(tw: adoption)
New
The baby is tiny. I can’t nurse him. We want him to have breast milk, but it’s hard to come by. There are various avenues to get it. I sign up on wait lists, join online groups. I constantly scan facebook and craigslist ads, anxious to be the first to respond. We meet up with strangers in parking lots—women who have frozen their milk; sometimes giving it away, sometimes selling it. There’s a vetting process, but often I just have to go with a feeling and trust that these women and their offerings are legit. I learn what the good stuff looks like, smells like. To us, it’s like liquid gold. A couple of times we run dangerously low and James drives 4 hours to another city to get the milk. There and back. The baby grows.
Martha
Martha has recently arrived in the U.S. from Mexico. She has no money, no job, and no English. She’s twenty-three years old and three months pregnant. Our adoption attorney calls and tells us there is a young woman in southern California who wants to meet us—us and another couple—but that if we meet her first our chances will be much better. “How soon can you get here?”
After three days of driving, we arrive. I’m worried about what to wear. Should we try to look rich? We’re not. Our attorney has arranged for us to meet Martha at an IHOP. James parks our car around the corner, out of sight. I’m worried, somehow, that Martha will notice how dirty it is, and judge us. We sit down at a table, the first to arrive.
Martha walks through the door. She’s tiny and gorgeous, with red lipstick and a leather jacket. I’m glad we didn’t dress up. She sits down. At first there’s just the sound of paper napkins being unfolded, water glasses lifted, then put back down. I fiddle with my silverware. Martha’s watching me. “Are you very nervous?” she asks, using the translator, but I understand the first time.
“¿Estás muy nerviosa?”
“Yes. Si, estoy muy.”
“Yo tambien,” she says, “me too.” She laughs. She’s very young, and full of life, I think. I correct myself: two lives.
We start to make conversation, talk about our interests. She tells us that her favorite thing to listen to is cheesy American seventies music. Her friends make fun of her for it, she says, and laughs again.
All of my preconceptions, my prejudices, that I didn’t, until now, even realize I had, get blown apart. The image I’d created—which would have made the situation easier to define—of an immature, hapless young girl—is wrong. Instead, she’s calm, well-spoken, self-possessed. And she’s funny. This is unexpected. Veering in the other direction, I begin to build her a pedestal.
Two Weeks
I take my Hispanic baby to the local co-op, and am immediately surrounded by a gaggle of older women. They're blocking my way. I can't get past them.
"Oh how cute! How old?"
"Two weeks."
"Oh, how precious!"
"He's so young to be outside! I never took my baby out of the house for the first two months!"
"Well, he's adventurous."
Then—"I just want to put a blanket on him."
"He's pretty warm right now actually. He tends to run hot."
"Well, I would give him a blanket. But that's just me. I'm a mama!"
Silence. Another woman comes forward. She's been thinking.
"He's only two weeks old?"
"Yeah."
"You look so great!" A questioning look. For all she knows, his dad could be Hispanic. But she wants an explanation.
"He's adopted," I say finally.
(I wish I'd said "You look great too," but I'm new to this.)
"Oh, I thought so. Well, that explains it! Ha ha ha."
"Ha ha."
The women draw apart, and let me pass.
Martha tells us that she likes to write. It’s how she processes things, she says. “Me too,” I say. I wonder if she’ll write about this.
We’ve been trying to adopt for six years now. Just a few weeks ago we had been in the car, driving south to meet a birth-mother. We had gotten the call in the morning and left the same day. I was in a panic. “We don’t have a crib! Nothing is set up! We’ll be gone for weeks! I have to quit my job!” I had run down the street to where I worked part-time at the laundromat, and quit. It was the second time I had quit the same job in two months, and for the same reason. But after a few hours on the road our attorney called to tell us that it wasn’t going to happen, after all. I went back to work at the laundromat the next day. Everyone at work just looked at me—I guess they didn’t know what to say.
The waitress brings us our orders. Nobody is really eating. Martha digs around in her bag and pulls out a large envelope. She hands it to me, smiling. It’s an ultrasound of the baby. I start to cry. I don’t want to, but I can't help it. I worry that she’ll think I’m too emotional.
One Month
The baby’s first doctor, who is, to put it gently, a diabolical cunt from hell, says to me at a visit "Do you know if any relatives had issues with—oh right. Of course you don't. You're not his real mother." (Except I do know.) Then, under "problems" on his chart, she puts: "adopted as an infant".
Martha and I talk about music. "I play in a folk band, Klezmer music mostly,” I say, then start to worry. I wonder if she’s Catholic. I wonder if that’s why she hasn’t had an abortion. Maybe, if she thinks we’re Jewish, she won’t want to adopt her baby to us. She doesn’t say anything. She takes out her phone and starts going through photos. I wait. “Mira,” she says, and hands the phone to me. There’s a photo of a man and a little boy. They’re sitting on the low wall of a fountain, in the middle of a town square. They’re dressed in old-fashioned clothes. There are lots of other people milling around the square, also in costumes. “It’s the Jewish festival; it happens every year in my town. This is my father and my son, dressed in traditional Jewish costumes. There is a lot of Klezmer music. We like to listen to it.”
Then, as if sensing my question, she adds: “Soy no religioso.”
Maybe, I think, it’s time to start being myself.
Martha tells us that her boy, who is five, lives with her parents. “I had him very young,” she says. Her mother, she adds quietly, is opposed to the adoption and wants to raise this baby too. Hearing it, I remember that adopting, which would be so wonderful for us, is bound to cause grief for others—not just the birth mother and the child himself—but others we may not even ever know about.
After a couple of hours, Martha gets up to leave. James and I sit for a few moments in silence.
“We’d like you to have this. On the house.”
I look up: several of the IHOP staff are standing over us. One of them is holding a plate with a big slice of cake on it.
“We couldn’t help overhearing everything at your table, and we really feel for you!” she says. The others are nodding sympathetically. “What an intense situation! And you’re doing such an amazing thing! That girl is so lucky to have found you two.” She sets the cake down on the table in front of us. “Thank you,” we say. Of course we know that we’re the lucky ones.
We spend a lot of time with Martha before the baby is born. We go to her doctors appointments, take her out to eat, she cooks for us and takes us to meet her friends at the beach. Everybody is friendly and chill. There’s a pretty big language barrier, but still, I can tell that she likes us. I share some ideas for baby names with her and she laughs at me. I want him to have a spanish middle name, I say. Okay but it can’t be Arturo, she says, that’s an old man’s name! We decide his middle name will be Manny instead. I slowly begin to stop feeling so much like I’m auditioning for a role, and start to realize that I’ve got the part. Somehow this person has chosen me to be her son’s mother.
Two Months
We don't get much sleep around here. Everyone's been sick. The cat got in a fight. I have a bad case of tennis elbow. The dog won't stop throwing up. Today I put the dirty laundry in the trash. Yesterday it was the dishes. At least I'm trying to clean. But the phone really shouldn't go in the 'fridge. I make up weird, meaningless songs to soothe the baby and am surprised to find that I'm still singing them fifteen minutes later, repeating the words mindlessly, as if—or probably just in—a trance. Today, in this foggy, drugged-like state, still wearing last weeks snot encrusted sweats, reeking of spit up, my foot covered in dog vomit that I hadn't had time to clean up yet, I found myself just standing there—rocking rocking rocking the screaming baby, looking out the window at the water and the trees—and absolutely grinning like a fool. But then I've always known that I'm the luckiest person I've ever met.
Six Months
Today I asked my baby’s super nice new doctor to correct problems: “adopted at birth,” and replace it with “asthma”. Which she did, quietly and unblinkingly—all consideration and tact.
Six months after our meeting in IHOP, Martha goes into labor. I sit with her in the hospital room. Her mom calls from Mexico. Martha argues with her, softly. “No, Mamá. No. Ya está decidido.” I look away. There’s a glare, even in the daytime, of the overhead lights. I feel slightly nauseated. We make small talk, but maybe it isn’t. We talk about how shitty men are. Except, we agree, for the good ones. Like James, for instance, I say. Yes, and my father, she says. And mine, I add. It turns out there are a lot of good ones. We laugh.
I watch her labor for twelve hours. People come and go. James sits with us for a while. Finally the doctor decides to induce the birth. The baby’s head crowns. It sits there, wet and dark, an impossible girth.
Eleven Months
On Sunday it was pouring down rain, windy and cold. It was also Mother's day. I tried to make the most of it, but after lying around for a little while I started to feel like I should do something, so I made us all go out for a walk. Let’s go buy a plant, I said. It was a long walk to the plant store, with nothing but puddles and trash for miles in both directions. At the plant store, a woman said happy Mother’s Day and I said thank you. But then she looked at my baby and added, where’s he from? We bought a plant and headed back out. The rain was cold and the wind came up. The baby cried, he was tired. We walked.
One Year
I’m walking, carrying the baby, headed home from the subway. The baby is crying, it’s almost dinnertime. We pass the big cathedral. A couple of nuns approach us. They come up astride and stay with us for a full block, all smiley and breathless like they’re high. They’re trying to get me to go to the evening mass. I’m not religious, I say, that’s okay, they say, you can just come to admire the beauty of the building. It’ll be past my baby’s bedtime, I say, that’s okay, they say, God loves you, and even your crying baby. Oh good, I say and keep walking. I don’t believe in God, but it’s nice to hear. I hold my crying baby close and we go home.
Now
Once a year, we take Manny to visit Martha. She continues to be friendly, even, and kind. She showers him with presents, and he laughs and smiles. He, Martha and I agree, is clearly one of the good ones.
She tells us that she’s happy in her choice. “Thank you,” we say, “that means everything to us.”
And it does. Martha thinks that we’re good enough—that I’m good enough—to love her baby. For his sake, I decide, it’s time for me to start believing it too.
I love the heart and happiness you’ve conjured here, around the core of melancholy that is Martha’s hard decision.
This was such generous, beautiful writing. Thank you for sharing it.