7. A Child's Gift

The lights are off. I’ve drawn the curtains with their pattern of little sailboats. And I’ve kissed the top of my son’s freshly shampooed, blond head at least five times. He has finished telling me about what happened to Thomas, the Tank Engine. I hope this will be an easy trip to the land of nod because I would like to have some time to myself. I am forty, exhausted, with two small children eighteen months apart.

“Tell me the story about when I was born,” he asks, holding onto my arm, not wanting me to go.

“Once upon a time,” I start, intending to make it short, “the phone rang super loud in the middle of the night and woke us up when we were sleeping. We got the news that you were born, and we were so excited.”

I describe what it was like flying across the big ocean to Poland and meeting him for the first time.

“You had strawberry-blond hair. It was love at first sight.”  

I tell him this even though it took me twenty-four hours to realize I was hopelessly in love.

“I couldn’t have babies, so we adopted you. And we brought you home, and your sister was happy to have a baby brother,” I say, a statement I was no longer sure was true.

“Why couldn’t you have babies?” he asks.

I wasn’t prepared for this question from my three-year-old.

“My tummy was broken.”   

“Mmm,” he says after a few seconds, “I was a gift.”

“Yes. You were a gift.”

I kiss him good night for the sixth time and tuck his blanket around him tightly, just like my mother used to do. I close the door softly behind me. Exhausted after nights when two children sometimes wake up, a day of work, making dinner, and fulfilling the evening’s demands, I flop down on the couch and pour a glass of chardonnay to smooth the edges of the day.

In the darkening room, I pour myself a second glass, then top it up with an extra large splash. Just two glasses, I think, it isn’t so much. I wonder what I will tell my son when he is older, and a broken tummy no longer suffices. I probably won’t explain everything. The work. The worry. The determination.

My son’s birth mother was living in a homeless shelter on the outskirts of Warsaw. I arrived with the lawyer, a colleague of the woman who had helped us adopt Alexandra, to meet her and the baby. A new lawyer—the first one had retired—added to the uncertainty around adopting a second child.

Laundry hung over the sink, and a kerosene heater in the corner struggled to take the cold and damp out of the November air. A small wooden box lay on a table, low to the floor in the corner. This was the crib where the newborn baby boy slept.

The young woman rose to her full six-foot height when I entered. She reached down into the box to hand me a sweet, slumbering baby, an infant no larger than a loaf of bread. I was pretty certain, after spending a fair bit of time in Poland at this point in my life, that I understood the situation.

The fall of communism in 1989 marked the start of a seismic change in Poland, with a complex transition to a market economy and democratic reforms. Here it was five years later, 1994, and amidst the excitement of newfound freedoms and opportunities, it was obvious there was a human cost. Not everyone who had known only a paternalistic cradle-to-grave system found the adjustment easy.

This young woman had lived most of her life under the umbrella of state support and limited choices. For her and many others, the shift from a society where basic needs were provided to one where individual initiative and adaptability were paramount was daunting. Estranged from her family and lacking marketable skills, she was unable to take care of herself and support a child.

The baby was so perfect and sweet compared to his bleak surroundings. We began the legal process, which would take four months to wind through the court system. It was the same drill we had been through with his sister. Once again, Ela and her family opened their small apartment to a newborn and me. Jonathan held the fort back home with eighteen-month-old Alexandra.

Nearly three decades later, my son’s words—“I was a gift”—still resonate, and perhaps even more so now that I am no longer too busy or too tired to notice. Motherhood has taught me many lessons, but nothing prepared me for the heartache of being unable to help a loved one. It was anguishing at times to witness my son struggle through his life. He contended with anxiety and depression—a crushing and unrelenting illness—first as a child, then as a teenager, and even into adulthood. New diagnostic criteria allowed him to receive a diagnosis of autism as an adult, which he says enabled him to understand his world better. It opened up a crack, and that’s how the help got in—borrowing from Leonard Cohen’s words. With a good heart, a sharp mind, musical talent, and an abundance of courage, he is forging his own path.

Parents with children who struggle with illnesses and disabilities know the worry and stress, not to mention guilt. Was there something we should have done differently? Despite everything his father and I tried, no amount of love, no drug, no health cure or supplement seemed to help.

I often reflect on my son’s remark that he must have been a gift. He has taught me to see differently, to listen and hear differently, and to be more empathetic. Motherhood has shown me the depths of fierce love. It has revealed my resourcefulness in advocating for and supporting my children.

Motherhood is subsuming. Motherhood. Mother Land. It is an existential place like no other.

We named him Matthew, and he is a gift.