Intimacy--a story (iv)

But you shouldn’t think that it’s been all tears. We have these great kids, both of them adopted--Carrie and Jared, wonderful kids. And sometimes it seems we've been blessed by being able to deal with the big things, if you know what I mean. We've had big things happen in our lives. It's the little things that cut and tear--keeping rooms clean, that kind of thing.

But with the big things, and never really on our own, I think we've done okay.

And then this.

In the middle of that pregnancy, our daughter asked the agency if they knew anything about her own background, anything medical that might be important. When we adopted her, the agency said the files were locked; but things were different back then, and there was no way Carrie could know. But they told her that if her birth mother ever came around and asked, they would let her know. “Sometimes that happens,” the woman said.

Amazing.  A few years later it did. All four of us met Carrie’s own birth mother in Toledo, Ohio, halfway to New York, where Garney—that’s her name—lived with her husband and two boys.

It’s seven o’clock at night, and we’re finally checked into the motel where we’d planned to meet her. Pretty much right away, we called to make sure Garny was there in another room. She was. “Whyn’t you come up to my room—seventh floor,” she said when we called—it was a Holiday Inn.

Nobody really tells you how to handle something like what we were right then about to go through. I don’t know that I’d call it awkward exactly, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable. I couldn’t.

My wife gave Carrie all kinds of space. We were on our way to meet this birth mother, marching down the motel hallway, fourth floor, and Sandra was backing off because she was thinking that this moment belonged only to our daughter. She was walking about two yards behind her--we both were--when Carrie turned around impatiently and snapped, "C'mon, Mom," she said, "you're my mother, you know."

That's the way she said it, almost scolding but full of love.

"I know," Sandra told her, in her sweet lilting voice. "Girl, I've been your mom for 22 years."

So we knocked on room 714 and this diminutive lady came to the door, a woman so tiny she looked unhealthy. Sandra is still giving Carrie all kinds of room; she’s standing behind her, at least a yard, and Carrie’s right there facing the door when this tiny woman with the silver hair, a woman with a matched set of our Carrie’s beautiful eyes, looks at our daughter, one huge smile growing across her face. There they stood eyeing each other—I don’t remember how long. No words.

And then the most amazing thing happened. Garny steps right pat her daughter. There’s tears in her eyes, but she goes first of all to my wife and hugs her, just hugs her as if the two of them were best of friends. You think maybe I’m making this up? Not so.

“Thank you,” this Garny says, just like that. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

That's what happened. That woman went right after my wife, hugged her and kissed her, and only then, and somewhat warily, started toward her daughter—our daughter.

I don't think I understood everything Sandra was feeling that night, but once we got into Garny's motel room, once this woman hugged Sandra and then Carrie and then me, once Sandra had given Garny the presents she'd packed especially for Garny’s two boys because she didn't want them to get lost in everything, she said to that tiny woman, "Do you mind please, ma'am, if I sit down? I'm just breathless."

Garny said, of course she could sit down, and Sandra did, on a bed in the manufactured air of that shivery motel room. And not until she sat there-­ overwhelmed, yet oddly comforted--not until I saw my wife perfectly speechless, even reeling, as if in a daze on that bed, not until then did I realize what this incredible meeting with our Carrie's birth mom had taken out of my wife, and what, bless the Lord, it had also somehow put back in.

Sandra watched for the next half hour. More than once, she’s told me since that she enjoyed every minute of it. In her daughter's eyes she said she saw appreciation and commitment and even some love, but no real bonding. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that that very first time Carrie and her birth mother met, there was no intimacy. 

Forgive me. I don't know if that's what either of us were supposed to feel, whether or not it's right, morally sound or not; but I know Carrie loves her mom, and I've no doubt that as long as either of them live, Carrie will know exactly where Garny is. But I don't find that threatening and neither does Sandra, because both of us know that whatever it is our Carrie has with Garny, she's also got a lifetime and more with us.

"I think I know why God wanted me way up here in the cold," Sandra told me one night about a year ago. "I’m pretty sure I got it figured out."

If she had a choice, she wouldn't have chosen to live in this cold little village a thousand miles into the great white north. She's a Southerner through and through and living up here has probably made her even more stubborn about for sure not being a Yankee. But she married into an old Dodgeville family, four generations of furniture sales, me the last probably, and she never quite felt at home in whatever culture we can be said to have.

"I’m here because of my children," she told me that night. "That's why I'm here. It’s very simple, really,” she said, something of a testimony. “I’m here because of them.”

We were in bed, lying there with the radio playing something New Age-ish. What she said came out of nowhere like it always does with her. I reached over and held her arm in my hand.

"God wanted me here because those kids needed me," she said.

I know when she wants to talk. “You mean to say that God almighty couldn’t find anybody else?” I said. “And what does that make me—succotash?”

“You’re an auxiliary, sweetheart,” she said and turned her body into mine.
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Tomorrow: Finis