Why did I tell the adoption worker I didn’t want to know anything about my baby? I was eighteen, I signed the papers, and I said it plainly. I know how that sounds. I’m not writing this to make myself look better, though there is a reason I said it, and it took me forty-five years to hear that reason out loud.
I was eighteen in 1978, living with my mother, Darlene, in a rented duplex outside Knoxville. I had a job at a diner and another folding towels at a laundry.
My boyfriend was gone before I knew I was pregnant. I don’t say that to make him the bad one. He was a kid too, and I let him leave because I didn’t know how to ask him to stay.
My mother said adoption was the only decent choice. She said it at the kitchen table, with a grocery list beside her and a pencil tucked behind her ear. I was eating toast because everything else made me sick. “You can’t raise a baby on two shifts,” she said. She wasn’t wrong about the money.
The hospital charged $3,175. I remember that number because I kept the bill folded in my purse and looked at it on the bus. I paid it a little at a time from both jobs. One shift, then another. I knew the amount I owed better than I knew what I was going to do with the baby.
I was tired, scared, and stubborn in the way people get when they don’t have a plan. I told myself I was being practical. I told myself the couple from Ohio had a house and wanted a baby, and I had a mother who couldn’t look at me without making that little tight line with her mouth. All of that was true. It still wasn’t the whole truth.
At the hospital, a nurse asked what to put on the baby’s card. I remember the damp paper under my wrist and the smell of the soap they used, which had a sharp lemon smell that stuck to my fingers. I wrote something in blue ink. I’ve spent a long time acting like I don’t remember what.
My mother came with me when I met the couple. They were kind. I remember the woman had a soft voice and kept smoothing the blanket even though it was already smooth.
The man asked if I wanted to hold the baby one more time before they left. I said yes, then got mad at myself for saying yes.
I didn’t know how to hold her without looking at the clock. That’s the part I hate saying. I kept thinking about the bus schedule and my shift at the laundry. I had to be there by six. The baby’s cheek was warm against my wrist, and I could see a tiny line of milk on her lip.
The photographer came through the maternity ward that day. I don’t remember asking for a picture, but the midwife later told me I had. I do remember the camera flash, and the way I kept my chin down because my face was wet. The couple left with the baby before I saw a print.
The adoption worker asked whether I wanted to receive letters or updates. My mother was sitting close enough for our shoulders to touch. I could feel her watching me, even though she had her eyes on the paperwork. I said I wanted no contact. I made that decision. Nobody moved my hand for me.
My mother let out a breath when I said it. Maybe she was relieved. Maybe she thought I’d finally stopped making things harder. I watched the worker write it down and didn’t ask her to stop. I didn’t even ask if I could change my mind later.
That was the first part I hid from myself. I called the choice forced, because that sounded cleaner than admitting I’d helped make it. I was eighteen and under pressure, yes. I also wanted my mother to keep loving me. I thought if I showed her I could be sensible, I might get that look off her face.
The next years weren’t dramatic. I worked. I moved to an apartment. I paid bills. I learned to keep my head down when people at work talked about babies. If somebody asked whether I had children, I said no. Not, “I had a baby.” No.
My mother and I didn’t talk about the adoption. She didn’t bring it up, and I didn’t make her. For a while, that felt like mercy. Later, I could see it was a kind of deal we had both made. She got to believe she’d saved me from a hard life. I got to pretend I hadn’t made a choice that stayed with me.
I never went looking for my daughter. That’s another fact I can’t soften. I asked once, in my thirties, how the records worked. The person I spoke to explained the rules. I didn’t fill out the forms. I told myself I wouldn’t want to disrupt a family. That sounded thoughtful. It was also a good way to avoid being told no.
When my mother got older, I helped her with groceries and rides to her doctor. We were close in the ordinary ways. I knew how she liked her coffee. She knew I hated being told what to do, even though she had told me what to do most of my life. I sometimes wondered if she remembered the baby as clearly as I did.
I asked her once, after she’d had a small stroke and was home again. We were sitting at her kitchen table. I said, “Did you ever wonder about the baby?” She stared at the grocery list in front of her and said, “We did what we had to do.” It wasn’t an answer, and I let it pass.
She died in 2009. I kept the blue plastic recipe box from her kitchen and got rid of most of the rest. I didn’t find any adoption papers or baby pictures among her things. I was relieved, then ashamed of being relieved. That was how I handled a lot of it.
I’m sixty-three now. I live alone in a second-floor apartment and work a few mornings a week at a pharmacy counter. My life is not sad. It’s just a life. I have a sister who calls on Sundays, a neighbor who asks me to bring her mail upstairs, and a bathroom drawer full of old receipts I’ll probably never sort.
Last fall, a large envelope arrived from a portrait studio that had been closed for years. The return address was written by hand. I recognized the studio’s name because it was printed on the back of school pictures all through the seventies. I stood by my front door with my work bag still on my shoulder and opened it with my house key.
Inside was half of a black-and-white photograph. It showed a newborn wrapped in a blanket. The picture was torn down the middle, right through the edge of the baby’s shoulder. My hand started shaking, so I put the photo flat on the counter.
There was a note with it, written in small, neat letters. The midwife had kept the picture. She wrote, “I kept this because you were crying.” I read that sentence more times than it needed. Then I touched the torn edge with one finger and set it back in the envelope.
I didn’t sleep much that night. I kept thinking the studio had found my address through some old record, but that didn’t explain the note. I thought about calling the number on the envelope, but I didn’t. I told myself I would do it in the morning, which is the kind of thing I say when I’m hoping the problem will be smaller by morning.
At 8:12 the next day, somebody knocked. I opened the door with the envelope in my hand. A woman about my daughter’s age stood in the hall, holding the other half of the photograph.
She had my narrow chin. I knew that before I knew what I was looking at. Then she tapped two fingers against the envelope, once, twice, the way I tap on a table when I’m waiting for someone to finish talking.
I didn’t invite her in right away. I hate that. I stood in the doorway, holding the envelope like it was something I could use to keep the hall between us. She looked at my face and then at the picture.
“I’m Bethany,” she said. “I’m not here for money.”
I moved aside. She came in, sat at the little table by the window, and put her half of the picture down. I got water from the tap and brought it over. Neither of us drank any.
The first thing I wanted was to ask how she found me. The second was to ask whether her parents were alive. I asked the first. She said the midwife had contacted her years ago, before she died, and left her a letter with the photo half. The studio owner had found my half in a file and mailed it after closing the place.
I don’t know why that took so long. Bethany didn’t know either. She said her adoptive parents had kept her photograph in a drawer, and she hadn’t seen it until after her mother died. Her father had died earlier. She had waited a few years before calling the number the midwife had left.
I didn’t ask what made her wait. I was glad she did. I was also hurt that she had known about me for years and still had a life where I didn’t exist. It was selfish to feel hurt. I felt it anyway.
Bethany said the midwife had told her I was eighteen and that I’d asked for a photograph. She’d also told her I’d been crying when the baby left. I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to tell her I’d been crying about everything, not just her. But that sounded like an excuse, so I kept my mouth shut.
Then Bethany said she wanted to know if I’d ever tried to find her. I looked at the water glass and saw a little bubble stuck to the side. I told her I had asked about the process once. I told her I didn’t fill out the papers.
She didn’t raise her voice. That almost made it worse. She said she had spent years thinking I’d made a clean choice and never looked back. I wanted to say that wasn’t what happened. But a person can never look back and still think about the same thing every day. I didn’t know how to explain that without making it sound like I deserved credit.
“I told the worker I wanted no contact,” I said. “I’m sorry I did that.”
That was as close as I got to an apology. I could hear how small it was. Bethany nodded once, but she didn’t say it was okay. She said she didn’t come to punish me. She also didn’t come to make me feel better.
I asked about the couple who raised her. She told me their names and said they’d been good parents. She sounded careful when she said it, as if she was watching for me to take it personally. I didn’t. I was grateful they’d been there, and jealous that they got to be there. Both things were true.
She told me she had children of her own. Two. They knew she was meeting me, but they didn’t know the details. She said she wanted to take things slowly and didn’t want me telling anyone in my family before she decided what she wanted. I said I could do that.
Then she asked if I had ever wanted to keep her. It was the question I had feared since the envelope arrived. I looked at the torn photo, then at her hands. Her nails were short. There was a little blue ink mark along the side of her thumb.
I said, “Yes. I did.”
Then I told her the part I’d spent years leaving out. I said I had also been scared, and I had wanted my mother to approve of me, and I had wanted the couple to take her. I wanted the hospital bill to stop being a number I couldn’t pay. I wanted the whole thing to be over. None of those things cancels out the yes.
Bethany asked why I had told the worker I didn’t want to hear about her. I said I thought I could make the pain easier by making the door shut on both sides. I said I was wrong. She said she’d heard that before, though not from me. I couldn’t tell whether that was meant to comfort me, and it didn’t.
She took a breath and looked at me. “Please don’t tell people you had no choice,” she said. “I need you to know you had one.”
I wanted to argue that it hadn’t felt like a real choice. I wanted to tell her what it was like to be eighteen in my mother’s kitchen, with no money and a boyfriend gone. I could hear all the facts lining up in my head. They were facts. They weren’t an answer to what she had said.
So I said, “All right.”
We sat for a while without talking. She didn’t ask to see my home or look at old pictures. I didn’t ask to meet her children. I wanted the day to keep going, and I also wanted her to leave before I said something selfish.
At the door, she told me she wasn’t ready to call me her mother. I told her she didn’t have to. She said she might call again after she had time to think. I said I’d answer if she did. That was all we promised each other.
She left with her half of the photograph. I stayed at the table with mine. For a minute, I thought about putting it back in the envelope and hiding it in the drawer with my old receipts. I didn’t.
I turned the photograph over. On the back, in faded blue ink, was the name I’d written on the baby’s card at the hospital.
Bethany.
