"The Second Rejection"
by Tricia Shore

(Finalist entry in the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition, May 2003)

     There was one more thing I wanted to do before I left North Carolina to return to California, one more person I wanted to tell about the new life growing inside me.

     My son, Caleb, fell asleep soon after I picked up I-40 from Raleigh to Wilmington.  I took advantage of his slumber to go through a barbeque drive-in, an entity that does not exist in my current home of Los Angeles.  As I ate hush puppies, I thought about how wonderful it was to traverse an interstate that was not crowded, how fabulous it was to see trees instead of a forest of lights and signs.

     That morning I had tried to call my mother, but did not catch her before she left for work.  It was the third week in June.  Only three years ago I had driven this road and stopped halfway between Raleigh and Wilmington.  My mother and I had agreed to meet at a rest stop there, our first meeting in over 34 years.

     Prior to that day, she had seen me last at the maternity home in Richmond where she gave birth to me.  The standard protocol of the day was for the moms-to-be to hide in a home that was a combination of plantation and prison.  My mom had been able to mill around the backyard, but otherwise was confined to the structure’s boundaries.

     She was able to keep me for four weeks.  Although it would have been in my best interest and hers for me to breastfeed, I was not allowed to do so.  I was somewhat relieved to learn that my half-sister, born almost three years later and raised by my mother, was not naturally fed either.

     The formula feeding frenzy of the 50s and 60s had an excellent effect on adoption: the true mother did not matter.  If a child could be fed just as well with formula, then why was the mother even needed?  I am thankful that most mothers today realize the importance of feeding their infants the way that nature intended instead of the way that scientists and formula companies tout.

     Not only was breastfeeding not allowed in the maternity home, but love was also placed at a minimum.  If mothers became too attached to the children that nature had provided them, then the infertile couples to whom the children had been promised may have to wait longer for a child.  My mother was encouraged not to hold me too much or too closely.

     Only after giving birth myself did I realize how much a mother’s feelings for her baby change after she sees her child.  Despite numerous ultrasounds and heartbeats, when I saw my son for the first time, I felt an intensity I never had felt before.  His father and I had created this being that was once a jumble of images on a screen.  In the moment of Caleb’s birth, when I went from mother-to-be to mother, I knew that he would always be our son.  The being I had held inside me still needed me--to nourish him and to give him the security that only his father and I could.

     My mother claims to have loved me much more after giving birth.  By that time, however, most of the moms had already been hooked into giving away their babies, having succumbed to pressure from social workers.  Twenty-two days after I was born, my mother signed away her right to raise me.  But no legal document could change my relationship to her; she is my mother.

     When my grandmother and great aunt came to see me at the maternity home in Richmond, it was a bittersweet meeting.  It would be the first and last time either of them would see me.  My great aunt, my mom’s favorite aunt, died a few years later and my grandmother died when I was in college, long before I was able to find my mom.  Knowing that my grandmother held me and still did not love me enough to keep me provides me with little comfort.  But my mother told me that years after my adoption, as my grandmother saw her suffer, she realized she had made a mistake in arranging for my adoption.

     On our last day at the maternity home, my mother turned when she heard her name.  Someone else had been holding me and when she turned back around, I was gone.  My mother never saw me again until that day a little over three years ago, when my mother looked at me and noticed, “you’ve got a dimple.”  She cried and I smiled and we went to the Rose Hill Diner and ate lunch together.  It was blueberry season and they had fresh blueberry pie on the menu.  I ordered some, realizing that my own mother had no idea how much I loved blueberries.

     To our waitress, it was obvious that we were mother and daughter.  What was not obvious was that we had been separated so long.  For that day and for many days thereafter, I tried not to dwell on our separation, but on the fact that when I was with my mother, people knew we were family.  For the first time since I was four weeks old, it was obvious to whom I was connected.  Many of my friends said we looked just alike.

     The decision to move to California after finding my mom was a difficult one.  I felt comfortable visiting her home, staying in what she called “my room.”  I lay there one night, a few weeks before I was supposed to leave, wondering if I was making the right decision in leaving her so soon after finding her.

     In September, my husband and I left for Los Angeles.  I looked forward to the promise of her visit for my birthday, the first of my birthdays that we had been together since I was born.  On this birthday, I thought, we have a life together, not separation, to look forward to.  My mom, my husband, and I ate at my favorite Los Angeles restaurant, the secret specialness of this event shared only by us.

     A year later, when my son was born two weeks after my birthday, my mother was there to accompany us home from the hospital.  It was a moment I had dreamed of.  I had not thought it fair to bring a child into the world who would only know his father’s side of the family.  Finding my mother and father freed me to have my own child, a child who would always know his relatives.

     My proudest moment came the October before Caleb was born, when the ladies who watched me grow up at Pleasant View Baptist Church met my mother.  I had thought that it took a lot of courage for my mother to come to my baby shower, but as she said, she wanted them to know that she “didn’t have two heads.”  Indeed, she fit in well with the women.  I wondered what they had thought she, a mother who had not raised her firstborn, would be like.

     Caleb’s first Christmas morning was spent at his maternal grandmother’s house.  As we opened presents and I tried frantically to write down everything my son received in the journal I kept for him, I felt the joy of Christmas as I never had before.  Mixed with the mirth, however, was a tinge of sadness.  I thought of all the Christmases we had missed.

     We often came back to North Carolina that spring because Beauford, the man who had adopted me, had major health problems.  As his power of attorney, I was responsible for his bills and his house.  Each time we visited North Carolina, my mother would drive to Raleigh or I would go to Wilmington.

     In the beginning of our reunion, my mother and I had talked like schoolgirls each night.  Thirty-four years of loss cannot be so easily caught up.  Even after I moved to California, we talked three to four times each week.  The phone calls stopped after Beauford died.  When his wife, Ann, had died, shortly after the reunion between my natural parents and me, my mother had sent me flowers and made sure that I was okay.  Beauford’s death made me frantic because in addition to suffering the loss of someone I loved, I was in charge of settling his estate.

     My mother visited Caleb and me in Raleigh a few days after Beauford died.  We were soon going back to California and I was nervous about everything.  Thinking that my mother would love me regardless, I allowed my insecurities to surface.  I talked too much about the funeral.  I talked too much about my feelings.  I talked too much about everything.  I was too opinionated.  My memories of that last day in June with my mother are cloudy, but as I was talking, I remember feeling as though something had changed.

     After I returned to California, I waited for my mother’s call or for flowers or a card, but received nothing.  In November, we flew back to North Carolina and had a first birthday party for Caleb.  My mother, although invited, did not attend; fortunately, my father was at the party, the only grandparent to attend.  When I returned I found a package that my mom had sent Caleb.  Finally I called her, but each of us seemed to want to blame the other; the trust I had hoped was there was gone.  I tried desperately to hold on to it, not only for my sake but also for my son’s.  There were scattered phone calls, but the honeymoon was over.

     The following June, after finding out that I was unexpectedly pregnant again, I had hoped that my mother and I would be reunited by this second child.  I had been driving around Wilmington, trying unsuccessfully to reach her.  I attempted one more call before I left and she answered the phone.  At first, she was distant.  Then it became obvious that she was angry with me.  In my attempt to find her, I had called her workplace and left a message for her from “her daughter, Tricia.”  Little did I know that she was still hiding me.  After three years, I thought she had told people at her workplace about me.

     She began yelling at me and accusing me of letting out that information on purpose, as if pride in being her daughter was a venial sin.  My son slept while I listened to his maternal grandmother act like a child.  I wondered how much yelling I could take, how much I wanted my son to see his grandmother.  My intuition took over and I realized that, although she would always be my son’s grandmother, I did not want him to be around someone who was ashamed to be related to him.  I could handle rejection of myself, but not of my son.

     I doubt that she heard me say “I love you” as I hung up the phone.  She was still yelling.  I doubt I will ever hear from her again and part of me wants to say that is fine.  Another part knows that as hard as it was being rejected as a baby, it is somehow harder being rejected as an adult and having my own son rejected as well.  Although my mother had shared me with her family, my relatives, she did not feel comfortable sharing me with her co-workers.

     Since that night, I have thought of many adoptees who accepted such deals from their natural mothers.  One adoptee in a support group I once attended told about his mother, who rode around her small community with him, pointing out the homes of his relatives.  “It was as if she wanted to get caught,” he said, but she did not introduce him, even to his half-brothers.  I have heard of other adoptees who knew that their pictures appeared on the end table only when they visited.  Perhaps I should have accepted my mother’s shame and stayed in hiding, but I could not do that and be honest with my son, my unborn child, and myself.

     My half-sister, who seemed to hate me from the moment she learned about me, must be quite satisfied to know that I am out of my mother’s life.  I also thought about the walk my mother and I had taken through my mom’s neighborhood a few months before she stopped calling.  How I had wanted to believe my mother when she said she did not remember the woman’s name and that’s why she did not introduce me to her neighbor.  I now realize that my mother had been ashamed of me.