The Love You Can't Give

“If that’s what you’ve decided to do, then go do it. But if you leave, you better know you can’t come back.”

I sat on the edge of the dining room chair as my mother stood over me, gripping the remote control in her hand, eyes blazing.

“I’m only moving to Astoria,” I said. Although my words came out smoothly, glibly even, my stomach turned over in knots.

“I don’t give a shit,” her voice shrieked to an ugly crescendo. “You are ruining this family! Tearing it apart.” She lunged towards me, daring me to recoil. I could feel the heat of her breath on my face. “You always do what you want to do. So go and goddamn do it.”

Explaining to an Armenian-Lebanese mother that you are moving into your own apartment may sound vaguely comedic. Perhaps by the end of this anecdote one would guess, or even hope, that by the time I packed the last of my belongings and drove to my new apartment my mother would have helped me unpack or brought over a tray of baklava. Instead, she didn’t speak to me for a year. She told me I’d never see my sisters again.

Upon first meeting my mother, most people find her to be charmingly dramatic, entertaining and vivacious. Yet most anyone who did not live with her was unaware of her persisting condition. Namely, the heady cocktail of bipolar depression and anxiety alongside her intense narcissism. After divorcing my father and enduring his abuse for sixteen-years, I had hoped my mother would be less miserable, freer. She remarried and had another child with her new husband. In spite of it all, she seemed just as unhappy. Being the eldest, I was the easiest target.

“One day you’re going to be a mother and I wish on you everything you have put me through and more. You’re going to see one day,” she said. “You’re going to see.”

I still sat by the television set, cemented to my seat. I looked away briefly, hearing her heavy-heeled footsteps disappear out of the room. And then the splintering crack of plastic against the television screen. I jumped, looked up. Pieces of the remote control and three double-A batteries lay all over the rug. By the time I looked up, she had stomped across the apartment to her room. I heard the slam of her bedroom door, final and absolute.

 ***

Years later, I sat on the porch steps of my mother-in-law’s house on Christmas Eve, a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and a lighter in my other hand. I placed my drink on the wicker picnic table and leaned towards the ground to light the cigarette. A harsh, bitter wind gusted through the bare tree limbs. My hands already raw, I flicked the lighter. When I sat up in my seat, I jumped; a shadow stood over me.

“How long are you going to keep this up?”

It was my mother, still sneaking up on me as she used to when I was a teenager. Mercilessly vigilant, especially during the holidays when I would goof off with my cousins in another room.

“Keep what up?” I asked.

“The smoking. The drinking,” she said.

What are you doing out here? I wanted to ask. Of all the nights of the year. Her appearance was souring. I wanted to stare out into the lovely night and enjoy my glass of wine and cigarette without her scrutiny.

“When are you going to start thinking about having kids?” she asked.

I wanted to remind her how miserable she had been raising me and my sisters. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t going to have children to spite her for refusing much-needed therapy.

“I don’t want kids,” I said. “Why are you out here? Everyone is inside. Why do you deliberately go out of your way looking for me? I just want to sit here in the cold and smoke my cigarette.”

“Your cousins all have children,” she continued. “I was on the phone with both my sisters yesterday. I’m the only one without grandchildren.”

 ***

It was a conference room with banquet-sized tables covered with my least favorite shade of burgundy; the burgundy that harkened back to my memory of velour jumpsuits in the seventies, shiny, hard-shelled Samsonite luggage, clutch purses with leather patchwork. I remembered what the shiny-faced receptionist at my plastic surgeon’s office had said to me when I told her I was taking a two-day trip to Buffalo: “Why are you going there? I lived there my whole life and trust me—there’s nothing going on.” We were going to Buffalo for an adoption seminar.

I gazed around me, taking in all the couples, understanding with little self-consciousness that they were doing the same. Two tables away sat a young man and woman, both blue-eyed and fair-skinned. As they spoke to the gray-haired, middle-aged couple at their table, they reminded me of the strange breed of student who arrived on the first day of school exuding an eagerness, a willingness to please that felt unnervingly foreign. They would volunteer later, with unblinking wholesomeness, that they were interested, specifically, in adopting a child with special needs.

“Welcome to Adoption Star.” A young man stood in front of the room handing out two stacks of papers to the administrators on either side of the room. As they circulated the room to distribute papers, I heard my cell phone hum in my purse. The man continued speaking. Brian scratched words across the notepad we had brought. I glanced at my phone. “Hi mommy. Look at what we made.” There was a photo with my daughter Sophia holding a plate covered in a pyramid of butter cookies. Brian nudged me.

“...and we can’t emphasize how important it is that you are honest with each other as you fill out the grid. It’s very extensive as you can see. Think about each item. Discuss it realistically. There’s no shame in your preferences. The more honest you are, the easier the process will be later on.”

A long stream of items unfurled as we read through the first page of the packet, three pages in length. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the grid as much as the items, which were each to be answered by checking off one of two boxes, “consider” or “will not consider.”

Conceived through incest

Conceived by rape

Mother/Father with schizophrenia

Mother/Father history of mental illness

Alcohol abuse during pregnancy

Marijuana abuse during pregnancy

Narcotic abuse during pregnancy

No pre-natal care

Mother/Father in jail

Cleft palate

Jaundice

Brian and I had spoken in length about adopting a child with needs. And as we began checking off boxes, I became aware of how we were narrowing the possibility of adopting a baby within a year’s time, let alone at all.

The weekend seminar was the last cog in the tireless wheel of our venture. We had spent the seven weeks prior driving to various offices and filling out paperwork; a prerequisite before registering for the adoption seminar. Fingerprint clearance, criminal history form, places of employment and residence of the past twenty-five years, were several among the many forms the adoption agency approved before we reserved our flight.

I had called my plastic surgeon’s office before making the decision to fly to Buffalo. My breasts, taped up and bandaged from the breast reduction surgery I had had the month prior, were still swollen and healing. I had made the long awaited to decision to finally undergo surgery after leaving the office of one of the top fertility specialists who told me that, given my age, there was a ten percent chance of getting pregnant even with the most aggressive treatments. I had already spent the previous year working with a fertility specialist who helped me time my ovulation and optimal conception days, ultimately undergoing three rounds of artificial insemination before turning to another recommended doctor. Knowing I would never breastfeed again, I had finally scheduled the surgery.

“So a little about myself,” the man from before stood in front of the room again. He was a young African American man, wearing brown corduroy trousers and a camel-color cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, sporting a pair of sensible loafers. He would tell us later on about his “adoption journey” and about the founder of the agency, who was also his adoptive mother.

“You will have plenty of time to fill out what we just handed to you,” he said. Everyone poured over the papers without looking up. “We won’t be collecting anything until the end of the weekend, but you do need it for your reference as we go through introductions and presentations.”

Still, most of the couples, now conferring quietly, did not look up. The young man gave a wide, patient smile and raised his voice. “My name is David. The seminar has begun.”

I laughed audibly. The gay couple sitting next to us glanced up.

 ***

“Why can’t you have a baby?”

I sat on the front steps of the house watching my daughter lift rocks, inspecting beneath each in search of snails.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Then I wouldn’t get all the love.”

She tells this to the social worker who visits our home a month after we receive a certificate for completing the adoption seminar.

“How do you feel about having a baby in the house?”

“Scared and happy,” says Sophia, as if she was waiting for the question.

“Scared and happy? Why?”

“Because,” Sophia begins, expounding with her hands, her knuckles no longer dimpled now that she is six. “Happy because I want to take care of a baby but scared because I won’t get all the love.”

The woman, Mrs. Perez, smiles at first, then breaks into laughter. She tells us she needs to walk through the home to check off mandatory items we need in the house. Namely, a Pack ‘n Play or crib, smoke detectors, and carbon dioxide detectors.

“I’ll give you a tour,” Sophia volunteers, to the social worker’s surprise.

Brian and I sit on the couch as Sophia walks the woman through each room, explaining with officiousness how safe the house is. How we have a house alarm that she gets to deactivate with the clicker when she wakes up in the morning. “The baby will definitely be safe,” she reassures Mrs. Perez.

As she leads her through the entirety of the house and back to the couch, I glance at the photographs hanging above the piano. Brian had taken each and set them in weathered, wooden frames of brown, blue, and white. They are all of Sophia. One is a picture of her from the year prior, the backdrop of a fading sunset, her posing with a hand on her hip, a smile caught in mid-laughter. I remembered that evening, Brian having to coax her to stand still until, having sensed his aggravation, Sophia stopped for a moment to appease him. I gaze at the photos carefully, having taken them more for granted than I realized. In another photo she is standing on the sand, two years younger. She wears a polka dot sunhat, smiling wryly and holding her thumb up impatiently as if to say, “Did you take the picture? Can I go play now?” That same summer, she stood in front of my belly and pressed her ear to my stomach, expecting to hear the heartbeat of a baby.

Mrs. Perez and Sophia appear back in the living room. She tells us we will work with her more directly when they have matched us.

“How long do you think before we receive a phone call?” I ask, hoping the answer will be less ambiguous than what the adoption agency had alluded to the day we flew back to Queens.

“It really depends on your grid. Sometimes it takes a few months, other times over a year,” she said.

Forty-four then. I calculated I would be collecting social security by the time my adopted child graduated from college.

 ***

We stand in front of Eddie’s Sweet Shop with half-eaten ice cream cones when Brian’s phone rings. He answers the phone, looks up at me, nods, holds up a finger as if to say, “Give me a few minutes,” and walks to the end of the block. I know it’s the adoption agency. It has been eight months since we completed the seminar, the first phone call we have received. Sophia and I lean against the building and eat our ice cream cones. We’re having a conversation I can’t follow because my mind is turning over with excitement.

“You’re not listening. I asked you who’s your favorite: Malificent or Mother Gothal?”

When he returns ten minutes later, he begins speaking in code as we walk back towards the house. “It’s nothing definite. There hasn’t been any prenatal care because they had considered terminating. The partner is out of the picture. Hispanic. Mother white. We are one of ten being considered. She’s looking through the portfolios now. We should hear back by the end of the week.”

The portfolio was a twenty-four-page picture book we had painstakingly put together. For the several weeks after our return from the seminar, we retired to the basement after tucking Sophia to bed to put together the pages. Choosing the proper layout, writing the captions for the numerous photographs we had to look through before settling on the ones we felt most represented us—it seemed a humiliating task. How carefully we considered each picture, trying to maintain an aura of dignity, to not look desperate, but hopeful.

A week passed and then another. When we called the agency, they told us it was in the mother’s best interest to not pressure her. If we had waited this long, surely a few more weeks, if that, could not hurt. I forced images of Sophia holding a newborn in her arms out of my head. I refused to daydream about whether or not to paint my office walls pink if it was a girl.

Finally, they called to tell us the birth mother had decided to keep her baby. I was happy for her.

Several months later after a pointed conversation with our agency case worker, we decided to walk away from adoption and not renew our papers for another year.

 ***

This past year on Mother’s Day, I woke up and reached for the phone. I pulled up my mother’s number, my thumb hovering over the keypad. “Happy Mother’s Day,” I wrote. “I hope you have a nice and relaxing day.” I had sent her the same message the previous year. The few years prior to that, I hadn’t acknowledged her at all. Much has changed since that cold evening on Christmas Eve. We are nearly strangers. That story is too long to write here.             

How can one explain having a child when they never wanted to be a mother? And then going to such lengths to have another? Here is what nobody tells you about having a mother who can only love conditionally: you don’t get to give love boundlessly, effortlessly. You learn, for the sake of self-preservation, to only give enough without sacrificing your heart.

Looking back, I was not terrified of being a mother as much as I was terrified of becoming my mother. I was terrified I would see how difficult it was to be a mother, and that within me a sense of empathy would bloom. I would have to understand my mother, forgive her, even. At forty-seven, I still want another child. The further away I drift from my mother, the more love I have to give. Sometimes it spills out of me uncontrollably. It strangles my heart. I wish I had known.

-Aida Zilelian

Aida Zilelian is a New York City writer. Her novel The Legacy of Lost Things was released in March 2015 (Bleeding Heart Publications) and was the recipient of the 2014 Tololyan Literary Award. Her stories have been published in over twenty-five journals and several anthologies. She has been featured on NPR, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, among other radio and print platforms. She is also the curator of Boundless Tales, the longest-running reading series in Queens, NY. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize.