Courage for a Child

            By then my birthfather was gone—killed in a motorcycle accident. She offered to contact his family, to put me in touch. Turned out, they’d long moved, forwarding service expired, but their old postman was subbing the day her letter arrived. He sent it through to Vermont.

            We’ve come together to reach out to our dead. My birthfather’s sisters see their brother in my daughter’s eyes; they find family traits in our story telling and in our chess strategies. And Val has become a grandmother to my girls that my mother never could be. She’s come for first communions, for dance recitals, she’s enjoyed art fairs and horse lessons. I think her favorite, though, has been sharing peanut butter sandwiches with my girls, their dolls pulled up to the table. We are close now, closer than I ever thought I’d want. When she first called me, I did, after all, already have a mother.

            Thirteen years later, and Val finally admitted the worst. “It’s just not right for a mother to give up her child. What mother would do that?”

            What mother indeed.

            The courage it took for a nineteen year old to walk into an ER by herself, to go through labor with no one by her side but a nurse who told her she had “done this to herself.” To give a part of herself to a stranger and receive nothing in return but the hope of a better life for the being she had brought into the world.

            I’m not sure she knew all what she was handing over when she did it. She’d been told by her parents it was the right thing to do. She knew if she’d ask, my birthfather would marry her. She knew if she’d ask, he would help pay. But she didn’t press him. Maybe that made it easier to let me go, too.

            Life is hardly a zero sum game, where what you do is equally good or bad for the other. Val had the courage to let me go, to give me the life she wished she could give me. And in so doing, she was left with years of grieving a child she could not hold. Even her own mother told her I was not hers to love.

I try to tell her I am glad for what she did. She’s not so sure it was the right choice now, not by a long shot. But there’s good reason Maslow put selflessness at the pinnacle of his hierarchy. Agape, we call it. Self sacrifice, for the betterment of others.

God help me, I hope that’s in my genes.  At the very least, it’s my inspiration.