by Tembi Locke
My family had welcomed my cousin into our kin by way of international adoption just one year before Saro and I had walked down the aisle. I was watching her grow up from a distance, seeing her at holidays and family gatherings. I saw the joy in her parents’ eyes. I saw the love. I saw the way adoption was deeply intentional and expanding. I saw another way a family could be formed, and I was hooked.
* * *
“Are we really doing this?” I asked Saro as I handed him a stack of forms. Two years after his diagnosis, he was in remission. The prospect of starting a family, the hope of life in the face of illness, was exhilarating and humbling.
“Of course we’re doing this. This might be the best thing we ever do.” He took the application, gave it the once-over, and then looked at me. “Do I have to type this?”
“No, write out your responses. Then I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“How are we handling the medical history?” he asked, peering up from the papers. A look crept across his face. I was just getting used to having his olive skin and flushed cheeks back again since he had stopped the harshest drugs. But the vulnerability on his face and the nature of the dangling question at the center of our lives were something I could never get used to. It struck fear in me.
“Truth. Always. We just tell the truth.” I grabbed him and kissed his forehead.
If we were to become parents through adoption, everything would have to be predicated on truth. We hoped we might match with a birth mother who was equally willing to disclose her truths. We were taking a risk. A big risk. We wanted her to see us for who we were, illness notwithstanding. That we were people deeply in love, people who had seen pain, who had survived it, and who would parent from a place of knowing what really mattered.
“You have to answer the question ‘Why will Tembi be a great mom?’ What are you going to say?” I pressed him to get started as we sat at the dining room table with a stack of adoption information laid out before us.
“I’ll say you’re perfect.” How he could be both flippant and charming, I still didn’t get. I was always one thing or the other. His duality was still the sexiest thing in the room.
“That is the stupidest answer. It says nothing. Actually, it says more than nothing. It says you value ‘perfect.’ Whatever that is.”
“Can you just let me do this? I love you. If I want to say you’re perfect, I’ll say perfect.” He reached for a pen to start writing. “We’ll be picked because the mother will see we are in love.”
“Okay, yes, we’re in love. But can you also be specific?” I liked that we could still fall into married banter. It was the marker of normalcy in the wake of illness, and I never wanted it to end.
“What have you said about me?” He put the pen down and reached for my application form.
“That you’re one of the most intelligent people I know, that you write poetry, that you are generous, that your cooking brings people together, that you play blues on electric guitar, that you speak three languages, read five.” I played footsie with him under the table. “However, I did not write that you used to confuse Kevin Bacon with Val Kilmer.”
“You’ll never let that go.”
“Not as long as I have breath to talk.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to try to get pregnant? I don’t want you to miss that, if you really want that.” He momentarily put the papers aside, waiting to see what I would say.
It was possible; we had frozen sperm. The day he had been diagnosed, somehow this husband of mine had had the emotional and mental wherewithal required to leave an oncologist’s office, drive two miles toward the Pacific Ocean, and walk through the doors of a sperm bank. Neither of us had said a word on the drive, nor had we considered turning back. Instead, we had arrived unannounced at the reception desk; he handed the woman the doctor’s note and soon after he disappeared into the back rooms of the clinic. He was someone who was able to somehow keep an eye toward the future even in the face of a diagnosis, protecting what might be. When he emerged a half hour later, he said, “I don’t know if what just happened gives us a future, but I did the best I could.” And then we left. We had been paying a monthly fee on the possibility of conceiving biological offspring ever since.
“I don’t really want to be pregnant. Trust me. The only thing I don’t want to miss is being a mom.”
I had no interest in retrieving the sperm. And neither of us was interested in returning to examination rooms and lab tests. I didn’t want doctors in white coats to be the way we started a family. Plus Saro had gently confided to me one night that he wasn’t thrilled about the idea of rolling the dice on his own genetics, given the unknown nature of his cancer.
For the next few weeks, we filled out what felt like reams of forms, we got fingerprinted, we did the FBI background check, got police clearances, got interviewed, turned over our financial records. We crafted a “Dear Birth Mother” letter, promising “It is our commitment to raise our child in an open-minded home with all the warmth, compassion and love that is his or her birthright to have.”
We got letters of recommendations from friends. We wrote dossiers about each other, answering questions such as “Explain why you’re so excited to become parents” and “Describe your home.” We wrote about our dogs, our extended family, the local elementary school nearby. We acknowledged that this was a difficult decision for her to make, and we thanked the birth mother for giving us a chance to share who we were. And, most important, we got a letter from Saro’s doctors stating that his illness was in remission.
When that was done, there was more. I finished working on The Bernie Mac Show and went straight to the airport to travel to a workshop for preadoptive parents on caring for the needs of a newborn. In the class, I diapered and burped dolls with a focus on eye contact and the need for attachment. They told a room full of prospective parents that the beauty of adoption is that dads get to hold and feed the baby equally and that this increases the parent-child bond with the father. Then I got back onto a plane and returned to set to work on a show starring Andy Richter about a family with teenage quintuplets.
Saro and I even attended a workshop in L.A. on transracial adoption where we were given a certificate for challenging our thinking on “the issues of race,” “white privilege,” and “differences in the transracial experience for children of different races and ethnicities.” Though neither of us had direct experience with knowing how those issues intertwined with adoption, we left the workshop confident that as an interracial, intercultural couple, we were cool on the potential of the cross-cultural aspects of parenting—despite the fact that we had parents in two different countries who couldn’t even talk to each other.
We cleared out the small office at home in the hope that one day it would be filled with a crib, a rocker, and a changing table. Naturally, we tried out names for our future son or daughter. Boy, girl, it didn’t matter. Race didn’t matter. Combinations of races didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that we asked not to be shown to birth mothers known to carry twins. That was our one stipulation. I knew we could handle a lot, but I knew we couldn’t handle two kids at once. Then we waited.
* * *
I was in the middle of a pull-up on the Reformer in a Pilates class when I looked out the window of the studio near our house and saw Saro. His face was lit up and beaming with excitement.
“What the hell is that guy doing?” the instructor asked, releasing me from the rings on the machine as she watched Saro move hurriedly across the parking lot.
“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 m
e 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.
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 com
bination 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.