A Generous Adoption

My parents held their annual Christmas party last night in St. Paul. It’s the kind of party where crowds of people from all walks of life filter through, staying for various lengths of time while nibbling on artichoke dip on crostini, Thai shrimp rice salad, barbequed meatballs and black-bottom cupcakes. It’s the kind of Christmas party that draws many of the neighbors but also lines the block with cars from neighboring cities and suburbs. Once a year my parents’ small living room is filled to capacity with friends from the theater, from the church, from their children’s schools.

It’s the kind of party in the heart of the city, where gathered around a crackling fireplace, sipping strong eggnog and eating sesame chicken salad dip, you might chat with a director from the local college, or the new boyfriend of the host’s son’s girlfriend’s mother. Long time attendees from my parents’ church might converse with the professional actress from next door and her lesbian partner. You might even have the chance to get to know the adoptive parents of the host’s biological granddaughter.

It was at this party, while sipping on red wine and crunching on ginger bread that I caught up with my birthdaughter, her brothers, and her mom and dad. We’ve chatted on the phone and seen each other maybe half dozen times since Jada was born last January, but by and large, it’s been a busy year for our families. It felt good to have time to stand and chat. As usual we talked about everything. Of course Nicole and Twila are main topics of interest for us, but also marriage, love, commitment, work, family, home remodeling, travel plans, cooking and the holidays fill our conversation.

As the night wore on, we talked about the first holiday party they came to here in my parents’ home, just three months after Nicole was born.

Remembering this, I began to think, not for the first time, about how generous Sandy has always been with my birthdaughter. I did a radio interview about being a birthmom last week for a radio show called, Adoption Voices: Journey to Motherhood . As I answered the host’s questions, Mary Beth Wells made an astute comment about Sandy. She pointed out that Sandy viewed adoption in terms of abundance rather than scarcity. In all these years of being a birthmom, I’ve known this but never have I stated it quite that succinctly.

So often over the years, especially in the first years of our adoption, Sandy said to me, “How can more people to love a child be a bad thing?”

It was from this perspective that Sandy and Tom opened their home to me, my mother, my brother and sisters, even my aunts and grandmother and some of my close friends. It was from this view point that she saw us, my family, for who and what we were, a family quite desperate to be a part of her new daughter’s life but not in a threatening or greedy way. We didn’t want to interfere with Sandy as a mother, we didn’t want to take Nicole away from her in any sense; we just wanted to see her, to witness her life, to hold her and smell her.

My mother and I remembered, after the radio interview aired, just how much we craved Nicole in those first months. It wasn’t a desire to influence or control her; it was just a biological need to be near her, to see her smile and laugh, and be happy in her new home.

We have always been grateful to Nicole’s family for welcoming us so wholeheartedly, so trustingly into their lives. But it’s taken eleven years to see fully how unique my adoption is. Its taken a decade of hearing other birthmother’s stories of struggle and negotiations just to get more pictures and letters. How mad birthmotherhood might have driven me if I had been kept from my birthdaughter. What a prison the condition of birthmotherhood would have been.

I wonder: would I have been able to grow through birthmotherhood and develop into my own kind of mother and live a normal life with my daughters and husband if my birthmotherhood wasn’t an enriching experience in my past but a gaping and unresolved wound?

It could have gone a million different ways, I thought as I stood before the crackling fireplace in the midst of the bustling party, watching my birthdaughter’s growing gracefulness. Now tall and self-possessed, as tall as my shoulder, she stands and listens and makes conversation with Ryan and me and her dad. Her brothers sit beside us, playing with Ryan’s Droid, engrossed completely in their own world. Nicole tells us about babysitting for her brothers, about school and her friends. She is beautiful. It’s the first time I’ve realized she can’t be called cute anymore. She’s growing into a beautiful young woman. And it’s almost chilling to realize.

Sandy reminded me about that first party, when Nicole was three months old, she remembered more about it than I did. I remembered her bare porcelain skin after Sandy took off her too-hot Christmas dress letting her sit in tights and tee-shirt by the fireplace. Sandy remembers worrying because she fussed when I held her; she worried that I would feel hurt, I think. But all I remember is that they were there. I remember being amazed and delighted that they would come. Would I have been that brave, as an adoptive mother? I have often wondered. Could I have been that generous with my newly-adopted daughter? I’d like to think so, but I can’t say ‘yes’ with any confidence.

What I am mostly sure of when I think of myself as this eleven year old birth mother, is that by their generosity; their bravery and courage in allowing our adoption to be so very open, I have been enabled to trust and to grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined twelve years ago when I was pregnant and thinking about adoption. It’s inconceivable to think about what my life would be like had my adoption gone differently.

My birthdaughter’s family chose a path on which we could travel together. They took a generous path that always included me and my family. It could have gone a million different ways. But it went this way.