(To my second son’s Birthmother on Mothers’ Day 2003)

On a weekend like this, with Mother’s Day getting a lot of attention, birthmothers who willingly or unwillingly placed a child for adoption might feel they have somehow disqualified themselves from the honor of celebrating Mother’s Day. Not so in my book.

There’s a woman somewhere in Indiana, whom I do not know, who has immeasurably blessed my life with the gift of her son. And now, the infant, bulging with good health in his dark blue sleepers, is asleep in a crib in a quietly lit upstairs bedroom.

Thanks, Birthmother. Your gift to me, I know so painfully offered by you, has vastly enhanced my life and life of the baby’s older brother.

You do not know him as he is now, but of course, he is very real to me. I know his sounds that announce when he is hungry, and I know when the dog has entered his room by the unashamed thrill in the child’s voice.

I know he is real to you, too, for you carried him within your womb. Now, and I am only guessing of course, he is probably real to you in the manner the baby of a distant relative might be to me. I know the child exists, but I do not have the smells and the sounds that make him a person. I hope it is something like that for you. I hope you are not daily in pain over your decision to give him to me. I want you to know he is safe, and, although I do not know you, I hope you are, too.

You are “mother,” and even though the boy is very young, I regularly tell him everything I know about you. I tell him that you carried him to full term; that you spent hours at his bedside in the hospital before you signed the papers consenting to his adoption.

A nurse, who would not describe you to me or tell me your name or estimate your age, leaked that she watched you sit lovingly with your son for several hours while he was in intensive care. She said your love and your anguish were very evident. She told me she watched you place a final kiss lovingly and gently on his brow, as if to say goodbye for years, but not forever. She said she watched you turn for the large glass double doors of the hospital ward and walk away to your hard life.

We do not know each other, but we do have something in common. I have your child. He is here. He is growing up under my roof. You completed all the paperwork, and now he has my last name and the first name I chose for him because no other name would fit.

I want you to know that he stands up by himself now. He walks holding onto things. He likes to play, and his favorite game is crawling away as quickly as his little legs will carry his little body when he sees me coming to do one of those repetitive parental tasks like change a diaper or wipe a nose.

Thanks for trusting me with your son. Thanks for believing a single man could do it. On this particular weekend, his first Mother’s Day, and on a day when his image and memory must surely visit you more than it does most days of the year, I want you to know the baby is safe with me. He is deeply and profoundly loved and widely celebrated.

Your gift to me is of immeasurable worth, and the world is better off because of women like you. Thanks, Mom. You are his mother. He carries you around in his being as indelibly as the memory you doubtless have of carrying him within you for nine months. You have richly blessed me, and I am very proud to be the parent of your beautiful son.

First published in The Indianapolis Star, 2003

(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