Adoption meant life
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
She is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.
She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.
I've known her since she was four days old. I was standing next to her mother and father the afternoon a woman from Catholic Charities delivered her to their care. So many parents talk about their joy at the moment of birth, how nothing has ever meant so much.
Nothing before this moment had ever meant so much. In this moment was the birth of love.
Love has molded Tara. Jill's love. Mark's love. Rita's and Mac's and Evelyn's and Lynn's and Judy's. All children should be so loved. Then all children would turn out like Tara.
She has always known she was adopted. But she has always known, too, who her mother is: the one who has kept a journal of her life; the one who drove her to dancing lessons for 10 years; the one who always insists that she can succeed when she is sure she'll fail; the one who scolds and nags and hugs and listens and suffers and cries with her.
Still, there are times she thinks of the girl who bore her.
Last week, in school, her English teacher told her class to write a poem about something they believed in. This is what Tara wrote:
"Seventeen years ago this month
A baby was born and she was loved.
Brought into this world unplanned, that's true.
But what if that baby had been you?
Her mother so young and scared at the time,
Didn't know what to think or do.
That mother, so young, I'll tell you was mine.
She gave me to someone who
Would love me forever and ever, that's true.
When the baby was born,
That's me, of course,
Mother and daughter immediately were torn.
But the tear in her heart was ten times worse.
The mother was just a child herself
But a child who knew what to do.
She had her child and gave her up.
It doesn't seem fair that if she wanted to
That child-mother could have gone
And ended my life before I was born.
So many young girls in the world today
Make the choice for themselves
Not thinking about the future of
The tiny life growing from her love.
Those babies inside who never will cry
Because their mothers took their lives.
So hypocritical to me, it seems.
They're give a life then it's taken back
They never will get to see their dreams
I can understand what it's like
One of the babies killed each year
Seventeen years ago might have been me.
Now it's quite easy to understand
Why I say with all my heart
If it happens to you, please think twice
Adoption, not abortion, is what's right.
