Biology

Biology

by Jillian Barnet

DNA image by Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

Our seventh-grade biology teacher, Mrs. Livestone, told us about how her husband, who was a surgeon, dissected his chicken at the dinner table before he ate it. When she described this, she wrinkled her nose in a way that made her look not much older than we were. Mrs. Livestone wore a white lab coat when she taught and smiled at us, her eyes shining behind large, dark rimmed glasses. I loved her and wanted to be just like her. Her classroom was at the end of the long second floor hallway, but the smell of formaldehyde wafted throughout the entire floor and stairwells on days when we got to dissect something ourselves, wearing gray smocks like cooking aprons, standing over our frogs, quivering scalpels in hand. Back then, formaldehyde was the smell of excited anticipation.
         Biology was my favorite subject, not just because of Mrs. Livestone. Biology consisted of facts and observations of things so small, quiet, and wondrous, they seemed private, as if you shouldn’t even know them. You had to dig for them, cut layer after layer away: shiny skin, tough muscle, yellow fat, to get to the real insides, the internal organs. You had to observe, sometimes for a long time. I saw why people talked about the secrets of nature. Mrs. Livestone showed us nature’s secrets.
                                                                

We learned about DNA, its twirly double helix like a colorful porch decoration that spins in the wind. Dominant and recessive alleles. Mrs. Livestone assigned homework: a poster-sized family tree—three generations—that included eye color, hair color, and one other inherited trait of our choice. Ordinarily, I would have enjoyed this assignment, its neat, graphic representations of biological principles, but right away I knew this was not going to go well. Even though I excelled at biology, the thought of this assignment froze me and made my clammy hands stick to the shiny pages of my textbook. I was afraid of failing this assignment. But I was more afraid of telling Mrs. Livestone I was adopted.
        To their credit, my parents informed me at a young age about my adoption. Actually, it was only my mother who spoke about it, using the same phrases each time she was forced to re-explain my circumstance, so that her words, as if rehearsed, became familiar. The setting, the dress my mother wore, her movements—these things too, though not always occurring together—would often be repeated. A watchful child, I took them in and, like an engraver etching over the same area again and again, formed a memory that, while overlaid, has become clearer over time rather than diminished.
        The memory persists because of the sick feeling in my stomach then and what seems to have been an intolerable, conflicting desire to gather in but also push away my mother’s words. The sick feeling, which carried with it what I think of now as suspicion, was something I re-examined with curiosity not just that day or in the days that followed, but throughout my childhood and for the rest of my life.
                                                                

My five-year-old feet dangled above the floor as I perched on my adoptive mother’s white chenille bedspread. She likely applied perfume, its scratchy floral scent filling her room. I think of her wearing the flowered chintz with short, puffed sleeves. Seated at her dressing table, her back to me, legs disappearing into the folds of the table’s floor-length celery green skirt, my mother resembled a lush garden. On the table’s mirrored top, another mirror, upright, three-paneled, captured her small, heart-shaped face from every angle. In the center mirror, I watched, as was my custom, as she selected a gold compact with a blue cloisonné lid from her various cosmetics and patted the makeup with a tiny sponge. She leaned into the mirror to apply its silly-putty color to her face as she spoke.
        “You were a very special baby,” she said without turning around, “because we chose you. The people who had you couldn’t keep you. Your daddy and I wanted a baby very much, so we asked them if we could have you. We were so excited when we got the call that you were born. Then, when you were six days old, you came to live with us. You see?”
        My mother’s eyes stayed on her task. I feel sure I sat on my hands, stared at my feet, and banged my heels rhythmically against the bed. Why was that? Because something about her story didn’t make sense? It could not occur to me until much later that my parents couldn’t have chosen me. They arranged to get me before I was born, a baby they didn’t know, and only because they didn’t have one of their own. The more I thought about it, the less that sounded “special.” But from the beginning, something inside my mother’s words felt like a scolding and sounded like a lie.
        Questions loomed then and always, but I learned quickly that discussion of adoption—my own or even adoption in general—was taboo. Questions like “Where was I born?” or “Why am I adopted?” were met with answers that weren’t answers at all: “In a hospital… Because we wanted you,” my parents’ sentences clipped, eyes turned away from me to some inconsequential task. My mother watched her favorite soap opera, General Hospital, daily, never missing an episode, but when one of the actors on General Hospital mentioned adoption, she clicked the television off. When a guest in our home spoke the word “adoption,” stony looks passed between my parents, their bodies suddenly rigid, like hearing a door slam. Their reaction looked like anger and smelled like fear. It communicated this is a fragile thing, a breakable thing. Something potentially disastrous.
        Back then, what exactly was being kept secret, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if my adoption itself was secret—relatives and friends of my parents knew. Rather, there was something inside my adoption that couldn’t be spoken—the part about exactly who I came from and why. Without ever speaking it, my parents communicated their fear of the people who had me before. I don’t think they worried that someone would take me away as much as they did that, I might love someone else more than I loved them. Their fear was like another person in the house who had more power than even they did—power over all of us. Just thinking about my adoption produced a gripping pain in the back of my throat and exhaustion as if I’d run a long distance, especially when I thought about my birth mother. To acknowledge my origin was the ultimate insult, the greatest hurt I could inflict upon my parents who seemed to wear a fragile mantle inscribed with What? We’re not good enough for you?
        Yet, partly because it was treated as a secret, my adoption became an obsession for me, the centerpiece of my identity. My most loved books and stories, Eloise, The Lonely Doll, The Little Princess, Cinderella, featured orphans or near orphans with whom I identified. Their unjust displacement and desire to belong animated my life. Though unknown to me then, they were stand-ins, my tears for them expressions of emotions I didn’t know I was entitled to feel. For as long as I could remember, I’d felt apart, cut off from something, an undefined longing that manifested in me as a constant interior ache. So, the idea that I came from people other than the ones at home must not have surprised me. My body already knew it. But once the meaning of adoption became clear—that my original mother didn’t want me, that she gave me away, but that she existed out in the world somewhere—I was drawn to look for her obsessively, as if surely, I would know her on sight.
        At six, I walked with my adoptive mother on a busy downtown Pittsburgh sidewalk at Christmastime. Exhaust fumes pumped from cars clogging the street, and Kaufmann’s store windows displayed towers of wrapped gifts with fancy bows and imitation snow piled around them. In my white tights, black patent Mary Jane shoes, and my favorite coat—deep red wool with black velvet collar and cuffs—I clutched my mother’s camel-hair hem so as not to lose her in the crowd while I scanned the faces of women coming toward us. I recall thinking that this day, when I looked pretty, would be a perfect time to find my real mother.
        Over time, my parents’ reaction to any mention or display of feelings about my adoption seemed similar to my mother’s acquisitive urge to collect things: three can openers, six beige sweaters, nine gravy boats. I was another thing to possess, not a person with thoughts and feelings, a unique history and story that belonged to me, separate from them.
        Traits of mine that differed from those of my parents were ignored, or worse, reinvented. My short, round, buxom mother with a hooked nose frequently commented that people said I—tall, lanky, flat-chested, and button-nosed—looked like her. We had to pretend I looked like her. To not look like her would be to open what she called “a can of worms.” Pretending there was nothing different, nothing wrong, nothing missing, stabilized us, as if we were a ship on dangerous seas. In a home where I didn’t belong, amongst sometimes volatile and unpredictable people, I sought stability, desperate to please my parents, to be good, smart, and above all, quiet about my adoption. The power behind the word adoption—my parents’ antipathy toward my origins and my own attraction to them— terrified me.
                                                                

After leaving biology class, I chewed over the DNA assignment for the rest of the day. Two things became clear to me: presenting a poster that made no sense, one in which everyone in my family had dark hair and brown or hazel eyes, and I had blond hair and blue eyes, would not work; and discussing this with my mother would be even worse. Talking to Mrs. Livestone seemed the only answer.
        The only other time I discussed my adoption, I was eight and revealed my secret to my friend, Peggy. We were balancing on our stomachs on swing seats, twisting their chain links until our feet came off the ground and the chains snapped back, spinning us. Peggy, a small, intelligent girl with brown curls and freckles, had never heard of such a thing. How strange and frightening even the simplest explanation of adoption must sound to a child. She stopped herself mid-spin and stared at me in shock. In her eyes swam something I must have recognized.
        “Where did you come from, then?”
        Was it her simple question that broke loose wonderings that began to rattle inside me? I didn’t know where I came from.
        “I can’t tell you.” I said, because, in truth, I couldn’t and I wanted something, even a secret I didn’t possess, to wield over Peggy, who played a shiny, black grand piano and had a real totem pole in her back yard. But Peggy became relentless in her campaign to know my origin. After weeks of her pestering, I invented a story that I’d come from another planet. It was 1965 and the space program played all over the television. Being from space was about as special and important as you could get. I swore her to secrecy.
        But my lie got hold of me. I informed Peggy that soon my real, alien family would come for me, and we needed to communicate with them. All that summer before third grade, I wrote letters on thick-ruled pages and stuffed them into old jelly jars, then, like gophers, the two of us dug holes under bushes at the periphery of my back yard and buried the letters. In them, I pleaded to be rescued from my adoptive family, among whom I felt like an alien. Skinny, blond, and shy to the point of anxiety, I lived in a family of round, dark, sometimes loud, frequently angry people. “They aren’t nice…they smell funny,” I wrote. “Please come soon.”
        My alien family was a lie, but it felt real, the way a phantom limb feels real to an amputee. Part of me believed the family who abandoned me would read the letters I left and show up some night to whisk me away in a silver saucer.
        Even when Peggy wasn’t around, I prepared brown paper bags of provisions: pretzels, a bottle opener, and a Coke to take with me on the journey. Late afternoons, I hiked down the wooded hill behind the yard with my paper bag to wait, sat on the ground with my back against a tree, hugging my knees as cicadas buzzed. Afternoon became evening, and I scanned the sky as it turned the color of a bruise. As the date of my promised departure into space with my real family neared, then passed, I avoided my friend and her incessant questions, crushed by my own lies and the fact that no one was actually coming for me. Talking about my adoption had resulted in a ruined friendship and a disgraced character. I vowed never to do it again.
                                                                

When the last bell rang for the day, before going to my locker to gather my books, I headed slowly to Mrs. Livestone’s classroom thinking about my mistake with Peggy and my stomach churned.
         “My poster isn’t going to look right. …I’m adopted,” I spat the syllables as fast as they’d come, wishing the word—and I—would just disappear.
         “Oh, I didn’t know!” Mrs. Livestone placed a hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes in a way that made me want to go home with her and dissect chicken at her dinner table. “But that’s perfectly okay.”
         She didn’t miss a beat. “You can show on your poster how you’re different! How dominant alleles carry through from your grandparents’ generation to your parents’ generation, but not to yours. That will be really interesting!”
         I thanked Mrs. Livestone and rushed to my locker, relieved at being able to complete the assignment without failing. But something about her plan made my insides quiver. My mother wouldn’t appreciate a graphic depiction of how I was different from my family—on a giant board displayed to the class, no less. Fortunately, she rarely took notice of my homework, and was unlikely to do so now.
                                                                

The candy store around the corner from our house carried school supplies, including poster board. My allowance money bought a large white poster board which the man behind the counter rolled into a tube and secured with a rubber band. At home, with the poster board laid out on the floor of my room, I began to sketch my family tree in pencil to get it just right before committing to magic marker. When the proportions were right and the design centered, I stood back to examine it. It needed something. Pictures!
         My parents kept shoeboxes full of family pictures in a cabinet in the living room. There’d be plenty to choose from. I ran off to the living room and brought back a box. I was kneeling on all fours, placing photographs of my grandparents on the poster board when my mother entered my room. I’d forgotten to close the door behind me.
         “What’s this?” she asked.
         My heart stopped. I didn’t know yet how to lie under pressure. “A family tree for biology.”
         “Don’t cut up the pictures. Maybe use ones that have duplicates,” she said.
        I was off the hook. But then my mother leaned in to look closer. “What’s all this with the eyes and the hair?”
         “It’s about DNA,” I told her. “But it’s okay. Mrs. Livestone says I can show how I’m different.”
         My mother literally gasped, then stopped breathing. Still on the floor, I looked up at her. She seemed to have turned to stone.
         “No. No, you won’t. You can stop right now. Put the pictures away.”
         “But…”
         “Put them away. Put all of this away.” She turned to leave the room, adding, “I’ll talk to your teacher.”
         I’d made my mother angry, but I felt angry too. My mother was forcing me to keep secret something that belonged to me. My outrage came from a growing desire to talk about my adoption, know about myself, cease keeping secrets. Though I didn’t realize it then, I wanted to claim my full self.
         In bed that night, I kept thinking about a time years earlier when my mother tried to impress upon me the respect I owed a relative, Florence, who was coming to visit. She leaned into my face and whispered, “Florence was the one who went to get you when you were born. It was very secret.”
         “Florence is Uncle Bob’s sister,” my mother explained. “She went to Boston to get you because I knew she was smart and would know how to get you out of there if something went wrong. The hospital took a long time to release you, something about having to examine you again because you were born prematurely. Florence knew right away something was wrong. She told them she was taking you without the doctor’s okay. But when she got to the airport, the flight was delayed. Florence,” my mother emphasized her name for dramatic effect, “knew it was dangerous to wait around. She got another flight. And she told everyone she saw that you were her baby. She kept your bonnet pulled down to cover your face until she got you home safe.”
        My mother’s story was likely embellished to impress upon me her cleverness, as most of her stories were. But what I took from it was something else altogether: a feeling, a notion of having been stolen. I hated my mother for stealing me and making me into someone else.
                                                                

The thought that I’d gotten Mrs. Livestone in trouble made my heart feel heavy in my chest. When I saw her the next day, I imagined a cold embarrassment on her part, which was probably only mine, but I was miserable in biology class nonetheless.
         That evening, my mother returned to my room. “I explained to your teacher that pointing out difference is hurtful. She’s very sorry. You’re excused from the assignment.”
         My mother had only made things worse by assigning to me emotions I didn’t have. I wanted to tell Mrs. Livestone and my mother that I didn’t feel hurt by the assignment. I was about to shout to my mother that what felt bad to me was not being permitted to complete the assignment—and so much more that pressed up from my chest, but which I had no words to explain. But as she stood there in the doorway of my room, older than most of my friends’ mothers, her elbows cupped in the palms of her hands like she should be carrying something, I stopped short.
        My mother had said she wanted me. But before that she had wanted a different baby, a baby of her own, the one that belonged on the poster board now lying on my bed. Her baby with dark hair and hazel eyes.

        All of a sudden, I felt bad for my mother. At the time, I didn’t know exactly why, couldn’t have articulated my empathy, didn’t understand her fear and secrecy as grief. Nor did I understand my own anger that way. But I could see we each carried within us a hole, like the hollow center of DNA, around which everything else branched. Just as I felt drawn to my birth mother, my adoptive mother must have felt the tug of that missing baby.
        Adoption made it hard for me to relate to and love my parents who were so different from me. What does it take to love someone else’s child? Without the bonds of blood, the hormonal assistance of oxytocin, it must be a special challenge. To my infertile parents, I, a stranger-child, must have been a constant reminder of the biological child they would never have, a disappointment that I doubt they ever fully acknowledged, let alone grieved. They would have tried extra hard to make this child, me, a member of the family, this bond airtight. The problem of course is then no light gets in. No one can breathe.
        It would take decades for me to see this clearly—until I had my own children and was old enough to wear a white lab coat at work similar to the one Mrs. Livestone wore. It would take even longer to realize the intense secrecy and the story of Florence were not about me or my particular history, but the paranoia engendered by the laws and attitudes surrounding a damaging system of secret or “closed” adoption.
        At the time, in my room with my mother, I simply fell silent, resigned. I rolled the poster board into a tube again, secured it with the rubber band, and stuffed it in the back of my closet where it stayed for nine years until I eventually moved out. Even then, the possibilities I saw in it made it hard to throw it away.