From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(38)

Then we offered to drive the birth mom home to give us more time together, away from the office. She accepted. We left the office in Oakland as three people in a new relationship and headed to her apartment in San Francisco. There was really little to say in the way of chitchat; there was only the heartfelt awareness that we had changed each other’s lives and that we were changing the life of a child.

We passed a traffic circle and a park, and then we were at her apartment. The trees were still full in the fall. She got out of the car, and we walked her to her door and hugged again. We took one last picture. In the photo we are visibly raw with emotion; her eyes are red, and I have my arm around her shoulder as if I don’t want to let go. The three of us, each from a different culture, each at a pivotal intersection in our lives, fundamentally changed. Then she headed upstairs and into a life that was hers, a life that would undoubtedly carry its own silent grief.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said once Saro and I were back in the car. “I can’t move, let alone drive.”

I began to cry in a way that didn’t make sense to me. I felt as though if we moved that car, if we left that moment, if we drove away, we would be doing something that would change all of us. We were taking custody of a bundle of love and leaving her birth mother in a world of hurt. I slumped over the steering wheel, paralyzed with conflicting emotions.

Saro grabbed my hand. “Our daughter is waiting for us.”

“I know, I know.” The thought of her, the baby we had yet to meet, the one with the beautiful eyes, a head of black hair, the baby who had come into this world waiting for us. That thought of her snapped me into an excitement as deep as my sadness.

“Let’s call the agency. Let’s tell them what is happening,” Saro said.

I called Karen at the office and told her I was feeling conflicted in a way that I hadn’t expected, that almost didn’t make sense.

“This is very normal, very normal. It has been a big day,” she said. Her voice was calm, cool, collected. “A lot has happened since yesterday. But I want you to know that this is the heart of adoption. Remember what you are feeling right now. Remember, because at the heart of adoption is this love and this loss, all at once. Your daughter will know this feeling one day. It is the realization that she had to say good-bye in order to say hello. That that is how your love as a family came to be. You have said good-bye, now you need to say hello to your daughter.”

She was right. Her words, her voice, gave me clarity and purpose.

I hung up the phone and leaned in to Saro. “Let’s go meet our daughter.”



* * *



There was a handful of families in the Bay Area who volunteered their homes to infants who were discharged from the hospital but whose adoptive parents had not yet arrived in northern California to pick them up. When we pulled up to the house of the woman who had fostered Zoela for one night, again there was a rush of adrenaline, nerves, butterflies in my stomach, pounding in my chest.

“Welcome, come in. I know you can’t wait to see her.” The woman who answered the door looked like a combination of Joni Mitchell and a middle-aged women’s studies professor from Wesleyan. Her salt-and-pepper hair was parted down the middle, and she wore corduroys with clogs. Her house smelled of formula and sandalwood. She held the door open as though she did this every day, a kind of hippie doula fostering newborns in a rambling ranch house on a hill in Marin County.

Once inside, I could see she had two children, sons, one white and one black, about a year apart. The older, a three-year-old, had been standing just behind his mom the whole time. In the background, I could see her other son sitting in a high chair. She had stopped feeding him long enough to answer the door. She still had a spoon in her hand. She never put down the spoon as she scooped him from his high chair, hoisted him onto her hip, and told her other son to show us to the baby. In a matter of seconds, we were led down the hall of the midcentury home, stepping over toys, passing an aquarium. Then we arrived at a crib in the corner of the master bedroom.

Her son pointed inside. There, sleeping on her back in a blue onesie with a knitted cap on her head, was Zoela. Her presence and her spirit met in the space between us, and I knew I had found a new kind of love. Saro took one look at her and took a step back. Then he sat down on the woman’s bed and let the emotion wash over him. He didn’t move for minutes. The foster mother drew near and told us how often Zoela ate, when she got fussy, that she was easy to burp. When Saro finally held her in his arms, she grabbed his pinky finger and held on. He, too, had found new love. Nearly fourteen years earlier, back in Florence, Saro had promised me “something great.” Here it was.



* * *



Motherhood made me into someone I was meant to become. Zoela forged a new person out of me, restructured me. When I held her in my arms during one late-night feeding and she was not yet four months old, I was scared. If what I knew of myself thus far were true, then I imagined the mother I was becoming would be equally flawed, fragile yet strong, and, on good days, blessed with moments of grace and wisdom. This child was along for the ride. “I will give you my best when and where I can,” I whispered, my mouth close to the crown of her head, lingering above that tender spot on babies that reminds us of the fragility of new life.

With motherhood had come the blinding reminder that I couldn’t fly from the anguish of what it means to be human. Life is tumultuous and complex. Illness had taught me that. Being a mother under the threat of Saro’s illness drove the message home.