At 41, American actor, comedian and author Julia Sweeney jumped on a plane to make her dream of motherhood come true. Doing it solo would be easy, right?
I was 37 and desperately in love with Joe. Joe is not his real name. In fact, let's call all the boys I fancied Joe, until I met my husband, Michael. And let's give him a number, too – let's say he's… Joe No 10.
Joe and I had been dating for about two years. When we first met, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and he had been an ardent and steadfast supporter through the whole ordeal. The cancer had left me without a uterus. But somehow, when the possibility of my carrying a child was gone, my desire to parent a child exploded.
I'd nursed my brother, Michael, who had his own cancer diagnosis (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), until he died. This tragedy had thrown me for an existential loop. I was devastated and unmoored after his death. My career as a comedian and writer suddenly seemed superficial and empty. After years of making decisions that led me away from being tied down in marriage and with children, I reversed course. Like most converts, my zeal was deep and unwavering. I wanted a husband and at least one child.
But Joe and I began to quarrel. The issue of a child came up in the wee hours, when both of us were so exhausted from arguing that we didn't know what day it was or what part of the day it was. The next morning, I got dumped. He said it was over between us. The end.
I was now nearly 38. I wanted to be a mother. I had no uterus, sure, but now I didn't even have a boyfriend. My heart was broken like never before. I felt physically weak.
And suddenly I was overwhelmed with such a deep explosion of need. It was like a gong clanged in my heart, and I realised that I just had to have a child of my own. It was true, if I had a child on my own, this kid would most likely never have a father, and that was sad because I had really lucked out in the father department myself. But I figured that if I could not provide a father for this child, or an example of a loving adult partnership, what I could provide was this: a home without a bad adult relationship in it. When I thought about it that way, it was a big plus. Even a gift.
Why couldn't I just adopt on my own? I realised I probably could. I tried to figure out what this whole single-woman-adopting thing was all about. It quickly became clear that it was all about China.
China has a one-child-per-family policy. It's loosening up a bit now. The Chinese prefer sons because, traditionally, it's the boys who take care of the parents in their old age. This has meant that many Chinese girls have been abandoned. And at the time I was adopting, China did not discriminate against single men or women seeking to adopt a baby. This made China ideal for me.
I didn't find out any details about the baby I was assigned until a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to leave for China. This is what I found out. She was 17 months old. She was from a suburb of Guangzhou called Tian. I was given a form with a two-inch-square photograph of a baby with black hair standing straight up like she was Eraserhead. Her gaze was sceptical and somewhat menacing at the same time. Her expression: "Who the hell are you?"
The baby was 17 months old! This was a surprise. I'd been preparing myself for an infant, maybe six months old, but this child was a toddler. I hadn't childproofed the inside of my house! I ran to the bookshop and bought International Toddler Adoption to read on the plane.
I was travelling with a group: 40 of us were going to Guangzhou to adopt 19 babies. Most of us were in our 30s or 40s, and childless. When we gathered for the first time at LAX, we all had these expressions on our faces, like, "This was such a good idea. In the abstract." And, maybe more accurately, "What the fuck are we doing?"
One couple had just found out they were getting twins, which they hadn't requested or anticipated. The expectant mother, who already looked wiped at the prospect, joked, "I figure it must have been all those fertility drugs."
The baby I was adopting was officially named Tian Mulan. Tian was the name of the town in which she had been found, and was presumably from. This name was used as her "family name". Mulan was the name they'd given her at the orphanage. "Mu" means strong in Chinese, and "Lan" beautiful. Even though I thought it was a lovely name, I couldn't let her keep it. I worked in Hollywood. Mulan was a popular Disney film. People would think it was the only Chinese name I could think of. I decided to make Mulan her middle name. Tara Mulan Sweeney. This is what I wrote on all the documents.
When we arrived at the hotel, our Chinese facilitators told us, "Come to ballroom tomorrow at 10am, we give you babies."
The next morning, all the nervous adults dutifully showed up in the hotel's garish gold ballroom. An officious Chinese gentleman standing next to me announced, "First we will begin to give you babies, then we also play emotional music." He turned to me and said in a confidential yet offhand manner, "Last time we no play emotional music. Not as good." I wondered, "What's the emotional music? Maybe some ancient Chinese folk tune, orchestrated with lutes? Or a little Yo-Yo Ma?"
He placed a banged-up 1980s boom box on a table. The facilitators herded everybody to one side of the room, and then they began the baby transaction process. Names were announced and the adopting parent or parents were manoeuvred to the other side of the room, facing the crowd. Then, from a door behind them through which they could not see, a Chinese facilitator appeared holding a baby above his head. The crowd saw the baby before the prospective parent(s) did. There was a gameshow quality to the presentation, as each baby appeared from behind Door Number 1. It was hard not to imagine scenarios in which a particular baby's looks might cause the crowd to gasp or boo. But everyone was well-behaved and, of course, the babies were beautiful.
Around the third or fourth baby hand-off, the guy who was manning the boom box took his cue and pushed his button. Out of the speakers blared a tinny My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from Titanic), and not even the Celine Dion version from the movie. This was a Chinese muzak version.
Sometimes, when I find myself in an overpowering, emotionally charged situation I end up focusing on minutiae. I was about to be handed my child and all I could think was, "This is the worst emotional music. What an awful choice. When I get back to Los Angeles, I'm going to send them some really good emotional music. This is not the right music for a scared, 41-year-old woman who knows nothing about babies and is about to be handed a toddler."
Before I knew it, my name was called. I went to the other side of the room.
They brought in a baby, and put her in my arms.
Baby. In my arms.
She looked up at me, quizzically. She was wearing a light yellow shirt featuring a bear piloting a helicopter. Written in black permanent ink on her left shoulder were some Chinese characters. She was also wearing thick red sweatpants, and written across the back were the same Chinese characters. Her square-shaped, pudgy feet were bare.
She tilted her head slightly as she took me in. I tilted my head slightly as I took her in. She felt dense, heavy even. Sturdy and built to last.
All the books say, "Don't expect to bond with your baby right away. This is just a person, like any other person. You'll bond over time as you get to know each other." To my surprise, I instantly felt a deep alliance.
She had a beautiful, distinctive little frown, gorgeous eyebrows and full, pink, heart-shaped lips. She immediately fell asleep in my arms, like, "OK, all this pomp and ceremony is too much for me to deal with right now. I'm checking out." Or maybe she was lulled by the emotional music. Whatever it was, it caused a surge of affection in me. I've wanted to check out like that, too.
They'd put little cribs in the rooms, but that first night I wanted to hold her and sleep with her. Then I figured she'd probably never slept with another person before, unless it was another infant, so I put her in the crib and tried to sleep. Both of us tossed and turned, but eventually I nodded off. I woke in the middle of the night. I could see her there in the darkness, silently standing in her crib, staring at me with these piercing eyes. I whispered, "Here we go, baby."
She did not smile. She never smiled. On the third day, I was videotaping her in our hotel room, just the two of us. That's when it happened. A shy grin. I wasn't sure if it was into the camera or at me. I raised my head and looked directly into her eyes, furtively – not with dominance or too much interest. She smiled again. She smiled! I beamed back, giving her my big grin.
She burst into tears. Oops, too scary. But she let me hold her and I felt her muscles relax.
I had conjured her and now here she was.
Finally, it was time for us to go home. I put Tara in the empty seat next to me and fell into a deep sleep. Then, waking from a trancelike slumber, I felt a poking sensation on my shoulder. I returned to partial consciousness, not quite understanding where I was. Through groggy eyes, I detected a man hovering over my seat. He said, "Hey, lady, your baby's on the floor."
What was he talking about?
I guessed he was probably referring to the baby I saw on the floor of the plane near my feet. The baby on the floor – oh, fuck. My baby. I picked up Tara and she began to cry. She'd been happily asleep down there.
When Tara and I walked in the front door of my house, she walked in on her own. This dramatic "threshold moment" was nothing like I thought it would be. I'd envisioned carrying in an infant in a snuggly. I had truly acquired a person, and she entered her new home on her own two feet.
We went to a lot of parks. I'd lived in Los Angeles for 20 years and had never noticed children's playgrounds. Suddenly, with a toddler, they sprang out at me everywhere. People seem much more likely to approach you when you have a child, and that's both a great and frightening thing. Once someone asked me at the park, "Is her father Chinese?" And I said, "Yeah. I think so. I mean, it sure seems like it."
They would also go up to Tara, ask her name, and she would just stare at them blankly and say nothing. I would allow a short pause and then answer, "Tara" for her. One day, when she was almost three, an elderly man leaned over and asked, "What's your name, little girl?" I said, "Tara" and simultaneously I heard my daughter say in a clear, loud voice, "Mulan." She looked at me with a frown, as if to say, "You can call me Tara. But I answer to Mulan."
I had to give it up. She was Mulan.
After that, I replied "Mulan" when people asked her name. Their faces would freeze in a smile and they'd say, "You mean, like after the movie?" And I'd say in a gush, "No, no. That was her name in China. I wanted to name her, well, I did name her Tara, but… blah blah blah." I soon tired of that song and dance, and eventually just answered emphatically and slowly, "Yes. After the movie."
Reading my journals from this time, I can see that I was very excited to "do" things with Mulan. We would wake early, around 6am. We'd often go out for oatmeal and then stop at the store. Mulan would ride in the front of the cart and I'd hand her things to toss into the back. Then we'd go to the park and I'd assist her on the climbing equipment and push her on the swing and help her go down the slide. We'd return home and empty the grocery bags. I'd make a snack and we'd get out the extra-large Lego and spread it across the living room floor. I'd glance at the clock after all this, and it would often read 10am.
Also during this time, I was busy rewriting my entire childhood. Turns out it was probably not nearly as bad as I once thought it was. In fact, my newly revised attitude about my mother is that she did the best she could. It dawned on me that the main topic of a thousand hours of therapy had been wiped clean, just like that.
When Mulan was about 20 months old, she went through a terrible time teething. She was up at night a lot, crying her eyes out. Neither one of us was getting any good sleep. At the time, I was voicing the main character on an animated TV show. I spent many afternoons recording. One day I was talking to one of the writer-producers, who had three children all under the age of five. I said, with circles under my eyes and my head hanging low, "How do you do it? It's so hard."
He whispered to me conspiratorially, "Get her on TV."
I was confused. I said, "What? Audition her for a television show?"
He said, "No, get her on TV. You know, hooked on the tube." I was going to be one of those mothers who didn't allow any sugar or TV. I said, "Well, Mulan doesn't even look in the direction of the TV when I have it on at night. She thinks it's just a flickering light."
He said, "Keep it on. Direct her gaze. She'll pick it up."
He turned out to be right. In fact, TV turned out to be a godsend. It was a fantastic carrot. Now, at nearly 13, Mulan "earns" TV by reading or practising piano. She began to read and read. Now she is in a special piano programme at Northwestern University that she had to audition for, and – at least to me, a not musically talented or trained person – seems quite accomplished. She ploughs through books and keeps a notebook adding up her time. She gets to reap the reward of TV at weekends. Genius!
When I first discovered the rewards-and-punishments angle of parenting, I didn't like it. This was not how I figured I would parent. I thought my child would acquiesce to my direction out of admiration and loyalty and love, but mostly by seeing that to sacrifice short-term desires for longer-terms goals was obviously best.
But, duh. That wasn't happening.
Eventually I felt like a Mom de Sade, trolling for ideas of how to create rewards and penalties. Once, I was driving and Mulan was in the back seat, holding a doll close to her, smiling and saying, "Mommy, I love my doll. I love my doll so much." My first thought was, Oh, you do, do you? Uh, huh. Good to know. Good. To. Know.
Last spring, Mulan was giving me advice about how I should behave when I came to the school and looked at the science fair projects. She was worried I would ask too many questions or stick out among the throng. The bottom line is that she was embarrassed by me.
OK, fine. I accept that. I was embarrassed by my mother, too, starting around this age. I wanted to remind Mulan that she hadn't always felt this way about me. In fact, there was a time when she even wanted us to get married.
When Mulan and I first met Michael, it was very exciting – we had this new person in our lives. Then she had this terrible realisation, and I could see it cross her face. Michael wasn't going. He was staying. He was giving attention to her, but he was taking attention away from her mother. This was not a good development.
I realise now, in retrospect, that Mulan thought she and I were a couple. Here's an example. Friends, a couple, invited Mulan and me over for an early dinner with some other couples. She was around five or six at the time. I think they invited Mulan because they'd just adopted a baby themselves, who was only a few weeks old. When we got there, their big long dining room table was set. Ten place settings along a long wooden table, five couples. All of them married or partners. But my partner was Mulan.
Towards the end of the meal, around 8pm, Mulan yawned with her arms outstretched, in a confident, languorous manner, leaning back in her chair. Her arm landed on my far shoulder, familiarly, proprietary. Like a spouse's would. Then, with startling confidence, she leaned in to the table, her arm still around my shoulders, and said to the group, "I think we should get going. I have to get up early tomorrow." She turned to me and said, "And I think you do, too, right?"
Everyone laughed. On the way home, Mulan asked, "Why was everyone laughing?""Oh," I said, "it's just you're getting to be so grown up." But really, to Mulan, we were a couple.
After Michael made us into a threesome, she rebelled. A few times when Michael and I were holding hands, she would come up and pull them apart and forcefully put her hand in mine. Once she put her little face a few inches from Michael's and said sombrely, with a Clint Eastwood-like simmer, "Get. Out. Of. Our. Lives."
She began to have major fits, melting down more often than usual. She became defiant. I could not bend her will, or cleverly work around her when her behaviour became obstinate.
One day, Mulan and I were sitting in Starbucks, me with my coffee, she with her hot chocolate. "Why don't we get married?" she asked me.
"Oh, honey," I said, floundering, "two women can't get married." (That was lame, I know, but I was scrambling.)
"Yes, they can," Mulan replied.
"Oh right. Yes, they can," I stammered. "But Mulan, I am your mother."
"So?" Mulan asked.
"Well, mothers and daughters can't get married."
"Why not?" Mulan asked.
"Well, because they're already mother and daughter."
"But why can't we be mother and daughter, and married, too?"
"Because we're so different in age," I said. Again, this was lame.
"Why does that matter?" Mulan asked.
I continued to fumble. "All our references will not be the same – our music, politics – it's too big an age range."
"And why does that matter?"
I regained my equilibrium. I began to think a little straighter.
"Well, because the feeling of love that two people who are married have for each other is a different feeling than mothers and fathers and their children have." Suddenly, images of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn burst into my mind. I almost said, "I'm not into young girls" but I thought that Mulan would probably take that the wrong way. She'd think, "Why did you adopt a daughter if you aren't 'into young girls'?"
My adult brain (or what passes for an adult brain) finally kicked in. I said, "It's a distinctly different feeling they have for each other which you will not understand until you get older and go through puberty and feel a sexual attraction for another person. It's love, but a different kind of love. Some day you will understand, but that's the best explanation I can give you right now. We just cannot get married."
"Oh," Mulan said, slumping in her chair.
Now I have an almost 13-year-old child who is not having tantrums any more. I feel I am in the grip of something I helped create, but that now owns me. I remade my world by assembling this family, and now this family has remade me.
When I became a mother, I had no idea that my concern for my own child's welfare would make me a lifetime hostage to fate. But now I am and what can I do? I have to just ride the wave that I have agreed to surf on. It's come at much higher costs than I ever thought, but it has deep rewards.
Mulan recently asked if I thought her biological mother was alive. I said she probably was. I told Mulan, "I think about her every day." It's true. I wonder about the woman who gave me this fantastic kid. I wish she knew her daughter was thriving. I feel sad that she doesn't get to see her beautiful child's face, which probably looks much like her own.
Mulan said, "I don't think about her that much. Maybe once a month." I loved her candour. Someday Michael, Mulan and I will go to China and see the neighbourhood where Mulan was found. When I think of that, I think of us as such a small random unit, passing through this life together in a big, unforgiving, frightening, unpredictable, beautiful world.
*• *This is an edited extract from If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother, by Julia Sweeney, published next month by Bloomsbury at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
I was 37 and desperately in love with Joe. Joe is not his real name. In fact, let's call all the boys I fancied Joe, until I met my husband, Michael. And let's give him a number, too – let's say he's… Joe No 10.
Joe and I had been dating for about two years. When we first met, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and he had been an ardent and steadfast supporter through the whole ordeal. The cancer had left me without a uterus. But somehow, when the possibility of my carrying a child was gone, my desire to parent a child exploded.
I'd nursed my brother, Michael, who had his own cancer diagnosis (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), until he died. This tragedy had thrown me for an existential loop. I was devastated and unmoored after his death. My career as a comedian and writer suddenly seemed superficial and empty. After years of making decisions that led me away from being tied down in marriage and with children, I reversed course. Like most converts, my zeal was deep and unwavering. I wanted a husband and at least one child.
But Joe and I began to quarrel. The issue of a child came up in the wee hours, when both of us were so exhausted from arguing that we didn't know what day it was or what part of the day it was. The next morning, I got dumped. He said it was over between us. The end.
I was now nearly 38. I wanted to be a mother. I had no uterus, sure, but now I didn't even have a boyfriend. My heart was broken like never before. I felt physically weak.
And suddenly I was overwhelmed with such a deep explosion of need. It was like a gong clanged in my heart, and I realised that I just had to have a child of my own. It was true, if I had a child on my own, this kid would most likely never have a father, and that was sad because I had really lucked out in the father department myself. But I figured that if I could not provide a father for this child, or an example of a loving adult partnership, what I could provide was this: a home without a bad adult relationship in it. When I thought about it that way, it was a big plus. Even a gift.
Why couldn't I just adopt on my own? I realised I probably could. I tried to figure out what this whole single-woman-adopting thing was all about. It quickly became clear that it was all about China.
China has a one-child-per-family policy. It's loosening up a bit now. The Chinese prefer sons because, traditionally, it's the boys who take care of the parents in their old age. This has meant that many Chinese girls have been abandoned. And at the time I was adopting, China did not discriminate against single men or women seeking to adopt a baby. This made China ideal for me.
I didn't find out any details about the baby I was assigned until a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to leave for China. This is what I found out. She was 17 months old. She was from a suburb of Guangzhou called Tian. I was given a form with a two-inch-square photograph of a baby with black hair standing straight up like she was Eraserhead. Her gaze was sceptical and somewhat menacing at the same time. Her expression: "Who the hell are you?"
The baby was 17 months old! This was a surprise. I'd been preparing myself for an infant, maybe six months old, but this child was a toddler. I hadn't childproofed the inside of my house! I ran to the bookshop and bought International Toddler Adoption to read on the plane.
I was travelling with a group: 40 of us were going to Guangzhou to adopt 19 babies. Most of us were in our 30s or 40s, and childless. When we gathered for the first time at LAX, we all had these expressions on our faces, like, "This was such a good idea. In the abstract." And, maybe more accurately, "What the fuck are we doing?"
One couple had just found out they were getting twins, which they hadn't requested or anticipated. The expectant mother, who already looked wiped at the prospect, joked, "I figure it must have been all those fertility drugs."
The baby I was adopting was officially named Tian Mulan. Tian was the name of the town in which she had been found, and was presumably from. This name was used as her "family name". Mulan was the name they'd given her at the orphanage. "Mu" means strong in Chinese, and "Lan" beautiful. Even though I thought it was a lovely name, I couldn't let her keep it. I worked in Hollywood. Mulan was a popular Disney film. People would think it was the only Chinese name I could think of. I decided to make Mulan her middle name. Tara Mulan Sweeney. This is what I wrote on all the documents.
When we arrived at the hotel, our Chinese facilitators told us, "Come to ballroom tomorrow at 10am, we give you babies."
The next morning, all the nervous adults dutifully showed up in the hotel's garish gold ballroom. An officious Chinese gentleman standing next to me announced, "First we will begin to give you babies, then we also play emotional music." He turned to me and said in a confidential yet offhand manner, "Last time we no play emotional music. Not as good." I wondered, "What's the emotional music? Maybe some ancient Chinese folk tune, orchestrated with lutes? Or a little Yo-Yo Ma?"
He placed a banged-up 1980s boom box on a table. The facilitators herded everybody to one side of the room, and then they began the baby transaction process. Names were announced and the adopting parent or parents were manoeuvred to the other side of the room, facing the crowd. Then, from a door behind them through which they could not see, a Chinese facilitator appeared holding a baby above his head. The crowd saw the baby before the prospective parent(s) did. There was a gameshow quality to the presentation, as each baby appeared from behind Door Number 1. It was hard not to imagine scenarios in which a particular baby's looks might cause the crowd to gasp or boo. But everyone was well-behaved and, of course, the babies were beautiful.
Around the third or fourth baby hand-off, the guy who was manning the boom box took his cue and pushed his button. Out of the speakers blared a tinny My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from Titanic), and not even the Celine Dion version from the movie. This was a Chinese muzak version.
Sometimes, when I find myself in an overpowering, emotionally charged situation I end up focusing on minutiae. I was about to be handed my child and all I could think was, "This is the worst emotional music. What an awful choice. When I get back to Los Angeles, I'm going to send them some really good emotional music. This is not the right music for a scared, 41-year-old woman who knows nothing about babies and is about to be handed a toddler."
Before I knew it, my name was called. I went to the other side of the room.
They brought in a baby, and put her in my arms.
Baby. In my arms.
She looked up at me, quizzically. She was wearing a light yellow shirt featuring a bear piloting a helicopter. Written in black permanent ink on her left shoulder were some Chinese characters. She was also wearing thick red sweatpants, and written across the back were the same Chinese characters. Her square-shaped, pudgy feet were bare.
She tilted her head slightly as she took me in. I tilted my head slightly as I took her in. She felt dense, heavy even. Sturdy and built to last.
All the books say, "Don't expect to bond with your baby right away. This is just a person, like any other person. You'll bond over time as you get to know each other." To my surprise, I instantly felt a deep alliance.
She had a beautiful, distinctive little frown, gorgeous eyebrows and full, pink, heart-shaped lips. She immediately fell asleep in my arms, like, "OK, all this pomp and ceremony is too much for me to deal with right now. I'm checking out." Or maybe she was lulled by the emotional music. Whatever it was, it caused a surge of affection in me. I've wanted to check out like that, too.
They'd put little cribs in the rooms, but that first night I wanted to hold her and sleep with her. Then I figured she'd probably never slept with another person before, unless it was another infant, so I put her in the crib and tried to sleep. Both of us tossed and turned, but eventually I nodded off. I woke in the middle of the night. I could see her there in the darkness, silently standing in her crib, staring at me with these piercing eyes. I whispered, "Here we go, baby."
She did not smile. She never smiled. On the third day, I was videotaping her in our hotel room, just the two of us. That's when it happened. A shy grin. I wasn't sure if it was into the camera or at me. I raised my head and looked directly into her eyes, furtively – not with dominance or too much interest. She smiled again. She smiled! I beamed back, giving her my big grin.
She burst into tears. Oops, too scary. But she let me hold her and I felt her muscles relax.
I had conjured her and now here she was.
Finally, it was time for us to go home. I put Tara in the empty seat next to me and fell into a deep sleep. Then, waking from a trancelike slumber, I felt a poking sensation on my shoulder. I returned to partial consciousness, not quite understanding where I was. Through groggy eyes, I detected a man hovering over my seat. He said, "Hey, lady, your baby's on the floor."
What was he talking about?
I guessed he was probably referring to the baby I saw on the floor of the plane near my feet. The baby on the floor – oh, fuck. My baby. I picked up Tara and she began to cry. She'd been happily asleep down there.
When Tara and I walked in the front door of my house, she walked in on her own. This dramatic "threshold moment" was nothing like I thought it would be. I'd envisioned carrying in an infant in a snuggly. I had truly acquired a person, and she entered her new home on her own two feet.
We went to a lot of parks. I'd lived in Los Angeles for 20 years and had never noticed children's playgrounds. Suddenly, with a toddler, they sprang out at me everywhere. People seem much more likely to approach you when you have a child, and that's both a great and frightening thing. Once someone asked me at the park, "Is her father Chinese?" And I said, "Yeah. I think so. I mean, it sure seems like it."
They would also go up to Tara, ask her name, and she would just stare at them blankly and say nothing. I would allow a short pause and then answer, "Tara" for her. One day, when she was almost three, an elderly man leaned over and asked, "What's your name, little girl?" I said, "Tara" and simultaneously I heard my daughter say in a clear, loud voice, "Mulan." She looked at me with a frown, as if to say, "You can call me Tara. But I answer to Mulan."
I had to give it up. She was Mulan.
After that, I replied "Mulan" when people asked her name. Their faces would freeze in a smile and they'd say, "You mean, like after the movie?" And I'd say in a gush, "No, no. That was her name in China. I wanted to name her, well, I did name her Tara, but… blah blah blah." I soon tired of that song and dance, and eventually just answered emphatically and slowly, "Yes. After the movie."
Reading my journals from this time, I can see that I was very excited to "do" things with Mulan. We would wake early, around 6am. We'd often go out for oatmeal and then stop at the store. Mulan would ride in the front of the cart and I'd hand her things to toss into the back. Then we'd go to the park and I'd assist her on the climbing equipment and push her on the swing and help her go down the slide. We'd return home and empty the grocery bags. I'd make a snack and we'd get out the extra-large Lego and spread it across the living room floor. I'd glance at the clock after all this, and it would often read 10am.
Also during this time, I was busy rewriting my entire childhood. Turns out it was probably not nearly as bad as I once thought it was. In fact, my newly revised attitude about my mother is that she did the best she could. It dawned on me that the main topic of a thousand hours of therapy had been wiped clean, just like that.
When Mulan was about 20 months old, she went through a terrible time teething. She was up at night a lot, crying her eyes out. Neither one of us was getting any good sleep. At the time, I was voicing the main character on an animated TV show. I spent many afternoons recording. One day I was talking to one of the writer-producers, who had three children all under the age of five. I said, with circles under my eyes and my head hanging low, "How do you do it? It's so hard."
He whispered to me conspiratorially, "Get her on TV."
I was confused. I said, "What? Audition her for a television show?"
He said, "No, get her on TV. You know, hooked on the tube." I was going to be one of those mothers who didn't allow any sugar or TV. I said, "Well, Mulan doesn't even look in the direction of the TV when I have it on at night. She thinks it's just a flickering light."
He said, "Keep it on. Direct her gaze. She'll pick it up."
He turned out to be right. In fact, TV turned out to be a godsend. It was a fantastic carrot. Now, at nearly 13, Mulan "earns" TV by reading or practising piano. She began to read and read. Now she is in a special piano programme at Northwestern University that she had to audition for, and – at least to me, a not musically talented or trained person – seems quite accomplished. She ploughs through books and keeps a notebook adding up her time. She gets to reap the reward of TV at weekends. Genius!
When I first discovered the rewards-and-punishments angle of parenting, I didn't like it. This was not how I figured I would parent. I thought my child would acquiesce to my direction out of admiration and loyalty and love, but mostly by seeing that to sacrifice short-term desires for longer-terms goals was obviously best.
But, duh. That wasn't happening.
Eventually I felt like a Mom de Sade, trolling for ideas of how to create rewards and penalties. Once, I was driving and Mulan was in the back seat, holding a doll close to her, smiling and saying, "Mommy, I love my doll. I love my doll so much." My first thought was, Oh, you do, do you? Uh, huh. Good to know. Good. To. Know.
Last spring, Mulan was giving me advice about how I should behave when I came to the school and looked at the science fair projects. She was worried I would ask too many questions or stick out among the throng. The bottom line is that she was embarrassed by me.
OK, fine. I accept that. I was embarrassed by my mother, too, starting around this age. I wanted to remind Mulan that she hadn't always felt this way about me. In fact, there was a time when she even wanted us to get married.
When Mulan and I first met Michael, it was very exciting – we had this new person in our lives. Then she had this terrible realisation, and I could see it cross her face. Michael wasn't going. He was staying. He was giving attention to her, but he was taking attention away from her mother. This was not a good development.
I realise now, in retrospect, that Mulan thought she and I were a couple. Here's an example. Friends, a couple, invited Mulan and me over for an early dinner with some other couples. She was around five or six at the time. I think they invited Mulan because they'd just adopted a baby themselves, who was only a few weeks old. When we got there, their big long dining room table was set. Ten place settings along a long wooden table, five couples. All of them married or partners. But my partner was Mulan.
Towards the end of the meal, around 8pm, Mulan yawned with her arms outstretched, in a confident, languorous manner, leaning back in her chair. Her arm landed on my far shoulder, familiarly, proprietary. Like a spouse's would. Then, with startling confidence, she leaned in to the table, her arm still around my shoulders, and said to the group, "I think we should get going. I have to get up early tomorrow." She turned to me and said, "And I think you do, too, right?"
Everyone laughed. On the way home, Mulan asked, "Why was everyone laughing?""Oh," I said, "it's just you're getting to be so grown up." But really, to Mulan, we were a couple.
After Michael made us into a threesome, she rebelled. A few times when Michael and I were holding hands, she would come up and pull them apart and forcefully put her hand in mine. Once she put her little face a few inches from Michael's and said sombrely, with a Clint Eastwood-like simmer, "Get. Out. Of. Our. Lives."
She began to have major fits, melting down more often than usual. She became defiant. I could not bend her will, or cleverly work around her when her behaviour became obstinate.
One day, Mulan and I were sitting in Starbucks, me with my coffee, she with her hot chocolate. "Why don't we get married?" she asked me.
"Oh, honey," I said, floundering, "two women can't get married." (That was lame, I know, but I was scrambling.)
"Yes, they can," Mulan replied.
"Oh right. Yes, they can," I stammered. "But Mulan, I am your mother."
"So?" Mulan asked.
"Well, mothers and daughters can't get married."
"Why not?" Mulan asked.
"Well, because they're already mother and daughter."
"But why can't we be mother and daughter, and married, too?"
"Because we're so different in age," I said. Again, this was lame.
"Why does that matter?" Mulan asked.
I continued to fumble. "All our references will not be the same – our music, politics – it's too big an age range."
"And why does that matter?"
I regained my equilibrium. I began to think a little straighter.
"Well, because the feeling of love that two people who are married have for each other is a different feeling than mothers and fathers and their children have." Suddenly, images of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn burst into my mind. I almost said, "I'm not into young girls" but I thought that Mulan would probably take that the wrong way. She'd think, "Why did you adopt a daughter if you aren't 'into young girls'?"
My adult brain (or what passes for an adult brain) finally kicked in. I said, "It's a distinctly different feeling they have for each other which you will not understand until you get older and go through puberty and feel a sexual attraction for another person. It's love, but a different kind of love. Some day you will understand, but that's the best explanation I can give you right now. We just cannot get married."
"Oh," Mulan said, slumping in her chair.
Now I have an almost 13-year-old child who is not having tantrums any more. I feel I am in the grip of something I helped create, but that now owns me. I remade my world by assembling this family, and now this family has remade me.
When I became a mother, I had no idea that my concern for my own child's welfare would make me a lifetime hostage to fate. But now I am and what can I do? I have to just ride the wave that I have agreed to surf on. It's come at much higher costs than I ever thought, but it has deep rewards.
Mulan recently asked if I thought her biological mother was alive. I said she probably was. I told Mulan, "I think about her every day." It's true. I wonder about the woman who gave me this fantastic kid. I wish she knew her daughter was thriving. I feel sad that she doesn't get to see her beautiful child's face, which probably looks much like her own.
Mulan said, "I don't think about her that much. Maybe once a month." I loved her candour. Someday Michael, Mulan and I will go to China and see the neighbourhood where Mulan was found. When I think of that, I think of us as such a small random unit, passing through this life together in a big, unforgiving, frightening, unpredictable, beautiful world.
*• *This is an edited extract from If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother, by Julia Sweeney, published next month by Bloomsbury at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.