Instant Mom (9 page)

Now, Ian and I wordlessly take in this room. Tomorrow a little girl will be living here. We are in shock. We barely sleep.

The next morning, I
make a long list and Ian flies out the door to get diapers, milk, bottles, and food. He comes back a few hours later and I can’t see him in his Prius—just a part of his face is visible in the front seat. The car is completely packed with pink things: quilts, sheets, pillows, toys, blankets. And one giant red Elmo doll.

We keep looking at each other, trying to get grounded, to be sure this is real—I suspect this is the alarm all expectant parents feel. Am I doing enough to prepare?

We quickly drag everything from Ian’s car into the house. We don’t know what a child of preschool age eats or plays with. I pull a T-bone steak and a teething ring out of a shopping bag—which one is appropriate? Will this jack-in-the-box toy scare her, or—it suddenly pops up in my face and I leap backward, bouncing off Ian. We keep running past each other putting toys and snacks out, then away, then out again—we’re completely freaked.

We run to take showers. Just as we throw on clothes, the front gate buzzer rings.

Fourteen hours after that phone call, I run down the stairs. I hear a rushing sound in my ears of my accelerated heartbeat pushing the blood through my body.

We sprint outside and immediately stop short on the front walk, trying to look as casual, just as friendly as possible. Where is she? I can’t see her in the back of the car. I’m dreading that they’re here to tell us they’ve made a mistake.

Then, surrounded by social workers, lawyers, foster care workers . . . I see her. There she is, our little girl. They’re taking her from the car and I see the sun’s light envelope her beautiful head as if to say, look at this shiny present.

The lightest of breezes makes my arms feel warm and yet chilled. I ache to run across the lawn and scoop her up, but I make myself take it slow. Ian and I are smiling at her as we slowly walk toward the car. I can smell jasmine from the bushes across the front fence as they bring her closer. I can hear a light buzzing of people talking, greeting each other. But I’m looking only at my daughter.

She’s here.

A social worker puts her down and without hesitation, she just walks through the front gate, toward us. She is so brave.

In the front yard, Manny intercepts her. He gives her a sniff, then licks her entire face. She doesn’t flinch at the big furry dog tasting her. Instead, she giggles.

I take her hand; it’s warm and so very, very soft. I want to cry, but I make myself keep it together. I want to be composed for this imperturbable little girl. Ian and I gently lead her toward the front door. She is calmly exploring the front walk, so we now let go of her hands and let her take her time. Then, she looks up at the house and casually walks in as if she’s lived here her whole life.

She spends the entire
day walking around, exploring everything. She goes into every room, opens every drawer, every cupboard, and just looks at everything. We just let her do what she wants so she feels comfortable.

Finally, the social workers, lawyers—everyone—leaves. We’re alone. Ian and I are not sure what to do—feed her, bathe her, watch TV? I’m not sure what we should be doing.

This sweet little girl is still looking around, and she won’t eat. She is too inquisitive to stop moving. Like all children, she arrived without an instruction manual. But this child walks. So we just follow her around.

I start to worry that we don’t know anything about her habits—Does she nap? When does she sleep at night? In the bag that came with her are two diapers and a change of clothes—no note. Again, like with an infant handed to new parents, there are no instructions on habits and sleep patterns. We’re on our own. We don’t know what she likes to eat, if she has food allergies. We assure ourselves that the social workers and this process are so thorough, surely we would have been informed. Ian and I keep offering her things like cereal or a cookie and she shakes her head. We now know she knows four words:
Mommy, hi, bye,
and
no
.

We talk to her as if she can understand. She does. We realize she’s just too excited to eat. She keeps exploring.

I’m relieved when she finally does take a bottle of milk. She can hold it and keep moving on her discovery tour. We now find the crayons and paper left over from niece and nephew visits and she sits at the kitchen table and lets loose with a drawing of an explosion of colors. I put the date on it so we can frame it for her room.

We decide to take her upstairs; she explores some more, and we now show her her new room. Her beautiful brown eyes take it in. Again, it’s as if she understands. She seems to be accepting this new situation.

It’s now nine
P.M.
, so we take off her clothes. I marvel at how soft her skin is as I put her in the bed and cover her with the new pink quilt. Her little face is very serious now. As I start to move away, she holds my fingers to stay. This literally makes me want to weep. I try to relax my face for her. Of course I’ll stay. I bundle her in the green and yellow blankets and pull her into my arms. Manny lies on the floor, Ian turns out the light, and we all just go quiet for a moment. I’m rocking her. Ian is stroking her hair.

And that’s when she starts to cry.

She is so scared, but we don’t know what to do other than reassure her over and over again that we love her and she’s safe with us and we will take care of her. She doesn’t ask for anyone. She just lets out heartbreaking plaintive wails through the night. She is terrified. Who wouldn’t be? We keep giving her bottles of milk, continually changing her diaper. At midnight, she is so exhausted, she finally sleeps. I run a cool cloth over her tear-soaked face. Ian is dozing, stretched across the floor.

I get up, let Manny out, and go to our room to send an email to the family that all is okay. Earlier in the day, I had called to let them know we were suddenly parents. The shock in their voices was only exceeded by my own. I’d asked for suggestions on what to feed an almost three-year-old child. I now see so many emails: my parents and siblings are going crazy with excitement, and my mom lets us know she’s on her way from Canada. I’m thankful for this. I need my mom. I mean, I’m elated but truly not sure about the best way to help our daughter adjust to her new home. She is scared. So am I.

The lawyer stands over
me and shrieks, “Wake up, Nia, you’re a mother now,” and I bolt up. I have fallen asleep on my computer keyboard and the lawyer, of course, is not in my room. It’s my daughter’s screams I’m hearing. She has woken up at four
A.M.
in this completely strange environment and is frightened out of her mind. I run to her room and Ian is trying to comfort her and she’s petrified of him. We take turns trying to soothe her until six
A.M.
My body shakes with my own impotence as she cries and cries. Finally, thinking a change of scenery might help, we take her downstairs. Our daughter cries harder as she peers at the sun coming in the kitchen window. Ian makes coffee. Manny steps forward and licks her feet. She sniffles now and takes a long look down at him. They hold each other’s gaze. His soft brown eyes say, “So how long you staying?”

I hand her a bagel. She starts to chew it. She stops crying. We all exhale.

• 10 •

Getting to Know You

It’s the afternoon of
Day Two and I have discovered my daughter has a temper. She is screaming and kicking and angry. You know what? I get it. We’re strangers to her, she hasn’t slept well, and now she is so mad her eyes roll back in her head. Yes, really. I try to comfort her and she stomps me on the ankle and runs. I’m afraid she’ll fall down the stairs, so I hobble after her. For five chilling minutes, I can’t find her anywhere. I can feel my hair going gray from the roots to the splitting ends.

Unexpectedly, she jettisons from behind a living room curtain and now bolts out through the patio door and into the garage I stupidly left open. Lamely trying to pretend it’s a chasing game, I emit a brittle laugh that sounds like a donkey getting hit by a bus. When I get to her, she takes my hand . . . and bites my finger. Hard. I’m talking eye-wateringly painful.

Now she roars at me. Like a demon-lion roar. I’ll admit it—she looks possessed. And, because her head will soon turn around on her neck as she vomits pea soup, I take two steps back to give her space. She has barely slept, barely eaten, and she is really angry. At Ian and me.

She’s acting out to see if we’re going to reject her. So we decide (mostly because we’re afraid of her) to just let her do what she wants. We let her stomp through the mud in the garden, sleep if and where she wants, and eat anything that isn’t poison. We stay close to make sure she doesn’t jam a crayon into Manny’s eyes (again) and decide we’ll figure out rules another time. My mom is flying in today. I cannot wait.

Later she calms down, sits on the couch with Ian, and watches the Mickey Mouse clubhouse. I run to call Kathy Greenwood, who just lets me blab and blab. I email her a picture. Kathy does exactly what a best friend is required to do: she tells me my daughter is beautiful and looks like me.

The social workers call to check in, which I really appreciate. By law they will have to do six impromptu visits to see how we’re all doing. I’m sure they hear my voice crack now when I say, “All good.” They tell me they know it’s not good and that’s okay, which is a relief to hear. But doesn’t help in the slightest.

They’d said re-naming her might help her see this all as a fresh start. As I worry it might hinder her acclimatization, they ask if we’ve chosen a new name yet. We have not. We call her “girlie,” “sweetie,” “honey,” and now as she naps on her face on the cold tile floor (her choice) of the TV room, Ian and I hide in the kitchen and go through names in a baby book. We decide “Cujo” might be too ethnic.

The beauty of adopting a child who is older than an infant is you can get to know the child and pick a name that fits. Since we don’t know her that well, we decide to not choose a name right away. Really, at this point, I’m just trying to keep the dog alive and my fingers uneaten. But no matter how many things she throws, how many times she scratches and punches us, we already love her so much it’s ridiculous. She is bold and fierce. I admire this little creature’s courage just walking into her new home. I marvel at her volcano of anger when she realized she doesn’t actually know us. She is so small, and yet an actual person. When she sucks on a bottle and holds our fingers, she is sweet and the depth of the vulnerability in her eyes makes my knees wobbly.

Ian and I grin, albeit maniacally, at each other. We are
so
off our game. This situation is baffling, invigorating, and completely daunting. We are intrinsically aware that the two of us are responsible for keeping this person alive. We don’t know what we’re doing. With Manny, we could go to a movie for a few hours and leave him alone. He was okay if we left the TV on. But this little girl is an actual human who needs constant monitoring because so far her hobbies are: running as fast as she can into hard surfaces, diving off the stairs, and emitting ear-shattering wildebeest squalls in the front yard. Ian remarks that this little spunky, opinionated kid is exactly who the two of us would make. He says it’ll take a little time for us all to get used to each oth— A banana smacks into the back of his neck. She’s awake.

We run to her and she takes off out the back screen door.

The phone keeps ringing
—the friends of Core want to come over and we keep saying no. This is not the norm for us. We love having people over, we love parties. I tend to cook large vats of wine-soaked pot roast or bake a stuffed turkey with sides of yams bobbing in maple syrup. Ian serves cocktails and we throw raucous dinners where friends sit around our long dining room table and tell hilarious psycho-dating, fired-from-work, or bad-audition stories. Everyone is witty and self-deprecating, and we all love a good loser story. Many summer weekends there is a pool party at our place. I make arugula salads, Ian grills, friends bring side dishes, and the parties go so long that someone will yell what’s said on a movie set in overtime: “Second meal!” Then we pull out pizza fixings or someone throws sausages they brought onto the barbecue. John, married to aforementioned Rose, has named me Mixie (a nickname I love) because I grab random ingredients and throw together second-meal dishes I can’t ever re-create again: sauces of leftover ingredients, or shredded chicken chili topped with a delicate and fragrant aioli (okay, okay, it’s just Parmesan cheese and garlic flakes in light mayo).

So of course now our friends want to come over and meet our daughter. Our families want to come visit. The phone keeps ringing with relatives congratulating us. Ian and I are so touched at how thrilled everyone is for us. It’s nice that everyone wants to meet her. But instinctively, we know this is not a good idea. We want this little girl to feel safe. The last thing we want to do is put her on display. I mean, we actually want to get a banner made of her little face and hang it off our roof—but we know that’d be all kinds of inappropriate. She’s just getting used to us; we have to give her some time to adjust and trust her new surroundings. We don’t want to overwhelm her. Plus, like any kid who’s sleep deprived, she’s not in the greatest mood. She’s Tasmanian Devil whirling around the house, tearing everything apart that comes in her path.

She clomps around the house now, picking up objects and throwing them at walls and at me. She waits, expecting me to get mad at her. The social workers have cautioned us: this is a test to see if I’ll reject her. So I toss my head back and emit another of my forced wheezy cackle-laughs in a feeble attempt to be a cool mom. She’s not buying it. I look crazy.

I give her the new toys; she plays with them for a few moments then chucks them at my front teeth and stomps around some more. I open a cupboard to find some colored paper and see a bottle of bubbles left over from a family visit. I blow one bubble. She looks up . . . and it’s as if her entire head smiles.

Ian and I look at each other: bubbles! We’ve found something she likes. We run outside with her and spend hours blowing bubbles, replenishing the supply with dishwashing liquid. The grass is now slick and will probably never recover. But it’s worth it. Because my daughter is chasing bubbles and laughing the most beautiful tinkling sound I’ve ever heard. We look like a Church of Latter-day Saints commercial.

I’m now smiling like
a baby with broccoli gas remembering it in slow motion as I wait for my mom at the airport. I scan the crowd at baggage claim. There she is. My mom and I see each other and weep through another episode of
The Ethnic Sloppy Tears Show
. We hug for a long time and then she exclaims, “Where’s my granddaughter?” I am so touched at how my family has embraced my situation. They don’t even know this child, and they already love her.

Here’s the thing about my mom, Doreen. She is unflappable. She was a stay-at-home mom who was always driving us somewhere yet found time to volunteer-teach Sunday school, fundraise for our church’s charities, and still visit the elderly. After we all moved out, she worked as a bookkeeper for my dad’s business of real estate development. And yet, she somehow kept a freezer full of baked goods at the ready for any drop-in guests. Although I based Lainie Kazan’s mom character in
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
after my mom’s personality of never-ending patience and acumen, my real mom doesn’t have an accent. She was born and raised in Winnipeg, but let me be clear—she is Greek. Both sides. Full Greek. Here’s why I stress this point: like many actors, there have been many wrong items or gossipy stories written about me and, yes, that’s annoying. But unloading my grievances to my mom really helped me get over the injustice of that aspect of being a known person. She would help me laugh it off, even when someone at church point-blank asked her if I was having an affair with Colin Farrell. Her attitude would show me the bizarre humor in the tall tales some less scrupulous members of the press would make up about me and our family. She was right; those who knew us knew the truth and the rest didn’t matter. Except this once—a publication erroneously reported my mother was not Greek. And she got furious that her full Hellenic lineage wasn’t respectfully represented. She called me up and said, “Get on the phone with them and tell them to check their facts!!”

Now, on the car ride home, my mom asks me questions about my daughter and I tell her the truth: she’s wonderfully perfect and I’m so happy, but it’s going to be a rough transition and I feel helpless. My mom assures me every new mom feels this way. I’m silent in the car because I cannot express how much this simple statement means to me. My mom has become a grandmother seven times before this day. I know my mom’s heart ached every time she’d see me admire all the school photos. Ian and I would visit Winnipeg and hear our nieces and nephews running into my parents’ home yelling “Yiayia and Pappou, I’m here!” Of course I was happy for my siblings, but I also wanted my own child yelling and running around my parents’ home. They all wanted it for me.

My mom knows what I’d been through. She was always supportive and told me to keep trying. On this car ride home, it feels surreal how suddenly those unsure days are over and replaced by new anxieties as I try to figure out how to help my daughter acclimate to her new surroundings.

My mom and I get to my house and as we walk in the door, I realize this is the first time I’ve come back into my home since my daughter arrived. It feels different. There is a vibrancy, almost a hum, even though the situation teeters uncertainly between a shrieking abyss of chaos and the blissful placidity of those two-minute naps.

My mom puts down her purse and sees a little girl across the backyard, standing with Ian. My daughter turns and gawks at us. My mom instinctively knows what to do. She walks out, smiles and waves, and just sits down on the patio step. Because of my mom’s wisdom and years as a parent, she knows not to run toward my daughter, arms outstretched yelling, “Come ’ere, ya shrimp.” That would send this little being into shock. My mom waits on the patio step, just smiling. Slowly my daughter meanders over and sits beside her, curious. They both sit there quietly. Then my little girl looks up at my mom inquisitively, as if to say, who are you? My mom gently touches her granddaughter’s cheek and says, “I’m Yiayia.” And my daughter leans into her.

A few hours later, we’re all in the house and Ian wheels in the suitcases. My mom asks him to put the biggest one on the TV room table. Our daughter watches as my mom unzips it and pulls out Tupperware container after container of baked goods, including a fresh batch of Ian’s favorite cookies. I exclaim, “We just told you yesterday, when did you have the time to bake this?” My mom shrugs, “Last night!”

My mom is consistently unruffled in that, like most moms, she can make a meal for fifty out of a handful of beans and leftover Halloween candy. Like all the women in my family, the best way to flatter her is to ask for the recipe. Also like all the women in my family, if you make the dish better than her, she’ll be happy about it. She is so good-natured and loving and now completely embraces her new grandchild. And now that my mom is here, everything starts to get better.

Yiayia cooks things that our little one actually eats, like lemon-chicken, and not-sweet milk-dunking biscuits called
paximathia.
Our house smells delicious.

There is almost imperceptible progress. On Day Three, to show she’s hungry, our little girl pulls my hand to lead me toward the pantry. I give her two
paximathia
and she takes them with a small nod, looking me in the eyes. Later, when she’s drinking water, she then hands the cup back to me and lets me stroke her cheek for a moment.

At the end of the day without warning, she calls Ian “Daddy.” I look up, fully expecting to find only a puddle with Ian’s eyeballs and a shoe floating in it. My husband has a look on his face that would best be described as a hot mess. This is the first time I have seen him at a loss for words. It’s a big moment. And “Daddy” suits Ian. Interestingly, up to that point, I had not referred to him as “Daddy.” This came from her. Like on that first day, when she called me “Mommy.” We’re keenly aware our daughter chose us as her parents. Even if she’s sometimes trying to kill us now.

Yiayia’s presence in the house is soothing and calming for our little girl. Together we bathe her and comb her hair and try to snuggle with her. Sometimes it’s allowed, and sometimes my daughter pushes away and will barely look at us. Sometimes, she keeps her head downcast. Her eyes stay hooded. She is confused. It’s understandable. She is pale and guarded. Sometimes she just wants to watch cartoons for hours and doesn’t want to engage. We decide to allow it and simply sit beside her on the couch. We just want her to get used to us. Sometimes, when she has a bottle of milk, she’ll lean into us. But she mostly stays away. She’s not whiney or clingy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. She is competent and independent. She’s sending the message that, if she could figure out a way to get that milk out of the fridge on her own, she wouldn’t need us at all.

She still sleeps for only a few minutes at a time. We’ve bought a stroller and have discovered she will fall asleep if we push her around the neighborhood. But when she wakes up from that nap, she cries. And when I try to console her, she usually kicks me in the face.