We See What We Want to See

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When my son was about a year old, I hovered on the edge of a closed toilet and watched him grip the white lip of the porcelain bathtub. He squealed with delight each time I dropped a favorite bath time toy under the running faucet. His pleasure with the colorful, bobbing plastic toys eased away the tiredness I felt from of a day mothering three children under the age of four. 

With one eye on my precious little guy, I darted to the bathroom door and grabbed his hooded towel off the hook. In those few seconds– between glancing away from my toddler, nabbing the towel and turning back again–I noticed something about my son that had eluded me until that moment. 

As my little boy stood gazing into the tub, I saw that the calf muscle of his right leg was chunkier than the left one. Rooted by the bathroom door, I stared. The right leg was not simply more muscular. It was longer too. A sour taste crept into the back of my mouth.

“No, how can this be?” I wondered. 

Next, I dropped to the floor and studied my little boy’s legs from a different angle. As he giggled at the yellow duckie drifting below, I observed how his right knee bent slightly, naturally accommodating the difference in leg length. 

“How did I not notice this before?” 

After I chastised myself, I arrived at a conclusion. Neither of my two daughters had exhibited any kind of limb deformity, and so I had not been looking for this in my third child. I had seen what I had wanted to see: another child developing normally. Yet, my headed pounded with concerns. How had the pediatrician missed the birth defect? What should my next steps be, and was this an indication of something else, a more serious underlying health matter? 

Several days ago, I opened an email from a reputable literary firm that reviews writers’ published work. Months ago, I submitted my manuscript for critique, a critical step towards gaining recognition and coaxing more readers to pick up my recently released memoir, Twice a Daughter. 

When I opened the attached critique, I thought, “No, how can this be?”

The paid reviewer awarded my book three stars out of five, a much lower ranking than critiques I’d garnered elsewhere. My stomach tightened. 

I scanned the analysis, puzzling what it was about my new book that the reviewer found less compelling than other critics had. Was it my writing style–my bent towards crafting memoir that reads like fiction versus a more literary narrative–or was it my characterizations or dialogue that had not rung true enough in her estimation? I knew that stories of overcoming adversity were becoming more common place. Perhaps, my book had been lumped by the reviewer into that crowded category.

I read the review again.

Besides a few factual errors (my sister’s name was spelled wrong), a phrase caught my eye. The reviewer labelled my five-year search for birth relatives–one that was incited by a breast biopsy–as an “ongoing middle-class, middle American experience.” 

I bristled. 

Nowhere in my manuscript had I used the words: middle-class to describe my story. My memoir is about navigating the closed adoption experience and reconnecting with birth relatives. In my head, I argued with the reviewer: adoption is an experience that transcends class, ethnicity, and geography. Adoption is universal; its prevalence covers the globe. Somehow the reviewer had made assumptions from the words I wrote and focused on those suppositions when crafting her evaluation. 

Much like the day when I noticed my son’s birth defect, once I got over the shock of the review, I speculated whether another issue was at play. Before dismissing the review, I scrutinized my manuscript. I do hail from the Midwest, and I did grow up in a middle-class family. But in crafting my story, I had not meant for the reader to latch onto those facts. My intention was to emphasize my struggle to find identity, family, and belonging, things that I was deprived of due to my closed adoption. 

I puzzled the situation. 

Perhaps the reviewer saw my book as another middle-class, adult woman writing about her troubles. Admittedly, on a very basic level, the book contains those elements. But why highlight demographics and ignore the book’s meatier themes of rejection, loss, acceptance and forgiveness? 

And so, I wonder. Is our first inclination to see only what we want to see? Is it only by chance that we put on the proverbially other set of glasses, lenses which shift our gaze from a more mundane perspective to the veiled place where profound truths reside? 

The day after the bathtub scene, I whisked my son off to the pediatrician. Until he was a teenager, he underwent annual examinations with numerous specialists. To this day he has not manifested any of the potential serious effects of an onerous diagnoses, and the larger, longer leg did not prevent him from leading an active life. But I gleaned something valuable from the experience. I have become a careful, vigilant observer who questions the obvious. 

While I’d like to ask the reviewer to re-read my book with the hope that fresh insights might emerge for her, that isn’t an option. The parameters of the review process are such that the writer must make a choice: accept the review– forever linking its publication with the manuscript– or kill it. Ultimately, I chose the latter because I felt that the review did not adequately represent my work. 

If I could communicate with the critic, I would offer this counsel: take the time to analyze everything further than is your inclination; truths that are screaming to be championed lurk below every surface. Diving deep is what we do when we really care.

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