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From Surrendered Child: A Birth
Mother’s Journey (UGA Press, 2004), winner of the 2003 AWP Award for
Creative Nonfiction Come winter, 2001, I have been reborn, in ways I
never expected. I have chosen who I
will love, and who I won’t. I’ve
learned to say no to lovers who fail to see me, or who hesitate to see
themselves. I myself have chosen,
John, a Monacan Council Chief from the heart of
Virginia, a lover who becomes my best friend.
I have come, at last, to trust that writing is my vocation, if not my
profession. By day I teach, this
winter at a small liberal arts college in Come winter, 2001, I’m worried that I’m stepping
back in time, to a limbo of the season I don’t like. I’m again between holidays and families
and, this year, between states. John,
now my fiancée, has unexpectedly remained behind in Then, my own life takes charge and pushes me forward
in a way I could never have predicted on Thanksgiving Day in the winter of
2001. For weeks, since I’ve purchased a new laptop, I’ve been obsessed with
e-mail, and Thanksgiving is no exception. I’ve checked messages five times already, waiting for the holiday greeting, when I open a
file that makes my world come open: Dr.
McElmurray, I
stumbled upon a web page looking for a book for a Christmas present. At the bottom of one of the pages I
saw your picture and I was stunned. The resemblance to
someone I know very well is shocking. I then continued to read that you had a son that
you gave up for adoption in 1973 and that you
were from My,
fiancée, Andrew, was born in 1973 somewhere
in and adopted. I have his permission to
write you. . . . He is a little nervous to do so himself. He is, however, very
interested in finding his birth mother. I hope it does not anger
you that I contact you. Have
you already found your son? Sincerely, Jennifer Williams Oh my god, I say to John, who is visiting
and making corn pudding. John hurries in
from the kitchen and I imagine sinking to my knees, hiding my face in my
hands. Later, I’ll think about my
Introduction to Creative Writing classes and my beginning short story writers
who describe moments in which protagonists receive extraordinary news and sob
uncontrollably into their toilet paper. Or experience terrible shocks and
fall, like lead onto floors, or slide
helplessly down walls or the sides of refrigerators. Could this really
happen? I ask them. Don’t we feel things more subtly? Don’t we just get
quiet, or go lie down, or watch too much bad television for too many hours in
a row? Anyway, I say, wouldn’t it hurt like hell to fall so hard? Show me, I tell my students. Show me what really happens when we feel
extremes. Give me sensory details—the
tastes and scents and textures of love, of grief, of desire. A pen rolls from the edge of the desk. My heartbeat
rises and falls. My mouth tastes like sweat. John hurries in from the kitchen
and we stand there, reading second-hand about a young man named Andrew who
has wanted to meet his birth mother. I don’t accept these feelings easily, of
course. John tries to hug me, but I push away from him with both hands. No, I say, but I’m not sure what
I’m denying. I want comfort and I don’t. I want my son in my life right now,
and I don’t. I want the baby who came from my once-girl’s body and not a man
who can be just as afraid as I am, now. I want this message to be true, but
every reason it couldn’t be comes to mind. That admirer of my novel who wrote
me, two years ago and kept writing with new e-mail addresses until I moved
away. It’s really him, I tell myself, pretending he’s my son’s fiancée. Or something simpler. A mistake or a
well-meaning stranger who’s seen my memoir described on some website for a
conference and who now wants to make my life all better. I’m pushing as hard
against the truth as I am against John as he holds on to me and tells me he
loves me and tells me he believes it’s happened at last. My
son and I have found one another. This is the truth, though it will take a month of
phone calls and more notes and a packet of photographs for all of us to
believe it. The truth is that my son, born on I don’t know what to
say. All that Jennifer has said to me,
shown to me, appears to fit with what I have come to know. I stand speechless, and
somewhat reeling, with mixed euphoria, dysphoria, and confusion. I’ve felt, for some time, the need to find an origin, but
have always pushed the notion aside, waiting
for a more opportune time in my life. Now a possibility has
fallen upon me. Perhaps I ramble,
instability beckons. I would like,
with some trepidation, to
contact you less electronically, or perhaps
for you to contact me. I’m unsure how
to proceed. The swirling potentials
are so new to me. Andrew I’m swirling too in late
February of 2002, when I meet my son for the first time. I can’t sit still and I’m pacing, though
I’ve managed to play hand after hand of crazy eights with John, whom I’ve wed
in December and who has come at last to live with me and start our lives
together. It’s a Saturday and Jennie
and Andrew have promised to drive from Andrew and Jennie have
promised to leave By four-thirty, then
five, I’m biting my cuticles until they bleed and we’ve gone from crazy
eights to spades and back again. The
cards slap down and the suits switch, hearts to diamonds to clubs, and I’m
aware of how old the deck is, the cards soft and pliable. I feel soft and pliable myself, since I
starting sipping an elixir of health-food store nerve tonic about one, then
switched to Just after five I head
down to the yard to talk to my neighbors, Jim and Susan. The whole clan is there—their two kids;
their out-of-town guests; Annabelle, their dog. Everyone is playing touch football and I
linger at the outskirts, feeling like an uninvited guest. Anabelle, who is a
It’s It’s like this. The sixteen steps down to the landing and
to the outside door are the longest I’ve ever taken. Other books, not adoption ones, but
saccharine romance novels and paperback mysteries describe such moments.
Her hands gripped the rough-hewn wooden railing as, one by one, she
inched her way down the steps to the landing where who knew what enormity
awaited her. Absurdly, I’m
thinking lines like this. I’m thinking
lines. So, Andrew, I’ll say. How were the roads? Was there much traffic? I’m thinking I’m becoming my mother. I’m thinking of glass beads on a
string. Absurdly, I’m thinking of a
heady treatise, An Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice.
Glass beads were the metaphor there.
We string them together, William Godwin says, the accumulation of our
experiences of right and wrong, good and evil, like beads on a string made of
our lives. That’s what I’m doing. Impossible,
they say, to think all of this down a mere sixteen steps, but that’s the way
it is, the way I’ll remember it. I’m
sixteen and I’m wearing a hippie peasant dress and I’m walking in a meadow
full of yellow flowers. I’m pregnant
with my son and someone, a friend’s mother, tells me I’m the most beautiful
sight she’s ever seen. I’m sixteen and
I’m laboring, forty-eight hours worth, and I’m high on pain and fear. I’m thirty and I’m incapable of love and
love it most at my Granny’s house, where I lie on her couch and pretend I’m
small all over again. I’m forty five
and the door is opening and I’m seeing his face, my very own son’s, for the
first time ever, the last or the first glass bead on a string of moments I’ve
accumulated until now. I wish I could
tell you, you who expect so much, that this moment was
exquisite. That we reached across the
distance from steps to car, took each other in without reservation. I wish I could tell you that this moment
was inviolate, a testament of love from son to mother, mother to son. You must decide how it was or choose to see
how it wasn’t, your own reunion story.
My first memories of my son are of a young man. Obvious, you say. Less obvious, that he is no longer a baby to
hold in my arms, but an attractive man with blonde hair He is standing at the bottom of the
outside steps, his face averted, his feet in black shoes I ridiculously find
stylish. The shoes are pointed
car-wards, ready to help him slip away.
Like me, he wants to hide. Like
me, he slides his hands deep in his pockets, stands to the side, awkward,
uncomfortable in his own fair skin.
His skin, I notice right away, is ruddy, the skin of a blond man with
light blue eyes who is Joe,
my boy-husband of years and years past.
He is Joe, and me, and someone else, my father maybe, with my father’s
build, his chest and soft belly. I do
not see my mother in my son’s body, do not think of
my mother at all. I do not even think
of myself as a mother, but
for a space of seconds am a woman outside myself, a woman vulnerable to
desire and I’m thinking, how
handsome he is, and I’m thinking I’m his mother and I’m not and I am.
What did an anonymous mother say in one of the adoption books I’d
bought? The only way, she said, she
could really have him back in her womb was to be his lover. My womb aches. That much is true. “Let’s go inside,” John says as he takes my hand and
as my son and his sweetheart follow me back in. |
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