The first time I met my son was in Phoenix, Arizona, a few days after he was born. My husband, Rick, and I flew out from New Jersey, where we live, to bring him home. I’d never been to the desert before, but Kim, the baby’s birthmother, described it for me the first time we spoke: “Sometimes I look around and wonder what made people decide to live here in the first place,” she said. Kim said that in the summer it was too hot to even walk three blocks to the park near her house. “I can’t wait till this is over and I can move to the mountains,” she said.
She said she chose us because she wanted her baby to grow up where it’s green.
Being chosen as adoptive parents is like being part of a crazy, modern arranged marriage – an arranged family, really. Kim found us through her lawyer, who knew our lawyer, who sent her a copy of our “Dear Birthmother” letter. (“Dear Birthmother, Thank you for taking the time to learn a little about us…”) In her early twenties, eight month’s pregnant, and no longer dating her baby’s father, Kim thought we seemed like a good match: Like me, she liked to run and read and hoped to major in psychology. She was good at math and science like Rick. She liked us because we weren’t religious (she grew up in an evangelical household), because we lived on the east coast where there’s grass and beaches and snow, because we went to museums and out to eat. “I don’t want him just sitting around on the corner with nothing to do, like the kids in my neighborhood,” she said.
Once Kim made us part of her plan, our life kicked into high gear. Between work and however it is that we normally fill our time (cleaning up after the dog and surfing the web, mostly), we answered emails about due dates and payments due; pored over medical records (my advice: call a doctor for help) and background questionnaires; filled out pages and pages of redundant paperwork; and set up a nursery. I became the kind of person who conducts long, loud – and very personal – phone conversations in public. It was harrowing, but happy. Although the red tape left me stressed and short-tempered (so much so that Rick wondered aloud about my potential fitness as a mother), the details, and our connection with Kim, made the situation feel right.
For a very young woman in emotionally wrenching circumstances, Kim was remarkably decisive. Our lawyer warned us about the statistics: Around half of all domestic adoptions fall through when a birthparent – usually the mother - changes her mind. We talked to Kim about the fact that it was OK to have second thoughts, and that we understood she might ultimately decide not to go through with the placement. But she was firm: “Nothing is 100 percent,” she said, “but as far as I’m concerned, this is.” Even our ultra-cautious lawyer started to relax a bit.
Although things were going smoothly, Kim’s lawyer wanted us to wait a few days after the baby was born so that she would have time to sign release papers. (Laws vary from state to state, but Arizona specifies a three-day waiting period before a parent can sign away custody, and she asked all potential adoptive parents to hold off.) Kim and I vetoed that plan, though. I was eager to see the baby, and neither of us was thrilled about the idea of him waiting in foster care for 72 hours when I could just as easily fly down and take care of him myself. So when the baby was born a month later Rick and I booked a flight for the next morning and packed three bags for the airport – one for each of us.
I don’t remember much about the flight, except that it was delayed and that I used the extra time to call everyone I knew to tell them we were picking up our baby. For once I wasn’t embarrassed that strangers could hear me. I do, though, remember Arizona. Kim was right about Phoenix: In the summer it was unbearable, the kind of heat where a breeze feels hotter on your skin than the still air, like when you open an oven. Still, I was prepared to fall in love, and although the scraggly cactuses and the yards with no lawns and the stretches of low brick buildings were as bleak and inhospitable as Kim said, to me it was also strange and wonderful: the unlikely heat; giant, papery cactus flowers; well-marked, easy-to-navigate roads, so different from the landscape back home.
As we drove to the airport from the hospital it hit me: I had absolutely no idea what to say to Kim. We were so focused on the baby, I hadn’t really considered the moment I headed toward. While I imagined there was something I could come up with that might be of small comfort, I couldn’t think of what it could be. So when we got to her room, I just tried hard to be kind, which mostly meant I made awkward small talk and judged myself unhelpfully: She’s giving you her baby and you’re talking about humidity? The only thing that made me relax a little was that Ricky seemed sweet and friendly and concerned, and I hoped she could tell I meant well.
Compared to me, Kim was composed and confident. She seemed genuinely happy to see us, and she held and soothed the baby so expertly that I couldn’t help but think that she’d make a good mother. She introduced us around to the nurses and doctors as the baby’s parents; gave him to us to hold; and cooed over the outfit we had to bring him home in. While I fumbled with the shirt, which was far too big, Kim told us about the baby, at two days old was already alert and interested in the faces around him. She seemed so together, but as the short time wore on the tension started to show. When it was time to say goodbye, she was shaking. “I’d better not,” she said when I asked if she wanted to hold him one last time.
It was awful. And it was a relief to leave and focus on our happiness, and on the baby, who seemed content to be with us and watched the trees as we drove. It took us a long time to have a family – it was seven years or so from when we started trying – and it wasn’t really sinking in. Because we lived out of state, we needed to hang around for a few weeks, waiting for our paperwork to be approved, but it was nice to be going "home" with a baby just like thousands of other families around the country.
We had just checked into our hotel and fed the baby – I lugged the formula all the way across the country – and laughed when we passed a Babies R Us on the way – when Ricky got the call. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I heard the funny tone in his voice, and saw his face go a little pale, and I knew it couldn’t be anything good.
Kim was on the phone, and our lawyers. “I’m so sorry, guys,” she said. “I just can’t do it. I’m so sorry you flew all this way.” She was crying too hard to say much else. I think she was as surprised as we were by her change of heart. We tried to come up with some gentle words, but we were mostly numb and incoherent. (I was relieved when Kim’s lawyer called us the next day just to thank us for being understanding.) It was a sad, strange car ride back – Ricky still drove ridiculously carefully, and I still sat in the back seat to make sure the baby was breathing. It felt wrong to feel so bad sitting next to a new, little life, but we couldn’t help it.
The next day, I couldn’t think of what to do next, unless it involved sitting in the hotel pool with sunglasses and a frozen drink, staring into space. But somehow Ricky managed to think on his feet. Our calendars were clear, he reasoned, and no one expected us anywhere. If we took our time, maybe in a couple weeks we’d be ready to face the empty nursery back home, tell our friends, and go back to work. It sounded good to me – I’d always wanted to drive cross-country, but never made the time. So we bought a map and I got a cowboy hat and new sunglasses, and we planned our trip from the road, cell phones on the dash in case Kim changed her mind. We decided together that by the time we reached New Jersey we would stop hoping she would.
That wasn’t our baby, but our baby is out there somewhere, I thought as I looked on the map spread out on my lap. It was comforting to think that he or she might already be conceived, growing somewhere quietly, and that we were already connected by the roads crisscrossing before me. When you drive, you get to see firsthand how things flow together, the desert becomes mountains, farmland gives way to forests, so slowly that we almost don’t realize the change. We’d wake up in New Mexico and fall asleep in Tennessee, the landscaping changing slowly around us, and it was good to focus on something other than ourselves.
We watched the sun set over the Petrified Forest; ate catfish and okra at a roadside stand in Pine Bluff, Arkansas with an entire little league team; walked around Nashville with my cowboy hat. We listened to a blues band at a bar in Oklahoma City, where I burst out crying and the waitress, without missing a beat, just kept bringing more beer. I cried so much Ricky called our trip the trail of tears – until we found out that our lower-states route paralleled the actual route of the Cherokee people – and then I stopped crying. We debated the merits of Southerners calling iced tea “sweet tea,” vs. “sweetened tea.”. (“But then you have to say “unsweet tea,” Rick argued, “and that’s just wrong.”) We were shocked by how many farmers erect crosses in their fields among the grazing cattle. We saw a wary bear circle a campground in the Shenandoah Valley, and stopped to watch a family fly fishing in a small stream on the side of the highway in North Carolina. When we saw the Welcome To New Jersey sign at the state line, we knew it was time to go home.
