Twelve years ago, in middle age, you and your husband begin the process of adopting a child from Guatemala. You’re assured by your lawyers that the adoption will go quickly, and that within a few months, you’ll be a mother. Still, you’re intimidated by the seemingly endless mounds of paperwork, and by how you must be fingerprinted and meet numerous times with social workers and lawyers. You assure yourself that it’s all worth it to become the mother of a child who needs you, and whom you need.
But there are legal snafus and political problems in Guatemala, and the adoption slows down. Way down. More endless paperwork. More endless meetings. Still, the adoption doesn’t move forward. Among other things, there’s a clerk in Guatemala who must stamp some of your papers, and that clerk is away on a long vacation, due back when, no one seems to know.
Throughout all this, there’s something else bothering you. You’re feeling ill. You’ve always had medical issues, among them, chronic, debilitating coughs that last for months at a time; rashes on your arms and legs that also come and go; needing to use the bathroom too many times a day, more than seems “normal.”
Now your cough is so bad, you frequently have to remove yourself from buses and trains and social occasions because of it. You need to use the bathroom so often it’s difficult to go out to see friends or do errands. You fear that you’re becoming housebound and will have to stop the adoption process that you’ve labored so hard and so long on because you’ll be too ill to care for a child.
You’ve been seeing doctors your entire life. Your mother brought you to doctors when you were a child. “She’ll grow out of these things,” she was assured. As an adult, you continue to seek help. One doctor tells you, “These things make you you.” Another says, “You’re depressed. See a shrink.”
But now the stakes are too high for you to accept that your symptoms won’t go away. You want to become a mother too fiercely. You’ll do whatever it takes. You return for the umpteenth time to your internist and tell her how sick you feel. “Okay,” she sighs, “I’ll send you to another G.I. specialist.” She’s as weary of you as you are of her.
You meet with the new doctor and recount your woes. She asks if you’ve broken any bones, if you’ve had gum problems, if your night vision is poor. Affirmative to all.
“I know what you have even before we do tests,” she says. “You have celiac.”
You’ve heard of celiac but she needs to explain to you that it’s an autoimmune illness that one has from birth. It damages the lining of the small intestine and prevents it from absorbing parts of food that are important for staying healthy. The damage is due to a reaction to eating gluten, which is found in wheat, barley, and rye.
You must be on a completely gluten-free diet for the rest of your life. You discover that gluten is everywhere, hidden in foods by myriad names, and even in your lipstick. If your gluten-free food is contaminated by food or silverware that has touched gluten, you’ll feel sick. You and your husband now keep an entirely gluten-free home. You tell your friends about your illness. One of them, less supportive than the others, says, “It sounds like a death sentence.”
Meanwhile, the adoption process has slowed even further — if that’s imaginable — due to changing adoption laws in Guatemala. You write letters to U.S. politicians asking them to get involved, but none do. There are rumblings that adoptions from Guatemala will be completely closed before yours even has the chance to go through.
“We just need the chance to become parents,” you say often to your husband. “Just the chance.” You are by now in great despair of ever becoming a mother.
Then finally, when you’ve almost reconciled yourself to it never happening, the new adoption laws in Guatemala are overturned, and you’re shown the photograph of the beautiful ten-day-old girl who is to become your daughter. “I love you, I love you,” you whisper to the photograph. But it’s still a long year from then before all the paperwork is approved and you’re allowed to bring your daughter home with you.
After a few months of her being home, you see a nutritionist who specializes in celiac. You tell her, “I worry that my daughter will be frightened by my illness as she grows older. And that her life will be too circumscribed living in a gluten-free home. I worry that she’ll grow to hate the food I serve her. I worry that she’ll grow to hate me.”
The nutritionist says, “Relax. Your fears aren’t only about the food, are they? Don’t worry. She’ll grow up loving your food because it’s the food she knows. And when she wants a yummy gluten-filled cupcake in the outside world, she can have one. And, oh, of course,” she smiles warmly, “she’ll love you, celiac and all.”
And then you see how lucky you are, to have been given two second chances at living the healthy and loving life you’ve long wished for: by at last becoming a mother, by at last becoming well.
Janice Eidus, 50-something, is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Twice a winner of the O.Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, as well as an Acker Prize, she’s published the novels, The War of the Rosens, The Last Jewish Virgin, Urban Bliss, and Faithful Rebecca. Her story collections include The Celibacy Club and Vito Loves Geraldine. Her work appears in such magazines as The New York Times, Arts & Letters, Lilith, and Jewish Currents, as well as such anthologies as The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and Desire: Women Write About Wanting. Janice has lived in The Virgin Islands and Mexico, and currently lives in New York City. She can be found at http://www.janiceeidus.com. Her daughter is now 10 years old.