I Keep Meaning to Write About the Day You Were Born
A birth mother doesn’t say she gave up her child for adoption. We say we placed our children up, careful with our diction because giving up means something different, something we are trying desperately each day to avoid.
When people ask why I did it, I feel like it’s a trick question with no right answer.
When I explain—despite my fierce urge not to—I sputter, say I wasn’t the best person to raise you.
That is the truest sentence I know and also the hardest to say.
I am not the most capable mother to parent the child I made.
It was difficult to admit then, thirteen years ago.
And it still is now.
I am not the best woman to raise you into someone who will be better than I am.
I don’t know what I mean by better but I think I mean more forgiving.
I am not good at forgiving, but I am a champion receptacle of resentment and remorse.
Forgiveness. I know the definition of the word but can’t remember a time I’ve practiced it.
•
I have boys I kept and I wonder if that is the universe’s compromise with me.
How I can be a mother without forgetting the girl I didn’t keep.
There were six Mother’s Days between your birth and Brandon’s.
2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
Nearly seven years living in the body of a mother with listless arms.
I’m not saying in those years I tried to forget you but I tried to stop remembering you.
I could not forget you anymore than I could forgive myself for trying to.
I think forgetting and forgiveness are tied to each other, at least I hear people say, “Forgive and forget.”
I used to have an impeccable memory. I recited 132 Bible verses in four days once, won a Huffy bike. My dad screwed wicker baskets onto it so I could deliver morning newspapers.
Now I misplace my glasses, my keys, my phone each day.
Sometimes my fingers shake and I think it is the absence of you twitching through me.
My body remembering that it held you once, cradled you in my womb, then my arms.
I remembered that on those six Mother’s Days: how warm your little body was the day you were born.
•
The Catholics believe in penance for your sins, which I never understood completely. I am not Catholic, but Sacred was the first language I knew. Penance, I think, must be actions toward forgiveness.
Sometimes I wonder if all these trips to the zoo and the children’s museum and putt putt golf are my own actions toward forgiveness.
Like I’m trying to prove that I can be a mother now that I wedged space between me and you.
Like those six Mother’s Days were me incubating, becoming for my boys what I couldn’t be for you.
When I looked up penance, I read about self-flagellation which is when a person punishes herself by whipping her own back. It is a voluntary punishment to atone for some wrongdoing.
I wonder if writing to you—this unmanageable task of putting words to sorrow—is my self-flagellation.
I think what I’m saying is that I keep hoping you will forgive me.
When I first sat down to write to you, it was to exorcise this grief from my body, to pull it through my throat in long ropy blood vessels.
I pulled and pulled until they pooled on the floor in giant piles: wet and heaving red cords I had never seen in the light.
When I stepped back from them, aghast at all that had lived spooled inside me, it felt like I would never swallow again.
I’ve felt like that before, when your second half-brother was born.
When the anesthesia wore off, I came to. I wondered where I was. When I heard the cry of a baby I winced, knowing a nurse would bring the baby to me and knowing I would hold the baby close to my breast—our skin steaming where we touched—and knowing it was temporary.
You see, I thought he was you.
•
I keep meaning to write about the day you were born.
It’s been a task on my office whiteboard for months.
But when I think of how it felt to hold you and know I had 48 hours to change my mind, to keep you, it still feels like I’ll black out.
I remember how small your fingernails were.
How your mouth yawned open when you woke, how you rooted toward my nipple.
When the nurses and the lactation consultant advised me how to feed you, I kept explaining I am not your mother, just your birth mother.
While my ice chips were refilled and people shuffled around on the polished floor with squeaky shoes, I lay there holding you.
It was as if the slow speed of you opening your fingers would be how time worked for us.
For those deciding hours, that’s how time moved.
Only the hours I slept were quiet.
All the other ones, my mind turned over keeping you—over and over, over.
The scenarios I constructed.
Not one of them feasible.
Feasible maybe, but nowhere near ideal.
For either of us, I mean.
The feasible ones had us in my parents’ basement—my family babysitting you while I worked a shitty job or two trying to get ahead.
The feasible ones had me gasping for air outside of that house, just like I had been doing while you grew inside me.
The feasible ones had you passed around from person to person who wasn’t your mother.
I wondered if you would wait for me to get home and coo at long last in my arms or if you would believe someone who held you more than I did was your mother.
If it would be like that, I’d rather find for you the mother I couldn’t be.
Which I had. She was next door, waiting out 48 hours, hoping to God I wouldn’t change my mind.
•
I don’t think I’m going to write that essay about the day you were born after all.
I just wrote what I could.
There are parts I can’t tell you because they can’t be pulled from my body.
They have melted into my throat, retreated into the lining of my womb, settled into the bones of my feet.
I can tell you I had to get out of that hospital as quickly as possible.
I had to wait out the rest of those hours away from you.
My friend picked me up from the hospital and we went to a movie.
Must Love Dogs it was.
It was brainless and stupid and I kept looking down at my hospital band, wishing I had cut it off.
It said mother on it.
•
Sometimes I see snippets of your dad’s sermons on social media and think how weird it must be to believe in god.
I mean, I did too once, I remember.
I fell asleep to Jack Hyles’ sermons on cassette when I was your age, went to a Regular Baptist Church.
Fundamental means forming a necessary base or core of central importance.
My mother told me to apologize to our church for making you and I said, “Don’t you mean ask God for forgiveness?”
That wasn’t what she meant.
When I moved away from home, ten days after your birth, I left everything I knew behind.
Including my religion.
I wouldn’t say I lost it as much as I abandoned it.
What I believe in now is friends who let me cry into cocktails while I give voice to all this I never said before.
Now I believe in the pursuit of forgiveness.
In the endless grasping to be good enough, to be loved, to be understood, to feel OK.
•
It’s hard to get all this in when someone asks, why’d you do it?”
It’s difficult to articulate to anyone who can’t imagine giving her child away that I also couldn’t imagine giving my child away.
Sometimes people like me end up in circumstances we never thought we would.
I gave you away because I wasn’t best suited to be your mother. Because I wasn’t equipped to give you all you are worthy of. That means, in part, a parent who can teach you how to love and forgive and receive love and forgiveness.
I gave you away and I haven’t given up.
I initially ended that last sentence with yet but I deleted it.
I deleted it because I know I won’t give up now.
I didn’t know that at first. I didn’t even know it a decade later.
But in writing these letters to you, I’m coming to some conclusions.
For example, that I am forgivable.
I am making a church of healing people, building a sanctuary with words.
I am doing this without forgetting you.
I am remembering you more than I ever allowed myself before.
I see the shape of your newborn fingernails in the silt on my keyboard while I type.
I remember your young, earnest voice that time you called me on the phone. I can still hear it all these years later. I remember the space between your voice and mine. I remember that I had both nothing and so much to say.
Holly Pelesky is a lover of spreadsheets, giant sandwiches, and handwritten letters. Her essays have appeared in The Nasiona, Jellyfish Review, and Homology Lit among other places. Her poems are bound in Quiver: A Sexploration. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. She cobbles together gigs to pay off loans and eke by, refusing to give up this writing life. She lives in Omaha with her two sons.