From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(37)

“That’s my husband,” I said locking eyes on him and trying to process why he was in a place he never came to. As the words were coming out of my mouth, the realization was settling into my brain. This was about the baby. I hopped off the Reformer and raced to the door to meet him. If I was right, this was happening fast. It had been only three months since we had started the process.

“She’s been born. The baby has been born. We have a girl,” he said. He handed me his keys. “We’ve got to go.”

“Go where? Who called? Wait. Where—where is she?” There was a girl somewhere waiting for us. This was happening. And fast. I was mother to a girl. “Where is the baby?”

“San Francisco. The birth mother wants to talk to us. She picked us, but she wants to talk to us. You’ve got to come home. We have to call her in an hour. Here, you drive.”

We left my car there in the parking lot. My first moment of my motherhood happened outside a Pilates studio in Silver Lake.

We went home. We called the agency, we got prepped on who our daughter’s birth mother was, the health of the baby, and the circumstances that had led to the mother’s choice. We were coached on how to talk to a woman who had just given birth: let her take the lead; what to ask: anything you want; how to reassure her: listen; how to say “thank you”: just speak from the heart. We were told the conversation would last about thirty minutes, maybe less. In the end, our call lasted over an hour. She was wise, intuitive, grounded. I was moved that she had not made a decision about the adoptive family until she had held her daughter in her arms, if only for a few minutes. Before she chose parents for the child she was painfully and lovingly relinquishing, she stared into her eyes, knowing they needed that moment. When we spoke to her, I could hear love and hope in her voice. I suspected that the torrent of feelings and processing would emerge in the days and lifetime to come. I was learning firsthand how much loss is involved in adoption. She was letting go of the child she loved and cared for so that that child could have a life she couldn’t give her. Saro and I kept looking at each other as we attempted to answer all her questions, even the one we were most worried about, his health. In the end she said, “When I saw you, I just knew.”

We hung up the phone as new parents. Hurried, manic, excited, overjoyed parents throwing toothbrushes into a carry-on and heading to Hollywood Burbank Airport to catch the next available flight to Oakland.

When we arrived, we headed directly to the offices of the agency where we were to meet the young woman who had chosen us as the parents of her child. The facilitator, Karen, had encouraged us to meet in person as part of the tenets of open adoption. It was “open” insofar as it was not the “closed” adoption of yesteryear wherein neither party knew who the other was and records were sealed. We were adopting in an era when having the adults agree to sit together face-to-face was desirable. It would give us the opportunity to get to know each other and understand that each of us would be vital to the child’s understanding of his or her own origin.

When Saro and I arrived, my body was aflutter with nerves and excitement. But this was unlike the nerves I had felt on my wedding day, unlike the nerves I felt when screen testing for some TV show or film. This was unfettered elation. I wanted to give myself utterly to the moment. I understood that my life was about to break in a new direction. And although I felt the anticipation in my body, there was also an internal calm that took hold because somehow I knew that everything in that moment was happening with a kind of divine rightness. Saro and I stood at the threshold of the office, grabbed each other’s hands, and locked eyes, and he said, “Andiamo!”

The first thing I noticed about Zoela’s birth mother was her incredible beauty. She was striking. The second thing I noticed was that she was also exhausted. She was doing the hardest thing she would ever do in her life.

The next thing I knew, we were hugging. I hugged her the way you hug someone you are thanking with your whole body. As though I’d known her my whole life. As though she knew all the secrets of caring for the child we both loved and by hugging she could pour those into me. We pulled back from each other’s embrace crying and smiling.

Saro asked her how she was feeling. Karen sat with us and took pictures so that one day we would be able to tell our daughter that we had met, come together, and made a plan that originated in our shared love for her. We could share the pictures that captured it.

Then Karen explained who was caring for the baby while we sat in an office getting to know each other. We knew that this way of joining families was part of the agency’s mission. Wherever possible, it tried to facilitate a moment for the birth parent(s) and adoptive parents to meet first, before the adoptive parents meet the child. The agency wanted us to come together as parents to truly understand that we were entering into a pact of love and commitment that should always be centered around the child’s best interest. And in their twenty years of facilitating adoptions, they also knew that for a birth mother to relinquish and begin to heal, it helps to have met the family.

We told the birth mom what we planned to name the baby: Zoela. Saro and I loved the name, an ancient Italian moniker meaning “piece of the earth.” We thought it symbolic for the child who had brought strangers together. Her name reflected the diversity of her biology and cultures. She was African American, Filippina, Italian, and even, Saro added, Sicilian.