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It is usually in the sixth month that they start looking for you to match. Janice is sitting at her desk, me across from her, and I am sweating in my t-shirt. Her office is always hot, and even though I have already taken off my sweater, I am sweating rivers down my back and my breasts are sitting in puddles.
I can see the file, my file, sitting on her desk, and I can see the edges of the profiles she has collected for me. I’m so nervous and antsy that I can’t sit still. “Do you remember when you first came here and we had you fill out all that paperwork?” she asks, letting her hand rest on my file. I nod. “Do you remember filling out your Wish List?” I do, although I can’t for the life of me remember anything I wrote down on it. I nod again, just ready to move forward. She always talks too much, too long for me. I just want to get to the point, and she wants me to be patient. “Well,” she draws the words out, “I took the information you gave me in your Wish List, and I worked through all the many profiles that we have, finding the ones I think might suit your desires. I have three for you to look at today.”
Yes, yes, I know. Let’s move forward.
“Don’t feel that you have to make a choice out of these three. I have others I can share with you. We understand that sometimes what you want when you first come in may change.”
“Can I look?”
She takes her time opening my file and slides the three profiles across her desk to me, in a slow, almost sloth-like, motion that nearly makes me lose my mind. I snatch them and pull them to my chest. “I ask that you keep them in this room, but I will step out so you can have some privacy.”
She is almost at the door when I spin in my chair and stop her. “How did you choose?” I ask, thinking back to what Cici had said about choosing the family that she wished she had.
Janice’s eyes widen, and I realize that she is surprised. She had thought I forgot our conversation the night I got sick with the flu, and I had thought it was perhaps all a dream. “Well, things were different back then. I didn’t get to choose. Mine was a completely closed situation; the agency matched my child.”
“That sucks,” I say, thinking how angry I would be not to have a choice.
“It was okay. They chose well. She’s had a good life.”
“How do you know?”
She comes back around and sits in the chair next to me, her eyes going soft behind her frames. “When she turned twenty-one and her files were unsealed, she looked me up.” She says it quietly, sharing this small thing with me because sometimes I may remind her of the girl she used to be.
“Did you meet her?”
“I did. We had coffee one afternoon at Jasmine’s in St. Louis. We stay in touch.” There is pride in her admission.
“Did she understand?”
“Oh yeah. She understood pretty quickly when I told her I was just twelve.” She smiles.
“So you really stay in touch?” I ask, because I need to hear it, that there is a hope my daughter will someday find me, and we can build something then. Janice nods, seeing in me what she has seen in so many girls before me. “What does she call you?” It’s wrong, I know as soon as I’ve said it.
“She calls me Janice.” But she knows what I am thinking, what I am asking. “I’m not her mother. I gave birth to her, but I didn’t raise her. Her mother is her mother, I’m more like . . . an aunt.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Yes, and you need to be, too.” She pats my hand and rises to go.
I sit for a very long time after she is gone, the profiles still clutched to my chest. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of somebody else being my baby girl’s mother, but it’s true. I’ll give birth to her, but that’s where my job is going to end. A mother, the type of mother I want for her, is the woman who will sing her to sleep at night, who will kiss her boo-boos and tell her stories to make her smile. I could do all of those things if I had enough money to take care of her. Maybe someday I will be a good mother, but not for this baby. The best thing I can do is choose for her the parents I wish I had.
I lay the three booklets across Janice’s desk and stand up to look down at the three pictures there. Smiling happy people look back at me, but not too happy—they are all missing the family part of their family portraits. There is a couple with a son, maybe seven, and when I flip through, I find out that he is from a first marriage. I set them aside. I hadn’t thought about brothers or sisters. I want her family to be solid. I want them to be free of risk of divorce. One couple is fair haired and golden; he is an architect and she will be a stay-at-home mom. They have a lot of friends but no family nearby. So no grandparents, no cousins, no aunts and uncles. I set them aside. The last couple is a man and a woman posing with three dogs, in three different sizes: large, medium, and small. They caught the woman getting a lick from the Boxer, and her smile is wide and happy and unselfconscious. He is looking at her and her smile, and I open their booklet, settling back on the chair to read all about Tom and Meredith.
When I flip through their booklet, I see pictures with older but not elderly parents, and family pictures taken at Christmas with cousins and aunts and uncles. She’s an art teacher, and he is a college professor of English at ‘the local university.’ I realize that all the names of places have been left out and understand that since this adoption will technically be closed, they don’t want me showing up on their doorstep six years down the road. When I’ve gotten my life on track and I’m ready to be a mother, ready to take her back. The last section of their book talks about their vacations. Since they both teach, they take six weeks of summer to travel. They have a motor home, and they take all three dogs and travel the country.
I set them aside, Tom and Meredith, and take a last glance through the two I’ve already set aside. Then back to Tom and Meredith. It’s her face, smiling out from the cover, and his face glowing just by looking at her, and it’s the pink of the dog’s tongue licking Meredith’s hand that seals it. She isn’t going to be fussy and uptight; she doesn’t mind being licked by a dog. She teaches art, for heaven’s sake. If only she had red hair and green eyes, she may well be who I hope to be in ten years.