Slide back, Dr. White instructed her. The exam-table paper crinkled beneath Lynette’s bare legs as she complied. Straightening goose-bumped arms, she raised her hips and nestled nervously onto a cool spot on the padded surface. Then the doctor placed his palm on her stomach and asked the question she came to answer.
Earlier that day in May 1969, Lynette called home from school to complain of a stomach ache and ask her mother to make a doctor’s appointment for her.
But her story was a ruse.
“So when was your last period?” the doctor asked knowingly.
Lynette paused before answering. From her position, she could not see her mother in the chair behind her, but she hoped to hear her stir or rustle — anything to indicate the doctor’s question had captured her attention. But there was no sound. Carol misses so much.
For the past eight months, Lynette had dined at her mother’s table, ridden in her car, passed her in the hallway. Not once did Carol notice the changes to her petite daughter’s body, budding beneath the fashionable but drapey empire dresses she wore almost exclusively these days.
“I don’t know. October? September?” Lynette finally sputtered.
Embarrassed to look the doctor in the eye, she fixed her gaze on the middle button of his lab coat, but Lynette could sense that his eyes had shifted to her mother. Perhaps he was scanning her face and wondering the same thing — how could she have not noticed?
When Lynette finally lifted her eyes to meet the doctor’s, he asked, “Do you know that you’re pregnant?”
The first tear trickled down her cheek.
“Yeah, I think that I knew that.”
Now, finally, her mother did, too.
I was in the room, as well, when the doctor broke this news. In fact, I caused the commotion. I was the baby in Lynette’s womb.
But I grew up knowing nothing of that awkward, awful afternoon, even though my parents never hid my adoption from me. To the contrary, in my earliest memory, my mother sits on the edge of my bed, crouching over me slightly, her dark-brown eyes glistening with the faint reflection of a bedside lamp. Her cool hand strokes my forehead, fingertips gently brushing my bangs. Linda Ivorene Wilson Kidd is about to recite the bedtime story she composed for me — the story she composed about me, actually. I liked it even more than the stories she read from my Winnie the Pooh book, and on nights when I was too rambunctious to fall asleep right away, I made her tell it to me twice:
Your dad and I love each other very much, and we have for as long as we can remember. In fact, we have so much love that we had to have a child to share it all with. So we prayed for a baby to love, too — a baby to make our family complete. We waited patiently for God to give us that child, but after many years, we still did not have one. That made us sad. But we just kept praying until, finally, we realized God wanted to give us a child who did not already have a mommy and daddy to take care of him. A nice lady at the adoption home helped us find a little boy with blond hair and blue eyes — just like Dad. That little boy was you, Mom would say, poking my belly for emphasis and piquing my attention for the story’s climax. When they put you in my lap, we knew right away that you were our son — the little boy we had wanted for so long. You make us so happy, and we love you all the more because you were selected, not expected.
Mom composed our adoption story to leave no doubt about the depth of my parents’ love for me. It could not have been stronger had she carried and birthed me herself. The story served her intended purpose. I was theirs, and they were mine.
So much so, in fact, that for most of my life, I had almost no curiosity about that girl on the exam table.
Mom’s story wasn’t the only reason for my lack of inquisitiveness. For starters, I have no memory of biological or foster parents. I was only 4 months old when Mom and Dad brought me to our home in Springfield, Ohio, on Oct. 24, 1969, two days before Mom turned 23. “Gotcha Day” became a warm-up for her birthday, an occasion the two of us quietly celebrated for the rest of her life.
Second, there was not much I could have known about my birth mother. Mom and Dad were told my biological parents were just 16 when I was conceived. Presumably, they lived about 45 minutes away in Columbus, where I was born, but Mom and Dad did not know their names. The only physical description of either provided by Clark County Child and Family Services was that my biological father had red hair, which likely explained my strawberry-blond mop.
Third, although it was clear from an early age I would never be as tall as my Dad — I’m sort of a pipsqueak of a fella, actually — we are both light-haired and blue-eyed. I looked enough like him that, when the subject arose, people were usually surprised to learn I was adopted.
But for the most part, the subject rarely came up at all, except at bedtime.
And once Mom stopped tucking me in, I could go from Gotcha Day to Gotcha Day without thinking much at all about the fact I am adopted. A biological mother? Yeah, I knew I had one. And I was thankful for her. However, she was a mere abstraction, existing only as I created her in my mind and only if I cared to create her.
And for the most part, I did not care to. I had doting parents, a happy, comfortable childhood, and no need for abstractions. Moreover, I lured myself into the comforting but annihilating fiction that what goes unseen does not matter.
Then Mom died.
Suddenly, an annihilating truth reminded me that someone I could not see still mattered to me very much.
I delivered Mom’s eulogy on a blistering July afternoon in 2017. I had struggled mightily to write it the day before. For hours, I sat utterly unable to articulate a “thank you” worthy of her, consumed by thoughts of standing drop-jawed and tongue-tied at the funeral home podium. I suppose that feeling is not unusual for a child attempting to eulogize a parent, but this struggle was particularly humbling for me. I’m a former journalist, you see. Deadline writing should have been no challenge, particularly since Mom’s health had been in decline for so long, particularly since we had already seen what her disease had done to others in my family.
Yet for hours, I could only stare at the blank screen and the mocking cursor. I had to cheat to cure the worst writer’s block of my life. I plagiarized Mom.
That bedtime adoption story was composed by a woman whose affection for friends and family knew no bottom and no shore. So I started Mom’s eulogy by reciting it for the mourners gathered at Powers Funeral Home in Lugoff, S.C.
I still remember clearly stepping onto the dais, pulling my notes from my jacket pocket, unfolding the pages, rubbing the crease flat with the edge of my hand. Looking up from the lectern to the crowd in front of me, I looked Dad squarely in the face.
That was an accident. And a mistake.
His grief-worn face nearly brought me to my knees. My throat and eyes brined like a rising tide. I closed my eyes briefly to remind myself of Mom’s composure 17 years earlier, when she so poignantly eulogized her own mother. I sucked the wave back into my gut, blinked until I could see again, then began to read.
No longer drowning, I began to float.
Heads nodded as I explained how I became the first of two fatherless boys Mom and Dad so lovingly raised. Bellies jiggled with soft laughter as I recounted the awkward genesis of my parents’ romance. Lips curled as I reminded them how Mom seemed to envelop everyone around her with love. Many of her neighbors, her co-workers — even her children’s playmates — became close as family to her. Writing the eulogy affirmed for me the profound fortune that made this woman my mother, and reciting it swelled my heart because the reaction told me those who knew her loved her for the same reasons.
I stepped down from the dais, confident she would have been as proud of me as I was of her the day she eulogized her mother. Yet, beneath my black jacket, my ribs tightened to constrain over-puffing pride. The sensation gave way to a gnawing sense of something left undone.
For the next several days, a line from the eulogy looped in my brain, as if I were not its author but merely the pupil of some inner voice determined to drill its lesson into me by rote. I realized that had some other boy been placed in Mom’s lap that October afternoon in 1969, “she would have loved him as much as she loved me.”
The line echoed again and again, sucking me into a parallel universe in which I am not rescued and Mom’s tale is woven for some other little boy. A universe in which some other 48-year-old man delivers her eulogy. A universe in which I might not exist at all.
I knew almost nothing at that point about that teenage girl on the exam table — the circumstances that brought her there, how her family handled her pregnancy, whether she ever had other children. I did not even know if she was still alive.
But I did know she was no mere abstraction. And I knew I had been equal parts selfish and foolish to think of her in that way.
That line from Mom’s eulogy screaming at me, I knew I had to find someone I never dreamed I would go looking for. Mom wasn’t the only woman I needed to thank.
But would that woman thank me for finding her? Well, that was another question altogether.
Jeff, this brought tears to my eyes