Later I learn that Pima was the name given to the Othama tribe by the Spaniards. It is a corruption, or misunderstanding, of the phrase pi ‘añi mac or pi mac, meaning “I don’t know”—a phrase tribe members supposedly said often in response to the invading Europeans.
A few months after your mother died, we got all her papers in the mail. One afternoon I sat on a milk crate outside our storage shed to give them a cursory look, trying to decide where to file them. Amid the mountains of medical bills and threatening collections statements, a certain set of papers stood out — papers with smiley faces and flowery mastheads, exclamation points and carefully handwritten signatures. Your adoption paperwork.
When you were born, you were Wendy Malone. Perhaps you were Wendy Malone for but minutes, or hours. We don’t know. Your adoption had been arranged prior to your birth, and at three weeks old, you were delivered to your parents, whereupon you became Rebecca Priscilla Bard. Which is who you were for the next twenty-odd years. Becky. In college, you made a loose stab at renaming yourself Butch, though, hilariously, you didn’t really know what it meant. It had just been a nickname for you, used by your father. After you knew, you could tell who was gay by introducing yourself. “I’m Butch,” you’d say, swinging your long blond hair. “No you’re not,” those in the know would chuckle. Then, after dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco, in a Judy Chicago — style rebirth, you renamed yourself Harriet Dodge. After you had a child, you inched toward the state and made the change officiaclass="underline" you placed an ad in the paper, filed the paperwork at the courthouse. (Until then, you’d kept your distance from “affairs of the state”: no one had your correct Social Security number until you were thirty-six; you’d never had a bank account.) Over time you became Harriet “Harry” Dodge: an attempt to conjure the feeling of and, or but. Now you are simply Harry, the Harriet a distasteful but sometimes indicative appendage.
When the New York Times ran a piece on your art in 2008, the editor said you couldn’t appear in their pages unless you chose Mr. or Ms. You’d been waiting your whole life for this kind of recognition; now here it was, but with this price. (You chose Ms., “to take one for the team.”) Around the same time, your ex wouldn’t agree to a custody deal if you checked the box on the second-parent adoption forms that said “mother,” but you couldn’t by law check the box that said “father.” (I judged you then for not having adopted your first son at birth, which would have obviated this torturous second-parent adoption process; to my surprise, I find that now I, too, am unwilling to undertake such a proceeding, vis-à-vis Iggy — I’d rather gamble on national LGBT legal momentum and the relatively progressive state of California than pay $10,000 in legal fees and allow a social worker into our home to interview our children, to deem us “fit.”) When we visited your mother in the hospital, she would sometimes say how glad she was that her daughter was there with her; the nurses would then wheel around the room, looking for her. When we take Iggy to the doctor together now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with a baby. I’m certainly doing their team a lot of favors, you mutter. Conversely, there’s at least one restaurant we don’t go to anymore because the waiter had a Tourette’s-like addiction to calling everyone in our family “ladies” every time he so much as deposited a bottle of catsup at our table. He thinks we’re all girls, my stepson would whisper to us in bemusement. That’s OK — girls are very, very cool, you would tell him. I know, he would say back.
In your early thirties, you went on a hunt for your birth mother. You didn’t have much to go on, but eventually you found her: she was a newly sober leather dyke — quick, articulate, tough around the edges. One of the first things she told you was that she had worked as a prostitute in Nevada. You offered her some probable excuses; she cut you right off, saying she liked the work, and if you got it, use it. During your first phone conversation, you asked about your birth father; she sighed, “Oh honey, I’m just not sure.” But when you met her for lunch at a Chili’s, upon seeing you approach, she exclaimed, “It was Jerry!” She said you looked just like her other child, whose father was Jerry. She had frosty gray hair and wire spectacles, wore lipstick and wide-bottom linen pants. She told you her father (your natal grandfather) had just died and left her a little money, with which she was fixing up a craftsman in San Jose with her on-again, off-again butch lover.
All she told you then about Jerry was that he was “not a nice person.” Later she said he was violent. She said she wasn’t in touch with him anymore — the last she’d heard was that he was living on an island off Canada with holes cut out of the armpits of his shirt, to air out his shingles. A few years later, she told you he had died. You never wanted to know more.
Your birth brother, who was raised by his father, has long been an addict — in and out of prison, on and off the streets. He wrote you once from prison, in a style that uncannily echoed your own — the same careening prose, shot through with a meticulousness, a darkness, a hilarity. The last time she heard from him, your birth mother tells us, he had been found unconscious in a parking lot, covered in blood. Once he came to, he called her collect; she didn’t accept the charge. She threw up her hands as she told us this story, saying, I didn’t have the money! But we also heard her saying, I can’t carry him anymore.
You had your last drink at twenty-three. You already knew.
It can be hard not to know much about one’s parents. But, you tell me, it can be awesome too. Before you had thought much about gender, you attributed your lifelong interest in fluidity and nomadism to being adopted, and you treasured it. You felt you had escaped the fear of someday becoming your parents, a fear you saw ruling the psyches of many of your friends. Your parents didn’t have to be disappointments or genetic warnings. They could just be two ordinary people, doing their best. From a very young age — your parents had always been open about the fact that you were adopted — you remember feeling a spreading, inclusive, almost mystical sense of belonging. The fact that anybody could have been your birth mother was an astonishment, but one tinged with exhilaration: rather than being from or for an other, you felt you came from the whole world, utterly plural. You were curious enough to track down your birth mother, but after your real mother died, you found yourself unable to answer your birth mother’s calls. Even now, years later, the interest you once took in finding her feels clouded by the memory of your mother, and your ongoing grief at losing her. Your longing to see her again. Phyllis.
It’s easy enough to say, I’ll be the right kind of finite or sodomitical mother. I’ll let my baby know where the me and the not-me begin and end, and withstand whatever rage ensues. I’ll give as much as I’ve got to give without losing sight of my own me. I’ll let him know that I’m a person with my own needs and desires, and over time he’ll come to respect me for elucidating such boundaries, for feeling real as he comes to know me as real.