Family Resemblances

My family doesn't have many pictures of me from before I arrived in the US at 5 months old. There's the picture that the adoption agency sent my parents, of me when I was a few months old, and then one time going through some papers, I found that my visa for entry into the US included a photo from when I was pretty tiny, maybe a few weeks old. I'd like to find that picture now since from my vague recollection, Allison Clare bears some resemblance to it.

I've been thinking some about my connection to her over the past 12 days. It's odd to have such an intense relationship with someone you don't really know--even odder still given that she doesn't exactly give a lot back quite yet. She doesn't even recognize her own hand, much less her name, or our faces. I think developmentally she's aware of our voices as familiar, and of my smell (which they imprint pretty early I guess), but that's about it, and she has no way of really showing that familiarity. She can't really smile yet, though she gives a good imitation when she's just filled her diaper.

But two things are surprising to me when I think about my relationship to her: one, she might actually look like me (this seems to be the consensus, though I think she has Sam's mouth), which is a connection that I don't have with anyone else (that I know). And two, she's not adopted, so in some sense, the way our family has been established is more conventional and yet less familiar to me than my relationship with my own parents. I don't mean to imply that either relationship is less authentic or deep, but just that they're different, and that I don't really know how this one works--somehow, the biological connection is significant, just as the connection established through my parents' experience of the adoption journey is also significant.

I love the memories of having had Allison in my belly, especially now that I know what she looks like and can imagine her better in there, and the memory of her birth (the "birth amnesia" phenomenon where the pain of labor loses its immediacy--totally true!). She will be told that she looks like her mom or her dad, something that only happened to me once, when I was 8 and a girl from my ballet class said that I looked like my mom (?!). I can't imagine what that would be like, though I also can't imagine not having had the adoptive relationship. It's as if having given birth to her creates one bond between us while it also means that another one, based on shared experience, is impossible. Not that that matters too much--she'll have a million experiences that I won't have. I've just been thinking about this one, about how the story of her origin and arrival will be so different from mine--and so much more like other people's.