The subtitle of Melissa Faye Greene’s memoir, out in paperback this week, breezily summarizes the plot. But the narrative slows down into a story that is filled with the joy, the pathos, and the frenzy that comes with a big family bound together by loving-kindness.

Greene has nine children—four of whom are biological and five of whom are adopted. With the exception of the first child that Greene and her husband, Donny Samuel adopted, four out of their five adopted children were born in Ethiopia. But it’s Jesse’s adoption from Bulgaria that builds the scaffolding of Greene’s enchanting memoir No Biking in the House Without a Helmet.

My husband Ken and I talked about adopting several years ago after close friends adopted two sons from Ethiopia. I watched the tapes sent to our friends from the orphanage in Addis Ababa. Each time a new child was introduced on film, I was terrified and excited all over again. Who would my friends choose? At the time these children were the ages of my young kids—beautiful, innocent, sweet—and they broke my heart over and over again.

I can’t give you a good reason why we didn’t adopt. I can give you a million reasons why we should have. We had a lot of love to give and compared to most of the world, an abundance of resources to bestow on a child.  And I felt I was getting better at this parenting thing. As my kids grew older, I could see the bigger picture. I knew that I wasn’t stuck with diapered, runny-nosed, colicky babies forever.

I thought about adoption anew when I interviewed Greene five years ago about her fourth book, the award-winning There Is No Me Without You—a compassionate, vivid account of an orphanage in Addis Ababa and the remarkable foster mother who founded, grew and ruled the place.

In No Biking, Greene begins the book with the hard-won wisdom that expanding her family was not solely about filling an empty nest. Adoption for the Greene-Samuel family was about loving a child, reconfiguring the family to integrate that child into the family, and reveling in a new group dynamic.

Greene writes about four-year old Jesse’s early rages—he was a madman on the flights from Sofia to London to Atlanta. At home he horded food. And if anyone came near his food he threw an earth-quaking tantrum. His language was as mangled as his behavior. Jesse suffered the physical and mental deprivation common in children languishing in run-down Eastern European and Russian orphanages. Greene waited for Jesse to come around, and more poignantly, waited to have an affirmative answer to the question that haunts many adoptive parents: Do I love him yet?

Jesse blossomed into a charming if mischievous little boy.  And within his new family, he took the lead in welcoming his sister Helen, who was the first to be adopted from Ethiopia. Greene and her husband are committed Jews who are aware that Jewish identities were never one-size-fits-all for their children. Rather the potential and the desire to be Jews were nurtured in each of them. In the case of Jesse and Helen, early on brother and sister bonded when Jesse served as Helen’s impromptu mikveh guide.

Greene writes that with the exception of his circumcision under anesthesia, Jesse had loved converting to Judaism. “Now in the backseat of the car, he excitedly prepared Helen for her visit to the mikveh. ‘The blue-green water will cover all your body and make you Jewish,’ he enthused.”

Soon after Solomon and then biological brothers Daniel and Yosef were also adopted from Ethiopia. The question of conversion was trickier for Daniel and Yosef who were eight and eleven and had been raised as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. But the boys eventually came into their own as Jews and chose to be bar mitzvahed.

My urge to adopt was recently reawakened as I wandered around the mall and came upon a gallery of photographs of kids waiting to be adopted. The pictures were captioned with just a first name and a biographical line like: “I draw exceptionally well. I want to be a superhero.” One girl with the lovely, hopeful, yet somehow fragile name of Destiny wanted to be a teacher.

That day in the mall I wanted to take every one of those kids home with me. But as Greene so wisely observes, adoption is not a good response to a humanitarian crisis. “Adoption is the appropriate response to only one situation: the need of a child for a new family, combined with a family’s desire for a new child.”

As difficult as it is to contemplate, I think I have my answer to why we never adopted a child. But I’m in awe of families like my friends’ and Melissa Fay Greene’s who truly forge bonds, never falling into the trap of serving as a way station or a group home or becoming one of those families who “collect” orphans.

And I pray that Destiny and her cohort soon meet the loving parents they deserve to have.

Published April 15th, 2012  ·  www.rumpus.net. filed under rumpus original

Neck Up.

If a man touches your tetas you will lose control and then lose everything.

Touch your cookie only to clean it. And do not clean it for too long.

Never talk to a man who has a tattoo.

Marry a Jewish boy.

Marry a professional Jewish boy.

If you use tampons you will lose your virginity.

If you wash your hair on the first day of your period you will be infertile.

If you want a baby girl, have an orgasm before your husband. If you want a boy, do not have an orgasm.

Give birth without drugs, that way you can have a big meal right after you give birth and you won’t feel sick to your stomach.

Do not scream in labor. Be a lady.

Do not leave your children with anyone except family.

Do not bring up your children to be gringos.

Do not paint your toenails red. Only chusma girls have red toenails.

Chusma girls also wear ankle bracelets and snap their gum.

Wear high heels—they make your legs look prettier.

Never wear sneakers.

Wear slippers with a heel at home. Your husband will like that.

Grow your hair long. Brush your hair a lot so that you don’t have bolones.

Wax your eyebrows every two weeks.

Swing your culo slightly when you walk down the street so that you are appealing yet still a lady.

Do not wear sleeveless shirts. Chusmas wear sleeveless shirts.

Do not knot your shirt so your bariga shows. Only chusmas show their barigas.

Pray that your husband has a long life.

Do not marry again when you’re old. You do not want to get stuck taking care of some old man you hardly know.

Pray that your children will take care of you.

Fast on Mondays and Thursdays if you want your wishes to come true. The gates of heaven are open on those days because the Torah is read in the Call.

Do not mix meat with milk.

Do not eat puerco and do not eat like a puerca.

Watch your weight. Men do not like gordas.

Get an education. You may need it if your husband turns out to be like your father who doesn’t make enough money and then you have to go to work.

Open your own checking account.

Make sure the department store credit cards are in your name only.

Make sure the house is also in your name.

Give your children everything.

Save something for yourself and don’t tell anyone.

*A Juban is a person who is both Jewish and Cuban

···
Judy Bolton-Fasman is writing a family memoir called 1735 ASYLUM AVENUE. (It’s the address of the house in which she grew up. Really). Judy is an award-winning columnist on family

It’s spring. It’s Passover. The days are longer. The trees are blooming. And in these past few months new trees – giving trees inspired by Shel Silverstein’s iconic book “The Giving Tree” – have grown out of Isy Mekler’s bar mitzvah project.

Isy, a seventh grader at Solomon Schechter Day School of Boston, was determined to emphasize the mitzvah in his bar mitzvah. Along the way he assembled a museum quality exhibit, excelled as a fundraiser for a national literacy program called Reach Out and Read and received a Make a Difference Award from the John F. Kennedy Library, where he was the only student who spoke at the ceremony.

Isy’s Giving Tree Project started as an English class assignment to write a fan letter to an author whose book was life-changing for the student. Although Shel Silverstein died in 1999, Isy memorialized him, praising the late author and illustrator for helping him understand life a little better through the tree’s unselfish giving.

“When I read your book ‘The Giving Tree,’ I thought it was absurd that a tree could be happy after stripping itself of everything it had. The tree gave away all its apples. The tree gave away all of the branches it had, and its trunk. But the tree was still glad that it could keep giving. …Now I understand how divine it feels to give.”

Isy wanted to “give” his love of reading to other kids. But he realized that such joy is not easy to come by for children who can’t afford to buy books or don’t have access to well-stocked libraries in their schools. He was also well aware that a meaningful commitment to literacy meant giving everything he had in the form of time and heart and love.

And then, there were the trees. Isy designed trees for artists to paint or illustrate that were composed of two quarter-inch thick hardboard panels that slid into each other to create a three-dimensional tree. Each tree measured 19.5 inches in height and 15 inches in width.

By the time the prototype for the trees arrived from Colombia – Isy’s family is originally from Colombia and his grandmother there oversaw the manufacturing and delivery – Isy had written to more than 300 artists, 28 of whom committed to painting or illustrating a tree to support kids and literacy. In addition, fine art glass artist Dale Chihuly donated seven signed copies of his books to Isy’s project, and illustrator Karla Gudeon donated a giclée print called “Big Tree.”

When Isy became a bar mitzvah last November, the participating artists had completed the trees in time to be used as table centerpieces for his celebration. Some of the trees incorporate explicitly Jewish themes. Tikva Adler, a North Carolina-based artist, painted her interpretation of an Eytz Chayim, the Tree of Life. Adler elaborated that creating art was akin to experiencing “prayer or meditation because it brings my awareness fully into the present moment.”

Joy Chertow, Isy’s art teacher at Solomon Schechter, created a weeping willow tree using wire. Isy noted that Chertow was the only artist who changed the shape of the tree. He pointed out, “When seen from above, Joy’s tree is more oblong and the wire seems to be swinging with a non-present wind.”

Raquel Rub, a Peruvian-Jewish artist who makes her home in Miami, painted her artistic interpretation of “Creation.” In a recent e-mail, Rub explained that when she visited Israel, she was moved by: “Four sites in Israel where I was inspired by Creation. In Hebron, I visited the burial sites of the patriarchs. In Tiberias, I took a boat ride on Lake Tiberias. In Jerusalem, we remember where the Temple stood. Tzfat is the mystical city. Together, these four places reminded me of the elements earth, water, fire and air to make the piece you now have called ‘Creation.’”

Illustrator and children’s book author, Aaron Becker, was so impressed with Isy’s commitment to service that he designed a tree based on his upcoming children’s book called “Journey,” which is set, in part, in a forest. The material was a natural fit for Becker, whose tree Isy admired for its air of mystery and “the beautiful shadowing and the soft glow of the lanterns.”

In his acceptance speech at the JFK Library, Isy said that his father “was the driving force that inspired me to enjoy reading.” He also noted, “I want to provide other kids with this wonderful gift, and I want to make a difference.”

And Isy continues to make a difference in the waiting room of a Roslindale clinic where he volunteers to read to the young patients twice a month.

Isy Mekler’s Giving Tree Project will be on display at the Danforth Museum in Framingham from April 15 to August 15 as part of the museum’s literacy initiative. After the exhibit, the trees will be auctioned, with all proceeds going to Reach Out and Read.

Kelle Groom—my friend and mentor—sees her best-selling memoir come out in paperback today. It’s a luminous book in which Kelle performs the delicate dance of being both lyrical and gritty without a misstep. The central event in the book is her unflinching account of giving birth to her son when she was 20, unmarried, unmoored and heavily drinking. Her aunt and uncle, childless and still young enough to raise a child, adopted her son when he was four days old. My friend held him twice and never saw him again. She still hears his cries as he was bundled up and taken away.

Kelle is a prize-winning poet and the title of her book—I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl—is both hopeful and elegiac in its reference to the blue dress  she wore as a flower girl. She was six when she walked down the aisle strewing rose petals. I was six too when I was the flower girl at my uncle’s wedding. I was all tulle and scratchy netting in a dress that turned me into a preternaturally aqua-colored cupcake. Anna was a flower girl when she was five. She wore a long rose dress with patent leather Mary Janes and fancy white socks that peeked out from the hem as she methodically scattered petals before my sister the bride. Kelle knows the tender soul of a flower girl.

After reading Kelle’s book and tiptoeing my way through the rush of my own memories, I believe that Kelle wrote her way to something that Abraham Joshua Heschel called “radical amazement”—a holy appreciation for a moment in time. In my case, it was a holy appreciation for motherhood. When Anna got some good news recently, she was so happy she jumped on my back without thinking. We were both surprised when I gave her a piggyback ride. It had been a half dozen or so years since I last tromped around the house with her on my back.

I’m not nostalgic for diapers or mashed bananas. But I miss lifting my children and feeling their beating hearts against mine. I miss their shoes that once fit in the palm of my hand. I’ve stashed away one of Anna’s onesies—the one a friend made exuberantly announcing Anna’s name, date of birth and weight in red and purple waterproof marker.

I met Kelle six years ago in a writing workshop in Provincetown. She presented a chapter from her memoir in which she was casting about for a definitive way to link the Superfund site in the Massachusetts mill town where her only child Tommy lived with the leukemia he developed at 9 months of age. He died in 1982 when Kelle and I were 21. I had just graduated from college and was paralyzed with anxiety about what would happen to me without the familiar scaffolding of a school routine. I couldn’t imagine being anyone’s mother let alone experiencing the aching, exquisite love I’d come to have for my children still to be born more than a decade later.

A few years ago I found my college journals in the shaggy, pink bedroom of my girlhood. I cringe when I remember that I hoped someone would discover remarkable poignancy in my self-conscious and self-important teenage angst. I wonder if Anna keeps a journal. I wonder when I stopped knowing everything about her.

When she wasn’t serving drinks at a bar or dusting the shelves at a health food store, Kelle often drank herself into a black oblivion in the early ’80s. Yet she never stopped writing poetry. I moved to New York and wrote bad fiction. When Kelle and I went out to dinner last year to celebrate the initial sale of her memoir, she had not had a drink in 26 years. At the time, I wish I had known that we had met within days of the 28^th anniversary of her son’s death. I’d like to think that when we talked about Tommy that night it felt as deep as a yahrtzheit—the anniversary of loved one’s death—for Kelle.

At the end of the book, Kelle sees her son in 8mm films that she has made into DVDs. She writes that she was afraid that these reels of film from her aunt and uncle  would crumble before they were digitized. She was afraid she would crumble if she got to view them. But they survived to and went digital. And Kelle  watched her son celebrate his first and last birthday from beginning to end in a hospital room. He will be dead in two months.

Kelle has shown me that the peace of motherhood is a restless one. She wears the ocean in the shape of motherhood. Every woman does. I’ve come to a teary acceptance of tears and joy in my own mothering.  Anna is a young woman but I’m still thrilled—radically amazed, really—when she puts her head on my shoulder and calls me Mommy.