7/23/96
I think that I had nursed Lana* less than an hour when I was flooded with the knowledge that I could love two – I could feel that intense, enveloping passion for another child without my love for Ben* being affected at all. I feel as though I have grown larger to fit around this extra child. Although she has just emerged from the womb of another woman, my love for this child is greater and deeper than anything I could feel for someone who was not my child.
Despite this, I wonder if I could ever do this again. Each throb of longing to care for this tiny person is coupled with pain and terror and helplessness almost great enough to overwhelm me.
I wondered whether another child could have the same evolutionary effect on me as my dear son. And I am that same wonderful mix of emotions as the day he was born but this time I feel confident in my ability to mother. This is who I am now and a vital part of the mother I will always be. My children give me life. They reconstruct me – transform me.
This transition is much easier not having to deal with the physical recovery from childbirth. But this is the only positive thing I can say about adoption. The rest of this uncertainty and lack of control makes the process too painful to go through again. This is just too hard. I have completely made myself open and the birthparents still have the power to take her away from us. They will keep me at some distance from this child for another 24 hours or so until she comes home with us. And then there will be another 24 hours before the consents are signed and we are in the clear. I have a serious case of suspended disbelief allowing me to go on.
I keep flashing to her little face when she pushed her cone-shaped head out of Kiesha. * The doctor just asked for clamps and ordered Kiesha to stop pushing as she placed a clamp on each length of cord wrapped around Lana’s neck. It seemed so long as she clamped one, started to cut, clamped the other, and started to cut again. I thought she would die. I thought she was dead. Lana was motionless and with each second she grew more ghostly blue. There was no movement in her face, still and smooth as blue/gray china. It was a doll’s head. She seemed dead, not human.
When all the chord was cut away, she was still alien. It was only after she swam out with Kiesha’s next push that I saw the blue fade and a reddish hue rush under her skin. She moved and coughed, resisting the plunging of the mucus in her nose.
Today I see broken tiny blood vessels under her perfect nose and bruising on the back of her neck where the cord was circled twice around.
Twelve hours after writing this journal entry, and after two days of my breastfeeding Lana, the birthparents decided to keep their child and I never saw Lana again.
I wrote this bit of journal in a hospital cafeteria on a writing tablet I had hurriedly bought in the hospital gift shop. I was sitting down to a sandwich by myself, attempting to sort through the emotions I felt and the journey that had brought me there. I had dragged my husband through a home study, through my naively becoming too sure that this adoption would take place, through my falling in love with this child who grew in another woman’s uterus. All the while, my husband protected himself and, I think, felt helpless to bring me to face reality.
Nonetheless, I was dealing with some universal issues about mothering and about mothering a second child. My relationship with my son was so close – my first actually intimate relationship. He taught me to be a mother, which for me involved teaching me to be truly human. But I feared, as many mothers do, that it would not be possible for me to love another human being as much as I loved my boy. So all the indefinite things about adoption were piled on top of my concerns about the limits of my love.
It was in this journal entry that I first articulated how I learned the great secret of motherhood – that your love is a web spun around all of your children and expands to fit them all. "Loving each one differently" was not a cliché anymore. I was thrilled to embrace this discovery about myself.
It took a very long time for me to think of Lana as her birthparents' child – something I should have done from the beginning. I continued to smell her smell, to clearly see the look in her eyes as she nursed from my breast.
It was not until ten months later when I gave birth to my second perfect boy that I finally completed my grieving for that dark-eyed little girl. She was a child who taught me extraordinary lessons about my capacity to love my children and about how dangerous denial can be to my family. My second son continues teaching me the lessons I learned in the first few days of that little girl’s life, as I wrap my love and mothering around my two sweet boys, each night confident that my capacity to love will allow me to stretch around all the children who come into our family.
But sometimes – only sometimes – I wonder
about the little girl and think to myself, "For two days, I had a daughter."
©Jake Aryeh Marcus 1999, 2008