by Cybèle Cochran
I’m running a 5K. The path is crowded with race participants and park visitors who seem oblivious to the throngs rushing around them like white water over stones. We run past picnic areas and parking lots, through forests and fields. The trail gets uncomfortably narrow, the risk high of tripping over a raised tree root or stone. It opens to a wider paved route which allows me the space I need to safely push ahead. I pass a tall man with a Bible quote on his T-shirt unaware of the non-Christians who might not want to read it. I pass a child with tidy cornrows. I pass two women walking side by side and weave around them carefully as runners in the 10K, who started before the 5K, run in the reverse direction like oncoming traffic. I call, “On your left” to prevent collisions.
There’s combustible fuel inside me and I’m burning it with each lift off the asphalt. I am a machine. I conduct my body like an orchestra, directing all parts into motion. It responds with the music of speed. I can do anything I want.
The course winds around Lake Accotink, fifteen miles south of Washington, DC. The race is an annual spring fundraiser for Foster the Family, an organization that supports families like mine. There are hundreds of people here representing the good in humanity—foster parents, adopted kids, grandparents, and other kin who stepped in when birth parents fell to their demons. My husband couldn’t make it, but he’s rooting from afar.
Many runners pass me and I mentally salute them. They are taking this race seriously, as is my older son who is so focused when he passes me on the return, he doesn’t see me despite my waving. His cheeks are red. His long hair bounces on his shoulders under his beanie. His too-small track team singlet, from which his skinny arms and legs emerge like roots from a sapling, make him look younger than his seventeen years. He wears it to impress the crowd of strangers and he is running hard to impress them more. He does not register my presence.
I wish my grandmother could have met him. She died ten years ago next month. By the time she passed from pneumonia, she was in a wheelchair living in the memory care unit of a nursing home. She recognized her family but lost track of crucial parts of her life like her first job and her half-brother David’s death. She did not forget her mother’s death, though. My grandmother retold that story at each visit, shaking her head as if the news were fresh. “She should have had her life ahead of her,” she said. “She was only thirty-two.”
At other points, she told me, “My head is empty.” She grimaced. I tried different tactics to assuage her, like quoting a New York Times article about older brains that retain information essential to identity, but relinquish less relevant details like that morning’s breakfast. I reminded her of all she had to remember over the course of her life, from getting her master’s degree at Hunter College to teaching kindergarten to raising my mother and uncle.
“Haven’t you worked hard enough to remember so many things over your lifetime?” I asked. “Don’t you deserve a break?”
My grandmother shook her head. “Disgusting.” She hated the brain that failed her, perhaps because it was the only thing that held her family together when her world fell apart at age ten. Relatives told me my grandmother was domineering with her younger siblings. Perhaps she was filling in where she imagined her mother would have, but with trauma-warped glasses. She tried to steer her memory through the fog of dementia but was powerless before its decline. I wished she wouldn’t be so hard on herself. I wanted her to accept both functioning and failing parts of her body.
My mother told me what my grandmother didn’t: how my grandmother and her little sister Sylvia were lying in bed with their mother when her heart failed. How the two girls were sent to live with their aunt Anna while their six-monthold brother Seymour was moved to an orphanage. In 1927, the New York City Board of Child Welfare deemed a father incapable of raising his children alone and Anna could only take on so much. When my great-grandfather remarried a year later and reunited the family, he forbade my grandmother and Sylvia from telling anyone his wife was not their birth mother. Being a stepmother carried stigma.
I told my boys our history because I wanted them to know we weren’t the first in our family—their new family—to piece a home together from shards. But I knew the similarities ended there. My boys and their sister were not removed from their family of origin because of death, and they were never reunited. They were wards of the state for nine years.
Their story carries stigma the way my grandmother’s did in her time. A social worker removed the children from their birth family when they were seven, five, and two. Their parents’ rights were terminated while they moved from foster home to foster home. Their sister was eventually placed with Andy, a single parent with no other children. More than three years ago, the boys came to our home.
My teenage son is unconcerned about stigma. It’s on the sidelines of his ambitions the way I was on his sidelines during this race. He wants to be a grownup. Our family is a way station between him and independence; what people think is neither here nor there.
But my younger son is like my great-grandfather. He doesn’t want anyone knowing how our family was formed. Despite misgivings about lying, I try to honor his wish: so few have been granted in his short life.
We pass as a biological family since the three of us are white and my husband is biracial. But a breath is all it takes to collapse our house of cards. I stammer every time teachers, doctors, or other parents ask questions about my sons’ early lives—no less a fog for my children than my grandmother’s memories were for her, and I am just as unable to fill in the blanks. At an office picnic, a senior official asked my kids what it’s like traveling the world as children of diplomats; after a frantic beat, I diverted his attention with a work question. When I ran into a colleague during a biological family visit at our local IHOP, all I could say for introductions was, “And this is my family,” with a sweeping gesture towards my husband, our two sons, their maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, their sister, and her adoptive mother. I can’t even begin to weave partial truths around that constellation. I wonder how my step-great-grandmother handled it. I guess she lied.
When my kids aren’t around, I lead with truth. I introduce myself at speaking engagements with a slide of our beautiful formed family. Diplomats often share family photos to emphasize the commitment that public service requires. Mine adds a flower to the greater family narrative bouquet. And I want to challenge stigma: my children’s history is nothing to be ashamed of. Their birth parents aren’t monsters. The boys, adopted at eleven and sixteen, are bruised but they aren’t damaged. Lotus flowers grow in murky swamps.
One time, a young white man with long curly hair approached me after I spoke to his cohort of interns. He’d introduced himself during the meeting as a junior at an Ivy League university and a recipient of a prestigious fellowship. Another privileged kid pushed to achieve, I thought.
“Thank you for adopting older children,” he said. “I’m an orphan. I aged out of the system without anyone adopting me.” I touched his shoulder because I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve never seen foster kids represented anywhere.”
Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black plays in my headphones, cord flopping against my elbow. I hear my breathing. The air rushing in and out of my lungs sounds like a series of h’s, unlike the silent rhythm of my gentle morning runs. I’m getting tired.
Adoption sparked my six-year-old imagination when my mother read fairy tales to me at bedtime. One time, I stopped her at an unfamiliar word.
“Mommy, what’s an orphan?”
“A little boy or little girl who doesn’t have a mommy or daddy.”
My eyes went wide with horror. “We have to take them home!”
My mother shook her head sadly. “There are too many. Our house is too small.”
“When I grow up, I will take them home!” I vowed. I could not accept a world where adults, with a sigh of resignation, turned away from problems they couldn’t solve.
I also can’t make my children believe we are their forever family any more than I could put my grandmother at ease with her myriad losses. There is a river of desires I reach for, swipe at—each progressing along its own path and timeline regardless of my intervention. The tension of doing versus accepting makes treacherous waters.
I reach the halfway point. The same distance is ahead of me and I can already feel my body protesting: my calves, quadriceps, and hamstrings ache to switch to lower gears. The orchestra is flagging. The music is drifting into cacophony. But my determination remains fierce. I will not let exhaustion take this race away from me.
I am forty-seven. How long will I be able to power my body through sheer will?
I am half my grandmother’s age when she passed. She started losing her memory in her late sixties but the symptoms were minor, like repeating conversations she’d had five minutes earlier. My sister and I, then a teen and a tween, rolled our eyes. Old people.
But in her late eighties, the forgetfulness grew to general confusion. My grandmother scattered lists throughout her apartment; she wrote down tasks and ideas and then misplaced the slips of paper. Her friend Elizabeth pulled me aside after dinner at the Olive Garden and told me she was worried because my grandmother needed help figuring out how to pay the check. Another time, when my mother and I visited her, we noticed dried food stuck on my grandmother’s clothing. She didn’t smell good. The skin on her face was flaky in patches. My mother grilled her on how often she bathed and my grandmother said once a week which we suspected was inaccurate. I called my sister from the beige phone on the nightstand in the bedroom and cried while my mother spoke with my grandmother quietly at the kitchen table. When had this started? For how long had we neglected her?
My mother started looking at nursing homes. She found a facility with a memory care unit that smelled the least bad and moved my grandmother there. During the first few visits, each time I told her I had to head back to DC, she begged me not to leave. I realized that my departure would upset her less if I told her I was going out for lunch. She would forget I had been there either way and the lie prevented unnecessary distress. “I’ll be back in a bit,” I told her as I bent down to her wheelchair to hug her. “I love you.”
Every part of my body is screaming so loudly, I can’t discern individual cries. My breathing is louder. My throat is raw. Sirens go off in my head and spinning red lights warn that I cannot continue. But I have to. The end is ahead and if I reduce the intensity now, all might be lost. I am racing to fulfill a promise: I said I would do it, and I will.
At the finish line, I bend over with my hands on my knees so I don’t collapse. The first person I recognize in the crowd when I look up is my twelve-year-old son. He wears a medal—second place in the under-thirteen fun run. He doesn’t run other than playing tag at recess, but neither, probably, do most of the kids here. Someone calls my name and I turn to see his sister’s adoptive mother, Andy, congratulating me on finishing. Behind her is my older son who finished long before. “I was the second person to finish the 5K,” he announces. “I was in front for the whole race until a guy passed me near the end.”
“That’s great, sweetheart. Good for you.” I struggle with recognizing achievement because he lives for praise. He wants to convince anyone and everyone that he is the best at whatever he does. It’s not teenage blustering. It’s a legacy of the survival skills he honed after being forced from four homes.
I cannot imagine how my sons process the succession of losses. I cannot imagine what safety looks like for them. I doubt the adoption papers give them any reassurance. My older son’s hyperfocus on validation is an attempt to exercise control in the face of an unpredictable and unstable world: I’m amazing. You’ll want to keep me.
I wish I could heal those wounds. I want him to be happy with himself as he is. I don’t care how fast he runs.
When the event organizers announce the race winners, I am surprised to hear my name in first place for my age group. I have never aspired for a medal. If my tombstone reads, “Finisher,” I’ll be content. Yet as I walk up to the announcer before 250 diverse formed families, I am overcome. I made a determination and I didn’t give up. I fought like hell. I feel deep satisfaction, like a child called to the front of the classroom while the class applauds her perfect score. Forget the battles whose outcome I can’t control through intention or persistence. This time, I won.
I take the medal and hang it around my neck, hoping that my boys and Andy will see me. She calls us the “in-laws” and I call her—as well as the boys’ bio family—our “big family.” We are different from one another in religion and politics, but we are family nonetheless. We root for one another.
The boys hover by the announcer until a volunteer herds the winners of each race and age group for photos. I watch my sons line up. My head is swarming with thoughts about how they might interpret the three of us with our medals; my older son, despite being a teenager, might recognize that his mom is good at something. We could build on this connection by encouraging my younger son to join the track team when he starts middle school next year. Maybe my husband will put his running shoes on again. It runs in the family, his teachers might say. Can this shared experience deepen the roots of our fledgling family? Can I make it so?
The medals would have filled my grandmother with joy—not because she cared about sports, but because we earned them. She was proud of everything we did. She would have printed copies of race photos to mail to extended family and framed her favorite one, displaying it alongside her grandchildren’s other achievements like my junior high school cross-stitch patterns and the cover illustration of my high school’s literary magazine.
My grandmother would have loved our boys. She saw my sister and me as a gift. I always felt she wanted to spend time with us. There was something she wanted to nurture, so it could grow and blossom into the wonderful thing we were meant to be. When our cousins were born, she marveled at them too, these unfurling green shoots rising in the garden of our family. We were each, in our variegated colors, necessary to create a connected work of beauty. We were rooted in our sense of self and in relation to one another.
After she died, I was struck by the number of framed photos throughout that apartment: every faded school picture from every grandchild was memorialized on her dresser or refrigerator. She would have responded the same way to my boys.
“You are a VIP,” she started saying at the nursing home. “Do you know what that means?”
“No,” I said with a grin.
“Very. Important. Person.” She looked satisfied with the explanation.
We came to parenthood through paper. Our foster care license was our pregnancy; a court order was their birth. But paper comes from trees—from soil, sunlight, and water. Hands and machines transformed the elements into scaffolding. Time built the frame. I spoon the sap of memories into walls.
I will stack this race and successive connecting moments like pebbles in a vase, the water slowly rising until it reaches the top. Until they have lived with us longer than they haven’t. Until my older son runs for pleasure instead of winning. Until they see their reflection in my eyes: infinite beauty, preciousness, and magic.
Even if the pebbles are actually grains of sand, it doesn’t matter how long it takes.
This is my promise. I said I would do it, and I will.
Cybèle Cochran is a home cook, runner, and occasional diplomat. This is her first publication. The views she expresses are entirely her own.
