I notice the family at the table we cross to get to ours. I notice them because they turn in unison looking us up and down, right to left and back. I notice them as they try to reconcile the story of us, the story of me. I hold her eyes, just a smidge before I turn away and seat myself. I wish I could sit down at their table and tell them the story.
Our story. My Story. The story of how I came to be a mother.
Where do I start?
Do I start in the late 90s when I was just over twenty when I sat next to my grandfather, then in his late seventies in the hazy zone between sunlight and dusk talking about college, life after college and marriage? Do I tell them how my grandfather was the sole survivor among many children (two sets of twins who passed away at birth)? He talked about his childhood and he talked about how he was ready to pass on. Most of all, that conversation sowed in me the idea that I would somehow be a mother to twins.
Do I start my story somewhere in the five harrowing years I spent post-undergrad talking to men set up by my parents? The conversations that had me wondering if I was somehow a soul aged way past my body. As we walked around my neighborhood under leafy trees and haphazardly parked cars, I listened as these men laid out their career roadmaps and aspirations and how my life could bend and mold to theirs. I sighed in relief as man after man declared I was too independent a woman to fit their plans.
I think I will start my story on one Sunday afternoon as I welcomed the family I would eventually be part of into the house where I stayed as a paying guest. We sat in my tiny room, on a bed that took up most of the room. We sat across each other, awkwardly hunched. For the first time in my life I spoke and he listened. He listened as I explained my new found views on feminism, on partnership and living with respect and dignity. He listened as I explained how my life could not mold and bend to fit other lives but it could morph and grow into something different that encompassed two lives instead of one.
In the hours after he left and I waited to know if he liked me enough, I realized I already liked him because he had cared enough to listen. I later learned that he was not sure he quite liked what he saw but he knew enough to understand not all women have given this much thought to what it means to be married. We were engaged two weeks from when we met and married three months from then. My emails to him during that time are a running record of my days and nights. A journal of a naive woman who is figuring out what it means to be an adult.
One of the biggest things I learned about my husband on our wedding night was that he was shy and I bold. I wanted children and he did not, at least not in the present. We learned about each other as we dated post marriage, in the years we lived together as man and wife in a one bedroom apartment oceans away from the place we called home. I made peace with my immigrant status and learned to keep home. I cooked and cleaned and he earned. We walked around our development each evening after he came back from work. We held hands and marveled at the moon. We picked flowers off the ground. We listened to birds sing outside our bedroom. We talked about children vaguely as if they would materialize, fully formed and ours when we were ready.
Three years into our domestic bliss, my body heeded the silently ticking clock and I said it out loud. I wanted a baby. I wanted babies. He agreed albeit grudgingly and we set out on a different journey, one that involved calendars, temperatures and lots of sex. Month after month my hopes surged and fell and like all else, I took the lead in reaching out to a reproductive endocrinologist.
Medicines lined the little table by our bedside. I popped pills, took shots and marked time differently. I looked at this detour as a way of making my grandfather’s words true. If genetics wouldn’t give me twins, Clomid would. Years sped and I used words as therapy. I blogged my journey and commiserated with others like me. I became conversant with the lingo of the infertility world. I also left my husband far behind.
Loneliness is a cruel thing. It crushes your soul. It makes you brittle. It makes you a master at disguises. You smile when you can’t speak. Your answering machine is always full and your inbox has a habit of missing emails that need answers to. You shrink from your real life friends and make many online. The anonymity of the screen teaches you to channel your grief so it finds expression without touching you.
Hope dies a slow death, replacing itself with cold hard cynicism. You judge, you dismiss and you covet all that you do not have. A walk around the neighborhood becomes an obstacle course. Strollers and parks become minefields. Friends with children become unbearable.
Somewhere the light breaks into the fog. You understand that this cannot go on forever. You make peace with your infertility. You grieve. You let go. You imagine living childfree. You peruse adoption boards. Then someone you know adopts a child and you fall down the rabbit hole again.
You talk to your husband. You talk like you should have before you got married. You talk about the child who may be yours one day. You talk about race. You talk about familial support. You talk about mental illnesses. You talk about drug abuse. You finally talk about what kind of a parent you want to be. You talk discipline. You talk education. You talk about the kind of child you want to raise.
You research agencies. You fill out reams of paperwork. You get clearances from the FBI and the police. You get everyone who knows you to write reference letters. You slave over a profile that markets you and your husband to the women who may one day decide to place their child with you. You start another blog, compartmentalize this part of your life from your real life. You do not share anything for fear of jinxes. You live and die by your phone. Then it happens.
You are matched. You experience pregnancy vicariously. You research heartbeat rates. You become an expert on pregnancy week by week. You know all about Braxton hicks and ligament pain. You are all but pregnant yourself. Then it happens again.
The adoption fails. Your heart breaks. You sob until there are no tears left. Your husband is stoic. You fall into a new pattern. One of silence because there is nothing left to talk. No new avenues to pursue. You think about donor eggs and surrogacy and a little part of your brain smarts. You realize there is a line you do not want to cross. A personal line in the sand.
You go about your life. You reconcile to being childfree. You focus on getting your MBA. You focus on your job. You tell yourself to fake it until you make it. Then it happens again.
The phone rings pretty late in the night on a Thursday. Someone you know from the failed adoption calls you about a situation. A mother to twin girls wants to place her children for adoption. Would you be interested?
The hope that is all but a sliver in the recesses of your mind flares and soars. You listen, take notes and turn to your husband after a good amount of time. He dismisses what you are saying. He says he has had enough. He is unwilling to put himself through this again. You lie back on your part of the sofa, spent, unable to articulate what this means to you. You make one last plea and he just about says okay.
You work on your profile one more time. You send it away a little past midnight. You go back to checking your phone obsessively. The hours and days inch past slowly. You meet the mother over Skype. You learn she liked you a day later. You may be parents you hear. The iridescent joy of the previous years has disappeared leaving in place a pale reflection. You hug the news to yourself. You permit yourself a smile when you think no one is looking. You put a safeguard in your heart and in your communications. You refuse to think of yourself as a potential mother until the papers have been signed.
You learn you are a mother in the air as your flight circles to land. You dash off pictures of your 10-month-old babies to your family and friends. In the midst of overwhelming joy, you realize that one friend who means the world to you is lukewarm. It puts a damper on your spirits. You think it is only natural that overwhelming joy needs to be counterbalanced. You rationalize. You dismiss. You finally give in.
Joy pervades your soul. It imbues everything in its reach with a soft glow. It coats your life with music and song. It lifts you up and holds you in its capable grip. You float along for the first year marking milestones, proclaiming from the top of the mountains that you are a mom. You are a mom to twins.
You juggle full-time work, part-time school and all-time parenting with the strength of one who has known what the other life feels like. You wake at the crack of dawn, cook, pack and get the twins ready before you leave for work. You spend your day at work trying not to sleep. You negotiate part-time hours, flexible hours and work from home hours. You leave before the peak traffic hits and head straight to the dishwasher when you get home. Your little ones reach home after a long day and you find their lunch boxes untouched. You feed them with the ferocity of a mama bear and bathe and get them to bed and then get started on your dinner. You retire from the kitchen way past ten, way too tired to sleep. You write, you read and get to bed right around the time the twins wake up screaming from nightmares. You run on low fuel and pure exhilaration the first year.
Then it happens. You notice while your children are hitting most milestones, they are lagging behind some. You read, and you research, you reach for help. The people who test commiserate with you blaming lax standards and way too many people needing help. You breathe a sigh of relief and hope they will outgrow whatever it is that you are seeing. Potty training takes longer. You celebrate unnaturally when your children finally ditch diapers. They struggle with coherent narratives and you attribute it to them being immersed in a new language late in life. They struggle with the concept of time and you figure they will get it eventually. You wonder if what you are seeing has a genetic component. You wonder about your children’s other family. You wish you knew them like your family.
One night before bed, you check your email and there it is, the email from your children’s other mother. You go back to your computer and write a really long email telling her everything about her children, your children. You feel relieved. You are also surprised. There was a time when you first considered adoption that you figured you were open to emails and pictures and not much else. Just one month of parenting your children, you crave to know everything about them and that means knowing where they came from, whom they came from and how they are connected. You feel a strange connection to this land they sprung from. Your immigrant soul finally finds roots. This is now home.
Life goes on, you outgrow the townhome that was way too big for you as a couple and move to a home with a yard and a fence. You gift the children a play set in the yard for their fifth birthday. They are growing and thriving. Life is peachy until one day you are late.
A niggle at the back of your brain tells you that something is off. You have never been late ever, not in the years of hoping and praying and trying, not under meds and medical intervention. You call your mom and ask about pre-menopause. Your mom mentions pregnancy and you yell at her. You look up the app on your phone. You are a week late. Your husband thinks you are crazy for even suggesting you should get a pregnancy test.
You do. You are pregnant.
You expect to feel elation. All those years of imagining how it would be like to find out you are pregnant fail you now. You feel nothing. Actually, that is not true. You feel dread. There is no rulebook for getting pregnant close to 40. There is nothing to tell you how to feel when your family is already complete. A family you have worked very hard to build. And there is absolutely no rulebook that tells you how to feel optimistic when every pursuit in your life has been tainted and veered off-path in some way.
You shove the test into the closet, make an appointment with the Ob-gyn and fully expect to miscarry. Your body does not let you down. You spot. Tiny specks at first then proper smears. You are not sure if you should be relieved or disappointed. Your pessimism angers you. You are lost, unmoored from everything.
Six weeks go by. Your HCG has been doubling. You have been gaining weight. There has been no nausea. There has been nothing to indicate you carry life except for the absence of a full-blown period.
At six weeks, six days you go for an ultrasound. One sac. One beating heart. 133 bpm.
You tell one person. The other mother of your children. She is excited for you. She reassures you that all will be well. You want her to be on your side. You feel guilty in some way for having reneged on an unvoiced promise. The arrival of a new child in your life presents you with conflicting emotions. You look at the children who made you a mother and wonder how this new child will affect all of your lives.
You hug your secret to yourself. Your mom takes over the kitchen and your life. You are pampered. You hug your children extra tight. You make calls to your siblings and you tell them. They are just as cautious as you are giving no indication of anything like elation. You track your blood sugars just in case and realize you are pre-diabetic. You forgo the gestational diabetes test and willingly poke yourself with needles. You measure portions. You learn to give yourself shots. Your abdomen is streaked blue and green from needles.
The months go by. You finally awaken from your state of denial and truly look at yourself. You fall in love. You fall in love with this swelling vessel holding life. You hug your tummy as you fall asleep each night murmuring prayers. You turn to the divine for who else is capable of miracles.
You throw yourself a baby shower. You get surprised by one. Your children are excited at the prospect of a baby sister. Your husband finally agrees that this might be happening and the two of you actually created life. You hold each other at night and marvel at the wonder of your life.
Your last child is born by C-Section on a Thursday morning. You declare her arrival on Facebook and are inundated with good wishes. No one visits you at the hospital but your children, mom, and aunt. You are not sure if you are upset. Then you realize all those people you shared baby dreams with now have middle school children.
You return home in a pink skirt one chilly spring morning and realize that you are living your dream. Everything you have ever dreamed of has happened even if not in the way you imagined it would happen.
You navigate parenting the way you navigate everything else. You network. You gather resources. You read. You practice what you want your children to follow. You yell. You slip from the pedestal you put yourself on. You get up and dust yourself off. You struggle. You feel guilty. You promise yourself that tomorrow will be a new day. You accept the title of a special needs mom. You accept that you are a visible family. You accept that you are touched by adoption in ways most mothers are not. You become an ambassador. You tell your story.
I am a mother. I am a mother by adoption and by birth. This is my story.
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