An Announcement

“We’re not done. They say, ‘Any plans for a fifth?’ And I say, ‘And a sixth, and a seventh, and an eighth, and a ninth.’ That’s my answer.”

-- Brad Pitt
People magazine

Dear Friends,

Forgive the impersonal e-mail, but I wanted you to hear the news before it was bruited about by mainstream media outlets. Not to put too fine a point on it: I’m going to be Brad and Angelina’s twelfth child.

Please know that I would never have applied for this position without a great deal of planning and forethought. From the start, I recognized the barriers I was up against. I’m 43 and white. With a mortgage and gym membership. And a Subaru. And a living parent, who would house me herself if she were younger and had an extra bedroom.

I chose to turn these lemons into a lemonade rainbow. My European descent? It only gives me the opportunity to apologize daily to my siblings of color. My age? In addition to being “just a number,” it leaves me well equipped to watch over the little Pitt-pats (as I like to call my new brothers and sisters) while the grown-ups are off enlarging the cinematic art form. “Think of it as an au pair with a permanent residency card” is how I put it.

I don’t mind telling you, the competition was fierce. In addition to the essay contest (which had to be done in crayon), there was a woe pageant. You never heard such sadness! A Malawian girl whose family was eaten by dragons. A young boy from Myanmar still looking for the village well. An especially poignant child from Belize (or was it Suriname?) who prefers to walk on his hands so that his dead grandmother (“up in Heaven Country”) can better smell his feet.

As I watched the tears well up in Angelina’s exquisitely manicured eyes, I canvassed my own misery archives: property tax assessments, slugs in the hosta, sprouts of ugly black hair in my ears. How could I hope to compete?

I knew then I couldn’t. I could only declare my unfitness. “It’s true,” I told them. “I haven’t suffered. No, not nearly enough. But if you accept me as your son, I will bear every child’s suffering on my back—like the dromedary that carried Maddox on his fact-finding trip to Morocco!”

I was gratified to see Brad clear his throat and look away.

For the final stage of the competition, we were asked to dress in the garb of our native land. I chose a blue blazer with gold buttons and cordovan loafers. (I was startled to see Senator Larry Craig wearing the exact same outfit, minus the shoes. Once his views on international debt refinancing became known, he faded to the back of the pack.) In the heat of the moment, I was even moved to sing one of the folk songs that my Irish grandmother used to sing to me as a child: “Friggin in the Riggin.”

And when, on an impulse, I plopped myself in Angelina’s lap (or was it Brad’s?) and heard the answering grunt of surprise – something like “Hoonfff” – I knew nothing more needed to be said. I was home.

There are wrinkles to be worked out. My birth mother is miffed at the “disownment letter,” though it was very carefully crafted by U.N. attorneys. My partner is unswayed by the promise of being invited over for “Uncle George and Aunt Julia” afternoons. There’s the additional matter of my own two children. I’m hoping they can be passed off as play dates. Failing that, an adoptee-subcontractor relationship might be an option.

Oh, my friends, I wish I could tell you how rich my newfound life is! Just the other night, I was laying my head on my adoptive mother’s bony but welcoming thigh. “I’ve never been so happy,” I whispered as she scissored away the remnants of my ear-hair.

“That’s because you are the apple of Mommy’s eye,” she explained, “and the center of her sustainable universe.”

And then, in a voice that might have herded yaks in Kazakhstan, she bellowed into the nearby antechamber:

“Next!”