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by Linda Back McKay
Mother's Day, 1998.
My son and his wife are going to make me a grandmother again. This is a priceless gift. Another gift that was never expected. Does it make up for losing him at babyhood? Does finding him make up for twenty years of not knowing?
I was born whole, then spent some years disintegrating. I lived with it. I built myself again, not without risk, but with a soft voice for babies. I was valiant. I survived. I decided to be happy. I built a whole family.
I went on, because it is what people do. Raised the other children I could have. I swallowed the experience, and it became my blood and bones. Everything I lived was taken inside me like food--bitter and sweet--to rest in quiet inside places. The loss is eternal and settles into another set of wrinkles across my forehead. I am not angry anymore. A little sad, yes, and humbly grateful at the same time. I put the sad in a box in the back of a high shelf.
What I have lived is almost obsolete. It is a recipe not for sharing. The ingredients are rare, and that is good. That recipe for dragon stew should be wrapped in white linen and placed in an attic chest. It should molder in the dry heat of history.
....FROM THE FORWARD Behind the sensational headlines, celebrity talk shows, and tabloid perceptions lie the secrets and truths of real women who each placed a child for adoption and years later were reunited. There is much more woven into the tapestry of our lives than the pain of loss and the joy of reunion. Each of our stories has a beginning as well as an afterwards. The ten women who tell their stories here do not share the same history. We are from various parts of the country with a wide range of social and economic backgrounds. We have only this one experience in common, and it joins our families together in a community of understanding. Out of the shadows, we come to share the peace and acceptance we have discovered through the telling of our stories. If you are a woman like us, a child like ours, a birth father, one of the parents who made room in your life for a child when we could not, or someone with whom we shared our lives afterwards--you are part of this story, too. We hope our stories help you see why we must tell them. TO ORDER YOUR COPY, CLICK HERE TO ORDERBack to Adopt Main Index
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