The Mothers: A Novel by Jennifer Gilmore

watched the steam fill the tub, already fogging the mirrors as I stepped in to get ready for the morning.

7
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    T he pièce de résistance of that weekend in North Carolina was not the pom-poms or the filling out of the profile form, or even the meat-filled dinner; it was not the sleepless nights in a lonely, sad hotel. It was the film.
    Good God, the film.
    It began Sunday morning’s training session. Nickie wasn’t there, so Crystal and Tiffany, now seated at the head of the pushed-together tables, timidly waited for all of us to file in.
    When we were all accounted for—public relations Gabe and journalist Brian filing in last and without apology—Crystal or Tiffany stood up.
    “We have a movie this morning!” she announced.
    The other one, Tiffany or Crystal, also stood. “We usually try and have birth parents come in to talk to you guys. And also some of our clients and the kids they’ve adopted. But today, we’re going to show a movie instead.”
    I looked at Ramon, my face asking, Why? Another wave of panic: this place is not real. They have no real birthmothers. They have no real people who have adopted real children. This isn’t even a real table. We are in a diorama, I thought, like the one depicting Native Americans swaddled in smallpox-infested blankets Lucy and I had seen at the Smithsonian.
    Tiffany or Crystal continued. “It’s a little out-of-date and it was really for when we started doing open adoption in the late eighties and early nineties. Just warning you! There’s some serious hair here.”
    Crystal and Tiffany giggled, their fine blond hair shining in the light, the pink of their vulnerable skulls peeking through.
    James, the volunteer fireman, stood up and flicked out the lights.
    Of course the fireman volunteers, I thought as the television went on, a square of blue and then a crude version of the sun shining over the agency logo, flickering across the screen.
    I half expected a sex-education tape to come on the display, the film of a dachshund giving birth to puppies, little beings slicked in blood and embryonic fluid, that I’d seen in fifth grade. The boys and girls had watched separately, equally entranced and repulsed by what was happening on-screen. And yet the girls all thought, Will this one day be me? I don’t see how that’s possible, we all thought, that this is our lot in life, this grossness .
    Bleary from the previous night’s whiskey and lack of sleep, I was grateful to be passive and watch a movie, to not have to think or consider our future. I was tired of deciding.
    The movie, a term I use here only loosely, began with a young woman, perhaps eighteen, who had placed her child for adoption and couldn’t have been happier about it. She spoke to the shaking camera in the backyard of a large stone house, a child, perhaps three, playing with a woman on an elaborate swing set behind her. “Come to mama,” the woman, in her late forties perhaps, cooed to the little girl as the young woman told the camera about knowing she could not parent and yet when she’d had her child, she had become a part of this new family. Through openness, she said. It had been amazing.
    The birthmother, who, one could tell when the camera panned out a bit, held a balloon as she spoke—was it a gift for her or the child?—discussed how she saw the family and her daughter often, sometimes five times a year, and always—no matter what!—on Mother’s Day.
    I admit my heart fell a little. Am I allowed to ask where I fit in here? There is a woman who gives birth and that is not I. And then she is in our lives—Ramon’s and mine, ours, whatever that life will look like—however she chooses to be. I accept that, but I had to turn away from the screen; when do I get to be the mother?
    Perhaps never. This, I realized now, is also an option, even if it is not a box I have checked. Breathless, the adoptive mother—that’s what she kept calling herself, that’s what everyone but the child