Thursday, July 9, 2009

Abandonment

She phrased it differently than I’d ever heard it phrased at meetings like this before. Just slightly. Did anyone else notice how it made all the difference?

“I wish,” she said, with a longing that I could feel from across the room, “I wish they’d been inside me.”

She was talking about her twins, adopted at birth. It had been an open adoption, with a birth mother passing them along carefully, having decided that it was best for them. They were five years old now. At this adoption support group meeting, there was a clear sense that we could say absolutely anything – and we often did. And yet, this group member didn’t think of saying that she wished she could have born children, any children. These particular children were hers so definitely, that she felt the need to have had them inside – them and no one but them. It wasn’t the experience itself that she wanted for herself. It was the closeness she felt for her son and daughter that made her wish, for their sake, for that missing piece.

I realized that I would express my yearning in a different way. After all, our stories were not the same. My two adopted children, two years apart in age, had each spent time in institutional settings before my agency had discovered them. I wanted the abandonment in my children’s past to simply cease being true, before they grew old enough to think about it.

A few months after that meeting, my son developed a curiosity about his birth mother. Sitting on my lap at home, he pieced together this question in the careful words of a three-year-old::

“What . . . her . . . name was?”

I offered her first name. That seemed to satisfy him for a year. It wasn’t until he was four that he brought it up again, in a very different manner. It was bedtime. We had just finished reading a book together and perfecting our duet of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” I had turned out the light and was lying on his bed with him, waiting for him to drift off to sleep. But he wasn’t ready for sleep that night. In his voice in the dark, I sensed the same yearning I had heard from that mother a while back, at the meeting.

“I wish that I came from your tummy,” he said.

I wanted to rescue him from the deep mourning I could hear. So on went the light and right there, right then, we arranged it. At my suggestion, he tried pushing his head under my T-shirt. It startled me how very much bigger than a newborn he was already. It wasn’t easy for him to get even his head under my shirt.

Then, I went into labor.

“Ooh, the baby’s coming,” I called. “I can feel it! He’s ready to come out. He’s coming now!”

As might be expected with a birth, he had some trouble exiting my T-shirt, so there was indeed a sense of triumph when he made it. He had but a moment to glory in it, with arms stretched high and a victorious shout of, “Ta da!” before I grabbed him in my arms.
“My baby!” I said. “My baby.”

Now, seventeen years later, the woman who did give birth to him and three others has phoned them all, even before the youngest had reached the age of 18, the earliest age when the law says okay if both parties want it. (It just took one of them to give her the numbers of the other three.)

When she has called, she has opened with these words: “This is your mommy.” And then she has called them by the names she says she would have given them. They want to see her, to get to know her. They want to fill in empty spaces. They’ve been spending a lot of time with her.

I worry for all of us. Is she trying to convince them to recognize her now as their only mother? What if her reason for making contact doesn’t have anything to do with their good? She left them once already. I can’t let that happen to them again.

As for me, I comprehend, as never before, how it feels to be abandoned.

4 comments:

  1. I believe and hope the birth mother is just curious---How creative of you to go into "labor" for your adopted "baby".

    i look forward to dipping into this blog in the future.

    Caroline Paulson

    ReplyDelete
  2. If life is a circle are there endings or beginings? Or continuations that have been altered by someething inside us or outside us?
    Isn't everything changing all the time and our perceptions change according to the tools we have to decipher our environments.
    Miriam

    ReplyDelete
  3. Since Life itself is filled with both spontaneous joys and unexpected sorrows, I imagine so is adopting a child. The human psychie is not always so easily decoded, and the birth mother may not even be aware of her own motives for wishing to erase the defining years in the lives of her children. But yes, I would also feel abandoned.

    What enormous love you must have felt for your son (and I'm sure you still do) to provide him with the experience of recreating his birth through the symbolic "labor" that you so tenderly described. It seems Love can also be very creative. - Erika

    ReplyDelete
  4. What an incredible, uplifting, painful tale. I look forward to the next installment. A year later.

    ReplyDelete