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Summary
Summary
Dispatches from the new front lines of parenthood
When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia."
Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. She's been praised for her "historian's urge for accuracy," her "sociologist's sense of social nuance," and her "writerly passion for the beauty of language."
But Melissa and her husband have also pursued a more private vocation: parenthood. "We so loved raising our four children by birth, we didn't want to stop. When the clock started to run down on the home team, we brought in ringers."
When the number of children hit nine, Greene took a break from reporting. She trained her journalist's eye upon events at home. Fisseha was riding a bike down the basement stairs; out on the porch, a squirrel was sitting on Jesse's head; vulgar posters had erupted on bedroom walls; the insult niftam (the Amharic word for "snot") had led to fistfights; and four non-native-English-speaking teenage boys were researching, on Mom's computer, the subject of "saxing."
"At first I thought one of our trombone players was considering a change of instrument," writes Greene. "Then I remembered: they can't spell."
Using the tools of her trade, she uncovered the true subject of the "saxing" investigation, inspiring the chapter "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Couldn't Spell."
A celebration of parenthood; an ingathering of children, through birth and out of loss and bereavement; a relishing of moments hilarious and enlightening-- No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a loving portrait of a unique twenty first-century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy.
Author Notes
Melissa Fay Greene was a paralegal with Legal Services in McIntosh County, Georgia, when the events that make up her award-winning book Praying for Sheetrock (1991) took place. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Book Award finalist, Praying for Sheetrock is set in the early 1970s, when the struggle for civil rights that had been going on for years in other parts of the U.S. finally came to McIntosh County.
Greene's next book, The Temple Bombing (1996) was the winner of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Award, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was also a National Book Award finalist. It concerns the 1958 bombing of the Temple, the oldest synagogue in Atlanta.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With four children of their own, Atlanta journalist Greene (There Is No Me Without You) and her husband, a criminal defense attorney, gradually adopted five more-one from Bulgaria and four from Ethiopia-to create a roiling, largehearted family unit. In her whimsical, hilarious account, she pokes fun at her own initial cluelessness regarding the adoption process, which the couple began after Greene suffered a miscarriage in her mid-40s; they procured an "adoption doctor" to advise them on the risks of adopting institutionalized babies from Russian and Bulgarian orphanages (e.g., the baby's head measurements and appearance in videos might indicate developmental problems). After several trips to a rural Bulgarian orphanage, they brought home a four-year-old Roma boy they renamed Jesse; Greene writes frankly about her own moments of "post-adoption panic" and doubts about attachment. Subsequently, as her older children headed out to college, new ones arrived: the humanitarian HIV/AIDS crisis in Ethiopia resolved the couple to adopt healthy, five-year-old Helen, orphaned when her family was decimated by the disease; then nine-year-old Fisseha, and two brothers, Daniel and Yosef, whom Greene's older biological son Lee befriended while working at another Ethiopian orphanage. The family often felt like a "group home," as Greene depicts engagingly, yet despite periods of tension and strife, such as the discovery of living parents and sibling rivalry, Greene captures the family's triumphant shared delight in one another's differences. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Greene (Praying for Sheetrock, 1991) has written what has to be termed a truly heartfelt memoir about the foreign adoption of five children during the past decade. It was not a casual decision for Greene and her husband to add siblings to their four biological children, but the onset of empty nest syndrome and a long-ingrained delight in a full house prompted them to look outward. Her detailed descriptions of traveling to foreign countries, making awkward first adoption contact, and later discovering and embracing her children's still-living family members makes for one touching reunion after another. She resists the urge to be cloying, however, infusing each chapter with a strong dose of humor and not shying away from the difficulties presented by adopting older children. The struggle to break through sometimes stoic demeanors is tempered by the delight of her new Ethiopian children in dominating sports in a way their American siblings never could (many funny moments here). It's all one big, happy family but also a very real one. Call them the twenty-first-century Waltons, and revel in the joy they have found and brought home for keeps.--Mondor, Collee. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
The prodigiously cheering reflections of a mother gathering a large brood of children, both biological and adopted.Greene (There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children,2006, etc.) is the kind of person most engaged when there is a thick scrum of children underfoot. So when her eldest of four prepared for college, the author began to feel empty-nest syndrome, and she and her husband considered adoption. This was in the 1990s, a faraway time Greene recalls when her computer has to do "squat thrusts" to warm up before connecting to international-adoption sites on the Internet. After finding a boy in Bulgaria, she traveled there to investigate. Upon meeting him, she began to realize the heavy significance of the adoption process: "If I had thought this was a free look, a check-this-one-out, a no risk trial with the possibility of a full refund, I was wrong. It is not permissible to dabble in that way in someone's lifeespecially a child's." Fortunately, the author and the boy formed a bond, and he became a member of the family, as did girl and three boys from Ethiopia in subsequent years. Greene is a writer of emotional impact. Whether she is describing the lands she visited to gather her children or the days that followed back home in Georgia, her words are flush with humanity and all the messiness and comedy that humanity trails in its wake. She goes the distance, which is a beautiful thing to behold, even as she plots her escape from all that she has called down on her head, for these are orphanage kids with plenty of baggage in tow. "I don't think our plan is working. We're getting all the pain of empty nest anyway," she complained to her husband at one point. Eventually, an enveloping sweetness and involvement swept away all but what is elementally grand about being a parent and nursing a child.An upbeat chronicle of a life that has been lived on the bright side of the road, its ruts beveled by naked love.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Room for One More? Lee, at ten, was the first in the family to mention adoption. He tore out of a friend's backyard at dusk when I honked from the driveway and clattered in cleats into the backseat, rosy and dirty under his baseball cap. "I have a surprise for you!" I said as he buckled in. "Are you pregnant?" he happily cried. "What?!" I stopped and turned around to look at him in amazement. It was 1998. I was forty-five. "Lee, no." "Oh!" he said with disappointment, but then offered knowingly, "But did you find someone really, really sweet to adopt?" I pulled into traffic and silently swung my arm over the seat to deliver a paper bag containing a brand-new bike lamp that had suddenly lost most of its sparkle. It was uncanny that he'd asked this. A few years earlier I had struggled with the question of whether I was too old to give birth to a fifth child, and as it turned out, Donny and I were but a few months away from wondering if we might adopt a fifth child. I'd been surprised, as I turned forty-one, by a sudden onset of longing and nostalgia. The older children were thirteen, ten, and six. Lily was only two. But she'd moved to her "big girl bed," and the crib stood--now and forever?--empty. Why did I hesitate at this moment to leap across the great divide--from childbearing years to non-childbearing years? Sometimes, standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window into the front yard and the shade of the massive tulip poplar where the children lay in the deep grass, chewing on weed stalks, I wanted it never to end. If our home were a houseboat, we'd started to throw off the ropes and rumble away from the dock, but what if one last child were racing down to the pier, hoping to leap onto the deck? On my mother's side, I have one female first cousin, Judy: she gave birth to her fourth child at forty-two. That long-ago baby had been greeted by merriment and snickering among the medium and upper branches of the family tree. As I turned forty-one, I knew that having a last baby at forty-two was within the bounds of physiological possibility and ancestral sanction. At forty-one and a half I pressed myself to make a now-or-never decision. Donny was surprised. "I kind of feel we're set up to handle a larger population here," I said. To assist, he wordlessly extracted from a closet shelf an explicit wooden figurine he'd lugged home from a summer trip to Europe twenty-four years earlier. Shops offering African jewelry, sculpture, and dashikis weren't then ubiquitous in American shopping malls, and this item had struck the shaggy backpacking seventeen-year-old as a real find. A foot and a half tall, the rough-hewn fertility man-woman had sharp, pointy breasts, a pregnant belly, and an erect male genital. Young Donny, back at home in suburban White Plains, had glued tangles of black thread to key locales to serve as the statue's pubic hair. Now he brought it down from behind his sweaters (I'd forgotten the thing existed) and stood it up on his night table beside the clock radio. Having his/her sharp parts all aimed at me felt threatening rather than encouraging. And I felt deeply undecided. Other than Donny, I could find no one who thought it was a good idea to try for a fifth child at forty-one. The months scrolled by, narrowing my window of opportunity. Then I turned forty-two. Then I was forty-two years and one month old. I made my first-ever appointment with a psychologist. "I need help deciding whether to get pregnant again," I told her. "I have two months left to decide." But she wanted to talk about every sort of unrelated thing! She wanted to hear about my marriage. She said, "You know, I used to be afraid of empty nest, too, but it can be an absolutely wonderful time for you and your husband to find each other again." "I haven't lost my husband," I said. "We're very close. Can you just tell me yes or no here?" "Many women find that once their children are raised, they have a chance to discover their own gifts and to pursue their own career aspirations." "Yes or no?" asked Donny that night. "She's not telling me until next week. Meanwhile, could you please turn that thing to face the wall? I don't like the way it's looking at me." The following week the therapist wanted to explore my relationships with my parents. "You're not going to give me a yes-or-no answer, are you?" Honestly, I knew this wasn't how therapy worked; still, I'd hoped for just a slender clue about which path to take. "The empty-nest years can be a very fulfilling time of life for a woman," she replied. "The answer is NO," I told Donny that night. Of course I didn't have to listen to the therapist, but in the light of her disapproval I began to picture myself as an old, gaunt mother struggling to shove a stroller up the sidewalk while the professional achievements and the season symphony tickets enjoyed by my friends remained out of reach for decades. By April 1994 it was too late to conceive a baby to whom I could give birth at forty-two. With gratitude to the universe for our four glorious children, I moved on. Donny stuffed the wooden fertility figure back on the closet shelf so it could return to the business of poking holes in his sweaters. Four years later--a couple of months after Lee asked his question about whether I'd just adopted somebody very sweet and I handed him a bike lamp instead--I stood in front of an audience, giving a talk, when I suddenly wondered what had become of my menstrual cycle. Was this menopause? On the way home I detoured to CVS to pick up a pregnancy test that would rule out the unlikeliest scenario. A pregnancy test is an embarrassing item to show a drugstore cashier at any age, but especially at forty-five. "You will not believe what I just bought," I called laughingly to Donny as I came in and jogged upstairs to rule out the ludicrous possibility that ... oh my God I'm pregnant. The timeline that came with the package estimated that I would give birth seven months hence, at the age of forty-six. Four times before, Donny and I had rejoiced at such news; we're not dancing people ( he's not), so our only spontaneous pas de deux have occurred at these moments with a brief turn about the bedroom. But now I exited the bathroom and threw myself stiffly facedown on our bed. As every previous time, Donny was amazed and thrilled, his eyebrows raised in happiness, his round cheeks red beneath the beard, his lips parted for a great laugh. Seeing my woodenness, he froze. "I want whatever you want," he offered quickly. "Can we even handle this?" I moaned into the bedspread. "Financially, I mean?" "A baby?" he roared with happiness. "Of course we can afford a baby!" Case closed! as we say in this family in which the father is a litigator. My elderly obstetrician, retired, agreed to meet with me for old times' sake. Creeping into his long-ago desk chair, he confirmed the physical toll and genetic risks foretold by the data. "I don't know if I can do this again," I told Donny that night. "It's not healthy for me or for the baby. It's a high-risk pregnancy in every way." I thought, but didn't say, What would I even wear? Sentimentally, I had saved my favorite maternity T-shirt, billowing white and dotted with small pink storks. It was a seventeen-year-old shirt, older than Molly. I got it out and looked at it but didn't try it on. While elbow-deep in memorabilia, I pulled out Lee's baby book. Here he was moments after birth, full of soft-lipped, plump-cheeked sweetness and the round-eyed promise of good humor. Just looking at the picture reminded me of the sucking, slobbery, exhaustive needs of newborns. Donny looked at the photo and drew a different conclusion. "There's our answer!" he yelled. "SO CUTE!" We took a moment to banter about names, always one of our favorite parts. "Finally we can name a child Gideon!" I said. "Giddie! Such a great nickname!" "Forget it." "You think Gideon Samuel sounds too Jewish," I accused, and he declined to comment. "I still like Kenny," I mused. "Too plain." "I still like Miranda for a girl." I said this only as a prompt for his reminder: "A criminal defense attorney cannot name his daughter Miranda." But I was worried. This child was so much younger than the others that he would be an only child by middle school. (I felt it was a boy.) Instead of food fights at dinnertime in the noisy kitchen, there'd be a poorly lit dining room heavy with the silence of impeccable manners. Instead of raucous Hanukkahs and crowds of mittened friends stomping into the front hall, there would be long winter weekends during which the pale fellow wandered quietly from room to room, turning the cold pages of coffee table art books while his elderly mother upstairs took a three-hour nap. "I'm not sure this is a good idea," I said the next day. "I'm not sure I can do this again. I can't really picture this kid's childhood." Donny, taken aback, nodded somberly, tactfully. It was a weekend of hard rain and high wind. I sat at the kitchen table anguished by confusion and fear. The children were mystified by my sorrow. "Look! Look at Dad!" yelled Seth, fourteen. Below the kitchen bay window, on the brick patio behind the house, Donny, in the downpour, was wrestling with contraptions and wire. "What on earth?" I said. "Run, help him. What is he trying to do?" Eager to cheer me up, Donny had driven to a garden store and purchased a bird feeder. Now he was jerry-rigging it so that he could hoist it by wire ten feet above the patio to swing in midair beside the bay window where I miserably sat. Engineering is not one of Donny's strong points, nor is he happy when wet. I watched him struggle in the rain, drenched, calling out instructions to Seth as if they were sailors trying to turn a boat in a gale. It was the most loving gift, the most romantic thing I have ever seen. The next day, I started to lose the pregnancy. I hurried to bed and elevated my feet. I called the doctor's office. I drank herbal teas and hugged a hot-water bottle. As I was losing the baby, I suddenly realized how much I wanted it, how much I wanted him . Far from a goofy and embarrassing situation to have conceived a child in my mid-forties, it now seemed brilliant, miraculous, one in a million. Gideon! I held my belly. "I'm sorry I said this would be too hard. Really I wanted you. I do want you. Please stay." But it was over. I was overcome with grief and remorse. Why had I not welcomed the new life wholeheartedly from the first second of its delicate touching down? I'd been offered a gift beyond measure, and instead of rejoicing, I'd whined. I'd made wisecracks. Now I blamed myself. Five was a marvelous number of children to have! It was a prime number, too, and prime numbers were Seth's favorites! What had I thought was more important? What "data" had I thought it was urgent to collect, to weigh what kind of decision? Now it was too late. Life was short--for the little zygote, life had been six weeks long. Life was short, and our family capacity was big: both Donny and I had started to make room for a fifth child. Again he longed to cheer me up, but he doubted that another bird feeder would do the trick. "Listen," he said one night as he punched socks into his overstuffed dresser drawer and I lay mournfully on my side in bed, my stack of books untouched, my lamp turned off. "If we really want another child, why don't we adopt one?" Copyright (c) 2011 by Melissa Fay Greene Excerpted from No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Still Here, After All These Years | p. 3 |
1 Room for One More? | p. 13 |
2 Nine Hundred and Eighty Thousand Websites | p. 19 |
3 Foreign Film Festival | p. 24 |
4 Motherhood vs. the Career | p. 29 |
5 Chrissy | p. 35 |
6 First Trip to Bulgaria | p. 39 |
7 Just a Weekend Getaway | p. 46 |
8 The Decision | p. 53 |
9 Return to Bulgaria | p. 60 |
10 Post-Adoption Panic | p. 66 |
11 Love at Second Sight | p. 72 |
12 The Art of Playing | p. 78 |
13 Crash and Burn | p. 83 |
14 Monkey icka Lion | p. 90 |
15 Sing, Goddess... | p. 95 |
16 Enormous Families, Group Homes | p. 99 |
17 Dogs We Have Loved | p. 105 |
18 The ABCs of Preliteracy | p. 111 |
19 A Continent of Orphans | p. 117 |
20 First Trip to Ethiopia | p. 122 |
21 Old Friends | p. 131 |
22 Helen in America | p. 137 |
23 Questions of Heaven | p. 144 |
24 Why This Is Not a Cookbook | p. 151 |
25 Married to the Defense | p. 156 |
26 A Boy Moves Out, a New Boy Heads Our Way | p. 163 |
27 Meeting Fisseha | p. 168 |
28 Searching for Grandmother | p. 173 |
29 Tsehai | p. 178 |
30 The Labyrinth of Nightmare | p. 185 |
31 The Professor Gives Birth | p. 188 |
32 The Young Hunter-Gatherer | p. 192 |
33 Identity | p. 197 |
34 Sandlot Ball | p. 203 |
35 Squirrels We Have Known, Also Insects | p. 209 |
36 A Wonderful Number of Children | p. 215 |
37 An Orphanage League | p. 225 |
38 Room for Two More? | p. 233 |
39 Their Histories | p. 241 |
40 Homeland Tour | p. 246 |
41 Class Differences | p. 252 |
42 Swim Party | p. 257 |
43 Reunion | p. 261 |
44 A Family Feast | p. 265 |
45 Daniel and Yosef in America | p. 273 |
46 Strife | p. 280 |
47 Fighting Words | p. 284 |
48 A Haunted Night | p. 289 |
48 The Silent Treatment | p. 293 |
50 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Couldn't Spell | p. 304 |
51 Songs of a Summer Night | p. 312 |
52 Another Mother | p. 320 |
53 The Jewish Guide to Raising Star Athletes | p. 324 |
54 Gurage | p. 333 |
55 Ten Things I Love About You | p. 341 |
56 DNA | p. 347 |
Acknowledgments | p. 353 |