Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey (8 page)

Especially, we found out, when it comes to motorcycles.

You can’t talk about yourself as a parent unless you backpedal a little to consider how you yourself were parented.

My mother married a man “with potential,” and for many years, my father made a very comfortable living. I benefitted from his work ethic in the form of horseback riding lessons and a private tennis coach. Life, for the most part, was good.

During my junior year in high school, my father declared bankruptcy. This was a horrible blow. This terrible (and humiliating, to hear my mother tell it) reversal of fortune was the result of my father employing extremely poor judgment when it came to investing other people’s money. I never got the specifics, and frankly, I prefer it that way. At the time I wouldn’t have understood, and now, as an adult, I realize the specifics are not important. He was careless, and it cost him more than his business; it cost us our family.

This isn’t exactly classified information, but needless to say, it isn’t the kind of story one tends to trot out at dinner parties. “Leave it alone,” John likes to say, “it’s all in the past,” but as I am learning, as we are all learning, the past has a way of catching up with you. And by “catching up” I mean hunting you down and pouncing on you when you least expect it. Always, the past is just a step, or a page, or a blood test behind you. You need not fear it, but you must always bear in mind that the past is never quite as finished with you as you think you are with it.

The thing is, there are events in our lives that impact us, and the bankruptcy issue and the divorce that followed it are two things that impacted me greatly.

When my parents divorced, I found myself bouncing back and forth between them, not only on alternate weekends, but in terms of sympathy. I would feel nothing but heartache for my mother when I’d find her sitting alone in the big master bedroom, crying into my father’s empty dresser drawers. And I would feel thoroughly awful for my poor, lonely father when I would visit him and find him eating cold beans out of a can (because his was part of a generation of men who had never been taught to cook). The thing I will never forgive either of them for is that they ignored my own sadness and used me as artillery against each other. They were more concerned with “winning” than with how their behavior made me feel.

Their hostility came to a head when it was time for me to attend the senior prom. I expected to go with the boy I’d been “keeping company with” (which is what my mother called it, as though her daughter was Scarlett O’Hara and not Katie Tamblyn). The boy’s name was Trevor Anderson. He had lent me his varsity jacket one crisp, autumn day and then never asked for it back, which officially made us a couple. But when spring came, Trevor broke my heart by asking Linda DeCapella to the prom instead of me. Well, Linda DeCapella put out; I didn’t.

My mother was as crestfallen as I was, possibly more. Trevor was husband material in her opinion (she pointed this out even though I was only a high school senior), and I should have found a way to keep my hooks in him without stooping to Ms. DeCapella’s level.

I wish that just once she’d indicated to me that she saw Trevor’s breaking up with me as his loss, not mine.

My father did. “It’s his loss, Katie,” he said when I told him the whole horrible story during my court-sanctioned visit that weekend. “That boy will be kicking himself one day, you mark my words.”

It’s his loss, Katie.
To this day, I remember that as one of the sweetest things my father ever said to me.

My mother dealt with the situation not by attempting to comfort me but by flipping through my school yearbook, in search of an acceptable replacement prom date for me. Do you think I’m exaggerating? I’m not. Her rationale was that I was going to have to work quickly if I had any hopes of securing a boy from one of the “better” families. She’d narrowed it down to Jimmy Hartley, from up the street (she knew his mother from bridge club), and Robert M. Dennison III, our class treasurer who was a legacy at Purdue.

I casually suggested that I might like to go to prom with a boy from my European history class, Javier Menendez, who had moved to town recently from the Bronx, New York. As you might imagine, my mother did not see Javier as a viable option, and she told me so.

She also told me that I could forget about my father coming to the house on prom night to see me in my dress and pose for photos with me in front of the fireplace.

“He’s not welcome here,” she said, turning another page in the yearbook in case she’d missed anyone who might prove to be more suitable than Robbie or Jim.

“That’s not fair,” I told her. “You divorced him. I didn’t.”

But I knew it had nothing to do with fairness. My mother was in the enviable position of having me on her home turf, and forbidding my father to come see me all dressed up and beaming beside my handsome date (whoever he turned out to be) was the checkmate move she’d been waiting for. Prom happened once in a lifetime and she was going to deprive him of being a part of it, just because she could.

How I felt about it, apparently, didn’t matter. I would have expressed my feelings, but that was not something my mother encouraged.

In the end I went to the dance with Robbie Dennison and (Bay will no doubt roll her eyes here, but I think Daphne will find it sweet) I was elected prom queen in a landslide victory. Take that, Trevor Anderson!

The point is that my mother had very definite ideas about things, and they were rarely open to negotiation. I’m that way when it comes to things like running with scissors and ingesting poison (and, let us not forget, riding on motorcycles), but I am a firm believer in giving a child the freedom to express herself.

Maybe I wouldn’t be, if I hadn’t had one kid who was a musical prodigy and another who was a gifted artist. Maybe I came to believe in self-expression because I found myself raising children who needed me to believe in it. And because I loved them and wanted them to be happy and fulfilled, I found a way to become the mother that fit them best, the mother I am today.

So perhaps you don’t just learn how to parent from your parents. Perhaps, some of it you learn from your kids—but only if you’re paying attention, and only if you’re willing to be taught.

Maybe, all the time we think we are guiding and molding our children, the reality is that they are guiding and molding us.

That never occurred to me until this very moment.

And here I find myself once again reminded that motherhood, in the very best of ways, will always find a way to surprise me.

Here’s what happened with the motorcycle: Prior to Daphne, Regina, and Adrianna moving in, John and I had taken Daphne for a tour of the prep school Bay and Toby attend. Our hope was that she would decide to transfer from her high school, Carlton School for the Deaf, and allow us to pay her tuition at Buckner Hall.

I can say now that this was not our most shining moment. We hadn’t thought it through clearly enough, being as we were so anxious to make up for lost time with Daphne. We meant well, but you know where the road to good intentions can lead. Carlton was and remains the absolute, uncontested right place for Daphne to be. But we live and we learn. Of all the platitudes and axioms and old sayings that have been articulated throughout this experience, I can tell you that this one rings truest.

Nevertheless, we called the appropriate administrators and set up a tour of Buckner. On the way home a motorcycle pulled up beside us, and to my horror, Daphne was riding on the back of it.

My heart thudded in my chest out of pure fear for her safety, and I actually called out to her through the window. But of course she didn’t hear me. Neither did the driver, Emmett, who was also deaf. I immediately had a sense that this young man, wearing his leather jacket and gripping the handlebars with such intensity, was filled with a combination of teen angst and passion, like a deaf James Dean. And, of course, therein lay the root of my terror.

But Regina, we discovered, had signed off on Daphne riding with this kid. Frankly, I couldn’t believe it, and I told her so, and of course, she defended her decision.

She countered by questioning the wisdom of buying Toby a thirty-thousand-dollar sports car.

It was a standoff, a battle of wills.

Ultimately, Regina came around. She didn’t allow us to forbid Daphne from riding with her friend, but she did admit to John that she had adamantly resisted the motorcycle for months before she finally broke down and consented. She told him she trusted Emmett implicitly, and that he had a stellar driving record. Of course that hadn’t stopped her from following them at a distance the first few weeks after she gave Daphne permission to ride.

“You know what’s funny?” she said to John then. “For years, I’ve wished there was someone else around to bounce this stuff off of.”

I think I know what she was getting at it. Bouncing something off of someone is different than actually giving up your voice. It’s a good thing when someone says, “Keep it up, you’re doing great,” but quite another when the response is “Let’s try it my way.”

We both wanted a voice. And we would both have one. The difficult thing was going to be learning to harmonize.

How Tandoori Chicken Can Change Your Life

I know there is no way I will escape this memoir without at least touching on that abstract concept known as Fate. Whether you call it karma, kismet, fortune, destiny, serendipity, good old-fashioned dumb luck, or all of the above, surely you must be wondering where, in light of my circumstance, I stand on this issue. As I am not a philosopher or a Zen master or a theologian, I will have to explain it to you in the rudimentary terms by which I myself have come to understand it. If it seems oversimplified, that’s because it is.

Six days prior to the due date of my second child, I found myself craving Indian food in the absolute worst way. Visions of Vindaloo danced in my head as I called John at work and instructed him to bring home as much curry-flavored take-out food as he could fit in the cargo hold of the Range Rover he was driving at the time.

“Isn’t Indian food a little spicy?” he asked cautiously. (I’d entered that phase of my pregnancy when even the slightest hint of provocation could send me into a hormone-driven meltdown.)

“It’s very spicy, actually.”

“Well, you’re due in six days.”

“What’s your point?”

Needless to say, John picked up the Indian food and I devoured every last morsel like the extremely pregnant woman I was.

Which was why I developed one hell of a case of heartburn.

Which was why I couldn’t fall asleep.

Which was why, at two o’clock in the morning, I decided the upper shelf of the walk-in cedar closet needed to be completely reorganized, and since in a mere six days I would be the mother of two (count ’em,
two
!) children under the age of twenty-four months, I’d better get a move on and do it now while I had the chance.

Which was why I was stupidly attempting to lift a thirty-gallon plastic storage bin filled with woolen blankets and flannel sheets in the middle of the night.

Which was why I went into labor six days earlier than I was scheduled to and wound up giving birth to my daughter on a day when the nurses in the maternity ward were being forced to work quadruple shifts.

Which is why in a state of utter exhaustion, one of them unintentionally gave me the wrong child.

Call it fate. Call it chance. Call it whatever you want. But that’s how it happened. Life is just one big cosmic flowchart. I can’t explain it any better than that. And I’m sure Regina can give me a similar breakdown of the events leading to the illness that resulted in Daphne losing her ability to hear. But what it all boils down to is this—whether you kill a ladybug in Tokyo and it causes a bridge to collapse in Belgium, or you crave Indian food in Mission Hills and it results in a hospital staffer putting the wrong ID anklet on your newborn baby, there are forces at work in the universe over which we mere mortals have no control. If I had been craving oatmeal, or mashed potatoes, then maybe none of this would have ever happened.

Or, then again, maybe it would have. I don’t presume to know, and frankly, it’s too exhausting to even try and guess.

I heard an expression once:
Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

In other words, the best and only thing we can do is simply enjoy the Tandoori and hope the dominoes fall in our favor.

I met John Kennish in the fall of 1990.

I graduated from Wofford College in South Carolina the spring before and was living at home with my mother and her second husband, Dr. Gregory Dixon, a very successful orthopedic surgeon. Most of my girlfriends were away in graduate school or paying their entry-level dues in the corporate world.

I had been working part time at The Gap, mostly to keep busy while trying to determine what I really wanted to do with my life. My mother was distraught that I wasn’t “serious” with anyone (I was twenty-one and, according to her, “not getting any younger”), so she saw to it that I maintained an active social life by setting me up on a series of dreadful blind dates with the sons or nephews or distant cousins of her bridge partners, country club friends, and so on. After one particularly horrific date with the godson of a church acquaintance, I caved in and called Trevor Anderson. Ol’ Trev was also living at home with his folks, studying for the LSATs. By now, I’d forgiven him for the Linda DeCapella debacle and I figured it would be far less miserable catching the occasional dinner or movie with Trevor than suffering through any more blind dates arranged by my mother.