(Written to my first son’s Birthmother for Mothers’ Day 2000)
I watch my two-year-old son bending at the hip, one foot raised and turning until he falls gloriously to the floor in convulsive laughter, and a momentary pain lights somewhere so deep inside me I can hardly tell in which of my internal galaxies it sits. It is swift and pointed, like the touch of a darting and determined fly set loose in my emotional innards. Then the pain is forgotten, swamped in the exceeding happiness of watching him attack life’s toddler challenges. He’s hungrily learning a language now, having conquered walking and running, and expressing his brand new heart sweetly in partial, ill-formed words and sentences which tumble, jumbled and joyed up all over the house. Sometimes he runs, singing at the top of his voice like an emergency vehicle out of control. With siren blaring, he sprawls across the floor and careens into a heap of toddler chaos. Recovering, he mounts the coffee table against my flagging will and hee haas astride his horse, a precocious knowing smile flashing from his distant meadow. In all of this activity and fun he eases his way further into my being, a steel pylon thrust securely into waiting, willing ground.
I think upon his mother at such times.
The pain I feel is for all she has missed and will miss in the future, and how each day she is surely reminded that she bore a son whom she does not know. I think upon this brave and generous woman who, to me, gave this beautiful child. I will see and know and feel from him what she will never see and know or feel from him. I will hold his head in the palm of my hand and feel his soft breathing against my neck. I will carry his exquisite sleeping frame and lay him down in all the warmth and safety I am able to create.
I, deserving nothing, have everything.
She, even though by her own determined choices, has nothing of him.
He will ooh and ah into my ear. Love’s sounds from a two-year-old in the middle of the night will be mine, not hers.
For her there is nothing.
I am caught in all the love an adoptive father can know. I am exhilarated with the thrill of raising the boy I named. Seeing our last name (I, a single man) upon his birth certificate or printed large, in my hand, upon his “sippy” cup can totally immobilize me. It is as if a wild underground river breaks its banks inside my soul and I am submerged in the miracle and pathos of it all.
But I think, day by day, about her. She, who so willfully and willingly made me a dad the day Methodist Hospital, became holy ground. I took the child and left the building with a car seat and baby in one hand, my other arm precariously clutching the pile of supplies hospitals send home with new mothers. I felt crowned with blessing even as we left her upon the landing, delivery still in the air, looking frail, bare, beautiful and childless. She, who had born to me a son, watched us go from her as a team; her part already played.
Fixed of purpose, the brave woman stood, upon her resolve. But thoughts of her are always there. The images of the final kiss, the last embrace. The first touch of the newborn forehead, with a mother’s lips, loom like expensive art immediately beneath my awareness to enrich every moment with my child. I see her often, the pain lighting upon my hidden place of worship, a reminder of the person who gave me so very much, so willingly. She parted with a life, known so intimately within her womb. She held him passionately in her loving arms, knowing all she would forgo, and did so all the same.
First published in The Indianapolis Star, Mothers’ Day, 2000
difficultrelationships.com 
Leave a comment