The Tree of Love
If there’s one assignment I’ve dreaded seeing my kids bring home, it’s the family tree assignment. It was bad enough in preschool when my son’s teacher asked the kids to bring in baby pictures. Situations like this require a girding of mental armor that always feels onerous to me; I can see feel myself sliding on the cuirass, donning my helmet, and charging forth to defend my kids’ honor. It probably shouldn’t feel like that, but it does.
Back then, I reminded the preschool teacher as gently as I could that many adopted kids don’t have baby pictures, and that mine are just lucky enough to have some, but that they bring up lots of feelings of unhappiness for my kids because in those pictures they’re inevitably alone, with neither their biological family or us smiling down on them as we cradle them. For many kids adopted from China in particular the first and only baby picture comes from the ad placed in the paper detailing their finding, a kind of want ad for found babies and missing parents, a mug shot for some undeserved criminality my children feel deeply but cannot express.
The preschool teacher blanched at my admonition. “I didn’t even think…” she trailed off.
“Most people don’t,” I said. “Why would you? It’s not part of your daily experience.”
I don’t know if they did that assignment again.
So, I’ve been gritting my teeth over the years, preparing for a family tree assignment. It hasn’t come yet, but I think about it all the time — the way our tree looks now. We’re like one of those miraculous grafting experiments that bear many different kinds of fruit on one tree. I like it. But I don’t know how my children feel about how different they are from their kin. I’m not even certain how much they feel our family difference yet.
As my son often says, “Oh, Mommy, it doesn’t matter that you’re white.” Part of him still doesn’t believe that I’m not Chinese, that I didn’t bring him home from the hospital. He still imagines that he was always mine, and that what I’ve told him of his birth up until his adoption is a fantastical story that has nothing to do with reality. He admits he has no feelings for his biological parents and no interest in finding them. What was missing for him has been made whole.
My daughter, on the other hand, had more time with her biological parents before her abandonment, and therefore more attachment. I believe that shows in the cycles of anxiety she goes through about them. She wants to know what they look like. Did her smile come from them? Does she get her big feet from her biological mom or dad? She worries endlessly about what they would think of her, whether they’d be proud. Do they think of her? Have they replaced her with another child? Sometimes she worries that they are ill or injured. When she was much younger, she would tell me that she needed to return to China “to rescue them.” She would talk often of all of us living together in one house and growing a garden together. She will always be searching for those missing parts of herself, shadows she tries to reach but cannot quite touch, roots beneath the soil of her being she cannot see.
All this prompted me to do an art project with them that I called “The Tree of Love.” I asked each of them to draw a tree with many branches. My son drew an entire ecosystem. My daughter drew a bow around her tree that said, “Care for me. Love me.” My thought was to put shadowy figures at the roots of the trees to represent their biological parents, then on the branches to paste pictures of all the people who love them. Not just family members but family friends, teachers, their pets, so that they would know that at all times they’re surrounded by love.
The pictures have been slowed in their arrival by COVID, just as everything has. The world we knew included visits to relatives, dinners with aunties, movies with family friends, piano and ballet lessons with doting teachers, Lunar New Year celebrations with the Chinese School, farflung visits across the world to see friends. But for the past year, it’s been just us. It felt sometimes like the tree of love shrank to one branch, and I worried that it wasn’t enough.
I think all of us parents have felt inadequacy in the face of a pandemic we could neither stop nor alleviate. Of course we shouldn’t feel this way, but we do.
I remember feeling that way another time when I took my son alone to Boston for surgery. One evening after a long battery of painful tests, I made a mistake and got on the wrong bus. Hours later, we finally were back in the neighborhood where we were staying. I got off the bus two blocks early, afraid we’d keep going down the wrong path. I will never forget my tiny toddler son, so tired he could barely walk, trailing behind me in the darkness and snow. I had a bad back and could not carry him, but he followed me doggedly until we collapsed together in the bed at home, warm and safe at last. There in Boston, his entire world shrank to me.
But I could not have done it without the community of angels that rose up and supported us — from the medical flight that brought us there to the local writers who met us at our house, carried in luggage and groceries, took us to medical appointments, and kept checking on us throughout our time there. Even friends from as distant as Paris ordered food and ice cream for us. And my aunt flew up to be with us on the day of the surgery. We were held up in strong branches the entire time we were there, wrapped so securely that our cradle never once fell.
That memory alone has been a powerful sustainer to me during the times of the pandemic when I feel most inadequate. Before the pandemic, I was feeling wistful, wishing that I’d had more time with my children since we’d adopted them at almost three and I’d only had three months of leave with both of them before I had to put them in daycare full-time while I worked. I had all these ideas about things we’d do together — crafts, projects, camping trips, etc. I would make sure they’d had what I hadn’t. I didn’t want them ever to feel alone or abandoned again.
Alas, though we did a few of the things I’d planned, we certainly didn’t do nearly enough of them. We went nowhere during the pandemic, because it just wasn’t safe. We barely even went for a drive. Once, I ordered eclairs from a bakery that we had to drive an hour to pick up. It felt unbelievably decadent. Everything pretty much became utilitarian, except for when the kids played on their tablets or watched TV. And yet, I was trying, trying and failing, so hard to be that entire tree of love for them, mostly alone because my husband as a biosafety officer had to work even more outside the home during the pandemic than normal.
Even then, friends sent little gift packages or links to things they thought the children would be interested in. One of their guardian angels FaceTimed with them, and we were able to get a few playdates with a classmate of my son’s. Another friend sent a Halloween-themed Easter egg hunt since we didn’t go trick-or-treating and she sent gifts when the kids were feeling unwell or sad. Little seeds of care were constantly planted, and I tried to nurture them as best I could.
My children went back to school on March 8. They both requested it. They miss their friends, their school. I think they love the ritual of it; the classrooms designed for them — recess, gym, music, hanging out in the cafeteria — all the things that can’t really be done over Google Meet. All the things that are not the sameness of home. And even though it still won’t be quite the same because they’ll be in a hybrid situation with a teacher who now must teach in-person and virtual at once, still they want to the chance to feel like they’re in school again, instead of sitting in their bedrooms all day.
I worry for them there. I do. It’s tempting to shield them forever from the cruelties I know may come as a result of their race and their adoption. But I also believe they should have some say in their own education — I know I had little enough of that myself — and so, if they want to go back, I’m letting them. It does make that lost year seem pointless in one way, but in another, I think we realized important things about our own limitations, how much room there still is to grow, and how very important their community of love is.
That love is far more important than blood. It holds them aloft in its branches and will not let them go.