Alaina

How did a forty-year-old woman who had been married for twenty years, had raised three great children, and had vowed never, ever to remarry wind up married again and adopting a baby at age forty-five? Who would have thought, twelve years earlier, that I would one day divorce my husband, marry my children's piano teacher, and adopt a child, much less want to adopt and raise another child? I stand in awe at the power of this love stuff.

I witnessed myself fall in love with this man — I literally fell under a spell, which I truly believe he did not consciously cast. He was just as surprised as I was by our love, our unfathomable attraction to one another, and our sense of cosmic destiny, though God knows he would never have used those terms.

I had known Jason for five years as "the piano teacher." I wrote a check once a week for my three children's piano lessons. I would run into the living room, scribble a check, and disappear into my room to correct papers for school. He would be cordial, smile, and leave. After my separation from my husband, Jason and I would chat after the kids' lessons for a moment or two about kids, life, and his desire to find a young woman to marry and have a family. I matched him up with a couple of my best friends who were anxiously seeking husbands, and he even took one out, only to return with shrugging shoulders. "No, too wild. I actually want a simpler woman — soft, nurturing ... you know, special!" Maybe if my children hadn't insisted that we invite him to dinner one night, I might have successfully escaped into blissful singledom, a place I truly longed for after twenty years of trying to please a host of people. But no. Instead, I said, "Sure. Ask him over." I had no clue what was to happen.

That evening, I volunteered to play a game of stare-down with him since he was beating my children handily, round after round. They would sit across from one another on the floor and try to make the other laugh. As a normal, red-blooded Leo female, I couldn't resist the game and wanted to prove my regal standing by showing this guy what I could do with my eyes. Thus, I stepped into destiny's web, totally unsuspecting. I sat down in front of this man whose athletic body, muscular and trim, seemed almost boyish next to my motherly figure. I crossed my legs and intended to have some fun with him. I fixed my green, feline eyes into his black-brown ones and waited. What happened was extraordinary. I was trying to think of something else so as to not start laughing or giggling, when suddenly my entire being was swept up into his eyes, and I felt myself being dragged into them. I tried to look away but was helpless, truly paralyzed. I whirled and whirled into the darkness and observed how he was not the person I thought he was. I felt naked and sexual, primitive and vulnerable, trapped, and even a little afraid. I used all my strength to exit his grasp on me. The kids were laughing and egging me on to win, but I had lost. More precisely, I was lost. Suddenly, the spell was broken when he blinked and pulled away sheepishly. "That's not fair!" he said.

From that night on, my life changed. Months later, when we were in love and there was no going back, I learned that he had felt the same thing but had thought I was doing it to him. Soon I was standing on a mountaintop stark naked, screaming about the wounds of my life and claiming freedom from the past. Some months after that, I discovered that part of me had been asleep before I met Jason, and his stubborn love was forcing me to face every demon I had ever created. One year after our stare-down, I was standing in my backyard reciting wedding vows I had written. I began painting for the first time, and I dreamed that with this man I could adopt a child and begin another family, despite the incredulous reactions of most of my friends. "What has happened to Alaina?" What, indeed!

We couldn't have been more different from one another. He was neat; I was messy. His toothpaste tube was always rolled up tidily; mine was, well, messy. He lived in shorts and tennis shoes; I liked to dress up. He was a spendthrift; I was a spender. I would have never picked him out of a lineup of possible suitors, or he me. He was darker than my type, shorter than my type, too alternative a lifestyle for my type. I always played it safe. After my childhood, who wouldn't? No, this man was not for me. I was too old for him, too tall for him, and I couldn't have any more children, the main item on his list. I was definitely not the Miss Right you take home to Mama: "Oh, Mom, I want you to meet this nice middle-aged woman I met at work and her three teenagers." No, I was definitely not the pick of the week. But what I was, was the best woman in the world for this man — well, maybe not the man whom the world knew: carefree-cute, tennis-playing, piano-playing Mr. Charm. But I was the right woman for the real man: brooding artist, secret-keeping man whose world lay deep within him and whose heart was wounded and vulnerable. I was the woman for that man. Or so I thought.

In our own way, we brought to one another a first-time quality: first conscious commitment, first transparency of the soul to another soul, first union of the spirit. These things could not be seen with the naked eye, and they certainly defied what everyone who knew us could see, but we knew what no one else could know: that it is very dangerous to get into a stare-down contest. Very dangerous, indeed!

But that's not really where this story begins.

Alaina

I am in a hospital. Many people are milling around whom I do not know. I feel a compulsion to go to the bathroom. Alone in the stall, I suddenly feel that undeniable feeling of giving birth. There, all alone, I deliver a baby girl. She does not cry, and I notice that her face is very mature. Her eyes, green like mine, look up at me trustingly. I am afraid she might not survive. She seems so serious for a baby.

A stern nurse comes in and shouts, "Have you not cut the cord? You idiot! The child will die." She hands me a scissors, and I try to cut the cord. Tiny filaments separate from the main cord, but the cord will not break. The baby seems weaker, yet she looks so trustingly into my eyes that I must proceed. After much effort, the last filament is broken through. The baby is now separate from me. Suddenly, I am alone with her in front of a large mirror. I place the child's face next to mine. To my utter amazement, our faces, hers and mine, become one.

Wasn't this the dream that started my journey to Jason? Wasn't this the dream that placed my unsteady feet on the path of awakening? As the resistant filaments of my past clung tenaciously to my unconscious mind, I knew that I, the real me, was yet to be born. I had no way of knowing then that this self-discovery would destroy my marriage to Johann, hurt my children terribly, and strike a death blow to the family I called my own. In the years to come, I would break all the rules: divorce my husband of twenty years, defy my family to marry Jason, unearth family secrets that lay asleep in my cellular memory, and blame everyone for my pain. I would also send three children off to college, adopt a baby, be forced to choose between Jason and my family of origin, and ultimately begin to put the pieces of my life back together.

When I was finished (although I doubt that one ever is), there was a new person staring back at me in the mirror — a stranger, an artist, a poet, a woman. Somewhere in the pit of my terror, I knew that my dream was a prophecy of the future that lay ahead. I had to make that journey because the newborn in the dream trusted me to. If there had been any way to avoid the pain of growing, I would have taken the easier road. I didn't realize it at the time, but a more authentic part of me was emerging.

I suppose I was remembering all of this because of Jason's and my decision to adopt. Adoption meant motherhood. Motherhood meant mother. Mother meant that I would finally have to come to terms with the woman who had governed my actions in life and haunted me in death. Mother meant I had to begin to unravel a puzzle that was complex, buried, and lost to my conscious self. How could I become a mother again if I didn't find the mother I had lost so long ago? I used to believe that it was my hatred for her that fueled my desire to live. I used to think a lot of things, most of them myths of my own making

I was born in 1945, just after the big bomb. I think my spirit didn't want to surface with the world at war; it waited until the war was officially over. On August 16, with my father in the Navy somewhere in Hawaii, I entered the cold world and was placed into the hands of a woman who loved me but didn't love herself, a woman who had been given nothing as a child yet was determined to give her children everything. Unfortunately, she had to take me home to her parents' house.

My mother's father, a womanizing, alcoholic gambler, loved my mother, hated his sons, and disdained the mother of his children, whom he had not married. I remember only terror in that house. I remember the indescribable feeling of secrets too awful to speak screaming through the rooms and waking me in the darkness of my tiny crib. I always knew I was not safe there. That house and all the pain that dwelled there haunted me for the next forty-two years.

When my nineteen-year-old father returned from the war, instead of coming back to Indiana and his basketball scholarship, his childhood sweetheart and his betrothed, and a neat little life on the farm, he came home to a beautiful, hot-tempered wife whom he had impregnated after he had known her but a few weeks. She loved him fiercely but had no tools to enter an intimate relationship with. He also found an eight-month-old daughter who resented his intrusion into her life with her mama.

My father's dreams ended that day. He would not be a basketball star. He would not be a doctor. He would not be happy. Instead, he would be tied down to me and the responsibilities of fatherhood. I thought he blamed me; I've lived my life in pursuit of his approval. Instead of becoming a doctor, he became an alcoholic, and for a very long time I thought that was my fault, too. It was my mother, however, who cared for me, sewed all my clothes, and did all she could to be the mother she never had.

I have no memories from most of my childhood. They are buried somewhere deep within me as a protective barrier against the parts that I don't want to see or feel. I grew up a good girl, trying to please everyone, hiding the secret of our family's troubles, and battling my mother. She loved me passionately, but there was one big proviso: I couldn't grow up! To Mom, that would have been betrayal. I loved her. I hated her. I needed her. I wanted to escape her. I learned to lie early to hide what little of my true self existed. I had to lie. What I felt or wanted was not heard. I developed a woman's body, but I was nothing more than a scared little girl looking for sanctuary. I sought love, yet when I got it, I ran away like hell. I never understood why I did this; I simply accepted the family's verdict that I was fickle.

As soon as I could muster the courage, I fell in love with a family in the church I was attending. They had a son who was going off to Viet Nam, and I adopted him — and them — as my road to salvation. Since "good girls" wouldn't think of having sex before marriage, I flew off to Hawaii to meet him for his R&R and we got married. Much to my naïve dismay, he had already been with many prostitutes and asked things of me I couldn't even pronounce, much less contemplate doing. My young husband took pity on me, and I managed to escape my honeymoon without consummating the marriage.

I returned home, angry with my father for not stopping me from going. He was too drunk to care. I buried myself in my studies at the university and began to experiment with my sexuality. My god, I was going to know something when that guy returned. When he did return, though, I packed him off, confused and befuddled, to his mother. I met Johann within a week.

Johann represented everything I lacked: stability, solidness, salt-of-the-earth kind of stuff. We dated for one year. Naturally, I couldn't tell him that I was still married, so the lies began. I wanted to be perfect for him. It never occurred to me to ask if he was perfect for me. All I knew was that I wanted him to give me a home and children. Children! Children were what I really wanted. They would make everything OK. They would make me OK.

I didn't tell Johann I was already married until the night he proposed. By that time, my guilt was so great and the shame so overwhelming that I practically begged him to forgive me. For what? What had I done? I was a lost child in a woman's body. I was unconscious. I needed him to give me definition, and that's exactly what happened. After I divorced the Navy man and Johann and I married, I made my well-being his job. It wasn't his job, but I didn't see that for many years. I never considered my first union a marriage, since we actually spent a total of only two weeks together. We were two lost kids caught up in the confusion of our generation's first war. My first true marriage was to Johann.

Things were rocky from the start. I didn't know how to be married any more than I knew how to feel worthy of life. But Johann was a patient lover, and I learned what I thought love was about. I polished his shoes and car. I cooked three meals a day. I bargained for our first child, begged for the second, and defied him for the third by getting pregnant without his permission. His ardent command that I couldn't have any more children after the first two was incentive enough to defy him, and I was pregnant a month later. He was furious and told me to get an abortion. I said no. I went home to my mother until he came around. He was a good man; I was a little girl.

Motherhood was the only thing in the world that made me feel complete. I was whole with my three babies. I was somebody. I loved being pregnant, and I loved giving birth. I loved holding and hugging my babies. I was in love with my children. Johann was in love with his desire to climb the academic ladder at the university, where he was a talented professor. We both had what we wanted, and yet we didn't.

The truth was, everyone thought we had it all. I was beautiful when I was young — that is to say, my mother thought I was beautiful, and men were drawn to me, though I really didn't know why at the time. Johann was successful and reliable, and we had these three beautiful, smart kids. But I didn't know what a healthy relationship looked like; I could have tripped over one and not recognized it.

Sometime in the ensuing years I began to suffocate. I was teaching at an elite high school in our town and beginning to think that I was smart and competent. I was also starting to realize that I needed to return to the spirituality I had enjoyed as a child. I ignored it on the surface, but a tiny voice in me continued to guide me back to God, back to myself. My mom, though flawed in many ways, had given me a simple faith that had sustained me throughout my life. Johann thought Christianity was "kitsch." I didn't know what that meant, but in time I realized it meant I wasn't good enough or sophisticated enough for him. When I began reading books on spirituality, he summarily threw my books away, thinking that would end the nonsense. It didn't. Instead, it went underground, where most of my life was lived, aside from raising the children. I continued to search, but I didn't always search in the right places.

Eventually, I realized that our relationship felt suffocating. There was always a teacher-student dynamic between us. I wanted to be separate, not just his underling. This, of course, ignited in him an almost compulsive need for conquest, but I was rebellious. No one would control me! I didn't have a clue where any of this was coming from. We started couples therapy to bring me back under control, although it would turn out to be the beginning of the end of our marriage.

During this time, my mother was dying; she had been ill for a very long time. The doctors had initially given her six months to live, yet she had lived eleven years. She was stubborn, too; that's where I got my rebel attitude. When my kids were little, she experienced a series of strokes, which turned my strong, feisty mother into another person, someone she would not have wanted to be. We spent days, weeks, months rushing to the hospital after working all day, only to sit helplessly by her bed and watch her fade from this Earth.