by Amy Seek
“You’ll know, Amy. I can’t speak from personal experience, but I have seen this happen so many times. Birth mothers have told me that when you meet the right one, you just know. You’ve done a lot of good work, and you still have time.”
I tried to imagine what that just knowing would feel like. Whether it would mean I wouldn’t have doubts. Or maybe there would be doubts, but they would be dwarfed by the certainties. Had I already met them? Was it possible to just know, and not know it?
* * *
It couldn’t be Robert and Deb. We finally received their responses to the 111 questions, which Robert said he found “aggressive, overwhelming, and too personal.” He said, “It seems like you’re trying to give us a multiple choice test, rather than build a relationship.” But we were building a relationship with every exchange, and with every exchange, we were getting the information we needed.
They wouldn’t answer the question, How do you celebrate your anniversary? They said it falls in the realm of private. What would you do if your twenty-two-year-old daughter told you she was pregnant? This sounds a little too close to your current situation for us to be hypothetically giving advice. Sorry. How is your family imperfect? All families are imperfect. We prefer to focus on the positive. What is the most beautiful place in the world? All places have their beauty. For some questions, they referred us to newspaper articles they’d written, or to previous e-mails. They reduced our 111 questions to: spirituality, environment, parenting, and community and answered them broadly.
“Friendship has to develop naturally,” Robert argued. “You can’t rush it. To quote Gandhi, ‘Love, which is a condition of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.’”
More clichéd words of wisdom that didn’t apply! It was impossible to pretend that the “friendship” we were developing was a natural process. That it didn’t have an immobile timeline and a definite end goal. And even as they thought we should just relax and let love grow, they pushed me to make a commitment to them.
“Between our interests, love of outdoors, being Christian,” Robert said on the phone, “it sounds like we should talk further and see if your child is meant for our family.” As far as they were concerned, we just had to work out the technicalities. “Our adoption agent, Sandra, knows our personal details, so she can answer any further questions about us and advise you on the legal issues involved in an out-of-state adoption.” That is, they wanted us to work it out with their agency and leave them out of it.
“I was thinking, actually, that I could move to Colorado so that it wouldn’t be an out-of-state adoption,” I told them. I was ready to forget about my internship and about school. I just wanted to do the adoption right. I would lose my university insurance, but their agency would cover maternity costs. Being near them would help me to think of myself as a surrogate mother and to care for the baby without growing attached.
“If you were to move to Colorado,” Deb responded, “I think you should look into Medicaid or COBRA. The costs you invoice to the agency are ultimately billed to me and Robert. But I’m not sure that you should leave Ohio, anyway. That’s where all your support is!”
There was also a significant difference in the retraction periods of the two states. In Colorado, a birth mother had thirty days to change her mind after signing the papers. If I stayed in Ohio, I’d have only twenty-four hours.
“Do you think there are a lot more issues to get resolved?” Deb asked.
“Are you starting to get comfortable with the idea of us as the adoptive parents?” Robert added. “I hate to say it, but you are going to have to let go eventually.”
They’d had five previous adoptions fall through; they’d attended one birth and they’d given money to two couples; they’d had one birth mother disappear completely; and so it wasn’t surprising that they wanted a commitment. But I was tired of being reminded I’d have to let go, as though my instinct to guard my son was unreasonable, or unnatural, or stubborn. It was true, I had to accept the limits of what I could predetermine or control; I had to acknowledge there were things I couldn’t know. But at this stage, that was all I would let go of. It would be my single achievement as a mother: to find the right family and to find the right moment—to let go of my son, himself, perfectly.
* * *
But it couldn’t be Jeff and Cindy, either. We found out that they were Christian Scientists, and when I asked about it, Jeff said it wasn’t a topic that was open for discussion. But I needed them to be able to talk about it. It was disturbing to think they’d avoided telling me. We met, but I don’t remember it. I was copied on an e-mail to them from Jevn in which he apologized for my obstinacy and told them that their cover photo was our favorite. They responded that in their “fairy-tale world,” we would get married and keep our child.
I couldn’t bear the thought of more Dear Birth Mother letters. More first phone calls and meetings. More hard-to-find but inevitable flaws. More fights with Jevn about how impossible I was being.
Then I thought about Paula and Erik, the Indiana theologian couple who wouldn’t tell us the names they had in mind for a son. We’d already had a few conversations, they lived close enough to us that we could meet them pretty easily, and I remembered liking some of their answers I’d skimmed through before. Paula said she was passionate about reaching out to people in need and practical expressions of Christian love and justice, as well as building lasting friendships. What do you use your basement for? Paula is notorious for stocking up on tuna when it goes on sale. Do you ever build a fire? Rarely, but Erik grew up in a farmhouse with a woodburning stove in the kitchen, so he’s the expert. Paula’s favorite T-shirt said Think for yourself, and they both had T-shirts that said I Miss Chicago, where they lived before they were married. They kept the TV in the basement, and among their kitchen appliances: a little thing that looks like a waffle-maker; you put slices of bread and filling in it, and it grills them into sealed little sandwiches (we never use it).
We didn’t have a lot in common. They didn’t spend their free time outside, or riding bikes, or building things, and they had no special relationship with mountains; they hoped someday to move back to Chicago, the flattest city I knew of. Erik had played basketball in college, but they weren’t physically active as a couple. They weren’t architects or musicians or designers. But I had grown skeptical of coincidences and things in common.
I read their answers to the 111 questions, pages and pages of answers, in their entirety. So many couples had received them defensively, like a volley of tennis balls forcing them to angle a response. But Paula and Erik responded as though I were handing them a curiously shaped small fruit, graciously exploring its various qualities with spontaneous ease and pleasure. Their answers were generous but straightforward, unfolding without calculation; they gave specific and varied dimension to what I’d designated only as a general region of acceptable response. In some cases they rearranged my map altogether, so compellingly elaborating an answer that it was rezoned in my own mind: a territory with hidden resources I’d previously thought unworthy of exploration.
One such territory was Eating Out. I’d asked, “Do you eat out or cook?” and they might have guessed the response I was looking for. A home-cooked meal eaten around the table was the image of stability and security they’d want to guarantee they could provide. It was what I’d grown up with. My family sat down every night, said grace, and talked to one another. Mom made fresh vegetables she grew in the garden or bought from her little man at the fork in the road, always accompanied by salad in a wooden bowl, and after my sister and I became vegetarians, she worried about our health and practiced making lentil loafs and tofu cheesecakes until we all liked the way they tasted. She must have made a decision about it early on, because it was always that way; even when it meant Dad came home and then went back to work afterward, we rarely changed course. On the few occasions when we did, they were specially designated “Fend for Yourself” nights—rare and exciting exceptions when w
e were left like the uncivilized to scavenge for leftovers and eat them out of sync with everyone else, maybe even standing.
Most couples had taken my cue to describe the dinners they planned to have together at home. But Paula and Erik apologized that they couldn’t eat out more. They explained that a meal out was for them an invaluable opportunity to see friends and set aside the preoccupations of their own lives. Because they couldn’t afford to do it much, they compensated by eating out for breakfast or getting coffee with friends whenever possible.
Those few words of explanation made me turn back to my whole history and all the things I took for granted. I saw that while there was a kind of security in sticking tight around a table together, for Paula and Erik there was a different, more dynamic kind. The world extended far beyond their own home, and their investment in the families of other people was an important part of their own. Jevn had wooed me in much the same way. Not by saying what I wanted, but by sweetly pushing at walls in my world to show me the infinite expanse beyond them. It was frustrating and unsettling and uncomfortable at first, but it created space in me that filled up fast with affection.
I sent them an e-mail, and we began communicating more regularly. There was something I really liked about them. I liked how articulate and clear-thinking they were. I liked that so many of Paula’s e-mails began, Erik and I were talking about it, and … Like every couple, they’d said they were best friends, but in various ways, they revealed that the fuel of that friendship was conversation bolstered by mutual respect and interest. Any issue might move and change and evolve through conversation; either one of them could shift the thinking of the other.
I even liked that they didn’t have a lot of money. My son would benefit from having resourceful parents, but more than that, there would never be any confusion, in me, in them, in my son, about what was being exchanged in this transaction. Financial security could never make up for the destabilizing loss of his family bond. We would only attempt to compensate for that loss with things that could begin to measure up. He would lose priceless things, but he would gain other, absolutely incommensurate, impossible-to-measure things.
* * *
Near the middle of March, Paula e-mailed, saying that she and Erik would like to think seriously about working together on an adoption plan. Above all, she wrote, we’re sensing that you are the kind of person we would be very glad to have as part of our lives. Since we’re interested in the possibility of future contact, that’s especially important to us.
They said they’d stopped corresponding with the other birth mother they’d been talking to. They still didn’t know where they were going to move in the summer; it depended on where Paula was accepted to doctoral programs, but that seemed like a surmountable complication. There was just the problem of her unwillingness to tell me the name they had in mind for a boy. In an e-mail, she said she’d heard stories of birth parents changing their minds, leaving the adoptive family to deal with loss while having also sacrificed a cherished name. It wouldn’t feel right to reuse the name with a future adoption. “Having said all that, let me defuse this issue a bit by telling you that the name we have in mind for a boy is Jonathan.”
Jonathan. It fell like a velvet cloak over him, revealing him. When Jeff and Cindy had said they would name their son Jevn, it felt like false flattery. But the name Jonathan was somehow right, and despite all the Johns I’d known, it was the name of nothing else.
* * *
But the moment I felt I might have found them, my guard returned. What about how different we were? Even with Robert and Deb, with whom we had much more in common, we’d struggled to reconcile our differences. They’d told us they simply couldn’t conform perfectly to our standards. We’d never achieve some kind of perfect eclipse, with them as parents giving our son exactly what we’d have given him. They warned us we would have to relinquish control when we relinquished the baby and “step aside” to let them move into the parenting role.
Paula and Erik addressed our differences in a similar way, but with an entirely different emphasis. They said they couldn’t be held to our standards, standing in for us and performing as us. But they didn’t see why they should have to—not when we could be there, standing in for ourselves, performing as ourselves, giving him all the things they knew we had to give him.
We continued to correspond and speak on the phone, unearthing not sameness, but sympathy. They were not the image of what Jevn and I might have become, ten years down the road. It seemed they spent most of their time drinking decaf coffee and reading theological texts from the thirteenth century, two things I’d never done. But they were in fact not like any image at all; they were constantly moving, thinking, and recalibrating—where they would live, how they would parent, where the money would come from. We couldn’t know exactly what kind of life they would provide, and they didn’t make promises. What mattered wasn’t the shape of the movements, or where it took them. What mattered was that we had a good feeling about the place they originated.
* * *
They had adopted their daughter, Sarah, a few days after her birth and had initiated contact with her birth mother, who had planned to have a closed adoption. Over time, they’d developed a relationship. Even so, they wanted to avoid modeling our relationship on that one. Our relationship would, naturally, be unique, and we began practicing it. We practiced telling each other incidental stories from our days and sharing our biggest sadnesses and hopes. It felt like when I got my first lunchbox, before I started kindergarten. The only thing I knew about the whole world ahead was what I witnessed every morning, my older brother and sister leaving home with lunchboxes in hand. So I practiced that. I put an apple, a banana, inside, closed the clasps, and carried it into the living room, dreaming of the future. I sat down on the cold brick of the fireplace and opened it. I loved the security of those varied things carried safely within the simple turquoise box, and I toted it around to every room in the house. I knew I couldn’t know anything about what the future held, but I knew I was somehow equipped for it.
And now, as then, I tested my relationship with Paula and Erik, experiencing the weights and movements of the interior stuff as I practice-carried things in it, into this and that space of my life, having no actual idea what open adoption would hold. I practiced calling them, practiced talking about them, practiced telling them hilarious stories, telling them sad ones, practiced imagining where they would fit—before the weights became real. Soon everything would depend on those dynamics, the sadness and loss and pain, the relationship with my unknown son, with Jevn, being able to fit within some new and clean and unfamiliar turquoise box, the confines of our relationship.
* * *
But we hadn’t met them in person yet, and as we drove west toward Indiana over ever flatter terrain, I prepared myself to be disappointed. We had been in this place so many times before.
On our way, Jevn and I argued about our recycling project. We were still collecting cans and taking them to be recycled every few weeks. Jevn thought we should abandon it. Let kids who drink Coke deal with their own waste. We were busy enough as it was, and I shouldn’t be carrying bags of cans up and down the stairs anymore. I totally disagreed. If we weren’t willing to do it, who would be? And then what? Just let the aluminum go into the landfill? And figure out how not to care about it? And then what else might we teach ourselves not to care about? He thought my extrapolations were absurd.
We maneuvered around the tiny, flat, empty downtown of Fort Wayne to the restaurant where we’d agreed to meet for lunch. Just outside, we saw Erik standing on the sidewalk. We recognized him from the photos, and that early Sunday morning, our car was the only animate thing in what might have been a stage-set city. Erik turned toward us, and just like love, it happened in an instant: Erik’s hand shooting skyward, honest as a rocket, to say hello, here we are, and to direct us where to park our car. Like falling in love, time was split in half in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was a fine edge; I barely not
iced it, but everything that followed fell to one side, and everything before fell to the other. One look, and somehow I knew he was my son’s father.
We continued around the block and parked the car. We got out and approached him, and we walked together to the restaurant.
“Paula’s inside, trying to persuade them to seat us. A small technical difficulty: the place we chose for lunch is a bar, and Sarah is, of course, a minor!”
We joined Paula, who was chatting with the staff. She was smiling, touching the hostess on the arm, both of them laughing, even as we were refused seats. A manager decided that we could be seated outside instead, and we arranged ourselves around a table on that sunny day that was not quite warm enough for sitting out there.
“Before you got here, we were talking about how not to have a second car,” Erik said. He said they wanted to end up in a place where public transit would give their children freedom and independence and would allow them to remain a single-car family. Ideally somewhere like Chicago. They asked us if we had any ideas. It was a problem we couldn’t imagine, but we thought it was great—public transit was great; living in a city was great; thinking about reducing your environmental impact was great. That they were talking about second cars instead of second babies was great.
After lunch, we walked around Fort Wayne, and Sarah wandered ahead or fell behind, inspecting things in the grass beside the sidewalk. Her eyes were dark under the canopy of her long eyebrows, which tilted at their ends in a smile. She was curious; she studied everything around her.
“Sarah loves animals—all animals!” Paula told me as we both watched her.
“I loved animals when I was little, too,” I said, and I felt I wasn’t just making conversation. I was giving Paula information I hoped she might someday share with my son. I told her how my dad would rescue turtles from busy roads, sometimes snakes and frogs, and he’d bring them home in a box and surprise us; we’d keep them for an afternoon before we’d hike over to the creek to find a home for them. Those rescue missions could have been the origin of everything I felt about justice, and love, and beauty.
