Before I Called You Mine

by Nicole Deese

  “Mom, stop. Please. I haven’t been brainwashed by anyone, but I do want my life to matter, and I do want to make a difference on this earth in whatever capacity I can. There are millions of children in our world who have no family, no parent figure at all to guide them, nurture them, love them.” I laid a hand over my heart as a sudden clarity rushed over me. “I can do something about that, and truthfully, I believe I’m supposed to do something about it. Not because my church told me to, and not because I think I’m ready for all the things motherhood will throw at me, but because I trust that adoption is a part of God’s plan for my life.”

  “Adoption will bankrupt you.”

  The hot coals simmering low in my belly caught fire in my chest and spread to each of my limbs. “No, it won’t! I’ve saved, Mom—for years. I’ve pinched every penny and budgeted for the costs involved, but since we’re on this subject, I’ve actually received two different grants from nonprofit organizations who support single women in the adoption community—”

  “Please don’t tell me you threw your life’s savings away on this? Lauren!” Her voice cracked, but I doubted she was capable of shedding a single tear over me. “Has my life taught you nothing?”

  “I don’t want your life!” The words punched out of my mouth before they even had a chance to register in my brain. “I’m going to adopt this baby, hold him in my arms, and give him everything I never had as a child—starting with love!”

  Shock and hurt flickered across her face, and some detached part of me asked, What did I just say?

  She slashed a finger in the air, and I swore I could feel it slice me in two. “Don’t come asking me for money when this thing implodes your life. I didn’t raise you to be such a fool.”

  “He’s not a thing! He’s my son!” I yelled after her as she pushed out of the closet.

  Lisa stood opposite me, her face slack with the same stunned panic I felt in every cell of my being. “What. Just. Happened.”

  Shame nibbled away at my insides. “I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t think. . . .” I closed my mouth, not willing to add to my list of growing regrets. Because I had meant what I said to my mother. Perhaps that was the ugliest part of all. I’d meant every single word.

  Lisa remained silent for a few seconds more before pulling herself onto a free-standing cabinet and exhaling deeply. “So this was the big secret you’ve been keeping from us.” She chuckled humorlessly. “I can honestly say I never would have guessed you’d be hiding a baby.” She considered me a minute more. “And I’m guessing this is also why you’ve cut yourself off from the opposite sex?”

  I gave a single nod, unwilling to share any more of the specifics. “I’ve chosen to adopt as a single mother. It’s what’s best.”

  “Listen,” she said, sighing again, “I get that you’re all full of maternal feelings right now. Those hormones are crazy strong. Believe me, it’s why Iris is here.”

  I glanced up to watch her nip at a nonexistent hangnail on her thumb, realizing that whatever she was about to admit wasn’t something I’d heard before. Come to think of it, this was all new—a complete role reversal. I was the peacemaker in our family. Never Lisa. “After step-momming the boys and dealing with Trent’s psycho ex, I wanted my own child, a child that came from my body, my blood. I was sick of Brenda barking orders at me—telling me everything I wasn’t doing right to care for their sons.” She paused again. “So I got pregnant with Iris, and I honestly believed that having her would help me love Trent’s boys more. Because maybe whatever was wrong with me for not being able to love them the way I knew I was supposed to would correct itself with her birth.”

  She shook her head, gently kicking the heel of her boot against the cabinet door. “But having my own baby didn’t fix anything. Motherhood is a tough job, but mothering children that aren’t my own . . . well, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.” In a rare show of vulnerability, her eyes met mine, tears dangling from her bottom lashes. “Saying yes to a baby won’t fix what’s messed up in you or your family. Take it from me.”

  I extinguished her words the instant she spoke them. I wasn’t the same kind of broken as my sister. Our lives couldn’t be more different. I had faith, a relationship with God, and a calling on my life to follow and obey. She had years of rebellious living, a suffering marriage, and a home life that mirrored little of the convictions I knew to be right.

  “I didn’t come here to ask your permission, Lisa, or even to gain your acceptance. I’ve already said yes to Noah.” His name empowered me to continue. “I’m going to be his mother, and you’re going to be his aunt. I just thought you’d want to know.”

  chapter

  fifteen

  Like a grouping of cancerous cells, my family’s cynicism had slithered into my subconscious and infected my thoughts with their poison. No matter how hard I tried to return to the blissful state of a woman who’d just glimpsed the face of her baby for the first time, I had barely been able to manage a smile since returning to my classroom over eight hours ago.

  Once again, I’d entrusted them with a tender piece of my heart, and once again they’d tossed it back in my face like in a violent game of hot potato. Heat flared in my chest at the remembrance of my mother’s words to me: “Don’t come asking me for money when this thing implodes your life. I didn’t raise you to be such a fool.”

  Why should I feel bad for what I said to her? Nobody ever stood up to my mother. I’d spoken the truth.

  Too agitated to grade papers or decorate my classroom with the box of snowflakes I’d pulled out of the game closet yesterday, I dumped a large tub of colorful counting cubes onto my conference table to give my hands something to do, something to fix. I broke the colorful mismatched squares apart, finding satisfaction in the pop-snap sound they made as they disconnected from each other.

  “Knock, knock. Lauren?”

  My hands stilled. I wasn’t ready to face the man who belonged to that voice, and yet in he came.

  “Hey.” I chucked a stack of red cubes into the tub and kept my gaze on the mess in front of me.

  “Yikes.” Joshua scanned the sea of snap cubes. “I feel like I just walked back into my childhood bedroom. Only that mound would have been Legos, not math cubes, and they would have been scattered all over my carpet like tiny spikes of death.”

  Without an invitation, he plunked himself down opposite me. “Here, I’ll help.”

  Sorting through another pile, I flicked my gaze north. “You don’t have to. It won’t take me long.” And even if it did, that was the whole point. I didn’t want to take this negativity home with me, not when my home would soon be Noah’s home, too. It felt wrong to taint the space he’d soon be crawling around in with this foul mood.

  “I want to,” Joshua said in that flirtatious tone of his, which I was beginning to realize was actually just his normal tone. As if he didn’t know how to be anything other than ridiculously charming all the time.

  He unsnapped several rows of cubes. “I didn’t see you in the lunchroom today. Or at recess.”

  “I had some grading to catch up on.” The lie sizzled on my tongue like Pop Rocks.

  “Huh, strange. ’Cause I don’t think I’ve handed out a single worksheet since before Thanksgiving break.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Guess I just got behind somehow.”

  And this, ladies and gentlemen, was exactly why you should never tell a lie. Joshua had been using my planner—teaching his class using my lesson plans—so he knew better than anybody else that I hadn’t been grading today.

  He placed a set of ten on the table and searched into my deepest soul with those mossy green eyes of his. “Are you okay, Lauren? You don’t seem like yourself.”

  I scooted away from the table and reached for the plastic container on the floor. I couldn’t have the conversation with him right now. Not like this, anyway. Joshua deserved more than my leftover frustration at my family.

  “I just have a bit
of a headache is all.”

  Container propped on my lap, I prepared to sweep the cubes haphazardly into the bin, but Joshua stopped my arm and chuckled, as if my dramatics were solely for his amusement. “Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Weren’t we supposed to be organizing these by colors?”

  Trapped beneath his hand, I met his gaze, a rabid fear rising in my chest. This couldn’t happen like this. I couldn’t allow him to lure his way into my mushy center. “I think I need to leave it for another day.”

  His eyes darkened with concern as he removed his hand from my arm. “You do? Because I’ve never seen you put away anything in your classroom half finished like this.”

  I cut my gaze from his face and stood, picking up the plastic tub. “Well, it’s late. We both should get going and allow the maintenance team a chance to do their job.”

  “So we’re back to this again, are we?” He made a throaty sound I couldn’t quite decipher, but knew I didn’t care for. At all. He laced his fingers behind his head and lounged back.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  A contemplative smile curved his mouth. “It’s what you do—whenever you don’t want to talk to me. You escape.”

  “I do not escape.”

  “You do, actually.” A matter-of-fact statement. “I guess I was hoping after the lighting festival that I’d finally gained some ground, that you might be starting to trust my intentions a bit more. . . .” He shrugged, not finishing his thought. I’d never done well with fragments. Maybe because I’d grown up in a home where there was little left to the imagination on where someone stood relationally with anybody else in the family. I wasn’t used to filling in the gaps when it came to statements of approval. It had always been feast or famine. All or nothing.

  “Trust your intentions? Joshua, I told you from the beginning how it had to be between us, and you seemed to understand.”

  Without taking his eyes off me, he stood, his steps as sure and measured as his voice. “How can I understand when you won’t let your guard down long enough to have a real conversation about the possibility of you and me? When you won’t tell me why I can’t take you out on a real date?” He paused long enough to disarm me, taking the tub from my hands and setting it down on a desk. “Because that’s what I want, Lauren. I want to take you out. I want to eat with you, laugh with you, and spend time with you in whatever capacity you’ll give me. And sometimes I think you might want the same thing, and then other times—” He pointed to Exhibit A again on the desk. “Other times I’m not sure what to think.”

  His shockingly male scent made thinking about anything difficult at the moment, yet I knew he wasn’t wrong. I knew I’d done a terrible job at keeping him strictly in the friend zone. Of living within the boundaries set for platonic male and female co-workers. I searched for words and came up with nothing more than a squeak before his much-too-tender eyes locked onto mine, and I was immediately transported back to Old Lauren. The one who teetered between present and future. Between reality and hope. I allowed her one last second to linger, one last second to bathe in a moment of possibility, before I broke the spell and spoke the words that had circled around my heart for well over a year.

  “I’m going to be a mother.”

  Through the window of his eyes, I watched his thoughts swirl and swirl and then finally sputter to a stop. “A . . . a mother?”

  In any other situation, the southern flick of his gaze to my abdomen might have been comical. But there was nothing even remotely funny about this moment. And I doubted there ever would be—not five years from now. Not even ten.

  “No, Joshua, I’m not . . .” I shook my head softly. “I’m adopting a baby. Soon.”

  The words settled between us, and I saw the exact instant he understood the full weight of my meaning. My heart wasn’t his to win because it had already been won by a little boy with wanting eyes and a winsome smile.

  He said nothing for the longest time, continuing to stare and work out a calculation he didn’t seem willing to share. “A baby.”

  “Yes, his name is Noah. I saw his pictures for the first time last night. He’s ten months old and lives in China, in an orphanage. I’ve been waiting to be matched with a child for a long time—nearly a year and a half. And there are certain requirements I’ve agreed to, commitments that are best for Noah in the long run.”

  A single nod followed by an exhale. “I assume not dating is one of those requirements.”

  For the billionth time in the last twelve hours, my eyes grew damp. I nodded. “I didn’t even tell my family members about the adoption until today.” I pushed the memory of that brutal conversation away and worked to keep myself present in this one.

  Joshua’s eyebrows seemed to be having an entire conversation without him ever opening his mouth.

  “I know this is a surprise . . .” I hedged.

  “A surprise?” He laughed at that, raking a hand through his hair like he wasn’t quite sure what else to do. “Lauren, prior to last week I couldn’t imagine a scenario more touchy than having to navigate through a regretful ex-boyfriend. But a . . . a baby.” He seemed to recall something else, taking an extra second to shape his mouth around the word. “Noah.”

  Somehow, Joshua saying his name was a deeper level of real than when I’d watched my baby’s video on my laptop for the first time.

  “I wasn’t trying to mislead you. I promise, I wasn’t.”

  He nodded, then looked away from me. “You told me you were in a complicated life stage, I just . . . I didn’t realize how complicated.”

  I swallowed, refusing to release the apology that tiptoed up my throat. Because I wouldn’t apologize about Noah. I would never be sorry I chose him first, because if I had to do it all over again, even knowing a man like Joshua could walk into my life at any moment and threaten the desires of my heart, I would choose him still.

  I would choose Noah.

  In all the weeks I’d known Joshua, I’d rarely seen him wear anything but his faithful, hope-springs-eternal expression. But not now.

  Defeat shadowed his gaze and dimmed his once-constant smile. It was the face of a man who engineered solutions for a living and yet couldn’t work out the problem in front of him. Because this equation had already been solved, and there was simply no factor that could involve the two of us together.

  chapter

  sixteen

  According to the Crayola color wheel, there were exactly nineteen distinctly different shades of blue. Add too much yellow, you get green. Too much red, and you risked falling into the violet and purple range. Somewhere between breakfast and a trip to the home improvement store, I’d become somewhat of an expert on blue.

  I stood back, tilting my head to the left and right, squinting at the crudely painted swatches on Noah’s nursery room wall, hoping one might call out to me. But so far the only thing that had called out to me was Skye when she needed a potty break, and Jenna, trying to pin me down with her let’s-set-a-date-for-your-adoption-shower texts every five minutes.

  Swiping my phone off the desk that still needed to be moved from this room, I snapped another pic of the most indecisive wall in America and sent it off to my best friend with nothing but a question mark. When I’d first visited the paint section four hours ago, I was set on a shade in the classic denim range, but instead, I’d come out more confused than ever, holding sample quarts in aqua, cobalt, and navy.

  My phone dinged with Jenna’s response.

  No, this is not a movie theater. It’s a nursery. That paint is WAY too dark.

  Sigh. You know when you go into a perfume store and the sales people bring you a bowl of coffee beans to sniff before you try out another scent? I think I need coffee beans for my eyes.

  It’s called blinking. And I’m sure you have at least one color swatch on that wall that will work.

  HELP!

  How about the one second to the left. What’s that called? Also, how does a New Year’s Day shower sound? I think
it could be totally cute! I just found these darling decorations on Etsy. Look.

  A pic of blue and silver plates, banners, and giant confetti balloons downloaded to my screen.

  New Year’s? I can’t imagine people wanting to spend their holiday that way. Second one is called Cadet Blue. I’ll paint more of it and send you another pic to confirm.

  LAUREN, seriously? People want to be a part of this with you! Yes, send pic after you paint more.

  I laughed and set the phone down so I could grab a fresh foam brush from my supply bag, then poured the correct paint into the disposable tray. One could never have too many throw-away brushes or plastic paint trays, in my opinion. Because if there was a worse job than cleaning paint supplies, I didn’t know what it was.

  Once the brush was sufficiently drenched in paint, I swiped it across the wall. My phone dinged again. And again. Jenna’s harassment would have to wait until I finished forming this sadly misshapen rectangle. I quickly reconfigured it into a heart. There. That was better—much happier, the way a nursery should be. Lifting my brush away from the wall, I took a step back and reevaluated the color. It was definitely growing on me. Cadet might just be the one.

  Hastily, I snapped another pic while trying not to drench my screen in latex paint. With a tap-swipe-tap of my knuckle, I clicked on the picture and selected Jenna’s contact, asking her if this one could work as a nursery color.

  Gingerly, I tucked the phone back into the waistband of my work sweats—yes, that’s a real thing—and prepared to tape off the large window that overlooked the snow-capped mountain range. It was this view that had inspired me to buy this place years ago, back before any housing inflation and when the banks only required a minimal down payment. It wasn’t large by any means: just a townhouse with two standard bedrooms, two full baths, and one sufficient living area on the main floor. But the view . . . goodness, I loved it. Just over a year ago, sitting at my desk, right under this window, I’d submitted my adoption application to Small Wonders. And soon enough, these same magnanimous mountains would watch over my sweet Noah as he slept.