My girl, Nettie, is turning 15 on Saturday. As of press time, the plan for celebration consists of a dinner reservation for 10 at Serafina, the Italian trattoria on North Main Street. I won’t be there to enjoy the heart-shaped lobster ravioli in lobster-bisque sauce. I am not invited; teenagers only. Should I order the party of teenagers in their evening clothes a single bottle of prosecco, for a birthday toast, or would that be illegal? Illegal, I think.
It’s getting hard to keep a grasp on what is and isn’t the right thing to do or to permit, with this teenage girl of mine. (It is here, in paragraph two, that I am supposed to say something like “and only an instant ago she was a babe in arms and what a graceful young lady she has grown into. . . .” But her childhood hasn’t gone quite that fast. Not fast, really, at all. Some of those years, when she was in preschool and her brother was a toddler, felt endless. Waking in the dark before 6, making two different breakfasts — one scrambled eggs, one grilled cheese — and convincing them to get dressed in the cold, and tying their shoes, cajoling them to brush their teeth and take my hands and run out the front door in the rain to the car, under the burden of backpacks and lunch bags and computer cases, the harried-sherpa years of motherhood. Nettie, if you are reading this in the newspaper — and I suspect you won’t read it for at least a few years, when you get curious in college and investigate to see what your mother may have said about you in print, should the world not yet have ended in a fiery cataclysm — please know that you are the most magical creature I ever met, and you are stuck with me forever, and you must never forget how strong and brave you are, and what a good heart you have. Always remember to be kind.)
When Nettie and I were driving around New England last winter and fall, paying visits to high-class boarding schools, I interrupted our road-trip playlist of 1990s hip-hop and asked Spotify to queue up a sentimental oldie, “Brown-Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. It’s a beaut of a sentimental tune even if you don’t have a brown-eyed girl, but I do: My girl has almond-shaped Ethiopian eyes, the color of dark Ethiopian coffee. Nettie and I are still working on our list of songs that we both like, so we have something to sing along to together, and we both like “Brown-Eyed Girl.” We sang it loudly together inside the Honda on I-95, heading north to New Hampshire, and (thinking vague mom thoughts of how she will leave me one day) I did start to cry a bit.
“Do you remember when — we used to sing? Sha-la-la-la-la-la, lah-tee-dah, lah-tee-dah.”
One of the other things moms and dads universally say is that their children “are who they are.” They arrive as themselves, and there isn’t much you can do about it. You can issue edicts about personal hygiene and learning to share cookies; you can guide, contrasting Bad People who leave dog-poop baggies on the beach with Good People who spend a stormy Sunday morning picking up trash and feeling tousled and virtuous; you can inspire, reading “The Wind in the Willows” and “The Dangerous Book for Boys” — but the core self is the core self. This cliché proves true. And having two adopted children proves it even more true. They arrive on Earth unique, individual, like crystals, as hard and pure as diamonds.
Having adopted kids is a bit like receiving these jewels in a gift-wrapped surprise box: You are constantly going, “Wow! Would you look at that?” You have no one to compare them to.
At parental functions — grade-school birthday parties, camp fund-raisers — someone inevitably says to the adoptive parent something like, “How lucky the kids are to have landed here, in this nation of plenty!” And I’ve always replied, on the contrary, how fortunate I am. I struck gold with my kids. Gold! Diamonds! I could have gotten a pair of dull-eyed lumps whose highest aspiration was to watch tween “comedies” on the Disney Channel all day, but, as the bumper sticker says, “My Children Are on the Honor Roll and They Have Lovely Manners When Speaking to Adults Who Are Not Their Mother (and My Daughter Made Varsity as a Freshman).”
In the wise words of my old friend John-David Rhodes, when he heard I was adopting Nettie in 2008: “Who needs our poxy DNA anyway, right?”
Nettie always was exactly who she was. She is an imp. She is a mischievous sprite. She is so small and she is so mighty. When she was 2, she had a pair of baby dolls, and when I asked her what their names were, she announced, with confidence, that they were Fronzo and Woncho. (Fronzo and Woncho? Who are Fronzo and Woncho? I googled to see if these names had Ethiopian echoes. Only Nettie knew.) When she was 3, she began keeping approximately 30 stuffed animals in an arrangement on top of her bed, each one placed just so, like a litter of orderly puppies, so she was never alone. When she was 4, she organized her preschool class into a schoolyard game of “Scooby Doo” that lasted until she graduated to first grade at 6; she assigned the other kids to different roles — Velma, Shaggy, Fred — while she took the starring role of Scooby Doo. She was Scooby Doo for three years.
When she was 6, she chased an older boy, twice her age and height and three times her bulk, out of a clubhouse, across a meadow, and off the camping grounds at Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Camp-Resort in Kingston, Nova Scotia, because the older boy had knocked down her younger brother, who was 4 and (due to a severe, congenital form of scoliosis) wore a plaster torso cast in the dust and sweat of the R.V. park in August.
In adoption circles, they talk about a child “coming home” — home being here, in adoption-speak, not the home of origin. When Nettie came home, she was a baby of 12 months with bandy, bow legs who couldn’t yet stand. When she began to walk, she was a toddler who didn’t cry when she fell; she didn’t know yet that if she cried, she would be rescued; she was not accustomed to rescue. When she learned to cry at 14 or 15 months, her tiny little baby mouth turned into the most amazing upside-down horseshoe, the upside-down horseshoe of grief and tragedy. She had a right to it, a fair claim. She had — has — the most incredible muscles in her face: She can play tricks with her eyebrows, rolling them comically, crossing her eyes one at a time. She made us laugh at 7 and 8, mugging and belting out the theme song to the 1970s cartoon version of “Godzilla."
She grew strong and straight (on a diet of spaghetti Bolognese, chicken Caesar salad, and Sour Patch Kids). She is fleet as the wind. She is a very beautiful girl, with a very beautiful face, dimples, and a smile that could blind a man. Lock up your sons. My daughter is patrolling Ditch Plain, as I type, in a Frankies Bikinis thong that she somehow convinced me to buy, because all her surfer-girl, Ditch Plain girlfriends are wearing Frankies Bikinis thongs this year.
I’ve just texted Nettie another tune for the mother-daughter car-singalong playlist: “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys. It’s a summer theme song, a surfing-dream song, a song of paradise — but the opening stanzas? The opening melody line of "Good Vibrations" is a perfect distillation of bittersweet youth in its brevity, of happiness and sunshine touched by melancholy, touched by the depths. My beach girl, with her dark eyes, will like that.