Telling the truth
09 September 2011 05:59 AM Categories: The kid | Best of the blog
I don’t know how we got on the subject of adoption. Maybe it came from his questions about my first marriage, though there were no babies, adopted or otherwise, from that union and about whether I had another child. From that point, we traveled to my mother’s adoption and her biological mother’s second rejection years later, her denial of contact and details.
And then I blurted it out. I want to write about it this morning, but it is one of those things that just can’t flow easily from my fingertips, so bear with me.
He was curious about babies. About whether I had any more out there. About adoption (the fact that my mother never knew her “first parents” made him cry and he resolved that we should find these people, and not just contact them, but meet them). I knew I had to tell him someday about my own experience, but I thought it would be later, much later, when it seemed more age-appropriate, but at the same time I didn’t want to keep it a secret, something dark and heavy.
So I told him my story, minus much of the emotional pain, of the stillborn baby I had when I was sixteen. I was expecting curiosity or perhaps disbelief, like the “you’re kidding!” response I got when I explained sex to him a couple of months ago. I wasn’t expecting tears, tears at the fact of the baby’s death, at the fact that he had a brother.
A brother. Tears. It was the first unfiltered response to my story that I have ever gotten. He wanted to know if he had a name. He wanted me to write it down so that he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to know what he would have looked like. I had to explain that the baby would be almost 26 years old by now, a grownup, and he wished that if the brother did still exist, he would be still be a kid and be around to play with.
How did I know he was dead? Where did I have him? I told the story without blame. I tried to explain how someone might not be ready to raise a baby. I told him that no one knows why the baby died and that when I was pregnant with him, the still-living boy, I was closely monitored, just in case.
Oh, the depths of this conversation, of feeling, of connection, the tangibility of what went before. It makes my heart ache. It returns me to the world, and I mourn again for what we lost.
The prompt for this was "At the grocery store," which obviously has nothing to do with what I wrote. To really write about this will take some time. It was a striking conversation and healing and very sad all at once. I realized that at least I could talk about it without being so focused on me and without maligning my own parents. For once the focus was on that baby and the sadness of his death, the feeling of mourning that I still stuff down.
Photo of the boy at Point Reyes by his father.
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