BY THE BOOK
GREAT RIVER REVIEW IS PROUD TO NOMINATE HEIDI CZERWIEC’S ESSAY, "BY THE BOOK," FOR THE 2021 BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS SERIES.
BY THE BOOK: being a rhetorical analysis, with annotation, of our adoption profile with The Village/Lutheran Social Services’ Adoption Option
[Black print on a cheerful yellow background]
“Dear Birth Family,
We can’t imagine how scared and confused you must be right now. It’s hard to be brave for yourself and for your child.[1]You have some big decisions to make.
All we can do is help you know more about what we could offer your child. And we want you to know that we would like for you to be a part of this child’s life.[2]
[Pictures of Evan and me: a couple of close-ups of us as a couple, and one in front of our house in Grand Forks.]
We were married on June 2, 2007. We laugh every day, we love each other completely, and we are happier than we ever imagined possible. We want to share that love and happiness with a child.[3]
[1] Every reference to “child” in this profile is fraught – what modifier should we use? The? a? your? our? Do the former sound cold, impersonal? If we say “your” too much, will the birthmother be less inclined to choose adoption? Does “our” sound presumptuous, or does it add to the imagined narrative we’re creating? We discussed articles and possessives every time the word appeared. Note how it shifts throughout.
[2] While the profile should introduce adoptive parents to a prospective birthmother and/or birth family, we didn’t want it to read as entirely “We…we…we…” – the profile opens with a direct address to the birth family, and here as throughout, we include “you” as much as possible, a “you” that is a sympathetic and even heroic character in this story, with agency and action. In fact, most of our revisions went toward including “you” so the birthmother would already feel included, would imagine herself and her child as part of the scenes described, a palimpsest of us imagining her imagining us, an imagined relationship that expands into a future that contains all of us.
Introducing Heidi & Evan:
Heidi on Evan[4] [accompanied by 3 photos: a candid photo of us from the back, snuggling at a concert, taken when we were first dating; an arty black-and-white photo of us all dressed up and posed on a fire escape; and a picture of Evan entertaining a friend’s child][5]:
Evan is the funniest, smartest guy I know. He makes me laugh every single day. He’s a true partner – kind and supportive – and he makes me want to be the best me possible. We enjoy spending time together, gardening, cooking, or just hanging out. In fact, on road trips we rarely turn on the radio because we talk the whole time. Evan has four guys he’s been close friends with for years – I think it says a lot about him that he has such strong long-term relationships, even after they’ve all grown up, got married, and started families. I love watching him play with my nephew or our friends’ kids – he’s happy diving in and being completely goofy, yet takes them seriously, too. I can’t wait to be a parent with him.[6]
[3] How do you convey incompleteness within completeness? A loving couple happy among themselves, but who wants to extend that happiness?
[4] We each wrote a short introduction of the other, with no oversight, in order to create a sense of voice, and to reinforce the image of us as a couple even as we were described individually. Also, there really should have been a comma after “Heidi” because as is, it sounds kind of sexual. Now that picture’s in your head, isn’t it. Sorry.
[5] Because we’re both camera-shy, we asked our friend Britta, a talented professional photographer, to bring her toddler and husband up to our house and spend the weekend documenting us in various activities. All of the pictures in these two introductions are by Britta, either from that weekend or from earlier gatherings, to show us as a couple and to show us interacting with children (See how natural we are with kids? How fun? What good parents we’d be?)
[6] I wanted to emphasize Evan’s sense of humor and loyalty, and especially to demonstrate how stable and involved he would be as a father – especially since I knew that might be important to a birthmother with no co-parent in the picture.
Evan on Heidi [accompanied by three photos: a picture of me knitting; a picture of me teaching my friend’s daughter how to knit; and a candid shot from the arty-black-and-white-pics-on-a-fire-escape sequence where our friend caught me smiling at Evan with such joy]:
Heidi loves stronger than anyone I’ve ever known. She loves to knit and cook, because she loves to knit and cook for people she loves. I leave for work before she wakes up, but every morning she wakes up long enough to say, “Have a good day, I love you.” When we get home, we give each other a tight hug and we each say, “I love you.”
Her love, and her enthusiasm, brought her here, to North Dakota. She’s a poet, a great writer, and a professor, a great teacher, and her love for those things brought her here for a great job. All that love makes for a beautiful, happy woman, and Heidi loves to share her happiness. Her family is close, and her friends are like her family: life-long, some from her childhood, some from her college days, some from here. She cares deeply for them.
I also love her laugh, when she is so happy that she cannot do anything else but laugh. I hope you get to hear it – it’s strong and quick. She smiles and her eyes sparkle and her lips shine and I am the luckiest man in the world.[7]
Raising a child [accompanied by a picture of me reading a book][8]:
[7] Reading this again makes me tear up. It’s adorable. I worried his emphasis on my professional life would raise red flags for a birthmother picturing a nurturing stay-at-home mom, but I think his emotional descriptors balanced this out. Plus, there’s no point hiding who I am.
[8] Do you know how difficult a “candid” photo of yourself reading is, when you know you’re being watched?
You should know we’re committed to raising a loved, loving, curious, and independent person. We both work at the University of North Dakota – Heidi’s a poet and professor and Evan’s the Director of Graduate Admissions – so both of us value reading and education. Our home’s full of books – we would read to a child all the time, teach him or her to love learning, and encourage him or her to discover the world. Because we work in a university setting, we will always be part of a stable, supportive, and diverse community.[9]
Family [accompanied by five photos: a Christmas shot with Evan’s immediate family; a Christmas shot with my immediate family; a picture of all our UsFest friends (our chosen family); and two others, all described beneath each photo as follows]:
Evan’s family (parents, 2 sisters, and a large extended family) is in Minnesota. His parents have a lake cabin, and the child would join us visiting his family there a lot, including big Thanksgivings and a reunion each summer.
Heidi’s family (parents, 1 brother) is smaller, but tight-knit. Because they live in North Carolina, we look forward to bringing our child to the ocean with us to play with his or her cousin, Jesse.[10]
It takes a village…[11]
[9] In a rural state suspicious of higher ed, how do you not come across as pretentious or intimidating? As the only university couple in the profile book, we tried to turn our education into a distinguishing strength, emphasizing access to learning, diversity, and other opportunities. Would this preclude us being picked by certain birthparents? Was that OK, even desirable?
[10] We hoped to show a network of family support and cousins to play with – both Evan’s huge Midwestern extended family model, with which we assumed a birthmother would be familiar, and the exotic prospect of my family in a completely different landscape.
[11] I hate this platitude, but Evan thought it would be appealing.
Friends are very important to us, almost like another family. Every Labor Day weekend, the child would be part of UsFest, where a group of us – grownups, kids, pets – all converge on Evan’s parents’ lake house for our favorite weekend of the year. The grownups cook fabulous meals and the kids run wild. We play games or sit around a fire at night and play in the lake all day. Currently, there are 17 people in UsFest (5 couples, + 7 kids and counting). We even make t-shirts and buttons![12]
At our godchild Mara’s baptism[13]
Playing a board game [with UsFest friends] – yeah, we’re nerdy.
[Two pictures of us in our kitchen, prepping food together]
So…pictures of us cooking. Yeah, that’s huge. We love to cook, and we love good food.
Your child would bike to the farmer’s market with us, help plant our garden and pick vegetables, help make jelly and pickles, and learn to cook all kinds of dishes. Eating together is important and a real pleasure, whether we have friends over or just us, and we would love to share that with a child. In fact, we talked many, many, many times about choosing adoption and raising a child while having a great meal in our dining room.[14]
[12] We knew Wyatt might be an only child, so we wanted to convey the idea of our child as part of a larger family with lots of children. Plus, don’t we all sound and look like fun? And the lure of the lake house, luxuriously pictured?
[13] See? Someone else has deemed us worthy to be parents (of a sort) to their baby!
[14] The image we paint is accurate – we are huge foodies and love to grow, cook, and preserve food – but we hoped it would help a birthmother imagine her child in specific activities. And is there anything more nurturing than family and food?
*
We’re going to keep a blog open for you – www.heidievanand.blogspot.com We’ll talk about our lives and our adoption option. Check us out![15]
Thank you for being brave! We know this is a difficult and wonderful decision for you, and, if we can, we’d love to meet with you and talk more about our adoption choice.
Pray about your choice, and know that we wish you nothing but love![16]
[Picture of Evan and me embracing in front of our Grand Forks house]: Our house, with the green grass of summer when North Dakota has the most beautiful long sunny days in the world, is a very very very fine house.[17]
[Back page] This is a page filled with Fun Facts[18] [arranged in brief nuggets in two columns]:
[15] We did lift this blog idea from other profiles. Though it wasn’t active for long (we were selected relatively quickly, within three months), we did reinforce our profile with posts about family visits, Twins games (see? academics like sports too, just like normal people!), planting our garden, and favorite recipes.
[16] While we recently had joined a church to have it as part of a support network, I was uncomfortable including religion in our profile – it seemed like a crass appeal. And yet. But this closing statement was meant to include the birthmother in our love, a nurturing image we thought a potentially isolated and unsupported birthmother would respond to.
[17] This is so Evan’s voice, simultaneously sincere and humorous. Also, see our pretty house? Very stable and middle-class and much too big for just two people, with a large yard for a child to play in.
[18] This page was a calculated risk, intended to render us as fun and quirky (but not too weird), and include any aspects of ourselves that didn’t neatly fit into the previous topics or hadn’t been adequately represented. We each wrote a list about ourselves and each other, and then picked the best ones, editing for balance and accessibility.
Heidi was a total Goth in high school – black hair, black eyeliner, and a car named the Cure-mobile.[19]
Evan & Heidi’s favorite show to watch together is Tabitha’s Salon Takeover.[20]
Heidi could eat a dozen Glazed Original Krispy Kreme donuts, all by herself.[21]
Heidi was an amazing flute player.[22]
Evan has made exactly one game-winning shot in a basketball game.[23]
Evan performed stand-up comedy for a few years while in college.[24]
Evan loves shopping for clothes more than Heidi.[25]
Heidi loves to go hiking and camping in the mountains.
[19] Yup.
[20] Remember this show? Wasn’t it awesome? Tabitha was a bitch-goddess. Also, it’s a reality show, not Masterpiece Theatre (which we also watch), so we sound totally accessible.
[21] And has.
[22] Evan wrote this – I thought it sounded like bragging and didn’t want to include it, but Evan liked how it added the opportunity for musical exposure for a child.
[23] It was a rec center pickup game. He was left unguarded, the ball came to him and he took a jumpshot. Ten whole people witnessed this epic moment.
[24] He dropped out of college because Mitch Hedberg said he was funny and told him to. An era of his life I missed, and that existed before YouTube. I would pay money to see this.
[25] It’s true he’s a bit of a dandy, but I wondered if this would read as effeminate in a state wary of any man who doesn’t hunt or work with his hands.
Heidi’s guilty pleasure is watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie.[26]
For our engagement vacation, we went to three straight Minnesota Twins baseball games.[27]
And this is the space for pictures of our cats.[28] [Three pictures – one picture each – of the three cats we had at the time: our old tabby, Moo; our older lilac-point Siamese named, improbably, Kitten; and our tuxedo kitten, Cody[29]]
[Profile pages inserted in clear plastic 3-ring binder sleeves; blue post-it note stuck to top page, with handwritten notation from agency: Selected 7/21][30]
[End]
[26] True, but also reinforces the Dakota connection.
[27] See? We really do like sports.
[28] Everyone advised including pictures of pets – kids and pets go together. If a birthmother had a cat, our cats would be a familiar draw; even if she was a dog person, pets were generally viewed favorably. Personally, I thought too many profiles prominently featured dogs as surrogate children, so I kind of loved the arch heading Evan gave to these pictures.
[29] Deceased; deceased; asshole.
[30] The agency’s Guidelines and Tips for Writing the Profile said “Be YOU! Show your values: who you are, what’s important to you, how you spend your time, your personality/lifestyle/
parenting philosophy.” Would you have selected us? On the basis of the profile, or the footnotes? Would I have selected us?
Poet and essayist Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com