Walt, our seventy-pound German shepherd, was lying on the floor, and Thorin wanted to get by him.
“Get up!” yelled Thorin.
He was still less than two-feet tall, but Walt jumped up so Thorin could make his way. Then he complimented Walt, saying “Good Walt!”
Thorin also started telling me “good job” when I changed his diaper.
I shared these observations with his speech therapist. She nodded her head but didn’t say anything. I didn’t even get a smile. I wondered if she thought, Poor Ms. Wagner-Peck . . . can’t accept the fact Thorin isn’t where he should be, so she makes up stories.
This suspicion by professionals of the accuracy of what Ward and I reported as Thorin’s development would continue over the years. If they didn’t see IT personally, whatever the accomplishment might be, IT didn’t exist. It was frustrating to be considered suspect by someone who saw Thorin only a fraction of the time Ward and I did.
Our communication challenges didn’t interfere with the fact that I knew when Thorin was mad. He became more comfortable being angry with us—more specifically with me. When Thorin was with Ward, he mostly squealed with delight, but with me, it was a lot of testing behaviors. We had been cautioned in our classes about the honeymoon period that adoptive families experience. Some children who are adopted tend to stifle their natural developmental behaviors until they have assessed the adults’ ability at coping.
Thorin started signing no to me upon any request I made, which was typical for a two-year-old child interacting with his parent. It annoyed me sometimes, but I took it as a healthy sign. It did get ridiculous when I would open my mouth and he would yell no before I could say anything.
He also regularly pulled shenanigans to assess my temperament. One morning, I turned my head just in time to duck before getting hit in the head with an open container of applesauce. It decorated the wall behind me, making a drippy mess.
“That didn’t look like an accident, Mister. Did you mean to do that?”
Thorin gave me the thumbs-up sign.
As I cleaned up his mess, I could hear him snickering. A few minutes later, he threw his juice on the floor. Thankfully, it had a top on it. This type of behavior became common at most meals.
Ward, on the other hand, found parenting a breeze—primarily because he was most comfortable in the realm of fun stuff. I had to deal with the actual responsibilities of parenting: transporting Thorin to and from school; meeting with staff at the school; buying clothes, toys, and books; and dealing with the mostly typical behavior meted out by toddlers.
At least a few times a week, I would ask, “Can you say Mommy, Thorin? Can you please?”
“No, Ba,” he said, shaking his head vigorously.
Thorin’s rebuff reminded me of a story that one of our adoption class instructors had told about her adopted daughter. For ten years, the girl addressed every birthday card to her in the same way: “Happy Birthday, Mrs. Clifton!”
I took two things away from that story: it gave me hope that the girl used an exclamation point, and I remembered Mrs. Clifton saying not to take it personally. I would eventually figure out that most of parenting was not taking things personally.
In the outside world, I also was often not acknowledged as Thorin’s mother. My age caused this confusion, and I struggled to not to take it personally. Soon after Thorin started preschool, I argued with a five-year-old who insisted I must be Thorin’s grandmother.
“Really, with all that gray hair?” he countered.
“For your information, it’s platinum,” I retorted.
“Yeah, right.”
On another day, I walked out our front door with Thorin in my arms, looking, I thought, hip and youthful in my dark rinsed jeans, my short-wasted safari jacket, and my black cat-eye sunglasses. As we made our way to the car, a man about my age passed by.
“Are you the grandmother?” he asked.
My cover was blown.
“No, I’m the old mother,” I said breezily.
During those months before we officially adopted Thorin, I turned fifty. It was not a traumatic event; it was a cakewalk, in fact. With all the things related to being new parents, Ward forgot I was celebrating that seminal birthday. No one else remarked on it either. I was not the recipient of the longstanding tradition of black birthday balloons or not-so-funny cards commenting on my advanced age. I realized that my mid-life crisis looked like what most people do with the first half of their lives. I was literally flipping the script.
Sherry notified us that Thorin’s former foster brother, Jacob, was being placed with a family in town, and he would soon be attending the same preschool as Thorin. The boys had only seen each other one time since Thorin moved out of Sherry’s house. I knew Thorin missed Jacob. Someone had given him the book The Snowy Day, where the central figure is a young African-American boy. Whenever I read it to him, Thorin would press his hands over the boy and say “Jac-ub.”
When the boys saw each other again in the hallway outside of their classrooms, Jacob said hi to Thorin and reached toward him. Thorin was smiling brightly. They gave each other a light pat on the arm. Then they spent part of the morning playing together.
The relationship was not an easy one for Thorin to continue. When they lived with Sherry, they were the only children in the house; they were each other’s playmates. At school, Jacob had his pick of many children to play with. He was also able
