If You Could See Me Now. Michael Mewshaw

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СКАЧАТЬ five months the Children's Home Society notified them that it had a baby girl.

      "I remember they told us, 'The birth mother's a lovely woman.And this is a beautiful girl like her mother.' Of course, that didn't matter to me," Mrs.Woodson said."Just as long as she was healthy and I could have her, that's all I cared about."

      I interrupted to ask Mrs. Woodson if she recalled the offices of the Children's Home Society.

      "Yes indeed," she said. "We were there a couple of times during the application stage and a couple of more times to meet Amy. Then we came back to pick her up."

      "Could you describe the place?"

      "It was a big white wooden house. It had columns and a gravel driveway. I remember the sound of that gravel as we drove in, then walked across the parking lot."

      I remembered it too—the grinding sound of pebbles under tires, then under the feet of a couple walking toward the house.

      Mrs.Woodson went on to describe her first glimpse of Amy."They took us into an office.A plain room with a desk and a couple of chairs where George and I sat.They brought Amy in. She was six weeks old then and wearing the cutest little dress. A foster family had kept her temporarily, and they provided us with typewritten notes about Amy's sleeping habits and her eating schedule. It was all very clear and formalized at the CHS, and the foster family had had plenty of experience.

      "The first thing I noticed was that Amy had a rash on her chest. I thought I knew what to do for that. She had dark hair, plenty of it, and her eyes were already turning brown. I held her, then George held her, and she never cried.There were two or three people from the agency in the room, but I don't remember the face of anyone except Amy. I just remember thinking, I want to get some cream on that rash."

      I appreciated Mrs.Woodson's relish in recounting her memories of Amy. I understood how she felt. I found that I had surprisingly strong feelings about Amy myself and liked hearing about her early life.

      "The night before we picked her up," Mrs.Woodson said,"I couldn't sleep, I was so excited. The next morning, we crunched up that driveway to CHS, and this time they took us into a beautiful paneled room with a fireplace. I don't remember whether the fire was lit or not.That's how nervous I was.Amy was in a carved antique crib.We had been told to bring clothes for her.We had to undress her and redress her so that the clothes she was wearing could go to the next adopted baby.

      "On the ride home, we made a mistake. Jeff was with us, and he sat in the backseat. George drove and I sat up front holding Amy, and Jeff must have been feeling ignored. He said, 'I'm not sure we're doing the right thing, having a new baby.' I said,'Let's give it some time.'Then when we got home, I let him hold Amy, and after that everything was fine."

      Compared to the lengthy and expensive tribulation that adoption has become, this sounded blessedly short and cheap.As Ms.Woodson recalled, the total fee for Jeff 's adoption amounted to $900. For Amy it was $1,200. "We were very lucky," she acknowledged, "to adopt at a time when there were lots of babies, and we could afford it. Nowadays, it would have been a hardship on a couple with our income."

      The mention of money prompted a digression. Familiar with the "nonidentifying information" in the CHS file, Mrs.Woodson was sensitive to the economic and social disparity between her daughter's birth family and her adoptive family. In the majority of cases, especially these days, adopted kids come from low-income backgrounds or from deprived or even destitute foreign countries.Their adoption represents a step up, a promising new start. But Amy, whose birth parents were from wealthy families, had been raised by people of modest means until she was six.After that, her adoptive parents divorced, and she had grown up with a single mother who had to pinch pennies to provide for her two children.

      "I always felt women gave up kids for financial reasons," Mrs.Woodson said. "They couldn't afford to bring them up alone. But to realize that with Amy's mom there was no good reason to put her up for adoption, that surprised me."

      I pointed out that Amy's birth mother had been under family and social pressures, but Mrs. Woodson insisted, "That's not what I call a good reason.This woman needed therapy. Her image was too important to her."

      I urged her to tell me more about what Amy had been like as a child.

      "Oh, she was a joy to raise," Mrs.Woodson said,"and such a beautiful girl. Even when she was five or six, people stopped and stared at her. When she was still in a stroller, people absolutely fawned over her."

      Mrs.Woodson laughed and admitted that while the adoption agency made every effort to match children with parents similar to them, they couldn't control chromosomes. "Amy doesn't look anything like me. I'm small-boned, petite, about 5'4", and I guess you'd say I'm zaftig. Beside me Amy always felt like a giant, but she was just tall and looked like a model.

      "Even as a little girl, she was always interested in clothes. It must have been something inborn. She certainly didn't get it from me."

      Mrs. Woodson recalled that Amy's adoptive grandmother had made her a dress for her second birthday. It was of green velvet, a color suitable for the Christmas season, and it had a white fur collar and a picture of a cat stitched on the pocket. Amy loved the outfit. But as a surprise her grandmother had also made a doll with brown hair like Amy's and a replica of the green velvet dress, accurate right down to the fur collar and the cat on the pocket. She presented it in a shoe box, and the instant Amy lifted the lid, she burst into tears and threw it on the floor.

      It amused Mrs. Woodson to think that Amy had reacted like a clothes-conscious woman who gets jealous when someone shows up in the same dress. But it seemed to me more likely that it had scared Amy to see a miniature of herself in a box.

      As Mrs.Woodson described Amy's adolescence, she emphasized her down-to-earth qualities. "She always had a lot of common sense. She was a decent student. Mostly Bs, some Cs. She wasn't really interested in going off to college, and I couldn't have afforded to pay for it. Her father didn't help much financially, and he didn't feel girls needed college. She did a couple of semesters at Pasadena Community College and worked at night at Monahan's Pub.That was a big pickup place in town, and at eighteen Amy wasn't even old enough to serve drinks. But she handled it well and was very level-headed."

      It struck me that, except for her level-headedness and her lackadaisical attitude toward school, Amy's childhood resembled mine far more than it did her birth mother's. Divorced parents, money trouble, parttime jobs and lingering confusion about personal identity.

      According to her adoptive mother, Amy became interested in her birth parents, particularly her biological mother, as she advanced into her teens."'I just want to know what she looks like,' " Mrs.Woodson recalled her saying."I told her that was normal and that I would have felt the same. Many adoptive parents feel threatened when their kids start searching for their roots. I didn't."

      Mrs. Woodson encouraged both of her children to feel free to express curiosity about their birth parents. The three of them joined the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association and once went to an ALMA national convention in Las Vegas where a parent and child who had been reunited spoke of their positive experience. From local ALMA meetings, however, they gained a more realistic perspective and realized that, as Mrs.Woodson put it, "not all stories turn out prettily. But most are happy, and the birth parents say they always wondered and worried what happened to their children."

      Whether reunions went poorly or well, Mrs. Woodson held the belief that adopted children have a basic right to know their origins. "The idea that third parties—doctors, lawyers, birth parents, adoption agencies—can contract away that right is appalling to me."

      Still, as had been her abiding СКАЧАТЬ