloth pinned at the hip, bald and alone. One of the pre-adoption legends is that I cried in the incubator and no one picked me up the whole time.
I imagine this trauma gleefully. My first trauma. The source of my artist angst. Without it, I’d be just another poor schmuck writing Hallmark greeting cards, my passion for calligraphy ruling my life. But no! That is not my fate. My fate is to be pained at birth. A lonely infant in a box. Like the boy in the bubble, but younger, frailer, and female.
So I fantasize this incubator and it’s oppression. A plastic box like those nuclear power plant boxes with the test tubes of glowing green liquid in them. And instead of the test tube, there’s this little premie baby. Me. Protective gloves the size of my head jutting into the box on my left, a rubber nipple on my right that I grab at with little, pink rat like hands. I’m pink, premie skinny-fat, face stuck in this silent scream. And the nurse. She’s wide. It’s all I know because she blocks the fluorescent lighting -my three week moon. Occasionally, she puts her pudgy fingers through the yellow gloves, picks me up, burps me, and drops me back onto the cold, plastic bottom. Plunk.
No blanket. No burping rag. Just me and my cries bouncing off the walls of my oversized test tube. This alleged trauma is the theoretical explanation for a couple things. One, I’m an outtie because I cried so much my belly button fell out. Two, I live my life trying to catch up with three weeks I lost because I was stuck in a piece of plastic. Think of our history’s great figures. Mozart, Van Gogh, Jesus, etcetera. They started so young. I could use the excuse that I was early. My birthday should have been in mid-March. But that’d just sound like sour grapes. February 9. Why didn’t I hit the ground running? But it wasn’t just behind in musical slash artistic slash religious genius.
There was love waiting for me. Tons of love and cuddles and coos beyond the incubator walls and in the suburbs of Orange County. Love waited for me. And I had no idea how much. As I was gurgling and cooing and crying incessantly, alone in my little plastic box, there was a line of people wanting to take me home. Later in life, I would listen to my natural mother stoically relay to me the series of happy coincidences that led me to the two people I call Mom and Dad. While Mom and Dad went into their second year, waiting for a half Japanese girl, my natural mother was leaning a list of ethnicities, ages, and professions on her distended belly and checking off “Japanese female, 37, housewife” -Mom, “Portuguese/British male, 44, postal worker” -Dad. All this while a line of suitors, friends, and family was trying to change the nineteen year old’s stubborn mind to keep me. Two other couples were on that list, their stats lost in some adoption agency’s filing void. To believe, for a moment I had eight parents. The ones who made me and six who wanted to raise me. Eight parents and none at all. Outside the box, eight people thinking about me. From “I hope this is the one” to “damn, I should have bought a condom.” Inside the box, me all alone, crying my belly button off.
And nurture waited for me. The experiences that shape a mind and heart. What do you create in a plastic box? Was I merely a bundle of genetics? Did that fleeting fateful brush with two other couples affect my looks, my personality? Not such a weird thought if you assume there is a man out there who had nothing to do with my birth, who never looked through that hospital window, who had just a fleeting five to 45 minutes with a woman who had a fleeting eight months with me. Give him credit for the genetic pond of me, then you might as well give credit to those two couples who lost sleep one night praying, wondering if this was the one. And of course the three biggies: Mom, Dad, natural mother. What are their contributions?
My first memory is about fourteen months after my birth. I am in the house. I was in my bedroom at the far end of our little one story box house and I’m now in the hallway just outside of it. I am holding myself up against the wall as I do this new thing all the kids are doing. Walking. As I look down the hall all the way to the opposite end of the house, I see my mother. Her back is to me. She’s doing what all the kids her age are doing. Washing dishes. My emotion is fear. I’m afraid she’s too far from me. I will never reach her and her back is to me so she can’t notice my need and I can’t walk fast enough. I keep almost falling. I need a wall. But I’m moving. I’m moving.
Shit. Door jam. No wall to prop me up. Do I drop and crawl? How will I get back up after I pass the door jam? I could crawl all the way to the kitchen. No, that’s so last month. But no wall. This is reality. There is no wall for a good five or six steps. Okay, drop and crawl. It’s the only option. No, it’s not. Be a kid and walk. Forget the wall. You don’t need a wall. Go! Go!
I take a step into the middle of the hallway. Fuck the wall.
And I fall.
Then I cry.
Mom turns around.
I have no memory of her face when she sees me in the hallway, crying. I assume it was confusion. And I wonder if she remembers this moment. I assume not. Or this moment happened so often, she has many recollections of finding me crying in the hallway. Who knows why. I have no recollection on the basis of the fear. What did I need from her anyway? I wonder if I told her? Does she remember that? I wonder if she thought I was a weird kid. When I call her and ask her if she remembers this, she does not think I’m weird. But she does think I’m incorrect. “You never cried. If you cut yourself, you cried. But when you walked down the hall and fell, you’d just get up and keep walking. Grandma Agnes said she liked you so much because you never cried. You were a happy baby.”
This comes as a shock to me. I am known for being a fairly surly personality. I am never happy. I laugh. I smile. I fake it. A lot. But the overall impression from me is life sucks.
I take a break from the writing to tell my friends this story. “Mom says I was a happy child. I laughed and just started walking. No one told me to. I just walked. And when I fell down, I got back up and kept walking. Isn’t that weird?”
My friends know me so well. They know this is a crazy beginning for such an angst-ridden writer as myself.
“Justina, you are so cute.”
My life sucks.
