Meeting Sophie: a Memoir of Adoption

The night before we left Beijing to meet our babies in Hangzhou, we went to an acrobatic show, all of the parents-to-be in our group vacant-eyed with exhaustion, swaying rather than walking, slumping into red velvet seats. I thought maybe I was hallucinating all the bright costumes, the traditional music, the movements combining martial arts and tumbling and body contortions. I kept dozing off while children stood on their hands, spinning cloth and tables and each other on their feet. I'd start awake to watch them walk across swinging ropes, twirl plates on long poles as casually as if they were holding umbrellas, balance on boards and barrels, build a rickety pyramid of chairs, and climb long tubes while rearranging their bodies into impossible configurations. My dreams were shattered by a table falling and breaking, a plate clattering to the floor. I jerked to consciousness to see the pyramid of chairs become so quivery that the performers gave up on it, hopped down, and signaled for the stage lights to dim.

For the first time in hours, days, maybe weeks, I was free of anxiety: fatigue and serenity felt like the same thing. Each mistake, each falter, seemed purposeful, choreographed and executed to emphasize the precariousness of objects and bodies, the difficulty of equilibrium.

While McCabe's title may suggest a simple story of adoption, this book is anything but simple. Rather, it is a compelling journey, encompassing loss, death, the fragility of memory-a journey of shattered dreams and renewed hopes. It is the bravely truthful story of one woman's determination to balance the plates and chair pyramids and tables of her life while embracing the unknowns of adoptive parenthood.

McCabe's journey gives us glimpses of a childhood where she was largely misunderstood, where the family jokes sometimes centered around whether she'd suffered brain damage in an early attempt at crawling-headfirst down the basement stairs.

…maybe I had (suffered brain damage), they joked. Maybe that explained things. How I always put my shoes on the wrong feet, how I never could seem to learn to tell time, how I came out mildly retarded on an IQ test when I was nine…(how) despite all this, I was good at school, my grades consistently higher than those of my brothers.

Rather than proving herself perceptive, bright and intelligent, the author's good grades earned her the label of being "not very bright," but "the one who managed to follow the rules." It's obvious the label stemmed from strong imperceptions.

As a toddler, she exhibited mountain goat tendencies, crawling over anything that got in her way:

"Keep your feet off the furniture," Dad kept saying to me when I was a little older because of my tendency to climb whatever lay in my path, always going over rather than around. Dad threatened that when I grew up, he would come to my house and tromp on my couch in muddy shoes. And while he was at it, he would clutter my car floor with candy wrappers and scream in my yard when I tried to work. I laughed hysterically at these images, but I kept climbing over the furniture. When did I ever follow the rules?

It is our good fortune that McCabe was never ground into submission, was never one to "follow the rules," that the rigid, Southern, church-connected college she taught at never managed to squelch her spirit. She recognized, in her adoptive daughter, Sophie, a kindred spirit, a Chinese girl who wailed loud and long to get her needs met in a world where girls are considered unimportant. McCabe's fervent desire to make a place for herself in the world and to give her child a better life may be the result of a childhood longing to fit in, but it is the author's strength, her wisdom to use negative experiences as springboards to growth, that ultimately deliver the tools she uses to bulldoze headfirst through every obstacle.

McCabe has managed, magnificently, a feat worthy of the greatest admiration. Her memoir suggests a life lived with vibrance, passion, and a breathtaking ability to daringly embrace "the difficulty of equilibrium."

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Season Harper has published book reviews, fiction and poetry in THE CREAM CITY REVIEW, ONTHEBUS, PRIMAVERA, THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW OF MODERN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE and other journals. She holds the Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is on the fiction faculty at Gotham Writers' Workshop online.

Article on Nancy McCabe and Literary Potpourri

Excerpt of Memoir published in Lit Pot MidMonth January 03

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