 |
Juliette Borda |
I was born to a
mother who decided to place me for adoption but
who feared she would not if she once looked at me. That
may be why I like to be fussed over on my birthday.
I don’t need big parties. I would rather be taken
out for as many meals as possible by one or two friends
at a time. And I don’t need presents to unwrap.
I have enough stuff.
But especially on milestone birthdays, I want some
attention, and I want to do something out of the ordinary.
For my 60th birthday, I decided to measure this big,
round number in relationships and words. I picked 60
people important to me. (I cheated a little—some
of my 60 were couples or families.) Giving them six
months’ notice, I asked each to write me exactly
60 words. I promised to write each of them 60 in turn.
No surprise that the 60 people I chose are a mirror
of who I am. It turns out that 20, including my own
two children, are other adoptees. Ten more are other
adoptive parents, or birthparents of someone they placed
for adoption, or adoption professionals. I have met
most of them in our work to make adoption more open,
better able to give children new parents without stripping
them of their origins.
Ten of my 60 are writers. (I’m a poet.) Three-quarters
are female, ranging in age from late 80s down to my
4-year-old granddaughter, Emily. Her Grandpa Burt, my
first husband, died a week after telling me what he
was planning to say in his 60 words. I redid my words
about him to include what he’d told me.
Only 13 of the 60 came into my life in my first 30
years, three of these at Stanford. More than a third
arrived in my 50s. No wonder that was such a good decade.
So many approaches to my request. One couple came up
with 60 words that could be spelled by the letters in
my name. My high school boyfriend described a fantasy
dinner he would make for the two of us and our parents
(all now deceased). My son wrote six very honest statements
of 10 words each. My daughter, her husband and their
children took turns adding words to their list. It is
all in my daughter’s handwriting, but I can tell
exactly who added each word.
One friend sent conceptual art. There were 60 little
Melba toasts, each with a one-word “toast”
pasted onto it. A friend who likes to break rules wrote
200 words but highlighted 60. Another wrote a series
of six poems, one of which contained the called-for
number of words. Two Harvard graduates who don’t
know each other wrote the goofiest rhymes. Is a Harvard
diploma a kind of poetic license?
What people sent me was arranged in two scrapbooks
in the order in which the contributions arrived. But
I arranged what I had written about my others in the
order in which people came into my life. Voilà!
I had a kind of autobiography. I’m not sure any
other 3,600 words would tell more about me.
A few weeks after my birthday, I heard seven words
that were what I had really wanted to convey to my 60-plus
loved ones. At the end of a transatlantic phone chat
with my friend Anna Miliotti of Prato, Italy, she called
out, “I love you; you’re part of me!”
That’s exuberant Anna and a literal translation
of idiomatic Italian. But that’s what I want all
those who count in my life to know: I love you; you’re
part of me. |
