Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (19 page)

Being pregnant is like carrying the future inside you. This collection of cells spinning into life was not merely the tiny blurred body on the sonogram, it was all the things this baby might grow to be: the little blonde girl who looks like her sister; the toddler who stumbles forward on shaky legs; the kindergartener and the college student, the bride, the CEO. Imagination melds into reality the instant the pregnancy test reveals two pink lines. Suddenly, we were a two-child family underway. My husband and I bought a minivan and picked out a crib. We held hands and said prayers at dinner. Often our daughter would close her eyes and add softly, “Please let baby Hannah be safe.”

When the sonogram technician asked me, “How far along are
you?” I knew. It was the wrong question. A tear slid sideways down my cheek. My husband sat to the side smiling, unaware. Deep inside, I knew this child had left me.

I also know “sneaking in” and “leaving” are not the right words, but this was the language of the experience. I had the odd sense of my body being entered and abandoned. Not pregnant and miscarrying.

There were endless weeks of mistrustful hope. Then one night I awoke to a piercing pain in the small of my back. After a rush of minutes on the toilet, I spent long hours staring at the moonlit shadow of the window on the ceiling, feeling the echoes of emptiness.

Miscarriage is a tenuous sorrow. There is no child to hold. Yet the future is lost.

When, again on the couch, I told my daughter about our loss, she nodded gravely and slipped down to the floor to play. Nights later at the dinner table, she took her father’s hand and mine in hers, closed her eyes, and said, “Please let baby Hannah be safe.”

Oh no
, I thought.
She does not understand
. I would have to explain better. My husband and I held her hands tighter. I told her again, more precisely, our baby was gone.

“I know,” she said and smiled. “Baby Hannah flew off on vacation, like we do Mommy, and she’ll be back.”

Children know things. Or imagine them. Maybe both. Hormones and tears can skew a mother’s perspective. For whatever reason, I began to think my baby would be back. Though I did not think
this
baby could return, I felt determinedly certain a child would come to me.

More than a year later, I still was not pregnant. Every month I felt crushing disappointment. I tried to have a positive outlook.
Things
happen for a reason
, I told myself,
even if we can’t see the bigger picture
. I could see only the small, sad part that left me with the feeling something—someone—was missing.

One June day, in a cranky act of surrender, I stomped across the bedroom, and shouted up toward the ceiling: “I quit. If you’ve got a better idea, well I’m open.” It was the bratty, arm-crossed stance of frustration. I did not expect an answer.

An answer came.

In July, I got my period. Again. While seeking the consolation of real caffeine at the coffee shop, I bought a plain, ceramic mug. The mug came wrapped in tissue paper. Script scrawled across the tissue reminded me life is full of “Secrets and surprises” and promised “The unveiling of the unexpected.”

In early August, I had a thought:
I could adopt a baby from China
. An odd thought for several reasons. This was back in 2003. I knew nothing about adoption and had no connection to China. I knew no one who had done such a thing. I would not have known where to begin. The thought evaporated.

Two days later, I met a freckle-faced woman on the elementary school sidewalk. She was the proud mother of a new kindergartener. When I asked if this was her first child in school, she whipped out a photo. One child looked just like her, the other two girls looked Asian; as it turned out, they were Chinese.

“I may want to talk to you sometime.” I said only that. She looked me up and down, pulled a grocery receipt from her purse, and wrote the number of her adoption caseworker.

As I walked away, I knew. As sure as I knew one soul had left my body, another was on the way to my heart.

Why China? I had no idea.

Things happened quickly after that. My husband agreed effortlessly to the idea, as did our daughter, when I asked her that same night. “Mommy, yes!” she said. “Let’s go adopt baby Hannah from China.”

The mounds of paperwork required for an international adoption, the interviews, exams, and background checks rapidly ensued. Our dossier was completed within six months. The process was not without its crises of confidence. But each time I veered from the path, a whisper of coincidence would steer me back on course. I dreamed of this child on the other side of the skies waiting for me as I waited for her. I could not picture her, but could feel her like a phantom limb, a part of me, only lost. Six months after our paperwork landed in China, we were matched to a baby girl with deep, soulful eyes and big, adorable cheeks.

While awaiting our invitation to travel to China, my now six-year-old daughter and I went to the bookstore. Pouring through a stack of books, we made a list of baby names, starring our favorite one. As we walked to put the books back on the shelf, she smiled up at me and said, “Mommy, I think Baby Hannah is going to like her new name.”

I surrendered again, this time with joy. Though I insisted we change the spelling.
Hannah
went from “Grace of God” to
Hanna
, “Goddess of Life.”

On a warm October afternoon, nearly two and half years after my miscarriage, I met this baby we would name Hanna in a nondescript building in Nanchang, China. She sat on a polished, wooden bench
and stared up at me with those deep, brown eyes, her lips pursed. I stared back, whispering hello in a language she could not understand.

Though we were strangers, when I lifted her warm body into my arms, it felt like she belonged there. Like when I first held the daughter I birthed, yet different. This child did not come from me, but to me, borne on random chance.

I carried her out into the sunlight and onto the bus that would take her to her new life. She sat silent and still on my lap, grabbed onto my thumb, and held tight the whole ride.

In spite of those first quiet moments, this child and I did not take to each other right away. She cried for hours every night in China and during the first months home in America. When I tried to comfort her, she pulled back, pounding her face with her tiny fists. Any fantasy of belonging withered away. I worried if I had done the wrong thing for her, for us.