February 2007

In 1979, when I entered Parsons School of Design, I began the study of Environmental Design. This was trendy at the time — a discipline covering industrial design, interior design, and architectural design. Of the three, I gravitated towards the third of these, mostly because it seemed the most definitive, macho (read: powerful), and least trivial. I hung out with the more intellectual crowd as a result, the crowd that was less concerned with post-graduate employment than with learning about the world through an architect’s eye. The fact that my portfolio from my construction drafting class got me my first job, rather than my design studio work, tells you the ultimate value of this choice of mine. But, I was 19. That excuse works for me.

My mooney-eyed admiration for architects led me to books about Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, a mid-winter trip to the midwest to worship in the temple of the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, debates about the talent of the later modernists like Saarinen and Kahn (I preferred Saarinen because his work was contextual, however awkwardly so, and was rebuffed by my modernist friends), and working as a student slave for Steven Holl, now a renowned modern architect in his own right.

The post-modernists were just beginning to surface, and in very silly ways. Michael Graves’ municipal building in Portland, Philip Johnson (turncoat veteran of the offices of the most iconic of the modernists, Mies van der Rohe) and his silly “highboy” AT&T building in Manhattan, and the absolutely derivative and scary, yet regrettably influential, residential architecture of Robert A.M. Stern. These were also the days when Tom Wolfe published his non-fiction essay, “From Bauhaus to Our House,” which skewered modernism as cold and far too “European” for a more sumptuous and textured American sensibility.

So, my introduction to post-modernism was within a highly modernist context. Parsons proudly modelled its curriculum after that of the Bauhaus, and I was surrounded by modernists. Also, these early examples to me seemed somewhat silly — I failed to see what taking a big box (Wolfe’s experience of the modern) and dressing it up with gimgracks, or building houses that were cheap imitations of pre-modernist pseudo-Victorian woodframe houses had to offer to humanity that was as transformative as the notions the modernists ushered in. The notions of negative space, expressive materials, introspective space, and the like. The modern notion seemed endless, the post-modern a silly regression by those who lacked the vision to “do” what was modern. The moderns had writers like Norris Kelly Smith, Kenneth Frampton, and Ada Louise Huxtable. The post-moderns had the odious Paul Goldberger, in the pocket of Philip Johnson for sure. The moderns won.

It didn’t matter that, deep inside, I did feel a bit of the emptiness that Wolfe was alluding to. That voice was drowned out by the heady intellectualism shared on the barstools, living rooms, and beds of Greenwich Village. My utterly intellectually defensible and free sexuality, freedom of thought, freedom of substance abuse, was as modern as modern could be. Their own whispers of emptiness, of the finite, were only whispers back then. Those were the days, for sure. But, life brings turns in direction, and passions light in places once dark. My passion for and work in the field of architecture died in 1992 when I left my second husband (an architect) and chose never to look back.

The darned term “post-modernism” lingers. Unbeknownst to me when I was younger, there were other disciplines in the world besides architecture that were wrestling with the meaning of this new word. I am now reading about post-modernism in the context of faith. That seems to me to be a whole new ballgame, and my older notions of post-modernism, informed by those early impressions, is beginning to be, however nauseatingly poetic this may sound, “deconstructed.” Ugh.

But, I am beginning to get some clarity on why no church has ever felt 100% comfortable to me. Highly uncomfortable with the Catholic Church of my upbringing (birth control, marriage for priests, and homosexuality, to name a few issues), I turned to the Unitarian Universalist movement. Talk about modernist! They had it all: freedom of thought, no outside influences that you didn’t want to let in, your own “personal journey” being the primary driver, and seven bland principles which were, essentially, the golden rule, in discrete steps to substitute for a “creed.”

The UUs held my interest for a few years, but then it began to wane. More questions were going unanswered by this lack of direction and focus. The role of religion as oppressor began to be substituted with the role as too much choice as oppressor. For all the talk in the UU about personal truth, I felt like I was drifting away from truth. Not that I think pluralism is a bad way to organize the world, but I do think it’s a weird way to organize a faith. I must say, I still don’t get it, and I tried. I really tried.

So, I find myself now in a liberal Christian church as a true believer. But, not a literal “Bible-based” worshipper, as many of my fundamentalist friends would define themselves. What does that make me? I am reading now a book by Brian McLaren called “A New Kind of Christian.” I recommend this book for anyone who is scrambling for a sense of what is real in their faith in these times of fundamentalist vociferousness from multiple corners, not all Christian. I am only half-way done, and I’m already getting some “AHA!” moments about just how rooted in modernism I have been. (As a side note, awful critic that I am, McLaren is not a very good writer. You’ll need to get beyond his high school writing style to get to the essence of the book.)

I am hoping to come out of this process with something better than the architects have had to offer us: old shapes in new decorations. I think something new is afoot inside of me, a giving way to a newer space I haven’t really explored. The closest word I can think of is one I learned in early sobriety: Surrender. I will stay open, and see where this leads.

Blake asked me this morning how you get a baby in your tummy. That’s tough to tell a 4-year old. I said that if you have someone in your life you love a whole lot, a baby sometimes grows like a seed in your tummy. He then said, “You did that with me a long time ago.”

Gosh, I wish it were true. I really do. I had to tell him, again, that I wish more than ANYTHING that he had grown in my tummy. But, he grew in his birth mother’s tummy, and I’ll never forget the day he was born, when I first saw him.

He then turned around, away from me, buried his head in a pillow on the sofa, and got very quiet. He popped up and said, “I know! when we get our baby stistah from afficah, you can put her in your tummy.” I said, “Do you think so? I’m not sure. I don’t think I can, but that sounds like a really fun idea!” I tickled him. I laughed.

My heart broke inside. Silently for me. Silent enough to hear his break, too.

We are adopting from Ethiopia, if all goes well, later this year. Yes, we are white, and I’m sure there are many folks who would consider our doing this as some sort of race-blind, liberal, do-gooder, Brangelina-wanna-be gesture. But, it’s really not that simple, or maybe it’s just simpler still.

We want a daughter. We want a daughter with African roots because our son is bi-racial. We also do not want to go through what we went through 18 months ago, when a birthmother took her baby back. Our son has not been the same since.

So for the sake of our son, we do not want to have a baby sister taken away from him again. To adopt domestically, either through the foster system, or through private placement, the possibility exists that his heart will once again be broken. Where I could handle it, and I think my husband could as well, I won’t do that to my son. I just won’t.

When we were mourning the loss of our oh-so-brief daughter, a friend of mine told me about Ethiopia and the tremendous number of orphans there. We had not considered international adoption before that time because, on principle, we felt that there were plenty of kids in the USA that needed homes. But the system is not set up to advocate for the needs of individual children or adoptive parents. It is set up largely, for better or worse, to advocate for the birth family’s rights, with the thought that, if at all possible, birth families should remain intact. I have no objectivity on whether this is a good thing, but I do know that we cannot allow ourselves to risk our hearts breaking agan. We have principles, but we have limits, too. We are human.

We have made the choice to go overseas, to be, essentially, guaranteed a forever baby (Blake asks if his “new little stistah will live with us a supah, supah, SUPAH, long time?”) at the end of this process. People are as tongue-tied around adoptive families as they are around people who’ve just lost a family member. They say things that are very strange, trying to comfort, or congratulate, but it’s always so lame. Things like, “Oh, the people from there are very beautiful.” I think they say that because they are not so dark or “black” as some Africans are, and they want to let us know that, if we are going to adopt a “non-white” child, we are going, at least, for a high-quality one. It’s kind of a backhanded compliment, unconsciously racist, and a little obnoxious, but I have to give them slack. People do try, and we try, too. I still don’t quite have the hang of taking care of my son Blake’s kinky curls. But I love him to the point of utter pain in my heart at the mere thought of his being hurt. I feel that way already about this baby, who I feel may already have been born. She is here, and I can feel her. She lives now, perhaps struggling for life, but waiting for us to come and get her. I pray for her mother, her father, her family who, out of love, or perhaps desperation, will think the unthinkable and do the undo-able: give up their child to a stranger.

So, if I am going to go down this road, I want to do it as best I can. With a child from a country like Ethiopia, we have an enormous amount of history to understand. We have a culture that is so unrelated to our own in so many ways that we need not just to understand in a historical way, but in an emotional way. The more I delve into it, the more overwhelmed I am about the beauty and mystery of this country, a true cradle of civilization.

I will never really understand how a country, a continent really, with such amazing cultural values and natural resources could contain such strife and poverty. I know that my own ancestors had a hand in that. But, Ethiopia is a very, very noble and unique nation among the nations of Africa. The history of the Queen of Sheba and the Lions of Judah, the Ark of the Covenant, the rich Jewish history (I had no idea! A dumb American, I did not consider that of course parts of Africa would have a rich Jewish history). Ethiopian leaders were the direct descendents of King Solomon. Ethiopians were never sold into slavery, and hold that fact very, very proudly. It’s the country where Lucy was found, the human mother of us all. Not to mention the most famous Lion of Judah himself, Haile Selassie. Through him they became the first independent, modern nation in Africa– quite a feat in the early- to mid-20th Century. No wonder he’s considered almost a deity:

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This is just so much to absorb, so much to understand. I feel very heavy-hearted at ripping a child away from this amazing, magical place to live in suburban Virginia with a couple of white Americans. For sure, we will become connected to the Ethiopian neighborhoods of DC, to African and Multicultural events and festivals locally, and to our diverse group of friends. But we are white, so very white, and I feel unworthy of this beautiful child whom I have not yet even met.

We parents who have to adopt to have children owe a debt of gratitude that no human could ever repay. To take someone’s birth child and raise them as your own is a solemn and sacred promise. In the case of my son’s family, we looked them in the eye when we made our promises. With our daughter, we will not have that opportunity. We will have to try to gather as much information as we can about her family, her community, the story of her birth, and why she was offered for adoption. We will not be able to comfort her mother, hug her, give her flowers, listen to her weep, as we did with our son’s birth mother. We will not be able to share diaper changing as we did with our son’s birth father. Our daughter’s birth mother will cry silently, perhaps alone, perhaps dying herself. It seems wrong that our joy should have to be at that price. Surely, the longing to give a good life to a vulnerable child is a powerful one. It is the longing that adoptive parents and birthparents share, even if they never meet.

“Love my daughter,” she might say to us, if she had the chance, among so much more. We will, I promise we will, as best we can. But we all know, that even by a birth parent, some hurts cannot be soothed. At some point, with our son, and someday with our daughter, we will all know that we could never fully heal their first, total, and primal wound. We can only love as a human loves, and it will never be enough.