by Amy Seek
And it wasn’t right to want him to save space for me. He would celebrate his birthday and not think of the moon that night we labored. He wouldn’t even know that the moon had been there to remember. He would take his birthday and run, and I would have to let him have it. But that was motherhood for any mother: it’s being happy that the ten fingers and ten toes you take such careful stock of will grasp and curl around the things of the world, will propel him forward and away, knowing that he will never look back into your eyes and feel what you feel.
* * *
I didn’t wake up when they did to feed him. I awoke only when I felt Sarah watching me early in the morning from the side of the bed. Then I heard someone in the kitchen making coffee. There was an awkward intimacy when Erik asked me through the curtain if I’d like a cup. Paula brought Jonathan in to say good morning, and Sarah asked if I was going to get up. The performance resumed: playing, chasing, tickling. All the while, I felt the weight of constraints no one was imposing. I stopped every gesture short of its full realization. I did not bury my face in Jonathan’s belly, or tell him that I loved him. It made me tired the entire day. I played with blocks and dolls and planes and held my eyes, heavily, from falling asleep. I would take every instant I could, a moment on the toilet, a minute running to the car to get my sweater, every chance I had, to rest my eyes against the exhaustion.
* * *
Construction on I-75 funneled traffic into a shoulderless two-lane road that ran for a moment diagonally across the old orientation of the road, still visible as a palimpsest of a grain, from so many thousands of cars running parallel to one another. You don’t realize the different depths of a road, the thickness of the striping, the heave of the centerline, until you’re forced to drive the wrong way across it. Hulking masses of concrete were placed just on the edge of the temporary striping. Driving on 75 was in these construction zones like threading an electrified needle.
I was aggressively embracing the good in everything. Squeezing it hard. Like I did my cats when I was little, so hard that the force cast a shadow over the sentiment. I’d squeeze those cats till the last bit of air in their lungs squeaked out, and I knew I’d achieved maximum affection. I liked Paula. I liked Erik. I loved Sarah. They were good at being my son’s family, and I’d told Paula I thought so. There was no one else I could have given my son to. They were doing everything right.
As I crossed the border into Kentucky, exhausted, the mountains fell away, and I had the comforting sensation that my car might soon ascend into the ether and disappear. Nothing weighted the horizon; my body flew across the surface of the earth at an inhuman rate. The most natural thing in the world would be to lift off into the sky. Failing that, as I threaded the concrete barriers, I considered the impact of small gestures. My structures professor’s wife’s generous offer. Sarah reaching out softly to pet my son. Kissing him goodbye in the foyer. My signature on the line. The impact, if I turned the wheel just a little.
TWENTY
It was easier to be away from him. Away from him, I could love him as much as I wanted. I felt a pull and a devotion to him that I can only compare to my drive toward other untouchable things; beauty, poetry, justice. Things without definite contours that sit quietly filling your heart, wobbling your compass, giving general direction but no image and no precise destination. I felt closer to him when we were far apart; the needle stabilized. There were days when just because I could feel my affection for him, a visceral fullness like pregnancy, I felt I’d captured him—the same way I would watch a sunset and declare it mine.
* * *
“So which are you? An angel? Or a slut?”
I was very far away from him that October, in northern Michigan. Twenty-five of us sat in a sort-of-circle, an assemblage of wooden-armed chairs and couches. We were gathered in the main room of a breezy log cabin, designed extra-large and open-plan for conferences such as this one. The heat occupied the vast space above the rafters, while we sat wrapped in blankets below, hugging our knees or lounging back with our feet propped on the mismatched coffee tables in the center.
“Most people see birth mothers as one or the other. We are angels for giving up our children. People say they could never do something so courageous! Or, it’s the opposite. We got what was coming to us. If we didn’t want kids, we shouldn’t have been sleeping around in the first place, right?” Laura was a birth mother of about fifteen years and the retreat organizer. She was an expert at open adoption. “Obviously neither of these extremes really describes us. It’s important not to let other people’s ideas about us influence the way we see ourselves. Reality is complicated.”
Paula had told me about this retreat for birth mothers, in open and closed adoptions, a weekend of training on issues like handling conflict with adoptive parents, having children after adoption, talking to friends and colleagues about adoption. But I decided initially not to go. My grief existed parallel with the rest of my life, inside my headphones, within the lines I drew; while I was applying for internships, or designing buildings, or stopping by the conservatory to play the piano—but I didn’t give it real time or space. If I didn’t have time for a son, I definitely didn’t have time to mope about not having one. I had to work harder so that I could accomplish all I’d given him up to accomplish.
But the grief would grow invisibly. It behaved like a tangle that develops at the end of your knitting yarn (when you are not the knitter your sheepherding aunts and uncles and sister and cousins are), building its own chaotic structures in a loose and inverse mockery of your aspiration toward a scarf, until it has gradually inched itself into your hands, where it stops all progress. You set things aside to untangle it, but as soon as you’re back to work, it starts to build again. The faster you move forward, the faster its return. The more intricate your patterning, the more complex its configuration.
I would wake up at night gasping for air, but I wasn’t just dreaming about giving up my son. I’d wake to find I’d done it.
I didn’t care about workshops, but I decided to go to the retreat because I was curious about other birth mothers. I couldn’t imagine birth motherdom as a permanent condition, only a sadness to outrun. What did women look like after a year, or ten, if they couldn’t? I sent off ten applications to internships for the following term in Seattle, Charlottesville, Boston, Chicago. And then I made my way to the flatlands of northern Michigan to a foreign woodland drained of color, with trees like standing skeletons.
* * *
But it wasn’t complicated at all to understand whether I was an angel or a slut. It was easy to be both and neither of those simple things. What was complicated was to understand whether or not we were mothers. I tried to see the motherhood in the women seated around the circle. I’d become attuned to the ways motherhood was represented in magazines and in movies, or in conversations I overheard. I measured my own motherhood against every reference. Before I’d left, I’d watched an opera on television in which a weeping soprano bellowed to a police officer: We do not recognize your sovereignty; we are lionesses, we kill for our cubs. Yes, I’d thought. That’s how you know you’re a mother. You don’t abandon your child; you kill to protect it.
* * *
I studied the girls around the room. They were in their twenties and thirties, but they looked older. Mature and hardened. Several girls who were not wearing glasses at the welcome pizza party the night before were wearing glasses now. Most of us had cried our makeup off or hadn’t put any on. Some of them knew each other from attending the retreat in previous years. They were sharing quilts or resting a head on a shoulder. I was wearing the retreat sweatshirt, having not brought warm-enough clothes. Actually, most of us were wearing it. Birth mothers together in forest green or red, united by the experiment we’d each entered blindly for our own inadequate reasons. Women as many as ten years down the road I’d just set out on, all still working hard on the project of living with ourselves afterward.
“We’re going to go around the
room, and each of us will tell the story of our adoption, wherever we are in it, whatever feels most important to share. When did you place your child? What is the adoptive family like? What’s the hardest thing for you right now? What’s the happiest thing? Who wants to start?”
A girl with short blond hair began. Her story was that her adoption had been closed because the adoptive parents said her visits were upsetting to her child.
“So after five years, they’re telling me that it’s suddenly confusing, and I don’t get it. There’s never been a problem before, but suddenly now they don’t want contact.” She said she didn’t know what she’d done, and the adoptive parents didn’t want to talk about it. “I can see wrinkles—literally wrinkles!—on my forehead that I know wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t gone through all this. I used to have smooth skin, and it started in the first year after his adoption. And now it’s permanent. Sometimes when I’m in my car I scream at God. Or I just scream. I’m sure I look crazy to the other cars!”
Seeing the child; not seeing the child. Both were complicated scenarios arising from the real problem: we were lionesses who gave up our cubs.
“I think the hardest thing for me, though,” she continued, “is just not being able to talk about it with anyone.”
Several of us nodded. There was no one to talk to and nothing to talk about; we had done adoption. My parents didn’t ask about Jonathan; they asked, “How was North Carolina?” As far as they were concerned, Paula and Erik and Jonathan and Sarah were just straightforward new facts of the universe. They’d get pictures Paula sent, and they’d talk about what a great photographer she was or how cute the kids looked together. They sent birthday cards and packages of fair trade coffee. They embraced the whole family, but they would never talk with me specifically about my son. Definitely not how it felt to see him.
Only my grandmother’s reaction was equal to the magnitude of what I’d done. She was furious. He’s a Seek child! Seek children belong with the Seeks! But even she calmed down when the terms of the adoption were explained to her. “Well, you certainly did drop a bombshell,” she said when she finally called me, “but I’m tickled to death that you’re going to be able to have some contact with the baby. And if it should extend—heavens be praised if it does—very good to have the baby for a week to see me. I can’t think of anything I’d like more, and Tunie would, too, and Aunt Mary would, too. And we’re all deeply involved in it with you.” She said she and my aunt Tunie were going to Pennsylvania to get some especially small knitting needles, as Tunie couldn’t finish the sleeves of the sweater she was making for Jonathan without them.
* * *
When the first girl finished speaking, we moved counterclockwise to the next, a tiny girl with thick brown hair, holding her mug with both hands for warmth. She had regular contact with her daughter, but it sounded very formal: they’d meet in a neutral location, an ice cream place or a park, for an afternoon every six months or so. In some ways it sounded appealing to have the boundaries so clearly defined.
“Everything’s fine; it’s great to see her. She’s in second grade now!” she said. “It’s just, for those first seven years, I really thought I was happy about it! And then all of a sudden it hit me!” A girl at the end of the couch handed her a tissue from the box on the side table. “I usually try to think of the good things that have come from the adoption. One of the few good things is that everyone who knows me says I’m a much nicer person.” She laughed. “I wish God could have done it some other way, but I guess I have to resist the urge to second-guess the big plan.”
* * *
We were all crying and wrapping our arms over one another’s shoulders. We had all softened since the first night, when we were introduced, and we chatted over pizza. We hadn’t talked so much about our children then. Mostly we had talked about men. Men are assholes, we seemed to agree: the fathers of our babies and our current asshole boyfriends alike. Everyone got into it; it was fun. I listened quietly, feeling I wanted to stand up for Jevn, but I didn’t say anything. There was too much pleasure in the consensus; too much consensus to interject. And some part of me was taking notes: don’t express bitterness about men, and you will never become a birth mother.
But then, I was also highly attuned to references to fatherhood in the world, and that fall I’d watched Stealing Beauty, the Bertolucci film in which a father finds out only when his daughter is a teenager that he has a daughter at all. The difference between men and mothers. Whether or not they were all assholes, there was certainly no circle of birth fathers gathered on soft couches in another flat forest, eating goody bags of chocolate, weaving dream catchers by the fire, sharing their stories of loss and counting the number of marshmallows they could stuff into their mouths because they couldn’t fill the void.
* * *
“I think you have to just remember your child is in the best possible place. I know that my daughter is with a very loving family,” another girl said. “Her happiness is more important than mine, and I think that’s why we’re very special people.”
Angels, I guess, was our conclusion.
“Yes, as selfishly as I would have liked to have raised my son, I think it takes much more courage to put aside your feelings for those of your child. That is the definition of a mother to me.”
Our motherhoods undermined by adoption, we sought every proof of our love. We embraced a paradoxical idea of motherhood; we were the best kind of mother because we gave our children away. We told ourselves it was the right thing to do. That our children were better off with someone else. That it was God’s plan. That our own feelings don’t matter. That our children are happy. That that happiness makes up for every other kind of loss, our child’s and our own. That men are assholes.
But didn’t openness mean we didn’t have to lie anymore? Instead of stories about their mother’s disappearance, our children could take comfort in the truth—that we loved them. They could witness it firsthand. And yet it seemed the lies had only retreated; we still bore them in plain sight. We accepted that we were collateral damage of our child’s adoption and took on an invisibility more complex than absence. We made our desires, our regrets, and our grief invisible, even to ourselves.
When the circle came to me, I only remember that I wanted to use the word regret, because it seemed like we weren’t saying it for some reason, even though it was part of every story. Even though it brought those ideas—being a mother and not being a mother—together in a way that could endure the test of time: the way I am most fully a mother is that I regret giving up my son. Regret felt like a bridge back to my son, one that could stand because it was true.
Everyone was surprised at how new my adoption was, and they consoled me: Your son is beautiful! His parents sound amazing! Those things seemed to sit beside my regret, but they didn’t elbow it or erase it.
I didn’t want it to go away. Admitting my regret felt forward-looking. It felt like progress. It brushed away all the lies that were so tempting to believe, exposing the real project. Which, like Laura said, had to do with not reconciling those realities, but somehow living them fully. Angel and slut. Mother and not a mother at all.
But regret was also terrifying, and as soon as I said the word, I understood why they hadn’t. I abandoned that forest in Michigan, as I had my son’s house. As though it were birth motherhood itself. I wanted to wipe every surface of myself clean. I felt disoriented, like I’d been driving the wrong way on a highway for hours, and when I realized it, the whole world appeared suddenly freakish and foreign.
I wrote to my sister. I tried to express it. The alienation of regret. Regret undid things. It stole the oxygen out of the delicate universe I’d agreed to live in—I needed to know, can a mother live without her child? It was a straightforward but urgent, physiological question. She responded, don’t look back—look at the future!—that is what you wanted—don’t ask yourself “what if”—it is not profitable speculation—amounts to nothing useful—cut it out:)
* * *
In January, I moved into an unfurnished three-bedroom apartment in Boston with five people from my program. I slept on a mattress made of two summer-smelling pool floats stacked one on top of the other and bound together with bungee cords. In the middle of the night I’d find myself on the hard floor, my hip dull with pain, and had to find the energy in my sleep to blow them up again. The pipes banged and clanged, like someone was beating them erratically with a hammer. The winter wind came right through the window I slept beneath and brushed me longwise from shoulder to toes. I waited at the bus stop with my roommates in the morning, but we parted at South Station; I walked across a long, cold, windy expanse onto land made of rubble to my internship at an architecture firm. My internship task was to find the right red for the interior of the lobby of a building that was well under way, and, like the leafless trees and the barren landscape, I concentrated my energies on essential pursuits. By my desk, I kept a picture of my son and a passage by Gabriel García Márquez about gratitude that Jevn had given me. Gratitude was many people’s paradoxical solution to regret.
I would not tell myself lies. But I wanted to be able to commit to a certain way of feeling. I wanted to be steady like Jevn, and moving to a new city meant I could do that—put the story down and make it stick. I bought a serious, calf-length, black wool coat and wrapped myself in it like a vestment. I decided I wouldn’t mention my son at all; my motherhood a vow of silence. I didn’t, after all, have a son to go home to.
After work, I walked four miles back to my apartment. I set a straight trajectory on the sidewalk of the city I didn’t know, keeping my head down and aligning myself with the right-hand edge. When someone crossed my path, I assured myself that I had the right-of-way within the narrow and unmarked sidewalk lane. Someone would swing his arms too wide and nearly hit me, or step out of a shop and merge into my path, not seeing me. Invariably, he wouldn’t notice he’d cut me off. I tried not to react; I could be so easily overcome with grief. I told myself I belonged here—and yet, what was the Surrender but an official agreement, signed by all of us, that I didn’t? I tried to think about red. The Right Red. Near the Common, I passed by bumpy graveyards, where freeze-thaws had shuffled and unsettled headstones. Bodies and bones mixed with soil; old chambers of lungs and coffins buckled and cratered the frozen ground. It seemed even the grave was a restless place. And mine was a cratered and unsettled motherhood. I couldn’t keep it buried. I studied the faces of new friends I met as I told them the story for the first time. I wanted to see whether they thought mine was a livable condition. Their faces would reveal what they wouldn’t say, but they seemed to share my question, studying me for answers as they looked back.