A grandmother is born

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I can’t stop thinking about my friend Jill’s new grandson. I look at his photo and smile. I speak his name - Chase Henry – just to say it. And I tell people – neighbors, friends, people at the gym, strangers in line at the deli - about this little boy, whom no one has met yet, but who is already, totally loved.

“It isn’t official, but here’s our baby BOY!” Jill’s daughter e-mailed. The phone call she’d been waiting for had finally come. After years that felt like decades, Tara and her husband Rob are at long last parents-in-waiting.

Chase Henry is five months old. He has dark hair and dark eyes and the cutest little nose and the sweetest ears and a perfect mouth and flawless baby skin and a round, perfect face.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” all of us who love Tara and Rob and who now love their child say, all of us who have been on this long journey with them, one step forward, two steps back, waiting, waiting.

“How much longer?” “Have you heard?” “Any word?” are questions they fielded every day. And now these few words – “a baby boy” – have changed everything.

Adopting is not easy. It begins as an idea, a possibility. Then a decision has to be made. Then there are meetings and paperwork.

And then there is only waiting.

Tara’s mother waited for her, too. When we were young, Jill rocked my babies in preparation for her own. She bought dresses for my daughter and shirts for my son and books and games and stuffed animals. And called to say, “Can I come by and see the kids?” or “Why don’t you and Bruce go out and Mark and I will baby sit.”

Waiting, waiting to have her own children to care for.

Jill and I took my kids to Washington DC when they were two and four. We drove there in the winter, in my car, 10 hours straight. I held my son’s hand in the elevator of the Crystal City Hyatt and Jill carried my sleeping daughter. After they were in bed, that night and for all the nights we were there, we talked about kids, mine and hers. A son or a daughter? Which would it be? When would this child come? Had he or she been born yet? We talked and dreamed about how wonderful life would be when the phone call came.

But the call didn’t come. Not that winter or spring or summer or fall.

We flew to Disney World the next year, my kids, our husbands and us. It isn’t easy being at a place where everyone has children except you. But Jill was a trooper, lavishing affection on my son and daughter even while longing for a son or daughter of her own.

It was a sunny February morning a few weeks after Disney World when the phone call finally came. The baby was a girl. She was four-days-oldl. A social worker would be bringing her to Mark and Jill’s within hours.

“It will be worth the wait, Tara. It will be worth all of your tears,” Jill has said to Tara so many times in the past few years. “When you hold your baby, you will forget all this.”

There are miles to go, still – nearly 7,000 - before Chase arrives in the United States. There are papers to be notarized and passports and visas to be secured and more time to be endured.

It will be months until Tara holds her son in her arms.

But she holds him now in her heart. Because what her mother predicted has already happened. Tara has fallen so in love that all those tear-filled days and sleepless nights aren’t paramount anymore because each one led her to him.

Jill has made copies of the photo the agency sent and she’s framed them and placed them in every room of her house.

She’s also handing out wallet size pictures to all of her friends.

“This is my grandson,” she says, smiling.

The day the social worker placed Tara in her arms, I watched Jill become a mother.

I listen to her now. “Look at that little face.” I see her smile, “Look at those hands!” I hear her boast, “Look at the way he is staring straight into the camera.”

Today I am watching her become a grandmother.