by Sarah Horner
I was late, maybe a week, no big deal. Taking the pregnancy test was a fluke. A friend had a test left over from a package of two.
“It’s two lines,” I called to my friend in the other room. “What does that mean?”
“No, it’s not,” I remember her saying. “It’s not. It’s not. It can’t be.”
Her tone said it all. I looked again. There they were — two tiny, soft pink lines that would change my life. I was pregnant.
I was 17 years old. I attended Catholic school. My parents were strict and disapproved of the troubled boy who was now the father of my child.
My initial thought was to make the pregnancy go away. For the first time in my life, abortion seemed like the right choice.
My friend and I did some research. If I wanted an abortion, she would help me schedule the procedure and hide it afterward. I thought I had made my decision, but she advised to let time guide me.
The next day I walked around like a zombie. Signs started screaming at me through the static. I saw a pro-life billboard and heard someone excitedly talking about her sister’s new baby. I saw mothers walking kids in strollers. Everything around me was speaking, tugging.
That night I was lying sleepless in bed when my brother popped his head in to say goodnight. It was late and he wasn’t living at home at the time. I heard myself telling him we needed to talk. Then he just knew.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked.
The story started spilling out. Although he promised not to say anything, he leaked a hint into a conversation with my father. Then my dad knew, and soon my mom.
When my brother told me he had shared my secret with the two people that I most wanted to hide it from, I panicked and left. I sat for hours crying and thinking, less about the baby growing inside me than about the shame and anger my parents must surely feel toward me.
When I got home, I knew I had to face them. I went to my parents’ bedroom. When my mom saw me, she got up and came toward me. Instead of yelling, she reached out her arms to hold me. Then we cried.
In that moment I knew I would have my baby, but not forever. I would give him up for adoption.
The support from my family, particularly my mother, gave me the freedom to own my decision. They never judged me, never pushed me, and never doubted me. They are largely the reason I can look back on my story with pride.
The decision wasn’t easy. I was just beginning my senior year. I wanted to go to college, to travel, to stay out late at concerts. I was caught in an extremely unhealthy relationship with a boy anything but ready for fatherhood. Our relationship needed to end, and I knew that raising our baby would tie our lives forever.
But it would be dishonest to say it would have been impossible to keep my baby. My family would have helped me figure out a way. I didn’t want to.
My mom put me in touch with an adoption agency about a month into my pregnancy, and I began to pursue the path of choosing parents. I flipped through profile books of parents and had to decide from one-page descriptions if these people were right to guide my child through life.
I looked at my own life and pulled what I valued into the decision. I wanted my child to grow up in a home with siblings. I wanted a couple that chose to have one parent stay at home. I wanted spiritual people that valued nature, reading, art, and family. I also wanted the parents to be financially comfortable, so they could give my child opportunities I couldn’t.
When I first found out I was having a little boy, the reality of my decision and deep sadness started to set in. I was no longer giving away a stranger. I was giving up my baby boy.
I started talking to him, reassuring my little someone that it was not lack of love but deep love behind my decision to let him go. Maybe our one-sided conversations were more for me than him.
I chose the moon as our bridge and spent night after night sitting beneath it, telling my baby that we would always share the same sky and moon. I cried and cried, holding him in my belly. When I wasn’t crying, I sang.
I also prayed. I asked a God I had long been out of touch with to give me strength of mind and heart.
Slowly I started to narrow the list of potential parents. My boyfriend and I began interviewing couples. He pored over lists of names for our child until he chose the name Michael, followed by his own name.
When we chose the couple and told them the name we chose, careful to explain they did not need to honor our choice, they surprised us by saying they had also selected a name — the same name.
The adoption was open. My boyfriend and I would receive pictures and letters every other month. As we worked out details, my sadness grew, but I had the happy faces of my baby’s new parents to weigh against my pain.
My mom gave me a quote by Kahlil Gibran. “Your children are not your children, they are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you, but they are not from you. Though they are with you, they belong not to you.”
That message carried me through many doubting hours. I was bringing my child into the world, and I could give him that. The rest the world would determine.
As the end of my pregnancy inched closer, so did my fear. I knew my choice was right, but I was scared that when they put my little baby on my stomach after he was born, I would never be able to let him go.
I went into labor early in the morning as my sister was saying goodbye before school. I ignored the pains at first, but when they grew in intensity and frequency, I knew it was happening.
I waited at home for my dad to pick up my boyfriend. He was already crying when he arrived at my house and didn’t stop through the entire delivery. By the time we got to the hospital I was seven centimeters dilated. My mom, boyfriend, and midwife surrounded me in my hospital bed.
The birth went quickly. I could have been lying in the middle of a stampede and wouldn’t have known the difference. I went inside myself and my body took over.
At 1:30 p.m., they placed Michael on my stomach. I remember every tiny thing about him. His tiny fingers, his pink feet, the precious way he sounded when he yawned, the way his little body felt in my arms, the way his skin tasted. I wanted to show him to the world. I was so proud.
When our last day in the hospital arrived, my boyfriend locked himself in the bathroom and played “Let it Be” by the Beatles for hours. I sat with my little baby on the corner of the hospital bed and cried. My body folded around him as if I were trying to draw him back inside me.
Our families and the adoptive couple had a farewell ceremony in the hospital chapel. We played the song “On Children,” the quotation from Kahlil Gibran. We read blessings we had written for Michael and his new parents. My sister sang a song.
We closed with a ritual. As a song played, my boyfriend and I stepped to the front of the room, holding Michael. Our family members came up one by one and kissed us, then said goodbye to our little boy. Then we placed Michael in the arms of his new parents, said our own goodbyes, and left.
Doubts from my decision did not follow me out the hospital door that day, only sadness. Every part of me ached for my son. I remember desperately wanting to kiss him again.
I started college three months later. I didn’t feel ready when I packed my bags, but the transition offered a needed distraction from my pain.
I saw Michael nearly a year later. I drove to meet him, his parents and his older sister at a restaurant. I was terrified. Seeing this little boy so connected to my soul was difficult, knowing he would not remember my face. His smiles overruled my anguish. He was happy. I knew what I needed to know. I drove home in peace.
Even if I never meet my son again, we will always be connected. We still share the same moon.