Advanced Essay #1: Toby

This essay was an writing experienced I enjoyed, the freedom and lack of creative boundaries made the process interesting and introspective. The goals of this paper were to find a deeper meaning in the roots of my brother’s adoption, there are a lot of family dynamic issues I am currently struggling with and I thought if I explored areas of our past I could try to understand and solve them. I also really wanted to practice recounting memories and using interesting descriptive language to paint a picture for the audience. I am really proud of some of my imagery and the structure of my piece, this step by step story style is one I enjoy writing in. It is like a film where the character is learning the same information at the same time as the viewer. Some areas of improvement are my more personal parts, the analytical side felt a little thin in earlier drafts and I want to work exploring this emotional side of me in my writing. I tend to feel a lot of things but I find it hard to solidify them into words on a page.

I was an only child for five years. I do not have a lot of memories from this time, but I do remember the moment I was first introduced to my younger brother. My mother entered our living room, while I was toying with the velcro on my shoes as I watched an endless television marathon of PBS kids. She was holding scraps of paperwork in her arms, her hair was awry with a few strands reaching towards our ceiling. She pulled herself down to my level and extended her right hand, a polaroid sat before me with a picture of a small hispanic baby. He sat in a makeshift tub made from a red plastic bucket, he was in a concrete room with a small window behind him revealing a guatemalan sky, the stars were brighter there.

“Who’s that baby?” I asked, sucking on the collar of my shirt. “He’s your baby brother.” My mother replied, a distinct gleam of joy in her tired eyes.

The following weeks consisted of me being a bystander to the adoption process. My parents sat up all night at the dining room table, papers in heaps around them, covering every square inch of our ikea catalog furniture. I lay on our on the splintery floorboards and observing my father rub his sunburned neck as he read document after document. I watched as he flipped a cigarette between his fingers and tried to count the number of furrows in his brow. At school I would sit on the rusted climber with my group of friends swinging my legs and speaking about how even if he wasn’t born from where I was born he was still my brother. One of the boys said,

“That’s messed up. That’s like calling your dog your mom.”

I then replied, “but Bradley, isn’t your mom your dog?” We didn’t speak for the rest of elementary school. There was this air of aggression and confusion that followed adoption, many people assume it has to do with conception issues and would often grow uncomfortable at this implication. There was a strange confidence I held throughout though, I knew he was my brother even before I met him. It didn’t matter that I was only five, I felt a kinship with this boy. I probably received this strength from my parents who wanted to adopt since they married. They spent all their lives researching and finding the most effective means of raising an adopted child, the found the Guatemalan adoption system the easiest to maneuver and then they found the boy in the polaroid.

After a year or so, my parents began traveling across the world to visit the boy. I stayed with the neighbors and their son. I slept next to his dirty basketball gear and ate clam chowder every night for two weeks. I would call my parents on their landline every other night and ask about Guatemala and what the planes were like, but I could only speak for five minutes because it cost too much money. Every time the kitchen timer would signal the end of the call I would panic and cry.

Finally, after a month since parents returned I was able to travel back with my mother to bring the boy back to our home. I wore my favorite wool hat, with a plastic spiderman logo stitched onto the front. I would run my tiny fingers over it as I gaped at the towering glass walls of the airport terminal. I remember gripping onto the elastic waistband of my Target jeans to stop them falling as we sprinted to catch our flight. The plane was cramped with many people yelling in Spanish, as my mother checked her watch and bopped her knee I sat calmly watching us leave the ground from the window. My mother smiled at me as she placed a Kodak film cartridge in my father’s Super 8 camera and proceeded to film me silhouetted by the passing clouds.

We left the airport. This was my first experience away from the first world, I had only seen a life of duplexes and skyscrapers and was unprepared for the aesthetic of an impoverished nation. There were slums lining the craggy road made of tin roofing and dried mud, the nicer homes were cinderblock shelters housing families of eight or twelve. I saw pregnant thirteen year olds and old men dusted with red dirt, you could see streaks of clear cheek paved by tears of irritation. I was filled with a sadness and guilt that followed these images, I felt scared and bad because of it. I had never seen such living conditions, but I am glad I have so I can appreciate the present.

After an hours drive we entered the city known as Antigua. My mother filmed with my father’s camera, she captured grainy images of thousand year old architecture painted with stone colored pigeons. She captured young children in bright handmade clothes silently dancing to the ticks and flaws of the film strip.

We then entered the apartment of the boy’s caretaker. The caretaker’s name was Hilda and she had golden teeth, she was the tallest woman I had ever seen because her knees reached my spiderman hat. She picked the boy from his crib and handed him to my mother, then we walked from the doors and boarded the next flight back to Philadelphia. As we sat in the blue leather seats of the American Airline’s plane, I stroked the bridge of his coffee nose and leaving in the middle of the guatemalan night. And when I looked into Toby’s shimmering eyes I realized the stars were brighter there.

Adoption is a choice a family makes, it brings many feelings into one’s household. Toby is a proud member of our family but there have been times where others have felt strongly against his relation to us, even he has struggled with his grasp of heritage. Personally, I will love Toby until I pass because he is my brother. I have watched him switch from velcro to lases, I have seen him sled for the first time using a trashcan lid, and I have seem him dance to Ray Charles in pajamas and my father’s suit jacket. I know that our family is unconventional, but it is a family nonetheless.