my compulsion demands it

i've spent two hours, after all...

Two steps back

Change can take place so quickly in an international adoption. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know you existed. Now, you're my son. Bizarre-not unlike science fiction. But as I reeled today, trying to take the next steps to bring home this one child, I remembered something that happened earlier, and its memory was muted, and I knew that I would have to intentionally return to it. That is difficult, because, as Doris Lessing so aptly observed, we tend turn a thing into story even as it unfolds, rendering our lives and our memories a series of fictions colored by who we were at this time or who we danced with that night or what was had for dinner or what we want the story to be...I am overwhelmed by my inability to tell what happened without interpreting it as I tell it, as if I am validating every action and thought with some transcending seal.

Nevertheless, the memory came, and now I sit on my couch and attempt to recall…

We were traveling, in Iraq, from one city to another. It was hot. It was always hot, but I liked that. I did not like that our driver was smoking incessantly. I focused on the landscape in an effort to avoid carsickness as we hurtled down the hot street with the windows up in the smoke-filled car with a single cassette blaring its Iraqi folk tunes for the seventh time round. I saw endless sheep, brush, small donkeys standing stock-still with their shepherds' baggage draped across them, large watchdogs at the invisible line between one territory and the next. I rarely saw the shepherds. The mountains were immediate and harsh.

Perhaps because we had been talking about parables, and probably because I was trying to contextualize this land and its strange familiar names—mostly from the Tanakh—I found myself thinking about the “Parable of the Lost Sheep.” Communism and Capitalism, neo-conservativism and liberalism collided in my head. Why seek out one lost sheep if there’s an entire herd intact? What about the greater good? What about acceptable loss? Margins of error?

And yet it nagged at me. There was not a system of governing or economy that I could summon that would affirm the decision to leave a large group of healthy individuals in order to find one that may or may not be dead or die soon. It made habits of highly effective people seem tainted, perhaps demonic. To value an individual in that manner, to that extent—I cannot yet comprehend. I looked at the sheep, and I was frustrated, because they were irreplaceable in that landscape. What if the lost one was stolen or eaten or trapped? What of the ones left behind? What kind of story is this?

It unsettled me, and I sat up straighter, and by the time that we stopped in Erbil to see its ancient walled city, I was grumpy, because I wanted to be unclouded for that old city. We drove up the wall as far as we could, and stood at the feet of a stone Imam, and strolled into a courtyard where a tablet in cuneiform stood open to the elements, pigeon guano streaking its sides. It told of Darius and Nebuchadnezzar, according to the translation. I raised my eyes to the opening in the outer wall, through which I could see the city bazaar, littered with tin roofs and satellite dishes.
I am back on the couch now, and I am shifting to warm my feet. I cannot know why I conjured that moment this morning. I think that I have told myself that story—of being frustrated with the parable—so many times now that I have interpreted it and have assigned it a place in my meaning.

I have conditioned myself, apparently, to recall that moment, those sheep, that cigarette, the conundrum, and to assign it a place where it serves not to answer but to interpret another event. I do not understand why a shepherd would leave ninety-nine to find one, but it is why I will leave teaching art to high school students and trying to get them to ask questions for adopting a child from another country who may or may not need surgery immediately and who may or may not be in need of a transplant someday. At least, that’s what it seems like at this moment.

Where do babies come from?

When a man and a woman love each other very much, sometimes they want to have a family together, and so they decide to have a child. First, they save up all of their money and pay off all their debt. Then they go to a building where people work who can find babies. They talk to the people, and they tell the people everything that ever happened to them, including any times that they were sick, how much they love their parents, what they think about discipline, why they think they should have a baby, and what they think about God. Then if the people think that the man and woman are nice enough and have good answers to all the questions, they let the man and woman give them a lot of money to find a baby. The man and woman have to get papers that prove they were themselves born, married, educated, fingerprinted, poked by a doctor, never scolded by the police, and they have to get letters from people to prove that they are a nice man and woman. Then, when all the papers are stacked up, the people in the building mail them off to another country, where lots and lots of babies need parents. For a long time, the papers live in an office, and then one day, they are old enough to be able to exchange for a baby. Then the country picks out a baby and calls up the man and woman. The man and woman buy plane tickets and fly to see the baby, and they hope that they know the right words to say to everybody and they take more money to hand out to everybody. Then, if everyone in the whole world is happy, the man and the woman are allowed to bring the baby back home on the plane with them. But they are not a family yet. They have to look for another person who can listen to their whole story and take another stack of papers to court, where the person talks to a judge who wants to have some money so that he can prove that the baby really should belong to the man and woman. And then they are a family. And that is where babies come from.