Free God and Jetfire by Amy Seek

sincerity was tempered with lightness: Interior decorating is her passion—she moves the furniture around occasionally to keep me on my toes (and, in case I did not get the joke: HA HA! ). Couples made random declarations, as if cornered awkwardly at a cocktail party— Dressing alike is Fun! —and fumbled for words, often seeming to forget I was literate and a native speaker of English. Sometimes the uncomfortably self-promotional nature of the form was playfully averted, as with a letter written as a screenplay in which the couple was endorsed, between antics, by their cats, Tillie, Simon, and Bingo.
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    None of the couples had chosen adoption out of concern for the unwanted children of the world, the way we fertile girls with noble principles sometimes imagined we’d do. Every single one was driven to it by misfortunes they mentioned only briefly. Complex stories inflected toward the positive. After five years of infertility treatments, two surgeries, fertility drugs, numerous tests and doctor visits, we believe adoption is the answer to our prayers!
    I had so many questions. I wondered how it felt to know their child wouldn’t look like the partner they said they loved so much. I wanted to know how their relationship had survived the blow of infertility—it couldn’t be their common interest in old movies ( Rick makes the popcorn!) . Maybe it wasn’t the place for stripped-bare authenticity, but I found myself wanting to scratch through the polish and explore territory not sanctioned by the agency template. In a situation like ours, with so little time to make such a big commitment, honesty was expedient. I wanted a candid glimpse of the couple. Special signals and particular stories to give me some flicker of an instinct that I’d found someone with whom I could share a future.
    Instead they lured me with loose praise, congratulating me for my strength and thanking me for my generosity. They assured me that giving them my baby would be the most unselfish and mature choice I would ever make. They tugged at my heartstrings with e-mail addresses like [email protected] and overwhelmed themselves with premature and cumbersome gratitude: Words are simply inadequate to describe the joy we will experience when we are told that you have made our dreams come true. They said they admired my courage. They knew I had a hard decision to make. But little did they know I was praying for a miscarriage! That the trinkets of the world they dreamed about by day—rattles and blue bears and birthday cakes—happened to moonlight in my nightmares.
    It was only on the topic of openness that the tone of the letters changed. They read like legal contracts written just to be revoked: “We are willing to pursue a level of openness that would be mutually beneficial and comfortable for all involved.” Some said that they would be willing to keep in touch through letters and photos, which seemed to suggest I wouldn’t get to see my child in person again. One couple offered a commitment to openness to sharing every progress of the child’s life, but didn’t specify what might constitute sharing (would they send letters through the adoption agency? Could we share an actual experience together?) or progress (the child’s first step? Or high school graduation—maybe with no progresses in between?). The whole phrase commitment to openness to sharing was so strangely layered, it was surely not to be mistaken for commitment to openness .
    But shouldn’t they be cultivating visions of openness that had the same neon joy and optimism as their idealized dreams of parenthood? If they could imagine rocking my baby to sleep every night, was it so difficult to think about having me over for lunch now and then? I thought that some of the warmth and affection they somehow already felt for my child might spill over to me by association. Or out of gratitude for my