"Is She Your First?" A Case against Asking

I can't count how many times I've been asked this question, especially since the birth of my youngest daughter.  She is seven months now, and when I bring her out into the world, people say things like "She's beautiful," "How old is she?" and almost every time, "Is she your first?"

There are many answers to this question.  And sometimes I try answering the simplest way.  "No," I say.  But that has never been enough.  Just last week at the doctor's office, the receptionist continued after my "No."

"How many girls do you have?" she asked.

I thought for a moment.  "That depends on how you count," I told her.

Like most others, she raised one brow and cocked her head at me.  As far as she was concerned, a child was a child.  I should know how many girls I have.

But for me and many others, the answer is not so simple.

At home, I have two daughters.  But I also have an older daughter who lives three hours north.

"With her dad?" people usually ask.

Well, yes.  But it's not what they think.  She lives with her father, yes. Her adoptive father.

"Oh, you gave her up for adoption," people say, praise in their eyes. "What a wonderful, selfless decision.  What a brave thing you did for her."

And I consider telling the rest of the story---the cowardice I associate with my decision,  the ten years I spent apart from my child, the therapy that came with them, the pain, the nightmares, the regret we both still have, the years it took for her to decide to call me "Mom" despite the adoption, the elation I feel flood through me when she does, the fear I still have about how to best be a mother after the distance from one another we've survived, if I have the right.  It's a story that takes time to tell.  It's a long one,  weighted with the nuances of what is deeply personal, impossible to judge accurately from an answer I might convey to you, any stranger, in a grocery line, at a doctor's office, at a Zumba class.

And even if I got through that, I still would not have told you about my 19-year old stepson who lives with us, most of the time.  He's a Freshman in college now, and for the first time in ten years, he has gotten the chance to live with his father.  His two sisters live with their mother, four hours north.  We see them every other weekend.  I love them, my stepchildren.  And they make six.

But that's if I don't count the daughter my husband and his former wife lost shortly after birth, the daughter he still counts as his fourth, the daughter he still grieves.  And so perhaps she, too, is a part of the family, a step-daughter I never met, a piece of my heart, a number--7.

And if I count her, maybe I should count my oldest daughter's twin, the child who made it only four months in my womb before she or he simply "disappeared," as the doctor called it, becoming what the medical community reduces to a "protein deposit."  I didn't even bleed when the baby stopped living, not until 30 days after I gave birth to my daughter when the blood came like a fierce storm, turning my skin white, and sending me into emergency surgery where they would "remove the protein deposit."  Was that a child I lost? Did he or she count?  8?

I do not want to simplify these long stories into one number, one word.

I think about others I know, the old friend who just lost her son at birth, another friend who lost four babies, each to his own miscarriage, a colleague of my husband's who lost a child years ago to cancer, a student who lost two children to foster care as a result of her addiction.  There are parents with a mix of adopted children, foster children, and biological children.  The stories of ourselves as parents are often  highly complex, laced with pain, heartache, regret, confusion, and guilt as well as joy and a series of other mixed emotions.  When we ask someone to count their children for us, we ask them not just to tell us those stories but to reduce them, to tell them quickly, simply, openly to a world ready to judge and sometimes to condemn.

For this reason, when I see a baby, I say something like "What a beautiful baby.  Look at those eyes, those chubby little hands." Sometimes I ask her name, how old she is, if she sleeps through the night.  But the stories of her family, of the others that have come before her, of how her parents count their children, is something more sacred, and with a deep reverence for the thickness of those narratives, I do not ask.