Storytellers: What Happens Next

I used to dread Mother’s Day.

For twenty-five years the second Sunday in May loomed on my calendar, a cruel reminder that I was a mother, but not a mom.

It’s the sort of thing you live with when you get pregnant at sixteen and choose adoption for your child.

Some years were better than others. I chose to view the holiday through the lens of pride. “I made the right decision,” I would say to myself, “and this is still a holiday for me. The word ‘birth’ may precede the word ‘mother’ in my title, but I’m still a mother. I still brought a life into this world!”

Some years I put on a pretty good front. I largely ignored the day, except for calling my own mom. I acted unaffected and sometimes even cold when my parents or my husband or a few friends wished me a happy Mother’s Day.

Some years I felt grief and anger and regret bubbling up inside me long before the day arrived. I cried, and I cursed and I felt physically sick. There was a hole in my heart that nothing could fill.

***

My pregnancy was the result of getting drunk at a party at the wrong house at the wrong time with the wrong boy.  As soon as I woke up on a couch half undressed and all alone, I knew that my life had changed. I just didn’t know how much.

Weeks later a pregnancy test confirmed my worst fears. I was terrified. Convinced my parents would kill me. Up until this moment I’d been the proverbial perfect child; getting straight As, playing sports, singing in the church choir. I was so horrified by the prospect of shattering the image my parents had of me that I called my cousin and asked her to take me to get an abortion. Of course, she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I wanted to die.

Instead I screwed up the courage to tell my mom. There was yelling and screaming and banging of pots and pans and crying and hugging and then the worst part…telling my dad. He didn’t yell or scream or throw things. He just cried. And my heart broke. And I wanted to die.

Instead I went to an appointment with our family doctor. As my mom and I sat in the tiny exam room he looked at me with his big, brown, sad eyes and handed me three pamphlets; one on abortion, one on adoption, one on being a teen mom. My mom exploded up out of her chair, grabbing the papers, smacking him in the chest with them saying, “She’s obviously not capable of making good decisions!” I wanted to die.

Instead I kept agonizing over those three choices. Three awful choices. I rolled each one over in my mind, playing out what the future might look like. I rolled each one over in my heart, wondering what the future might feel like.

I was still going to school every day and by now, everyone in my small town was talking. Kids whispered in class. Some shouted at me in the parking lot. Others shoved me in the hallway. There were notes that read, “BABY KILLER” taped to my locker. Every day was filled with morning sickness and anxiety, every night with uncertainty and fear. I begged God to change my reality, “I’m so sorry. Please, please, please just make this go away. I’ve learned my lesson.” Nothing changed. And I still had life changing decisions to make.

I can’t really explain why I decided to keep my pregnancy and make an adoption plan. It just seemed like the least awful thing for my baby and for me. Once I’d come to that conclusion, I had no idea what to do next. How does one go about finding parents for their child?  It was 1990. I didn’t have the internet at my fingertips. I couldn’t Google where to find resources or how to start the process. My parents and I ended up in the office of an attorney in our small town. I’m pretty sure he thought I was crazy. He looked at me like I was crazy when I said I wanted to pick the parents. Not only pick them but interview them. The concept of “open adoption” was unheard of then. Few prospective adoptive parents had any desire to meet, much less have a relationship with birth families. My options were narrowed down VERY quickly. I started looking through family profiles.  It’s basically like pouring over resumes. I’d open one manila folder after the next...each one contained a photo and a couple of pages of information like height, weight, hair color, eye color, professions, hobbies, religions, etc, etc...and none of them seemed “just right”. 

One day my English teacher called our house asking to talk to my mom. It made me nervous and I thought it was strange. I mean – I knew I was in trouble – but I was a straight A student and I never got in trouble at school. It turned out Mrs.Stitt wanted to know if I’d be willing to take a look at her daughter and son in-law's profile. They had one child and wanted more but had been told they couldn’t get pregnant again. I thought – why not?!? The clock was ticking, and the perfect profile hadn’t landed in my pile yet.

And then, it did. 

I didn’t have to read a word about them.  I opened that folder and saw the picture of Mike and Kathy and Annie and I just knew. Here they were. This was my baby’s family.  Within a matter of weeks they made the eight hour drive to our house. When I opened the door, 3-year-old Annie looked around, put her hands on her hips and asked, “Where’s the baby?!?!” We all laughed. It just felt right. 

Still, nothing can prepare you for giving your child to someone else, and for me – that process was interrupted because after my baby was born, he was whisked away in an ambulance to a hospital ninety miles away because he wasn’t breathing.  After all the drama surrounding my pregnancy and what choices to make and trying to do the right thing, now I feared it was all for nothing. There was a good chance my baby would die. 

He didn’t. 

David was in the NICU for ten days. If you’ve never lived this, you’re lucky. It’s horrible. There are rows of teeny tiny helpless bodies hooked up to machines pumping blood and oxygen, filling the air with artificial sounds; there are parents clinging to the most minute shreds of hope offered up by medical teams; there are families sobbing in the hallways because their little ones didn’t survive. David was there surrounded by his family. Me, my parents, his parents and sister and grandparents. All of us praying for his survival. It was a terrifying time, and it forged a bond none of us could have imagined.  

The day David was released from the hospital was bittersweet for me. I was relieved that he was ok but scared because I knew what was coming next. I knew he was going home with them, not me. After they left I was consumed with grief. It was physical. Debilitating. My parents supported me and loved me a tried to console me, but there was really nothing they could do and they were grieving, too. I spent countless days sobbing in my room. I sat in the bathtub with my hands over my now flat stomach, missing the child that had lived there for nine months. I felt so empty.  I wanted to die. Instead, a few weeks later I went to volleyball practice. Then school started. I acted like nothing had happened. But the very essence of who I was had changed. 

Two months after David was born, I turned seventeen. I came home from a volleyball tournament to find a birthday card taped to the front door. I recognized the handwriting immediately. It was from Kathy. “I’m down the street at Mom’s house with the kids if you’d like to see us,” it read. My heart was pounding. My throat tightened. My eyes filled with tears.  I couldn’t get there fast enough. When I held his squishy little body and kissed his tiny head and breathed in that precious baby smell I could hardly believe it was really happening. I was consumed with love and joy and gratitude and grief. It was the beginning of our two families becoming one.  From then on we saw each other on a regular basis; for birthdays and holidays and random visits just like any other family. It was a complex relationship that none of us planned and it certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was ours and we made it work.

Every time I got to see David I felt a mix of pleasure and pain. It was a joy to watch him grow up and be part of his life, but every goodbye had the effect of ripping a scab off a never quite healed wound. Some dates always did that, too. His birthday. Mother’s Day. My heart would hurt and my body would ache and the void there would fill up my entire being. I couldn’t imagine it hurting more.

But it could. And it did.

***

Moe than fifteen years later I was married to a great guy (as planned), we were both at the top of our careers (as planned) and we decided we were ready to start a family (as planned). We were planners. And our plans usually worked out. Until they didn’t.

Once doctors told Michael and me we would never get pregnant without medical help, we got busy fixing the problem. We are “doers”. Give us an assignment – we do it and do it well. Show us a problem – we fix it and fix it fast. Patience is not a virtue either one of us possess and neither one of us deals with the word “no” particularly well. So we dealt with infertility like we did with any other issue. Head on. Forcefully. Fiercely. Focused. It didn’t matter. Turns out infertility doesn’t care how smart or driven or successful you are. It is a BIG FAT NO to your desire to be parents. Every month I’d hope and pray and beg and plead with God…”please let this be the time…please, please, please…” And every month I’d end up in a bathroom somewhere holding a tampon, sobbing. I wanted to die.

This is when I began to hate Mother’s Day with a red-hot intensity.

Everywhere I turned I saw pregnant women. There were babies everywhere.  I was constantly having to read stories on the news of people who had abused or murdered their children. Each month I became more panicked, more bitter, more angry, more jealous, more closed off from the people who loved me the most. My “therapy” became what I call the “three Ws” … work, workouts, wine. I was a mess.

It’s difficult to explain all the emotions that accompany a round of infertility treatment. I think Michael and I always felt this bizarre mix of excitement, fear, anticipation, dread, hope, anxiety…but you’re trying to stay calm and go to yoga and meditate and drink tea and go with the flow because that’s what everyone tells you should do.  It is SO WEIRD. And the waiting is the WORST. We did it for nearly a decade.

***

When the nurse from the fertility clinic called me with the results of the blood test in 2015 I was prepared for the worst. When she gave me good news I was in shock. I crumpled to the floor of our kitchen. My reaction was similar to the times I’d gotten bad news. I sobbed. This time – tears of joy instead of sorrow. Michael and I jumped up and down and danced and hollered…in amazement and disbelief. And then we worried. After years of disappointment it was hard to believe that things were going to be smooth sailing for us. I was over 40 and what doctors call “advanced maternal age”. It meant lots of monitoring and extra ultrasounds, which was fine by us. Every time we got to see “Baby K” we’d ooh and ahh as the technician pointed out the head and rump, hands and feet.  “Isn’t she cute?!?” we’d exclaim over the black and white blob on the screen. I’m not sure why we were so convinced it was a girl, but in our minds it was and each month our list of names and our vision of this baby grew. Each month meant we were another step closer to the dream that had eluded us for so long.

Michael and I were in bed when my water broke a little more than a week before my due date. While I showered, he made me breakfast. When I started doing my makeup he was pacing circles around me, “What are you doing?!?!” he was just a *little* freaked out. “It’s fiiiiiine,” I assured him while I was putting on lipstick and filling in my eyebrows, “we have plenty of time.” Remember – I’d been to this rodeo before, he hadn’t. The one thing we had in common that day was not knowing the gender. From the beginning we wanted the chance to experience one real surprise in this wacky journey of infertility and boy did we get one.  When the doctor held up the baby I exclaimed, “It has testicles!”

That wasn’t the only surprise. More overwhelming than the shock of our baby girl being a baby boy was the flood of emotions I experienced when our nurse placed that baby on my chest for the first time. I was prepared for feeling relief and joy and love. I was  NOT prepared for the rush of grief – the way my heart contracted and grew larger at the same time, the way I felt a great gain and a great loss, the way I was transported back in time twenty five years to the moment my first son came into the world. The child who was mine, but not mine. To whom I was a mother, but not a mom. I don’t think I truly started coming to grips with everything I’d been through as a birth mother until my second son was born. How traumatic unplanned pregnancy had been, how strong I’d been, how much I’d never really grieved what I’d given up, how much I’d faked being “ok” for so many years, and how much the experience had shaped the woman I’d become.

It was as if something inside me broke. Or rather, it was put back together. From that moment on I felt more alive and complete and authentic than I had in years. It’s not that the grief disappeared, but it was as if the sharp edges of it were softened. Now “mother” and “mom” had new meanings for me. I was reborn.

***

And now on Mother’s Day I feel gratitude.

To my parents — for teaching me how to parent and for always supporting me, even when I made it really hard. I love you.

To my son, David — for making me a mother and changing me forever. My heart has ached every day since you were born, and everything about me is better because of you. I love you.

To David's parents, Mike and Kathy — for being the most kind and generous people I've ever known. Thank you for being the mom and dad I dreamed of for my son and for letting me and my family be part of his life. I love you.

To my husband — for being my rock. I love you so much. I know sometimes I have been difficult to love in return. Thank you for being my steadfast friend and lover through all the highs and lows. Especially the lows. Thank you for staying with me while infertility threatened to rip me – and us – apart. Thank you for being willing to pursue every option under the sun to make my dreams of parenting a reality. Thank you for making me a mom. I love you.

To my children Michael Francis & Audrey — thank you for making me a mom and changing me forever. My heart has grown every day since you were born, and everything about me is better because of you. I love you.

To those of you whose hearts are aching today because of children for whom you made other plans, for children you lost to miscarriage or stillbirth or accident or illness, and for children never conceived; my heart is with you today. I know what it's like to dread Mother's Day.