She is my fourth child and my third daughter. She holds a special place in the order of the family. She is my last child. The others are grown or grown enough to be out of the house. She is the child I long to be closer to. She is the child who pushes me away and the child who needs me the most.
In 1981, I gave birth to my son. I was 23 years old and single. In 1995, I married and at 48, in the prime of mid-life motherhood, I traveled to China to bring home my third daughter. Mei Mei means little sister in Mandarin. I traveled with my two older daughters, also adopted from China. We were a fearless bunch maneuvering our way through Hefei, the city where my third daughter is from; all speaking Chinese together and attracting a crowd wherever we went.
Meimei was six and a half years old and seemed happy to be in our company. I already had some experience adopting older children from China. My first daughter was five when she joined our family and my second daughter was seven. I had learned enough Mandarin to communicate with them and had continued studying the language. I had parented my son singly and learned much along the way. I believed my third daughter would fit in nicely.
My marriage had always been a challenge, but was tempered by the constant activity of our children. In 2000, my husband decided to leave Massachusetts and move to California to help his aging parents. We started life over in Berkeley. The everyday fullness of raising the girls distracted us. I landed a job with a non-profit organization that helps Chinese orphanages. I had not planned or even wished to adopt another child. But in my job, surrounded by reports of hundreds of older children in orphanages all across China, I was swept away.
I told my husband I felt we should adopt one more. He wished me luck but said I was on my own. And then things changed again when someone I had never met came forth and said she wanted to fund the costs of adopting our third daughter. My husband didn’t believe it until a check arrived in the mail and we were on our way.
The first photos we received of our third daughter showed her in a little blue dress rimmed with a collar of apples. We began calling her Apple Girl. How beguiling and sweet she looked.
We had two years as a family of five. I changed careers during that time and fell in love with a woman I worked with. It was like being slammed over the head with a frying pan. I was gay. It explained a lot. So, things changed again and I circled back into life as a single mom. I’d like to think I made that circle gracefully but of course the girls suffered for my choices. My third daughter chose to stay with me. The older girls stayed in their dad’s house for their few remaining years and visited me often.
My third daughter moved with me to New England last year where I started life over once again. She is 16 now and if she is still our Apple Girl it is of the tart variety. I had a girlfriend in Berkeley who called her “crusty.” An apt description.
But in starting over, we have found humor together and share in the triumphs and woes of building a new community. We get that our lives are what we make them to be. As a teen who struggles to understand her own anger, I have become the mom who champions her through it. I no longer love being a single mom (yes, I actually did love it at one time), but now in my 50s, I am a determined one.
On some days I live with a McIntosh, and on others, a Granny Smith. But as my third daughter prepares to make her first solo journey back to China this summer, I imagine her returning with a greater sense of who she is.
This is the last chance I will have to parent into adulthood and I sense how critical it is that I stay front and center. I wonder sometimes how I have gotten this far. And I wonder on other days how much farther I have to go.