Dylan Stafford

(Cont.)

It was the lunch break of our Saturday, Pre-Adoption Workshop, and we all sat outside in the California autumn with our Subway sandwiches and drinks. USC’s campus is so urban compared to UCLA, but we were in a small courtyard oasis.

We got to know the other soon-to-be adopting families, what they were dealing with and why they were adopting. The hour passed quickly and we headed back inside for the second half of our workshop.

In the conference room a new woman was seated at the head of the table, waiting to be introduced. Our facilitators got us all seated and settled and we met our next speaker.

She was tall and elegant and carried herself with grace. Her clothes were flowing and she had gold bracelets and gold trim on her glasses.

“Good afternoon,” she began. “I was a birth-mother. I got pregnant at 16 and placed my daughter up for adoption. It was over 40 years ago, and the world of adoption was very different then.

“If you could believe it, it was the first time I’d ever been with a boy. We were just kids. We didn’t know what could happen, or what could happen after just one encounter.

“My family had stature in our city. We were a big family and my uncles were pastors at a large university church in our community. We were known.

“Again, this was a long time ago and things were different. I went to my parents and told them I was pregnant. They held a family meeting to decide what to do. I didn’t know any better; couldn’t know any better. They decided I would be sent away to have the baby. They decided the baby would be put up for adoption. They decided I would still have a chance to go to college and start my life without being a mother-at-sixteen.

“My boyfriend and his family came and asked to keep the baby. They were sincere, and nowadays there would be rights for the father, but times were different then.

“‘Mommy, why can’t I raise this baby?’ I asked.

“‘Where are we going to say that baby came from?’ was the reply I got from my mother, and that was that. We were a family in the community. This was a baby out-of-wedlock. Me keeping the baby was not an option.

“Before I tell you the rest of the story, I also want to jump ahead and tell you that I spent part of my career working as a social worker. In fact, I used to work here for Holy Family Services. So I’ve been around adoption both personally and professionally.

“I want to share with you the best perspective I have on what is happening to you as you go through adoption.

“I had a chapter in my life where I was down, where life wasn’t going well. Someone gave me a book to help me. The author was talking about his relationship with God, and he wrote that if he could pick one word to describe God it would be balance.

“At the time I didn’t get it. Balance? God? It didn’t make sense and it was one of those teachings I had to ponder for a number of years before it would click.

“You’re sitting here today, you’re pondering adoption. I’m sure each of your stories are different, but you’re all coming to terms with this process of adoption.

“And, if I could give you one word to describe adoption, it would be this.

“Timing.

“Adoption is about timing. It’s not about love or caring or emotions like that, it is about timing. If you are in this room, preparing yourselves to adopt, in 99% of the cases there is a fertility situation. The timing isn’t working with your biology. The baby you want to make on your own, right now, isn’t coming.

“The same thing can be said for the birth-mothers. For me, I was 16 and pregnant, just a girl myself. But the average age of our birth-mothers is late-twenties. These are grown women for whom the timing isn’t right.

“They get pregnant. They look at their life. And they have three choices: they can stop the pregnancy; they can have the baby, when in their heart-of-hearts they know they can’t give the baby the future they want to give it; or they can go through the whole 40 weeks of pregnancy, with the morning sickness and the stretching and all of it, and they can place their baby up for adoption.

“There are two sets of almost-opposite emotions happening at the same time in adoption, mourning and joy.

“The mourning is for ‘perfect future’ that isn’t going to happen. Then on the other side, there will be this joy, this huge swell of love as you ultimately receive your new baby into your life.

I sat in my chair and listened. She sounded like a preacher, like a woman people usually listened to.

One of my heroes is Father Richard Rohr. He’s a deep thinker and a spiritual director. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of his lectures on CD as I’ve driven the 405 in Los Angeles.

Father Rohr says that the highest appreciation he ever receives from one of his lectures is when someone tells him, “Thank you. You named my experience.” His gift is teaching and lecturing and for him, the highest praise is to name someone’s experience.

As I listened to our birth-mother, as she told us about mourning and about joy, I got what Father Rohr was saying. This woman was naming my experience.

In the weeks that would follow, going through Thanksgiving and through the Christmas season, bit by bit I digested our Pre-Adopt Workshop.

She told the rest of her story. How the rest of her life went the over 40 years since she placed her baby for adoption. It was a fascinating, American tale of hope and love and life.

Her birth-daughter, as an adult, would locate her and they would create a relationship that goes forward to this day.

She herself went on to marry (not the sweet-sixteen boy) and have three daughters of own. Those three daughters would also re-unite with their half-sister. There would be girls-weekends and euphoria, and there would be mis-communications and breakdowns. It sounded just life sibling-life as I’ve known it with my own sister and brother and friends, life on life’s terms.

I was starting to appreciate the miracle of adoption. I was starting to empathize with what it might be like to be a birth-mother. I was starting to experience the spiritual connection that I’ll always share with a woman I’ve never met, but whose body is carrying the child I’ll always know.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Time for a coffee break.