The Day This Picture Was Taken

(photo by Greg Halvorsen Schreck)

It was one of those hot days that wraps itself around you from the moment you enter into it. You open the front door and, within seconds, you feel your clothes begin to adhere to your skin, the hair on the back of your neck is wet with sweat, your eyes sting in the heat.

By noon it was approaching 95 degrees. Now it was one o’clock and the temperature was still climbing. There were 27 of us in the small, attic studio. 13 children, 12 parents, and two adults who were along to observe. The children were arranged on a raised platform, the first row of them sitting on a bench. A lone fan attempted to keep the air in the small room moving. From time to time, some of the children stepped off of the platform and put their faces inches from the fan, making vibrating, insect-like sounds with their voices. They laughed at the transformation.

The photographer held a camera whose lens was the size of a small plate. His 8 year-old daughter wore braids and a bemused, patient expression. A little girl with piggy tails screamed. A boy in the back row with a crew cut stood up straight and alternatively showed his teeth (as his father instructed) and closed his mouth to smile (as the photographer requested).

“Teeth, Andrew,” his Dad called over the sound of the fan, the crying two year old, the voices of the other parents.

“Close your mouth, Andrew,” the photographer said.

Andrew intermittently opened and closed his mouth, smiling all the while.

The mother of three of the girls sitting on the bench in front handed out Swedish fish and sang a song. Her daughters’ eyes tracked her, shining with love, as she sang, jumping up and down next to the photographer.

“A peanut sat on a railroad track,” she sang raucously. “His heart was all a-flutter...”

The girl with the piggy tails began to shriek. Perhaps she didn’t like the song. Or maybe she was just hot. The youngest of all the children, a very little girl wearing a white dress with eyelet and puffed sleeves, looked concerned. She sat on a large Ansel Adams book on the bench in the front row. The proximity of her own mother – kneeling before her on the floor – and the half-eaten Swedish fish in her hand kept her from crying - for the moment.

“’Round the bend came number ten. Choo Choo! Smash! Peanut butter!” Other parents had joined in the song. 

Did I mention it was hot?

My daughter, standing in the second row of children, pushed her hands more deeply into the pockets of her jeans. They were new jeans, bought that morning for this picture. Her new blue suede sneakers peeked out from the flared bottoms. The strap of her sleeveless top fell over her left shoulder. Her bangs, black as licorice and straight as a line, began to stick to her warm forehead. She stood confidently, patiently, eyes glued to the lens of the camera. Among all the beautiful, exasperated, overheated children, she was, in my eyes, the most still and brave. 

All of the children posing for the photograph had come into their families by adoption. Their birth countries stretched from Latin America in an arc over the globe, past China all the way to South Korea. They were here to pose for a picture that would celebrate families who were forged by international adoption.

I wish the photographer could have turned the camera around – could have caught expressions of love and pride and anxiety on the faces of us parents as we smiled, waved, sang, and whispered bribes (“Just smile – then we’ll get ICE CREAM”) to our children. What a photo that would have been!

The slim, blonde mother of the little girl perched on the Ansel Adams book. The cheery parents singing the peanut song, handing out Swedish fish, waving and cajoling, instructing (“Teeth, Andrew!) their kids. All of us hoping to facilitate the process and allow the photographer to do his work so that we could leave this hot attic, shuffle these children into a cool place, and reward them with ice cream.

Seeing those two pictures – the first of the children and the second of their parents at the edges of the room – might work to break down some of our fabricated distinctions or labels about “us and them,” about race, and even about geographical boundaries. In those pictures, the notions that we sometimes unthinkingly rest in about what constitutes a family, and about what a family resemblance really means, disappear.

After all, not one of those children had any doubt who her mother was. She was the one whose eyes were locked on her child’s, who saw her own child as the most beautiful, and whose heart was swollen with love and delight.