Instant Mom (19 page)

Ilaria is inquisitive bordering on nosy, and this has evolved into her being thoughtful and remembering characteristics about each person, from who enjoys grapes to who plays hockey. To make friends feel appreciated, she brings out gifts they once gave her, like a heart-shaped beach rock from Mark and Yeni. She asks adults questions about their day and work life as if she cares. She has so much charisma, we ponder if she’ll either be president or running her cell block. Hey, I figure either way she’s a leader.

She has those ideas I wonder if we all once had before adult common sense squashed our imaginations. Once she said: “Mom, I’m gonna make a purse for you that’s a robot and it’ll pay for anything.” The simplicity kids see things with is eye-opening. Once during a sleepover, I hear a female cousin she adores whisper to her, “Don’t tell anyone, but when I grow up, I’m going to be a wizard.” There is a pause in the dark, and I hear Ilaria innocently ask, “You’re gonna grow a beard?”

She has those existentially puzzling thoughts four-year-olds have. One time before bed, she asks me, “Is God dead?” I say, “No.” And she says, “Well, you said he’s in heaven and when we die we go to heaven, so how did God get there?” Hm. This is not something you can boot up your search engine on.

She is already reading. Yes, sure, so is your four-year-old. But my kid didn’t speak for a while so that’s why I’m boring you with these updates. Ilaria tested as being ready a year earlier than usual for public kindergarten. We didn’t start her in school early because kids’ development can progress in fits and starts and also stall. She could have mastered some skills today and yet struggle tomorrow. Because we’ve had the benefit of my siblings being parents long before us, we get good advice that kids’ maturation during the heaviest years of acquiring knowledge is not a steady road without bumps and potholes. Also, we’ve promised ourselves we’ll give our daughter a normal life. As much as we can. Maybe she just thinks everyone’s mom teaches their daughter to do a spit take. With milk. Maybe she thinks everyone’s parents get asked for autographs and pictures. She still doesn’t know or care what we do for a living. She hasn’t asked.

When I have had to travel alone for work, Ilaria acknowledges it’s part of my job. Even though we have Anna to babysit, Ian and I have never been away from our daughter together overnight. If there’s out-of-town travel involved for work, we all go along, or one of us always stays in Los Angeles with her. She’s okay with one of her parents traveling . . . probably because she looks forward to the treasure hunts. My mom did this when she and my dad went on a vacation, and I remembered how the time passed effortlessly, as everything does with the promise of hidden candy. So I make small postcards like my mom did, put them in envelopes, and give them to her when I travel—one for each day. Inside are clues she has to solve around the house and yard to find the hidden treasure—usually candy or a plastic ring or a Scooby-Doo toy. She loves to discover the treasure. Except one time I hid a pencil. In my defense, it was a shimmering red pencil. When I got home, Ian described her expression when she found that dud gift. Her face was on par to Charlie Brown getting the rock in his stocking. She’d dropped the pencil, looked at Ian, and deadpanned, “Get some chocolate.”

Like most kids, sometimes she embarrasses her parents out of total innocence: we are meeting a new pediatrician and she announces, “My daddy has a big, big penis.”

Sometimes, her humor is observational: I had a lot of cheese at a Christmas party so the next day my face is literally swollen from the salt consumption. Ilaria wakes up and exclaims, “Mom, are you wearing a different nose?!”

When Ian heads out the front door to take her to preschool, she now asks, “Wallet, phone, keys, daughter?”

Once on a Friday night, I asked her to please try to sleep in the next morning so we could all get some rest and she slyly smiles, then at dawn whispers into my eyeball, “Let’s get this party started.”

Because we don’t make her eat everything off her plate—we just ask her to eat until her body is full—and I say “listen to your body,” now at the end of a meal, she cocks a hand beside her ear to listen and out of the side of her mouth ventriloquist style, says, “I’m full.”

The days of her Jackie Chan drop-kicks to my thorax are gone. She is gentle and amenable. And so droll that I can now wake her up in the morning by putting a cold water bottle against her upper arm. She jolts awake, squeals with laughter, and spends the rest of the day plotting to get me back. Later in the day, I take her to a studio lot with me because I’m just dropping off a casting list. As I’m speaking with the producer, she gets me back by lifting up my skirt and screaming “Ew!” at my black satin panties. (I’m only telling you this story because I had good underwear on.)

Tonight, she asks me to tell her the story again about when she was up in heaven looking down on me. I start it as usual: “I was looking up asking, when,
when
will I be a mother? And you were on a cloud, looking down at me saying ‘wait for me I’m’ ”—and she interrupts me with a wry smile and says, “No, I said, ‘Why is that lady crying? I’m trying to take a nap.’ ”

It’s a huge moment. Sure, I laugh so hard I can barely breathe, but because I see something so interesting in Ilaria’s expression. Deep satisfaction at making her mom laugh. I have the same feeling when I make my mom laugh until she can’t catch her breath. I love to make my mom laugh with my stories. And now I have a funny girl too.

The extra cot is long gone from the hallway—it’s now stored in the garage. But at night before she sleeps, because this is when the good stuff comes out, Ian and I lie in bed with her to talk. One night, Ilaria and I are looking up at the neon stars her godfather, my cousin George, sent from Australia. They’re pasted on her ceiling and when the lights first go out, they glow in the dark. Ilaria tells me all about Australian animals and how one day she’ll be an animal rescue worker. As Ilaria drifts off, I think about George, my ironic cousin, who as a teen upon seeing one of our aunt’s vast fleshy arms in a summer dress, drily declared to me, “Always remember darling, sleeveless is a privilege not a right.” He was always funny. Yes, of course he was always gay. In the same way I was always going to be an actress. We are who we are. So when people compliment us on our daughter, Ian and I thank them. But we know we did not make her funny and smart—Ilaria arrived this way.

Then, did she adapt to her environment because it’s a match made in heaven, or because she is biologically wired like us?

For example, in terms of how I feel about gay and lesbian equal rights, there isn’t any teaching to do. Ilaria has seen our own group has many same-sex couples and she is part of a generation of kids who started preschool with the kids of same-sex parents. To her it’s as common and accepted as I hope it can be soon to the generations older than her. I know she’s blasé about it because one day, we were in a diner and two cute guys in their twenties were holding hands at another table. I saw Ilaria watching them for a while. Then she turned to me and straightforwardly asked, “Do you think
he
asked him for the date, or
he
asked him?”

Is her reaction biological logic or environmental education?

Again, I’m not telling you all this to brag (okay, I am). I am now fascinated by any discussion of nature versus nurture. Maybe our human growth is a combination of both facets.

In truth, I’m telling you all these stories to dispel the myth that adopted kids are damaged. There is nothing done that a lot of love can’t undo. Someone once asked me if I think adopted children have abandonment issues. My answer is yes. We all do. That’s why so many love songs are written and we play Adele’s CDs over and over and wail to our cats about the one who left us.

But for now, Ilaria is comfortable. I always say she just walked in and turned our house into a home.

By the way, we have a new dog too.

I don’t know what it is about us, but Ian and I find a lot of dogs on the street. We’ll see one running without a collar and just groan because we know what’s coming: months of trying to find the owner. Years ago, we’d found a stray, dirty dog running along a street. No one in the neighborhood knew her or claimed her. We took her in and called her Trudy Trouble because after weeks and weeks of trying to find her a home, she’d chewed through all our screens and eaten a doorknob. She didn’t have a microchip, and no one responded to our many signs and calls to shelters. Finally someone did call and said she was theirs for a while but they didn’t want her anymore because she was “untrainable.”

We were advised if we dropped her at a shelter, she’d be put down in ten days. Trudy was very sweet, very affectionate, and very odd. She’d eat anything from shoes to hardware. I’m not talking chew. I mean eat. As in digest. No one could figure out what breed she was—she was unique looking. Sort of like a white husky and a terrier with tempestuous eyes. But she was sweet, she loved petting—she would arch her back as you stroked her fur—something I’d never seen a dog do before.

Then she displayed erratic behavior more often and almost bit Ilaria, so we hired a professional trainer. But Trudy Trouble was loving and still acted wild. She’d run around the house banging into furniture and our kneecaps. One day before I got on the plane back to Los Angeles from a New York trip, Ian informed me we had to do something about Trudy Trouble because she’d tried to bite Ilaria again. She’d wrapped her jaws around Ilaria’s leg as if, when given the chance, she was testing to see how fast she could swallow it.

I got on the plane, worried about the situation. Like many travelers, I absentmindedly flipped through that in-flight magazine. It had an article on animals. I sort of glanced at each picture—from dogs to raccoons. Then I saw a picture of Trudy Trouble. I looked closer to learn what breed she was. And under her picture I saw the word—
coyote
.

I paced until that plane landed then called Ian and screeched out that Trudy was a coyote. I’m sure Ian picked up Ilaria and ran out of the house. That evening we found a place for Trudy—a ranch where she could run wild. I know this sounds like the fake story you heard from your parents when the dog you were allergic to oddly disappeared, but the woman trying to train Trudy agreed with our assessment that she was part coyote and actually helped us place her. The owners of the ranch did not have kids and have since called to tell us Trudy is doing well and is especially happy at night when they let her out and she howls at the hill. Of coyotes.

So it’s understandable that since then we groan when we see stray dogs on the street, but we can’t help ourselves when we see their sad eyes. We pull over, go door-to-door to find the owner, and if we can’t, we put up signs in the neighborhood and take them home until we can find them a home. After we found another little white-spotted puppy who peed on every surface we owned until we got him placed, we vowed we had to stop picking up strays.

Then one evening on a neighborhood walk, Ian spotted a brown lump of mangled fur running toward us. This little dog’s pink tongue hung out, a chewed rope was around his throat, and he had a bite clean through one ear. No one in the neighborhood claimed him. So we brought him home—the bottom of his paws were so soft, it seemed as if he’d never been outdoors. Of course he didn’t have a microchip, so we put the standard signs up everywhere from the vet’s office to around the neighborhood.

But we really didn’t want anyone to come forward. He was as soft as a plush-toy animal. He didn’t bark or shed, and he even pooped outside the house. We all loved him. It was important to Ilaria that we didn’t give this dog away. She wanted to adopt him.

So after a month, the vet said no one had come forward so we could adopt him. Ever the ombudsman, Ilaria incorporated Core suggestions and named him Louie Salvatore Dominick Bagel Vardalos Gomez. The minute we got him home, Louie shed all over the furniture and pooped on my white carpet. It is once again a test. I can see it in Louie’s eyes—do you really want me? The answer is, yes. I can get a new carpet. But there’s only one Louie.

Manny is at first annoyed with his new little brother/shadow. We try to give Manny extra attention and assure him he’s still top dog. But Manny gives us a look as if he’s saying, “That’s what you said about the little girl and then she got her own room.”

Plus, Louie has a habit of physically leaning against Manny. And Manny is like Ian, in that he’s hot when he eats, he’s hot when he sleeps, he’s hot when he swims. So Manny is annoyed and tries to ditch Louie, who dutifully follows him from room to room, then leans and snores. But after a while, Manny realizes Louie has his own food bowl, doesn’t take up much space, and hates squirrels too. So he decides Louie is okay. I try to house-train Louie and get him to stop tasting the piquancy of the carpets and my shoes and it is extremely time-consuming and hard for him to break these habits. Plus he has a pornographic habit of waking us all up by putting his tongue into our mouths.

But one evening Ilaria cries about not wanting to take a bath . . . and Louie sidles up to her and licks her tears from her cheeks until she laughs. Her mood is completely changed, and as she gets into the bath, I decide this little dog can poop on my pillow and I’ll love him forever.

I realize adopting a dog makes Ilaria feel even safer in the family unit. Slowly, slowly Ilaria let go of the anxieties she was feeling and settled in. Is it her nature that helped her fit in so well? Or is it the nurturing? Ilaria calls Manny and Louie and herself our “kids” and I can see for her that Louie is a completion of our family.

By the way, even though like most kids, Ilaria occasionally said she wanted a sibling, that has passed. Yes, we are still on the waiting lists for various countries and know the phone could ring with a sibling. But I am living in the moment and don’t think about it. By the way, it’s a nosy question often posed to me and for the record: asking a woman if she’s going to have more kids is like asking a man if he plans to do something about that bald spot.