Roots

In Liam's end-of-year box I found an art project he'd made but didn't show me: a little booklet of 6 things he loves, with little illustrations throughout. In order, his 6 things: Mommy, Me, Cameron, My Teacher, Elephants, Makhan.

My mother was in his class that day, picking the stuff up; I was down south at work. "I don't know who Makhan is," the teacher said. "Probably a character from Cartoon Network," my mother said, not recognizing the name since Liam had spelled it phonetically: Mukin.

Makhan, of course, is Liam's biological father. Or so we think; I know I've written before about this journey, and how the people listed on Liam's relinquishment document as his birth family have since firmly denied being his birth family. The physical resemblance is striking, though, so I tend to think they're lying; it's a point of some shame to give up a child, here or there. But in the meantime--not knowing for certain--I've been walking a thin line with Liam, who draws pictures for Makhan and Aparna, and writes them letters, and hands them to me to be mailed. I've not mailed them.

(Is it better to have something that could be false packed away--to build on that block as if it were solid, even if you might discover down the road that what you thought was true was not? Or is it better to know what you don't know, even if it means you have a hole where others have something, right there on the foundation level of a human's construction?)

Yesterday Liam asked me, not for the first time, when we could go and visit Makhan and Aparna and their other kids. He misses them, he tells me. I don't know why our deepest conversations take place through the rearview mirror--why we're never looking each other in the eye--but it felt like the right moment to tell him why we can't go and visit them.

I can't remember the words--I stumbled--but I told him that although Makhan and Aparna are on a document that says they're his birth family, they've denied it when we ask them. I told him that often people deny things when they're afraid--and that they don't know us, don't know if they can trust us. So we'll just stay in touch with them and see if they can begin to feel comfortable enough to tell us what happened.

He was crying by then. "So they might not be my family? So I don't have a father?" Oh God, I'm fucking everything up--I know I am. "Everybody has a father," I told him. "We just don't know for sure that Makhan is yours. But I think he is."

This morning he asked me to clarify: why did I think Makhan was his father. I pulled out the fat binder of court documents--stuff he's never seen. I showed him the paper where some man and some woman had identified themselves as Makhan and Aparna, and listed the address of the Makhan and Aparna we'd been speaking to. I showed him the photos of Makhan and their other kids; we looked at how their noses curve the same way, their eyebrows are identical, the shape of the chin--the hairline--the lips: identical. "I think he's the one," Liam said. "Me too," I said. "But we won't know for sure until we get more information."

Then I showed him the document with his name and my name--the document that the High Court issued granting me guardianship. "And this is the paper that says you and I are family forever," I told him. He read what he could. Fingered the seal. "If we want to be," he said. "No," I said, "whether we want to be or not: we're family, forever." "OK," he said, then hopped down and wandered off.

If you talk to adult adoptees, they tend to tell you that they wish their adoptive parents had played it straight with them: that a painful truth is better than an easy lie. But it's not that simple, is it? Could be the easy lies got them to adulthood intact, able to reconstruct, to process. This issue confuses me like no other.

LATER: God, this sounds horrible. I can't tell whether I see it more clearly when I write it out--and so can say easily that I should have said nothing to him--or if the account isn't right. It doesn't reflect months of his little comments--his eagerness to see them, his assumptions about our visits there, his questions about calling them, about sending birthday cards, about inviting his siblings to come to school here because the schools here are so good. He's only six, but would it be better to keep silently nodding and then tell him when he's ten? Or 14? At which point I'll have omitted key information for his entire childhood?