Where My Baby Came From-The Beginning

I love babies. Obsessively. I always have. I love their rolls of leg chub, their tiny chicklet toes at the end of smooth, kissable feet. I love the stage where their stubby fingers point at something and look at you expectantly, "Wha's dat?" I will answer the name of endless items--bird, tree, boy, cloud, car--and wait while they repeat the word in sweet babyese. I love the smell of newborn--a mixture of milk, fresh diaper, baby lotion, and sleep. I love the way babies fit in the crook of my arm. I love when they copy facial expressions. I love to hear them belly laugh.

Teaching is a fantastic career, but I know my favorite job ever was working at a day care center in the toddler room. Kids came to us as babies, little bundles of energy who were just beginning to get vertical. They'd toddle around, going from the leg of a highchair to the shelves, gripping tightly. Then, one day, they'd try it out, "Maybe I could let go and get over there quicker?" Their faces of glee when one step led to ten led to running everywhere. When they entered our room, they'd have very little speech, but enormous vocabularies. They'd know what we were saying, but not be able to vocalize it yet. It was almost like they were still in-utero when they'd come to our room, because they were just breaking their way OUT of the baby phase. So, we'd sing songs, go for walks, push them on the swings, read books, build with blocks, change about 68 diapers each day, and watch them turn into little human beings. When they left our room, they'd have begun to string words into short sentences. "What doin', Warwa?" a little girl named Haley asked me once when she arose from her nap, and that memory has framed all of day care for me. I knew she'd leave soon. The kids would gain an awareness of the bathroom and begin trying it out. They'd insist on feeding themselves, sometimes even wiping their own faces and hands. "My do it!" was very popular as a method of determining that someone was ready to move to the next room at day care. It was crushing to me, to see them travel up to the next room, move on without me, especially knowing they'd never remember me. I was in there--with my Winnie-the-Pooh march and my funny story voices--but they'd never recognize that piece of me inside themselves.

I had this job at 23, prime "I want a baby" age. My poor mother had tried for YEARS to have a baby, only to miscarry before we'd even be able to see the babies on an ultrasound. I had been consumed with baby envy since I'd been old enough to fake feed a doll (Rub-a-Dub dolly-age three), and my mother's barren plight had only fueled the fire. My mom and I were those ladies in the store that new mothers hate (I say "were," but it really should say ARE), We would come up to any baby and talk, wave, coo, play peek-a-boo. If mothers made eye contact with us, we'd ask, "How old?" "Are you getting any sleep?" "Looks like a keeper!" and other horrid phrases that I know new mothers dread. But we couldn't help ourselves (still can't). We wanted our own baby, and there was nothing we could do about it.

We "adopted" several families with babies. I babysat for a couple down the street, practically LIVED at the home of a family from our church when I was 14, latched onto a Michigan State Trooper in the grocery store parking lot when I found out her daughter was 18-months-old. I shared these babies with my mom, but they grew, and, really, they weren't ours. Again, they'd move on, and we wouldn't necessarily be there as they turned into leading characters in other people's lives.

So, as a new teacher, at 24, I was baby crazy. I admit it. A few of my friends started to have babies, and it made me nuts. Of course, they were married and ready and socially acceptable. So irritating. At the school, I'd make friends with all the moms lugging around baby carriers. I even baby sat for a friend's baby in the mornings the year I taught part-time in the afternoons. Once, as I was chatting up a baby in its carseat, making it giggle and kick those little legs, a fellow teacher said, "You know, you really should get one of those." I knew she was right. But, not really something I could pick up at the store. Or could I?

It was Labor Day weekend, the weekend before I began my third year teaching. I was four months away from turning 26. I had spent the whole summer thinking about first grade and how it would go, so I was more than ready for school to start. My parents were volunteering at a local homeless shelter, helping with dinner and night programs. Would I like to go? Honestly, I couldn't come up with an excuse, and so God drove me to the Nehemiah Project.

While we were dining, I met Lee. She was probably a year or two older than me, with two daughters under school age, and a belly brimming with baby. The whole evening, I played games with her daughters, combed their hair, read them stories... and stared at that belly. Every other occupant had constant advice for her, "The girls should be in bed by now." "They shouldn't be eating that." "My mother never would have let me do that." I was so impressed she didn't punch anyone in the face. As we left, Lee's girls gave me hugs and I tried to hug Lee with my eyes. I just felt so awful for her, stuck in this situation, wondered what she was possibly going to do.

"I feel so bad for Lee, Mom," I said in the car as I drove my mom back to her house. "Those two little girls, and now a baby coming! What is she going to do?"

"Oh, honey, she's giving that baby up for adoption." My mother's words slapped acoss the car, rolled my eyeballs back into my head.

"I would love to adopt that baby." I said the words before I thought them, even. But, once they were out, I knew I'd never said anything more true. I had a "dad" who wasn't my biological father, what did I care how a baby came into my life? I knew, I knew, I knew, I was ready to be a mother.

My mom patted my leg, "Oh, sweetie, that's nice," like I'd said I'd have her and dad over for dinner that night.

I stopped my car in her driveway. I looked at her with a burn behind my eyes. "No, Mom, I am completely serious. What would I need to do? Do you know? I always thought the hardest part of adoption would be finding the baby. I would love to adopt that baby!"

Mom tried to look away from my stare, but I wouldn't let her break eye contact. "Well, honey, I guess... I guess you should talk to Pastor Ward about that. It's just, honey, it's such a serious thing to say."

I didn't blink. I felt like my heart had woken up when she said the words, "She's giving that baby up for adoption." It all finally made sense in my head. Why I had been engaged, but never could go through with a marriage. Why my thousand first dates had rarely led to a second. Why buying my own home had been the first thing I did when I received my full-time teacher contract. It all led me to this moment, to this conversation, to adoption. It all made sense.

My mom hugged me, then got out of the car and went into her house. I'm fairly certain she thought that was the end of the conversation. That I'd go home, and realize that raising a child alone was nuts. That I'd look at the rooms of my house and think, "A baby? Here? That's crazy!" That I'd be too shy to call Pastor Ward and tell him of my insane scheme.

Instead, I went home and called my best friend. Thank God cordless phones were the new thing, or I'd have been tied up in my phone cord. I paced back and forth from my living room through my dining room into my kitchen and back. "Listen," I said, "What would you think if I said I was going to adopt a baby?"

"I'd say it's about damn time." Did I mention she was my best friend?

We talked and talked, and everything that made sense to me made sense to her. "It's a God thing," she said. "You know how I feel about God things." She had this theory that God would put things in your way when they weren't according to His will, and that He would slide things into place when they were according to His will. "You just gotta call that Pastor. I mean, jeez, it's a Pastor. How much more of a God-thing can you get?"

So, I did. Much to my mother's dismay, the very next day I called that Pastor. I told him about our conversation about Lee, and how the words, "I'd love to adopt that baby" had exploded from my mouth. I waited for him to say, "Oh, sweetie, you're too young for that!" or something similar. I waited for him to say something that would make me feel silly, immature, unrealistic. Instead, Pastor Ward carried on with "the God Thing."

"Well, Laura," he said, " I think we should proceed with this by assuming that God has called you adopt."

And, thus, my journey to adoption began.