A Free Fall with a Soft Landing

Boston Herald

“However motherhood comes to you it’s a miracle.” - Valerie Harper

She never believed. Not in her core. Not the way she believes that morning follows night.

Or that ice melts in the heat. Or that if you throw something into the air, it will fall back to earth.  This kind of certainty eluded her.

Tara’s faith was tenuous. Some days she hoped. Some days she despaired. Most days she wondered if she would ever be a mother.

Her mother, Jill, tried to help. “It will happen, Tara,” she said. “I promise you. And when it does, you will look back at this time and think it was worth the wait.”  But the drumbeat in Tara’s head was “When? When? When?” And it never stopped. It was like a radio left on in an adjoining room.

It takes love and faith and courage to raise a child, any child. It takes closing your eyes and leaping into the unknown, then free-falling to the ground below.  But how far below? When you adopt, you don’t know. So it takes patience, too, the wait harder because it’s uncertain, waiting always a strain even when you can draw a circle on a date and point to it and make plans.

But when you can’t point? When the pages of the calendar turn again and again and there is no circle?

Tara and Rob made plans anyway. They decorated a room, bought a crib, books, blankets, and stuffed animals, and dared to imagine at every child-centered celebration that went on in their lives -- their families big, their world full of other people’s children -- that soon they would have a child, too. Maybe next Christmas. Maybe next spring. Definitely next year.

Days drag when you’re counting minutes, but somehow seasons fly. Summer came again, and there was still no baby. Babies were everywhere, the beach full of them. Summer was Tara’s season of discontent. “It will happen, Tara. I promise,” Jill continued to say. But it was getting harder and harder for Tara to believe.

And then the call came, and a picture of a baby boy. And there was relief and joy and hope and thanksgiving. But still no circle on the calendar. He could arrive in two months. Or it could be four or six or eight months. His picture sustained her. This was her son. But then came the “what ifs.” What if something went wrong? What if he didn’t come? What if now, after falling in love with him, memorizing the shape of his lips, his eyes, the tussle of his hair, she lost him?

She didn’t. Chase Henry Matthews arrived at Logan Airport, eight months old and beautiful, so wanted and already beloved. A woman half a world away loved him enough that she gave birth to him. Another woman, his foster mother, loved him as her own for eight months. Another brought him here, to the United States, to Tara and Rob, who loved him even before they knew him. It doesn’t seem so long now, the long, long wait. This is what happens when you land on soft ground. You forget the time spent sad and afraid and crying. You forget everything except the baby in your arms. 

Tara’s mother had told her this. But children never believe their mothers, not even grown children, not even when their mothers have walked where they’ve walked, not even when they’ve wept the same tears. For Jill’s promise was never based on faith alone. She knows firsthand not just that morning follows night and that ice melts in the heat. But that the heart melts, too, and forgets its sadness in the presence of joy. For many years ago, when she herself was a young woman yearning for motherhood, the clock was a drumbeat for her, too, years of days spent playing with my children while waiting for a child of her own.

And then a social worker put Tara, just three days old, in Jill’s arms. It was February, not October, in an apartment, not an airport. And it was thirty-two years ago. But the moment of absolute love was the same.

Back then, I watched Jill cradle Tara, breathe in her smell, stroke her cheek, look into her eyes and adore her. And now I have watched Tara, too, cradle Chase and do all the same things.

Sometimes, a woman gives birth and becomes a mother.

But sometimes more is required. Sometimes a woman has to leap off a cliff with her eyes closed and her arms open and wait and trust that her mother is right.

“It will happen,” Jill said.

And miraculously -- for every child is a miracle -- it has.