For Karin

Day 23 of Nanowrimo (challenge: use "Does a person make people?"):

How is it some things I remember in such vivid detail, yet others fade away. And it’s always the minor details I remember, the little facts that are so unimportant. I remember my room perfectly: it was a pantheon to gender neutrality. Both my parents were determined that I not be biased by a plethora of pink and dolls and frou frou. I had metal brackets in the walls and plain wooden boards as shelves that were painted green. My walls were a light blue with a thick yellow stripe going around the top of the entire room. Those shelves were filled with Lincoln Logs, Legos, cars and trucks. I always wonder if my girliness today—my love of high heels and pretty lingerie and, yes, the color pink—is just a natural inevitability, a genetic fact, or a reaction to my upbringing. Boy do I remember coveting that massive Barbie head that you could put makeup on and style the hair. Barbie, it goes without saying, was verboten in our house.

The shelves were lined with books—all my favorites, including Amelia Bedelia, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and Nate the Great. But I also held, what I later called, “adoption armory,” the books that my parents and I would turn to again and again: Adoption Is Forever; I Don’t Have Your Eyes; Being Adopted; The Chosen Baby; Is That Your Sister: A True Story of Adoption.

So much of my childhood is lost to the ether, memories I just can’t hold on to that have just slipped through. But one, just one, conversation has stayed with me all those years. I think it was the one where I began to piece it all together, when all the talk of adoption suddenly began to make sense.

Jocelyn would sometimes come and linger over my bookshelf, running her fingers along the titles. She was jealous because I had more books than she did. She liked for my parents to read her my books and she’d pretend she was adopted, too. I remember this one day when she was very young—probably four, so I was five—she quizzed me on the facts of life.

“Does everyone have a mommy?” she asked me.

“I dunno,” I replied. “I guess so.” For some reason this conversation is tied in my mind to the Smurfs, so I’m guessing that while we were talking, I was coloring in a Smurfs coloring book. Or maybe I had a Smurfs doll? I can’t remember. I just remember the Smurfs figuring prominently in this memory. I know I was especially—embarrassingly—fond of Smurfette.

“What about a daddy? Does everyone have a daddy?”

“Yeah, I think everyone has a daddy.”

“Just one daddy?”

“Yeah, just one daddy.”

I’m imagining here that I was coloring the Smurfette pink. Even though they were all blue, and even though my mother did her best in insure it would not be the case, even at the ripe old age of five, I had a fondness for the pastel palette.

Jocelyn thought for a moment before asking, “But you have two daddies?”

I shook my head. “No. Just one daddy.” I colored some more and answered, probably without thought, “Or maybe two. I dunno.”

“So, does a person make people?”

This was more familiar territory. This was something I understood. “No,” I told her. “Two people make people.”

“How does that happen?”

“A special naked hug.”

Jocelyn contemplated this. “A hug? If I hug someone we can have a baby?”

“No,” I corrected. “Mom said it’s a special naked hug between and man and a woman and that they both have to be grown-ups.”

“So Mommy and Daddy had a naked hug and I was born.”

“Right.”

“But they didn’t naked hug for you,” she said.

Put in such plain terms, it kind of hit me. I sat up from my coloring or whatever it was I was doing to think. “No,” I said. “They didn’t naked hug for me.”

Jocelyn then asked the question that has rooted itself into my self-conscious, that has both been completely inconsequential and completely overwhelmed my every action in life: “Then who did?”