Childhood

It's not exceedingly frequent, but I have often considered the idea of adopting a child. Depending on my circumstances in a few years, I may even consider adopting a couple of children.

On a flight to Miami last year, I sat next to a woman on the plane. She was interested in me and what I do, and so we chatted about this and that. Women who are mothers typically light up when I tell them about my research. It's kind of cool, because I get to hear many wonderful stories. Before I knew it, she told me the story of her adopted daughter. She said that when she was 28 years old (my age!), she was working as a nurse in one of the Miami hospitals. She and her husband had been trying to conceive their own child for 3 years, and nothing was working. One day, a 15-year-old girl girl arrived at the hospital with "stomach cramps" and delivered a full-term baby. The girl was on vacation with her family from Brazil, and the father insisted that she leave the baby behind. Apparently, one of the nurses came to the woman when she was on her break and asked if she wanted a baby. The answer was an unequivocal yes, and she and her husband adopted the baby girl. The woman beamed when I asked to see pictures of her then 18-year-old daughter. In 100% proud mother fashion, she shared with me all 30 of the wallet photos she had in her purse.

In my travels, I get handed babies all of the time. Of course, I find this more comical than anything. I always bounce the baby around, make a few faces, laugh and hand it back to its rightful owner. One time, though, I was touring through a coffee-picking tenement near the Nicaraguan border, when a woman desperately handed me her child and said that he would die if I didn't take him with me. I certainly didn't laugh when I heard this one. She said that the baby was her 5th child and that she couldn't afford to feed another one. I looked at her, then looked at the little boy in my arms and realized immediately what was amiss. The mother was a very attractive woman with dark, distinctively Mayan features, but the child had honey-colored skin, curls of dark-blonde hair and big, round, deep green eyes. The mother pulled me aside and pleaded that I take her child to his "American father". At first I was confused, but then I looked at the two children that were clinging to her skirts and knew exactly what had happened. Sexual tourism is a big thing in this part of the world. American men come down from the States for women like this all of the time. I later learned (in a brothel in San Jose), that these loser American types are referred to as "Teddy Bears" because they are all typically big, fat and hairy. (And in my mind, telling their wives and kids in the suburbs that they are going on fishing trips down South. Anyway.) Doing the math on the child in my arms, I calculated that he had most likely been conceived during the last Christmas season. From my brothel friends in San Jose, I learned that it's not especially uncommen for women to come to the city sell their bodies, most especially over the Navidad season, so that they can give something to their children.

Of course, I am in no position to even consider bringing children into my life. I don't anticipate being there for quite some time, and I am in no rush. But the thought is there. Not too long ago, I thought about how the act of parenting is really having the ability to give someone a great childhood. Every child deserves to be safe and loved. In this, every child deserve a proper childhood. One day, I'm sure I'll reclaim a bit of my own lost childhood in the process of caring for new little people, whether they are biologically mine or not.

Teach Your Children Well

Namaste (before sunscreen), 1981

My parents? They were hippies, uh-huh...

I spent the better part of my early childhood living on a small island in Boston Harbor, where my father's ratty old canoe was our car, and my mother kept a very strict Macrobiotic kitchen. I knew all of the Hindu names of yoga postures, and spent a lot of time hanging out with a revolving group of Persian and Afghani children whose families also sought refuge on the island. I had a working vocabularly of Dari and Farsi without knowing the difference, or, for that matter, even caring. My father would jam out on his 12-string acoustic guiter, and I entertained anyone who would watch with my perfectly pitched song and dance performance of "Puff the Magic Dragon". Even though I often took requests, at 3 years old, I did a fabulous impersonation of Janis Joplin. Can you imagine your 3 year old, dressed in beads singing "Mercedes Benz" at the top of her lungs? Indeed.

I did not consume processed sugar until my grandparents haplessly handed me a lollipop at the age of 5. In fact, it wasn't until the age of 5, when we moved off of the island and into the heart of Washington, DC that I learned that little girls were required to actually wear shirts and bathing suit tops to cover their nipples even though boys and men were not. For a child who spent the better part of her young life in the buff, I found this incredibly problematic. Perhaps it is for this reason alone that I am an adult fan of topless beaches and fail to understand why Americans are so weird about their bodies. Just last week, a friend of mine confessed to me that she is incredibly uncomfortable when she sees women breastfeeding in public. My best guess is that she's one of those women who puts her flannel grandma pajamas on immediately after sex, and if she has ever had an orgasm, it may have been once, by accident, on the treadmill, at the gym. But I digress.

From time to time in my yoga practice, certain early childhood memories (such as the one above) will come to the surface of my consciousness and leave me smiling for a few days. In a very meaningful way, I find that a patient, ego-free hour or so of this sort of meditation allows me to reconnect with that bead-wearing, half-naked girlchild banchee within. Because of this, I've recently started to wonder what kind of parent will I be one day to my own little hippie children? I really hope that I don't become one of those parents who makes their offspring overly neurotic and fearful of the world at large. I also don't know how I feel about full-time daycare or live-in nannies. No. I want sweaty, earth-caked children with sticky hands and pet frogs, who have an abudance of crayon drawings on their bedroom walls. They will love to read and build tree forts, and stand up to school bullies, and spend hours doing gymnastics tricks in the back yard.

Lately, I have had the vision of one day bringing my own girlchild to yoga classes with me so that she may grow up loving herself and her body. And I see myself being the kind of mother that allows her boychild to know respect, sensitivity, strength and compassion, so that he may grow up to be a very good man. Of course, all of this is contingent on actually having these fictitious children. Given the fact that in the late 1970's, they stopped placing biological clocks in most of America's girlchildren, I am in no serious rush to reproduce any time soon. In fact, for now I'll just be sticking with the yoga, the topless beaches and my all-time favorite set of hippie beads.