And there was the day, in the grocery store checkout line, when a cashier brightly asked, “Would you like to contribute a dollar for Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless?” and I snarled, with murderous anger, “I…HAVE…GIVEN…ENOUGH.”
Lying awake at night considering, “If I drive all night and check into a motel in Indiana, will anyone ever find me?” also might have signaled that I was having some issues with our son, Jesse, whom we had adopted from Bulgaria three weeks ago.
All night long I thrashed and pummeled my pillow, in the grip of panic and grief and regret.
“Well, gosh,” chirruped a friendly voice on the other end. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before! Let me find somebody who might know.”
Undone to learn that I was the first, the very first, adoptive mother to even ask such a question, I was incapable of gathering enough voice to reply. I hung up on the woman and doubled over in agony.
“Can you believe I’ve done this to myself?” I cried to a visiting friend, gesturing wildly at the child. Jesse, with his neat brown bangs and dark eyes, was sitting at that moment on the screened porch, trying to learn how to play with blocks. So far that morning, he’d confirmed that the wood blocks were not edible, but he was unsure what he was supposed to do next. I was in too foul a mood to show him.
“Can you remember why you wanted to adopt?” asked my friend, at a loss as to how to help me. The child looked fine to her, cute, even.
“No!” I sobbed. “I can’t. It wasn’t me. I can’t even remember that person. What was she thinking?”
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