Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
The third in a trilogy of stories by three women whose lives were changed forever by adoption.
Jan 6, 1999 | When it comes to motherhood, I have really never thought of myself as anything other than just a "mom." Not a qualified "adoptive mom." Just a "mom."
Our first baby, a son whom we named Jimmy, died at 7 weeks. We had been his parents since we first held him when he was 3 days old and took him home from the hospital with us two days later. When he was 6 weeks old, my parents drove from Denver to see their newborn grandson. The night after their arrival, while my mother and I were at a shower for our baby, my husband, Frank, called to tell me that our son's slight fever had risen above 105. We hurried home, and Frank and I rushed him to the emergency room.
Frank and I were young and hopeful, and seeing Jimmy at the hospital made us feel strangely reassured. In thebaby ICU, surrounded mainly by tiny, fragile-looking premature babies attached to machines, our son looked round and beautiful and large. It never crossed our minds that he would be the one who would not live. But after five agonizing days of fighting meningitis, he died.
Three weeks later, I went back to my work as a first-grade teacher, hoping that class rosters, homework assignments and playgrounds might assuage the despair I felt about his death and help me gain some sense of equilibrium. But after school one afternoon shortly following my return, Al,the school custodian, paused in his sweeping of my classroom to offer his condolences. "It's really not all that bad," he said. "At least he wasn't of your flesh and blood."
Al's words, meant in comfort, stung me. He was right -- Jimmy wasn't our flesh and blood. But what did that have to do with our being his mom and dad? Since that time, I have heard this sentiment expressed again and again -- that adoptive parents are somehow less real parents. A few years after we had adopted two more children, a friend told me over lunch how her inability to have a baby had tormented her and forced her to conclude she was less of a woman -- a failure -- until she finally was able to bear a child and pass on the "line." As a student of British history, I certainly understood the importance of lineage -- why was I sogreatly surprised?
The answer, I think, is that I was interested mostly in being a mother, not in bearing a child. To me, my friend's desperate interest in fertility and passing on family genes had little to do with nurturing a new life, even as it made me realize how important the issue is to others. Perhaps I was naive. Perhaps, also, I protected my naiveti because it protected me.
In part, my naiveti was due to my own heritage: By the age of 6, my father was an orphan without siblings; by 12, my mother had lost her father and all but one sister. Frank's mother and aunt, an aunt who had helped to raise him, had also been orphans. All of these people, whom we deeply admired for their strength of character and capacity to give unconditional love, made our wish to adopt seem a natural and even desirable means to becoming a family. They had passed on a reverence not for bloodlines, but for loving the family they had.
During the first five years of our marriage, Frank and I had made a conscientious effort to see that I didn't become pregnant while he finished college and I worked to support us. During the next five years, when we were ready to start a family, we came to suspect that we were not going to have children biologically. When the doctor confirmed this suspicion, I remember thinking there was a little baby out there somewhere who needed us just as badly as we needed a little baby.
We opted for a private adoption, which my gynecologist arranged. Duringthe '60s in California, a private adoption, unlike one strictly controlled by the county, meant that the adopting parents could learn something about the birth parents beforethe baby was born. My gynecologist knew both parents; he told us that the biological mother was a nurse and the father a doctor. We were also fortunate in knowing that if it became necessary for health reasons to learn more medical history, quick contact with the biological parents could be made. However, the arrangement had one major disadvantage for adopting parents: For one year, the biological mother had the right not only to visit the child, but to change her mind and take the child back. We were assured that this would not happen, as the doctor was an older, married man with several children and had no intention of breaking up his family. The birth mother had insisted she had no interest in raising a child by herself; she had already relinquished one baby for adoption. But several months after Jimmy's death, we heard that the doctor had indeed left his family and married the nurse. We often wondered if they might have decided to take Jimmy back and we would have lost him in yet another way.
Jimmy was born before his due date, while we were on a trip to Colorado visiting our families. I still remember how we heard the news that we had a new baby boy: We were at my sister's house, barbecuing hamburgers in the backyard, when we got a call informing us that our son, a healthy baby boy of six pounds, seven ounces, had been born. When could we get back? We packed right away and left at dawn. During the drive to California, we talked a little about our fears of how the baby would change our lives, but mostly we were exhilarated with anticipation: about the future, about someday watching our son play baseball, rip open Christmas presents or play in the yard of the house we did not yet own. After trying for five years to have a baby, the thrill of seeing Jimmy and holding him in our arms for the first time at the hospital had nothing to do with flesh and blood. Neither did the depths of our grief when, six weeks later, after a four-week bout with a staph infection, we found ourselves rushing himback to the hospital. As the doctors worked to save him, we watched him slip into a coma from which he was never to recover.
Does love begin when a child is born or first imagined? Jimmy had been ours to hold andlove for a short six weeks, but he had been in our hearts for muchlonger -- through months of elaborate infertility testing and discussion of procedures that could possiblylead to a pregnancy; through hours of intense, personal interviews to determine our capacity to parent, something biological parents are not subjected to. We hadn't carried our child for nine months only. We had carried him for several years.
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