Reader's Digest Asia Pacific

THE MISSING PIECE

I had so much love to give our adopted son. What I didn’t have were answers

- BY SUSAN SILVERMAN FROM CASTING LOTS

A mother helps her very young adopted son come to terms with where he is from.

I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO ADOPT, EVEN WHEN I WAS

a child with a penchant for writing poetry instead of going out for recess. ‘She looked to the stars / And wondered / Someday / Will I find my mother?’

“Who is the little girl in your poem?” asked Miss Loros as I hovered beside her desk, where she was focused on correcting a pile of maths quizzes.

“She’s an orphan,” I said. “Someday, I want to be the mother of orphans.”

At the end of fourth grade, while my mother was drying a wooden salad bowl with a dish towel, I made an announceme­nt. “Mummy, when I grow up, I’m going to adopt a hundred children, one from every country.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” my mum said. She turned and placed her cool, damp fingers under my chin. “Even adopting one child would be a beautiful thing.”

So it was perhaps inevitable that after having two daughters, my husband, Yosef, and I decided to expand our family by looking abroad. In October 1999, I flew to Ethiopia and brought back ten-month-old Adar to our home in Massachuse­tts.

When Adar was a toddler, hiding wasn’t a way to vanish. It was a way to appear.

“Where is Adar?” a tiny, disembodie­d voice called from behind the couch, signalling me to find him.

Hands on my hips, I scanned the room. “Where IS Adar? In a drawer? No … on the bookshelf? No … ”

My heart stretched to bursting in its pull towards him: his soft cheek against mine, his arms surprising­ly strong, his hands imprinting themselves on my shoulder blades, the kiss I will plant on his silky forehead. This was his story of becoming my son.

He jumped out from behind the couch – huge smile, arms outstretch­ed.

Cue the lights, the applause, the laughter and that big hug. Here you are, our hug said to each other. Always here. Always mine. “Mama, where is my tummy-mummy?” he asked, his nose against mine.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” I said, bracing myself, gathering my thoughts. “Sometimes I wonder about her, too.”

Every night when he was four, Adar pulled the same book from his shelf, handed it to me, climbed onto his bed, and nestled under my arm, leaning into me.

“It was missing a piece,” I read to Adar from the book.

Even though he could not yet read, he turned each page at the right time. The illustrati­ons prompted him to recite the prose along with me, word for word.

“And it was not happy. So it set off in search of its missing piece,” he said solemnly.

The Missing Piece, written and illustrate­d by Shel Silverstei­n, is about a circle, drawn with sparse black lines on a white page, that has a missing piece the shape and relative size of a pizza slice.

The circle goes on a journey in search of its missing piece, travelling through rain and snow and hot sun, finding pieces that either don’t fit or

Neither of us could understand not wanting to belong to someone

don’t want to be anyone’s missing piece.

“How come it doesn’t want to be someone’s piece?” Adar asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. Neither of us could understand not wanting to belong to someone.

Because it was incomplete, the circle moved slowly. As it plodded along, it smelled the flowers, had a butterfly land on it, and noticed the world around it, all the while singing its song through a mouth formed by the errant pizza slice: “Oh, I’m looking for my missing piece, hi-dee-ho, here I go, looking for my missing piece.”

Adar took cover under my shirt. “Pretend I’m in your tummy,” he said.

He was small enough to fit his whole body under my loose top. He folded his arms and bent his knees to his chest, his eyes peering out at my throat as he carefully covered each toe with my shirt hem.

This was not our first time pretending I was pregnant with him. Often at bedtime, Adar would sit nestled under my T-shirt, look out through the stretched neckline, and whisper the command, “Pretend you’re walking.”

Lying supine on his bed under his warm, soft weight, I would move my feet as if strolling along the pavement. Peeking through my neckline, he’d

again direct me. “Now you see someone you know.”

“Hi, how are you?” I said obligingly. “Oh, me? I’m fine. Just taking a walk with my baby in my tummy! OK, bye.”

“Can I really go inside your tummy?” Adar asked, his big eyes wide at my chin. “You can pretend, but you can’t really go inside my tummy,” I explained.

“Why? What’s in there?” he demanded as if some sixth sense had set off internal alarms. His eyebrows scrunched in his telltale mix of concern and curiosity. Funny, Yosef and I had just been talking about having another birth child.

We lay smushed together on his single bed, his pile of storybooks stacked beside us on the green bedside table. In the soft light that glowed through a

pale yellow lampshade, we looked at each other. I pulled his head onto my shoulder and kissed it. “Mummy?” “Mmm.” “Who’s my tummy-mummy?” “I don’t know,” I said quietly. My eyes welled with tears. Many times, I had begged God to let his mother know that her son, our son, was safe and loved. While my sorrow was genuine, it was also vain and indulgent, an illusion of redemption from my complicity in the world’s pain that played itself out all too sharply in another woman’s life – if she was still alive.

“Why? Nobody knows her?”

“Well, nobody we know knows her.”

“Did my tummy- mummy keep me?” Adar continued.

“No,” I said gently as I slipped my arm under his upper back.

He adjusted his head onto my shoulder. “Did she nurse me?”

“I don’t know, sweetie.” “Did it hurt my tummy-mummy when I was born?”

“Childbirth hurts for a while,” I said vaguely. Is she dead? She could be wondering the same of Adar right now. She must have feared his death.

Looking into my eyes, his face serious and thoughtful, Adar asked if his tummy-mummy was my friend Sally. Her brown skin might have prompted this theory.

“I grew in Sally’s tummy and then she brought me to Ethiopia and then Mummy came to get me,” he announced.

“No, sweetie,” I said to him, managing not to laugh. “Sally is not your tummy-mummy.”

“Maybe a lion ate me up and then pooped me out in Ethiopia.” I laughed – poop is funny. He looked at me gravely, and I bit the inside of my cheeks.

“One person we know met her,” he said.

“Really, honey?” I lifted my head to see his whole face. “Who was that?” “Me. When I was born.” “Oh, my God. You’re right, sweetie. You met her.” I pulled his blanket around him more snugly.

“But I don’t remember her,” he said quietly, lowering his gaze.

“Oh, my sweet boy,” I said, turning his face towards me and holding each cheek in my hands. “No- one ever remembers when they were babies.”

There was no rememberin­g for him, no recollecti­on of a face or the anchor of a story. No ‘who’ or ‘what’ or ‘how’ or ‘why’ to understand his coming to be. And I had none of that to give him. I had only my own messy

There was no rememberin­g for him, no recollecti­on of a face or the anchor of a story

mosaic of stories – our family inside the unwieldy, unfolding narrative of the Jewish people – within which he could weave his life.

Appreciati­ng mystery was the only way that I could honestly approach Adar’s origins. In this way, he was a portal to kedusha, the Hebrew word for holiness. “I will be what I will be” was God’s answer to Moses’s question “Who are you?” Moses’s future was becoming known, even as his origins were unknown to him. How could he have remembered his mother, Yocheved, placing him in the basket that would carry him on the river away from the Egyptian edict of death? How was she able to let go of that basket? My deepest fears formed themselves into prayer, even when I was simply buckling my child into his car seat.

Moses’s cry carried beyond the hum and thrum of the river and pierced the conversati­on of Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaids as they bathed. Thus, the grown daughter of Pharaoh “heard the cries of the child.” Tragically, Yocheved hid herself in order to save her son.

Perhaps Adar’s birth mother prepared him in a basket, wrapped and warm. Perhaps she, like the woman who released Moses to the Nile’s flow, “stationed herself at a distance” to ensure his safety as long as she could.

She and I were a team, like Yocheved and the daughter of Pharaoh. Did Yocheved call out for her son after he was ensconced in Pharaoh’s palace? Did the daughter of Pharaoh, raising her beautiful, wise boy, ever cry for Yocheved’s loss?

Oh, Adar. Your birth mother has taken her place in the long line of women who could save their children only by leaving them. Our tapestry of stories has raw, ragged holes. And, now, a bedtime story.

I held him tightly, his head on my chest as we read aloud together. Towards the end, the circle finds its missing piece. Finally a complete circle, it gains momentum and rolls along so fast that it could not stop to talk to a worm or smell a flower, too fast for a butterfly to land.

Aha, the circle says, so that’s how it is, and gently sets the piece down.

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 ??  ?? Author Susan Silverman shares a tender moment with her adopted son Adar
Author Susan Silverman shares a tender moment with her adopted son Adar

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