Family Resemblance

Abstract

Family Resemblance Marian Crotty (bio) Every summer, we met up in a different city where one of our families lived. San Diego, Minneapolis, Camden, Pittsburgh. Other than a brief excursion to a butterfly garden or beach, every trip was essentially the same—hotel breakfasts with stainless steel coffee dispensers and plastic canisters of Cheerios and Fruit Loops; hours in a dimly-lit hotel pool where the kids splashed around, and the adults drank the gin and tonics or vodka sours we’d poured into insulated coffee mugs in our hotel rooms. We knew the faint outlines of everyone’s separate lives back home in their separate cities or suburbs, but these trips were for our children, and every conversation centered on them and “Jake Gyllenhaal”—the sensitive skin, the aptitude for spatial relationships, those big blue eyes and thick brown hair. To see all of them in one place made us dizzy. That first summer, there had been eleven families who’d signed up for the sibling registry. By the second summer, there had been sixteen, and every summer after that, there was a slow trickle that added up to a number that was beginning to make us uneasy. When would the vials finally run out? When would children who looked like our children stop being born? And, considering that we had yet to meet one of those hetero, two-parent families who grinned at us from the website—we were lesbian couples and Alex, a single mother by choice from the Detroit suburbs— how many other families were out there? But as anxious as some of us were, we were also grateful to be living in this moment and in this country, to have the thousands of dollars needed to create our families—and we were grateful for this group, which would provide our children with a glimpse into the other half of their DNA, a chance, perhaps, to make up a little of what had been lost in being born this way. And so, when a new family arrived, we answered the questions we always answered about our children’s health, second parent adoption, the best phrases and phases to explain all of this to a child. We cooed over their babies and welcomed these new people into our fold. The eighth summer, there was just one new family—Izzy and Olivia and their nine-month-old daughter, Hattie. We knew already from [End Page 35] our Facebook group that they were cooler and more attractive than the rest of us, but we didn’t fully appreciate just how beautiful they were until we saw them in person. Izzy was slim and delicate with chin-length platinum hair, sharp cheekbones, blue eyes edged with dark liner. Many of us had never been women who felt comfortable in high heels or lipstick, and now that we were parents approaching middle age, we dressed entirely for utility and comfort—cargo shorts and Fruit of the Loom t-shirts, Teva sandals we’d owned since before our children were born. Izzy wore leather flats and a silk blouse tucked into a pair of stiff, high-waisted denim pants that we understood must be trendy. She had the small, lithe body of a dancer and movements so graceful she made us self-conscious about how we carried our own bodies. Of the two of them, Izzy was the more conventionally attractive— she looked like a model—but it was Olivia, with her short, edgy haircut and her masculine energy, who really intrigued us. She was alluring in an androgynous, macho way that felt both familiar and also completely reimagined—a better, sexier version of ourselves. Tall and lean, wearing long cutoffs and skateboarding sneakers, a faded t-shirt from an indie rock band we didn’t know, she had the magnetic pull of a stylish tomboy old enough to have harnessed her powers. When she introduced herself, her handshake was firm, and she held our gaze just long enough to make our hearts beat a little faster. “Call me Liv,” she said, her voice low and husky as if she had just woken up. “It’s good to finally meet all of...