PrintJuly 10, 2010
The Twilight of Fatherhood
She was abandoned at birth, hastily deposited inside the entrance to a hospital in Cebu City, the Philippines, on February 24, 1992. Her guilt-racked birth parents appeared at the hospital a few hours later, identified themselves, and gave the baby a name for her birth certificate. Then the parents vanished again, this time for good.
Coney Ledesma Tasan was eventually placed in an orphanage in Cebu, where for the first year of her life she thrived. Then, one night in the winter of 1993, a fire broke out in the orphanage, one so intense that the children literally had to be carried out through billowing smoke and licking flames. But they all survived.
Coney was then placed with a foster home in the suburbs of Cebu, where she was fully embraced by a retired military officer, his wife, and their four grown children. As is the custom in the Philippines, she was given a nickname, Chi-Chi, and she came to be adored by the family and their neighbors. The family nurtured Chi-Chi's quickness of mind and seemingly uncanny physical ability, which was repaid by the little girl's unconditional love for her foster family. The family tried to hold their attachment to the girl in check, though, knowing laws in the Philippines prohibited foster parents from adopting. Their home was merely a way station to a better life for the girl, a life that would probably continue in America.
One day, when Chi-Chi was about two and half years old, a tall white man and his wife appeared at the door. Knowingly, Chi-Chi's foster mother gestured for us to come in. My wife immediately went to the girl and presented her with some candy as I somewhat hesitantly waited by the door. Chi-Chi was eventually comfortable enough with my wife to be held by her, though it would be days before she would accept any contact with me.
Later that afternoon, Chi-Chi, her foster mother, and her would-be parents went to the local social services office in Cebu to make the adoption official. At one point, the foster mother picked up Chi-Chi and held her for what would be the last time. She then hastily departed, her wails of grief audible as she made her way out of the building and onto the street. Chi-Chi screamed her sorrow off and on for what seemed like days on the long journey home to America.
Within three months, the little girl had accepted us as her parents, and our four-year-old son Alex as her brother. While we had kicked around the idea of giving her one of the trendier names of the day, such as Lauren or Madeleine or Taylor, in the end we decided to pay homage to her Philippine roots and make her first and middle names Coney Cutamora, the latter name in honor of the family who had so lovingly raised her for eighteen months. Conveniently, this meant that she could go by CC -- not a far leap from her Filipino nickname, and a name that would easily assimilate her into the world of the Jaceys and Susies and Annies of America.
As CC grew through toddlerhood, it quickly became apparent that she had a gift, despite her diminutive size, for all things athletic. When she was taken to a Toys R Us and informed by my wife that she could have anything in the store -- this was shortly after her arrival in America -- all she wanted was a 69-cent rubber ball about the size of a soccer ball. Before she even knew the game, she was dribbling, kicking, and heading that ball around the yard. More remarkable was her incredible sense of balance. While she was still light enough for me to bear her weight, she could stand straight up in the palm of my hand for up to a minute, looking for all the world like a cherubic Oscar statuette astride its pedestal.
CC blossomed in other ways as well. She became a social leader, working her small size, exotic Pacific Islander looks, knack for mischief, and palpable self-confidence to become someone you wanted to be around. Even as a small child, her swagger could be infectious. To this day, when I walk into a public place with her, like a restaurant or a store, her presence, all 4 '11'' of her, is empowering. She makes me feel like the luckiest man alive.
Her early teen years, though, proved to be no different from the angst-ridden travail of other girls going through puberty, and after my wife and I divorced, CC even shut me out for a while. But time, as they say, heals everything, and once she had accepted my new wife, I was not only back to being Daddy, but I became her confidant and friend as well. No exception to the usual teen transgressions of underage driving, a bit of a nip now and then, and late-night hijinks, she confessed easily, which made it possible for me to forgive easily. Such was my comfort level with her that late one night, unprompted, I committed the unpardonable sin of telling her the circumstances of her adoption, including her abandonment by her birth parents. But I thought she was tough enough to take it, and I was right. Sensing an adventure, she just looked at me and said, "So maybe I'll go to Cebu some day."
By the time CC turned fourteen, she was playing over one hundred soccer games a year at the club and high school level. She was both fast and quick and played like she had eyes in the back of her head. College coaches started to take notice, and when she realized that she might be able to go to the school of her choice with a scholarship, she focused on that goal for the next four years. We rewarded her ambition by seeing to it that she played on a traveling team that would compete at the highest level. (As it turned out, eight of the twelve girls on her club team ultimately received scholarships.)
CC has never expected the world to give her anything other than life. Now eighteen, she works two jobs and does a bit of modeling on the side. (While the camera loves her face, she is too short to make a career of it, so she is doing it as a way to learn the fashion business.) She has never once complained about her race, or claimed victimhood, or asked for anything special because of her ethnicity. (She has been racially profiled only once, in Mexico, where her swarthy complexion had the natives thinking she was one of their own.) When an Asian member of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado penned a two-part article in the local paper a few years ago about the burden of being a minority in America, I had CC read it to see what she thought. She practically fell off her chair laughing. She thought it was a spoof.
In a month's time, CC will be off to college, having earned both academic and athletic scholarships. I live each day prior to her departure knowing that this is the twilight of fatherhood, and that the calendar stops for no one. Come August, the little girl who once stood in the palm of my hand will stand among the world, as strong and upright now as she was then. She will embrace life fully and take nothing for granted.
When she was still in middle school, CC started to collect inspirational aphorisms that she would occasionally tape to her bedroom walls or scribble in a notebook. One that I saw often was this: "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
