Dear Sweetness,
If you were here today the house would have been filled with the smell of bacon. As per our tradition we celebrate your adoption day by making more bacon than one family should ever eat. This all started when our friends “The Owls” wrapped multiple packages of bacon for your brother as a present for his adoption day. When you requested the same treatment, it became tradition.
Adoption day is celebrated not on the day you came into my life but the day I legally became your mother, six months after your birth. Legally the state had to give ample time for someone else in the world to claim you as their own. Possibly your birth father whom we both still know very little about. Fittingly adoption day marks the day I went to court and signed papers in front of a judge. A different kind of court than the one I have spent many days in since fighting to retain custody of you and your brother. In adoption court there was music playing and pictures were encouraged. The judge even handed you a stuffed animal, a tan basset hound with long floppy ears who you eventually named “Adoption dog”.
I thought I would tell you your birth story this year because I could not make you bacon. You and your brother each have a book your dad and I made you that lays out your origin stories. These books are full of pictures that remind us we were once a puzzle that can no longer fit back together again. This story is different.
It all started with a snow storm. It was Super Bowl Sunday which really meant nothing to me because I never could get myself to watch football. But to your Pap, my father, it was a sign because the Steelers were playing that year. If you are from Pittsburgh, and most of my family members are, you have to like the Steelers. Not a birthright but a requirement. Even though they lost that Super Bowl, Pap said it was worth it because you were born.
I got a call from our adoption agent after waiting nine months on a list. Not a list with any sort of order or process of ticking through the names. No “you’re next” kind of scenario. This list was a list of people who had been vetted. We all had several rounds of interviews, home visits, fingerprinting and criminal background checks. To give birth to a child, none of this is required. Everyday I wondered if that day my phone would ring and I would be chosen. Maybe I would get the call that would make me a mother.
When the call finally came, I prepared myself for more waiting. I had assumed there would be a long drawn out process of meeting the birth mother then waiting again until she made her final decision. Months in between keeping my fingers crossed and making wishes on the time 12:34. I had no idea that it would be instantaneous. In one moment I was childless and in the next I was your mother.
The adoption agent told me over the phone that you had been born that morning. That your birth was quick, just four short hours. Afterwards your birth mother, who had been avoiding making a decision until that moment, picked me and your dad from a stack of books each filled with the lives of potential adoptive parents. Each of those books did their best to describe the life each one of us could give you, trying to predict your future. Your birth mother was left to make the choice on her own in the most difficult of times.
Once our book had been chosen and the very anticipated call had been made, our job was to get to the hospital as quickly as possible through the snowstorm. This journey involved either driving over a mountain through a mountain pass or driving around the mountain which would take considerably longer. Seeing that there was so much snow on the ground and much more snow falling we avoided the mountain pass and took the long way around which took what felt like to me an excruciatingly long time. In reality it was about one and a half hours.
Before we left I packed up all the things I had so carefully procured for your arrival. Swaddle blankets, your coming home outfit, binkies. These things had filled your nursery with its old wooden wide plank floors and a view of the rushing river. The room I had prepared months ahead of time. The nursery everyone in my life feared was filled with too much hope for your arrival. Me knowing that you were coming and it had to be done. I had prepared with absolute certainty that my preparation would not be for nothing.
The journey to meet you felt like traveling through a mystical snow tunnel to another world. There were barely any other souls out on the roads after the announcement had been made that travel was for emergencies only. Your arrival defined the word, something that required immediate urgency. When we got to the hospital we were greeted by the director of the adoption agency who spent about fifteen minutes explaining the papers we were about to sign. Time felt elongated as we sat in a little waiting area just a few feet from the door that led me to you. I don’t remember one word of what she said or what I signed. I didn’t care. I would have signed anything to become your mother, to see your face, the face of the child I had been dreaming of night after night waiting for you to come into my life.
She was explaining all of the toxic things they had tested you for and what was found in your system at your birth. They wanted to inform us of what we would be signing up for, what you would be up against in the first few months of your life. I had been told you would be withdrawing from opiates and it would take about a week under hospital supervision before you would be stable enough to come home.
I wanted her to stop talking so badly or for the paperwork to have less pages. I wanted to cross the threshold of the room I knew you were existing in. Sign me up, I am now your ride or die, let’s just get on with it. Each minute we were apart was a minute before you would know I would never stop being your mother.
As much as I had anticipated that moment, sometimes I also feared it. Wondering if an adoptive parent had ever met a child and had second thoughts. Thoughts they felt guilty for even thinking. Maybe they weren’t the right fit. Maybe their child is ugly. Thoughts pregnant mothers push from their minds.
It all quickly faded when I walked into your room and I saw you. You were being held by your birth mother’s adoption agent. She had been holding you all as you cried in pain, withdrawing. Her arms the placeholder for mine until I arrived and she handed you over to me. Your face becoming something I could not imagine a time not knowing. There was no before, just forever.
The next hour was a whirlwind. Nurses rapid firing information at me, telling me how to feed you, how to change you, how to bathe you. All the while worried as you got sicker and your fever wouldn’t drop. The hospital you were born into was in a rural area and still took your temperature the old school way by taking an old glass thermometer and sticking it in your butt. It seemed barbaric as you wailed to keep undressing you to poke you again and again this way.
Quickly we realized the nurses were on a mission to get us removed from their care. Away from the other mothers who had not brought babies into the world with “problems”. Meaning drug dependent, addicted, sick. We were disturbing their peace. It was easy for me to judge them judging our situation but I knew there was a layer below that. It was their fear. That had no idea what to do for you and you were getting sicker.
On day three we were told you would be moving to the big hospital about an hour away but you would have to be transported by an ambulance in an incubator. By this time I had come up with a method of swaddling you and holding your arms down so that you could relax and stop screaming. Your dad called this special hold the “lobster claw”. I didn’t want you riding alone but they wouldn't allow me to go with you. You were placed in an incubator, your head held down by a strap. They wheeled you away screaming.
You were taken directly to the NICU in the new hospital. Before I could see you again there was more time put between us. Paperwork to fill out. More information that had to be spoken to my deaf ears. Explanations about procedures we needed to follow to scrub in and sign out. Someone wanted to show us where our locker was and how we could get on a new list to sleep in a room parents shared on a different floor whose children were all in the NICU.
From the forty or so other children, some of them crying, machines beeping away and many layers of thick glass between us, I knew you were there because I already recognized your scream. This is the moment I knew we were connected. I was your mother. You were my daughter. And I recognized your cry. Then the nurses came out to interrupt our information download to come get me, having heard there was some trick I had invented that could get you to stop. The lobster claw.
They ushered me right to your side to soothe you. Now was our moment to prove that you and I had this figured out. That we belonged together. So I picked you up, I swaddled you, I took your little vibrating arms in my hand and held them down, engaging the lobster claw. Instantly you stopped crying. There we were mother and daughter fighting to get through our first big adventure together, getting you through opiate withdrawal.
The adoption agency director called me a few days later, when we were still at the hospital, to tell me that your birth mother wanted to visit you one last time. All of a sudden all of the gratitude I had felt for your birth mother was replaced with feelings of threat. Maybe she has changed her mind.
After she had visited you the nurses told me they had hooked you up to many more things than you actually needed before she came to hold you. They wanted her to see the impact, wanted her to walk away knowing what she had done had consequences for you and your little body. They also wanted to secure our future together. Make her doubt her ability to care for you. There was no need for any of this. In reality all your birth mother wanted to do was hold you to say goodbye and to make sure you were ok. No one needed to add to the guilt and shame she felt for the pain you had coming into this world. The pain you felt, she felt it too.
You often say you are not strong because you don’t rail against the world like your brother. But you my dear are a fighter. You fought like hell to get well. You were the strongest baby I had ever seen. The little muscles building up in your arms and shoulders to fight against the shakes of your withdrawal. You were in pain and you told the world about it, broadcasting your suffering out into the universe knowing it could handle it more than your little body could.
When it was safe to take you home, everyone came to visit you in our yellow house by the river. Our dog became your protector, often sitting right next to you, towering above you, watching the world for threats to your survival. He now had a job he never knew he needed.
As I sat in the rocking chair feeding you day after day, I felt unbelievably grateful for this woman I had never even met who had given me the biggest gift a human can give another. What I know about your birth mother is this. She believed that I was meant to be your mother. That she was meant to bring you into this world so we could be together. She told me she believed this to be true. You know I am not the most woo woo person on the planet and this might sound kind of esoteric. But sometimes a statement like this can form a belief that makes the bad times better. Your birth mother made this happen for all of us. She has made something of her life. She tried her best to make something of yours too.
Your birth mother was born in the same place and in the same month as you. She left the state you live in and moved to the state and the exact town I now live in, a very weird coincidence. She followed a man who did not take care of her and led her down his own path of addiction. She has never wanted to fill in the blanks of who your birth father is but she did reveal that when she found out she was pregnant with you, she knew she had to leave him. He was beating her. She knew she had to get out so that you would be safe.
She went back home to face her mother and the mistakes she had made. After your birth she kept going. It took awhile for her to find her way to stability, but eventually she went to college, became a teacher, found a man who she loved and who loved her back. They have formed a family of their own and you now have two half-siblings.
This rebuilding wasn’t easy. After your birth, your birth mother settled in a little town nestled in a valley. Away from her hometown, away from the memory of giving birth in the same place she was born. She got an apartment and a job at a restaurant. She was finding her way. Then one day I walked in carrying you in a baby carrier strapped to my chest. She waited on me instantly recognizing me from my pictures in the adoption book. We had not yet met and so I had no clue that the woman taking my order was your birth mother.
Your birth mother’s recovery plan had landed her right across the river, across the covered bridge from our yellow house. She had taken a job at the place where I got my weekend coffee. We had found solace in the same place. The same valley that I dream about when I close my eyes at night still. As much as my presence unfortunately derailed her, I have always found something comforting about the fact that we found the same place comforting. After asking around and finding out that we in fact lived in her newly formed bubble, it was too much for her and she had to relocate.
A few years passed until your birth mother decided she was ready to meet us. When I saw her I understood parts of you that were the parts of her. I watched you both play in the sun blowing bubbles, talking about unicorns. There was a freeness about her that I also saw in you. Something I didn’t possess. I think it was painful for her to stay in touch but we did see her one more time after the birth of her son. We have pictures of you all together playing with a giant stuffed giraffe at the adoption agency.
Your birth mother still checks in once a year, around the time of your birthday to ask about you and give me an update. Once you did a video call with her to help you do a family heritage project that sent us all into a deep spiral about what family is. Why do schools continue to do these projects?
You have said to me that most of the time you forget you are adopted but while you were here over the summer you were processing the pain of a birth mother who has moved on to have her own family without you in the picture. I know the only way she was able to do this was to believe she was meant to be the vessel for your story, not a main character. If she felt it was right to mother you and she thought she could do it well, she would never have given you up for adoption.
Sometimes I wonder about the reason your dad never stayed in touch with your birth mother or the adoption agency after our divorce, even though we both signed an agreement to an open adoption. To acknowledge your adoption is to acknowledge what he lacks, the ability to make his own children. It questions his manhood. His fertility. Fighting for full custody continues the cover up.
People often think adopting from another country will wash the slate clean. In an open adoption, the birth mothers are out there and you will return to face that fact at least once a year. It can feel a little bit like thinking you look decent in your clothes but after stripping down in front of the mirror you are forced to face your naked body, to face all the things you can't stand about yourself.
This is how I felt about our divorce. I felt like I had failed your birth mother in the promises I had made to her. The lies that the pictures in our adoption book laid out as your probable future.
But I am glad I signed an open adoption. I want to remember. I want to be reminded of my purpose in being your mother. I never felt I had the right to claim ownership of you. I have no idea who you will become, no preconceived notion of talents passed down. I have always seen my role as your mother as one of guiding you through the complications of life. I’m here as a pillow to soften the blows when you fall. To remind you to get back up.
I have thought a lot about your birth mother over the years but even more so this last year. The time after I signed the papers to move you onto the next phase of your life. Your birth mother made a hard choice in an attempt to give you a better life. Now I have done the same.
We can both be looked at through the same distorted peep hole now. Both of us can be viewed as failures at mothering you. We weren’t in it for the recognition. We were in it to save you. We both made decisions that branded us as pariahs, yes, but nevertheless they were important decisions to make. We were both just doing our best to love you even if we aren’t the ones who are there to watch you play field hockey or help you with your homework. A good mother knows what their child needs and even if it might break their heart in the process, willingly gives it to them.
Happy adoption day.