Waiting To Be Born
Part One
Let’s say that my own darkness before
dawn begins at a specific time and place. Winter, 2001. I’ve
been living for almost five months in a one-room upstairs
apartment at a small Southern college where I’m writer-in-residence.
It’s that time of year that feels like limbo to me—the
holidays, families in different states, Santa Clauses in every
department store window, and it isn’t even mid-November
yet. This particular pre-holiday season, John, my then fiancée,
lives in Virginia while I’m in Georgia. I have two small
dogs, but even they keep looking expectantly toward the door
every time it knocks as if SOMETHING is getting ready to happen,
though none of the three of us know what exactly.
The truth is, I’m not actually LIVING in the one-room
apartment. What I feel like I’m doing is hiding out.
I came to the writer-in-residence job under the supposition
that I’d be promoting, both for the college and for
myself, a book, a memoir about adoption. The college has even
put the information about my forthcoming book on all their
websites, so when I’m asked about the book I hem and
haw. The memoir, then called Mother of the Disappeared, has
been finished for almost a year but has been delayed in its
publication by a small Southern press beset, like the rest
of the nation, by economic fallout from the terrorist attacks
of September 11th.
I received my first notification of the publication delay
at the end of spring, 2005, a full summer before my move to
the writer-in-residence job. By then it’s too late.
I’m committed. I’ve taken leave from my regular
teaching job and they’ve hired a replacement. What I
feel like I’ve done, by the time I’ve packed my
car full of belongings and headed south during late August,
is take leave of my senses. Leave a full-time job for a one-year
job, all hopes hinging on a new book coming out? What have
I done? It’s been way to late for months to write the
school and say, well, I might not be coming there with a book
after all.
Instead, once I’ve arrived at the new school, I write
the publisher. I write the publisher daily. In the initial
notification, the delay was to have been a few months. Ensuing
e-mails promise a book by no later than mid-winter. Then by
no later than early spring. Lately, since winter has set in
the one-room-apartment, I get fewer and fewer responses at
all from the publisher about when, exactly, the book will
be forthcoming. The small southern college has already planned
a late spring reception in a garden and a book signing. They’ve
planned notices in papers, invitations, advance orders. At
night I’ve begun to have dreams about large, garden
weddings where I arrive, walk down an aisle, a stark-naked
bride-to-be.
In my waking hours, I don’t know what to tell anyone
about dates for my book. I’ve begun to whine when I
tell select people about what I mysteriously refer to as “publisher
problems,” which sounds a little bit like a phrase I
detest: “female problems.” In fact, my body itself
has begun to respond to stress. Before I know it, I’ve
gained ten, then twenty pounds after weeks of sitting by the
computer screen, struggling with a new book and consuming
butter mints by the pound. More bad news filters in. When
I try to order copies of my FIRST book, a novel, for a public
reading, I discover that the publisher failed to tell me they’d
taken that book out of print almost three months earlier.
I refer the people who want to know about the novel to good
sources for rare and out of print books. I call lawyers I
can’t afford. I sign up with the Author’s Guild,
which promises free legal advice.
I’ve begun to obsess over the similarities—waiting
for a book and waiting, almost thirty years after his birth,
to see my own son’s face. The subject of my memoir is
my life as a birth mother—the relinquishment of a child
to a state supported adoption almost thirty years ago. When,
I begin to ask myself, will there be a happy ending—unknown
child and uncertain future of my book blur and bend in my
consciousness. The similarities, as I think about them more
and more in my one-room apartment days, are almost unbearable.
I relinquished a child and all state records are sealed. I
signed a book contract, and no lawyer can assist me in breaking
that contract, in getting my book back. In one conversation
with said publisher, when I ask about the status of “my”
book, I’m told it isn’t, after all, my book. It’s
theirs, their baby. I hang up the phone, sit staring, unable
to believe the irony of what has just been said.
I bite my nails and eat more butter mints. I stare at my computer
screen and try to summon new words. Come spring, I remind
myself, there’ll be love and a book and all good things
I can see and touch, but right now everything feels like it’s
waiting to be born.
Part Two
Then, come December 2001, the creator picks me up by the collar
and shakes me. Hard. One cold morning that month I went to
check my e-mail and found this message:
Dr. McElmurray:
I stumbled upon a web page looking for a book for a Christmas
gift. At the bottom of one of the pages I saw your picture
and I was stunned. The resemblance to someone I know very
well is shocking. I then continued to read that you had a
son that you gave up for adoption in 1973 and that you were
from Kentucky. My fiancée, Andrew, was born in 1973
somewhere in Kentucky and adopted. I have his permission to
write you…he is a little nervous to do so himself. He
is, however, very interested in finding his birth mother.
Have you already found your son?
Sincerely,
Jennifer Williams
The truth is that in those weeks and months of worrying and
waiting for a book about my son to finally be published, I’d
never dreamed that something even more amazing would happen—the
actual reappearance of that son. We met for the first time
in February of 2002, when he and Jennifer Williams came to
spend the night with me in my apartment. For that one night,
what is born is a real young man and not a book—a young
man who walks like me, hold his hands in a particular fashion,
even dreams, as I do, about vulnerability. Come the end of
March, I’ve visited him and I’ve met and am my
way to becoming good friends with his adoptive mother, Betty.
Altogether, my karma seems to be shifting, because by that
late spring, I’ve accomplished what had begun to seem
impossible in my publishing life, as well. I have come to
the end of my two year and six months contract on the memoir
and, with the assistance of an Author’s Guild attorney,
have sent the necessary documents to reclaim my book. Agents,
other publisher, other contracts, avenues and possibilities
seem to be presenting themselves. Everything is in place.
Not quite.
By early summer I’ve begun to realize the limitations
of a relationship with a child I’ve never known, especially
with a child who is now thirty years old, with myself a mere
fifteen years older than him. What are we to one another?
Mother and son? Brother and sister? Not-quite friends? I write
him desperate letters. I e-mail him daily, and I wait by the
phone when he doesn’t call me back right away. We talk,
with long silences and a hundred questions between us, most
of them unsaid. When I show him a draft of the memoir, he
doesn’t respond, at all. When I break down and ask him
what he thought, he says, “It was okay” and I
cringe, dissecting that word in my head. Okay? Okay?
By mid-summer my memoir, has found a home at last, but by
that time, all of it is nearly irrelevant. I’ve lost
the twenty pounds I gained when publication was stalled, but
now I sip white wine and obsess in new ways. I’m the
possessor of a published book, a memoir about a relinquished
child, but I’m no possessor of the child himself. There
is no child and I, in fact, am no mother, at least not the
one I have imagined myself as for years. I sip wine and turn
words over and over on my tongue. Possess. Have. Own. Take
back.
Part Three
Behind all of my obsessions about my book, my sugar-induced
weight gain, and my feelings of victim hood at the hands of
my then-publisher are some real truths, one that I knew in
those days of in-between in that apartment, ones that I remind
myself of now, after those days are past. Writing, the real
writing, has nothing to do with who publishes what or when
or how. In my writing classes these days, I try to spend a
third of each seminar discussing not just craft, not just
the in’s and out’s of how one might publish here
or there, how one gets and agent, finds a publisher, signs
a contract. I try to discuss the word, and I mean The Word,
in all capital letters. A gift, sacred and earned in a variety
of ways we, in this very difficult “business of writing,”
can neglect. Most days, what I have is a question: how to
hold any truth at all near and dear, next to my heart?
