Growing Girls by Jeanne Marie Laskas Page A

loves you, Luna girl!”
    Alone with that dog in the woods, scratching her belly and praising her and loving her, one thing I learned about myself was that I was no good at not-bonding. I was only good at bonding. Was that really such a bad thing?
    When Alex drove up the driveway, he saw me up there waving my arms and he popped the trunk open and got something out and came running up the hill. I told him Skippy found her, I told him about the ball of white in the woods, I told him she was a good dog, I was breathless with glee. He was shaking his head, smiling, trying to catch up, and he was holding a large steak bone.
    “You bought her a bone?” I said.
    “In case she ever came back—”
    “I don’t think we’re supposed to buy her presents,” I told him. “I don’t think it’s in the code of ethics—”
    “I bought a pork shank for her and also a hairbrush,” he said.
    “Oh, dear.”
    “Oh, well,” he said.
    We loved Luna. There was nothing that anybody at the Maremma Sheepdog Club of America could do about it. Alex bent down and scratched her belly and gave her the bone. I thought: Oh, look at this. I thought there should have been daisies in a nearby meadow, and a beautiful rainbow stretching across the sky. And a unicorn flying and emitting a shower of glitter. The completed picture, I thought. Here it was, a real happily-ever-after tale. The pig had her pancake and was now going to move on. Close that book. Throw that book out. All righty, then. The end.
    That weekend my friend Robin came for a visit from New York. She brought her husband, David, with her, and a notebook with a list of questions written inside. Robin and David were adopting a baby from China, and they were coming to Alex and me for answers. Nearly all the questions were about bonding and how to make it happen. I remembered this one: When you’re adopting a child you have a fear as real as a toothache that somehow, since the baby didn’t grow in you, she isn’t going to attach to you. Or, worse, you aren’t going to attach to her.
    Robin said that one of the things she planned to do when she got her baby in her arms was she was not going to allow anyone but herself and David to hold her until the bonding process was complete. That way, she said, the baby could avoid the confusion over just who, exactly, her real parents were.
    I asked her how she would know the bonding process was complete.
    “Well, I have no idea,” she said. “How did you know?”
    I told her that with Anna, I felt connected the moment I touched her, and with Sasha the process may have been a millisecond shorter, or longer, I couldn’t remember exactly. “It was all more or less instantaneous,” I said. “It’s your baby. You’re the mom. You bond.” I told her not to worry about it, knowing that nothing I could say would quell her private fears. I told her that I thought all you really had to do was want to bond. But I was no longer sure even that much was necessary.
    She looked at her notebook, seemed almost disappointed that there wasn’t more to write down than that.
    I told Robin about Luna, the dog Alex and I promised not to love. I told her I thought bonding was the natural order of things and the much harder job was not bonding.
    I believed all of this, and still do. But that day with Robin I felt all wise and important. Then things went downhill because our second and last remaining pecky rooster made a beeline for Robin. I don’t know what we’re doing wrong that all our roosters end up being pecky, but I was done with roosters. We were standing down by the chicken coop and Robin was admiring the whole Green Acres theme of the place, and just out of nowhere and completely unprovoked, that rooster came charging at Robin while he puffed his chest and he started attacking her ankle.
    “Oh!” Robin said. “Ouch!” She was so polite about this. She had lived her whole life in Manhattan and she had no practice with chickens and I think she