It seems crazy, looking back now . . . but at the time, I really did think that I might have found a genius solution to everyone’s problems.
The idea came to me in the middle of the night, as I tossed and turned and relived every second of those moments with Lilly in the birth suite earlier that day. I’d never seen someone suffer such anguish, both during the labour and after, and I was genuinely distraught for her . . . but the truth was, I was as unsettled about my own situation as I was about Lilly’s. For the first time in my life, I was living out of sync with my own values. I was learning the hard way that happiness is repelled by inner turmoil.
I eventually took to staring at the ceiling wondering how on earth we’d both get through this period in our lives, and then in a single heartbeat, all of the pieces of the puzzle shifted into place and I started to wonder if I couldn’t fix the entire mess in one fell swoop.
I knew that I desperately needed to find an out. Lilly desperately needed to find some more time, so that she and James could marry and set themselves up for parenthood. And Grae . . . well, Grae wanted me to consider adopting, and if that was all the leverage I had, then maybe I could work with it.
The lightbulb went on in my mind, and then all that was left to think about were the logistics. Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep, but I rose early and cooked Grae a full breakfast.
He was tucking into undercooked bacon and burnt eggs when I cleared my throat and threw my idea onto the table.
‘We could do a trial adoption.’
I saw his eyes light up a little, but he was wary.
‘Is that a thing? Why would we do that?’
‘Well . . . it’s not really done very often . . .’ The truth was, I’d made the phrase up on the fly. ‘. . . but there’s this baby at the hospital that we don’t have a home for, so she’ll be going to the orphanage. We could take her for a few weeks.’
‘Why can’t we just have her?’
I choked on my coffee.
‘Grae, I told you, I’m not sure that I’m ready to adopt yet.’ The coffee stung my sinuses and my eyes watered, which I knew Grae misinterpreted as tears. His expression softened, but his words were firm.
‘You’ve been telling me that for two years, Meg. We’re not getting any younger. You said this baby doesn’t have a home, why don’t we just adopt it?’
‘Well . . . eventually, I think her real parents will keep her. They’re a wonderful couple . . . they’re going to be terrific parents, but . . . they just need for us to buy them some time to get married and maybe to organise a few things before she comes home. We could really help them out if we brought the baby here for a while, and . . .’ This was the tricky bit. I shrugged and tried to appear thoughtful. ‘Who knows? I think it’d help me get used to the idea.’
‘What about your job?’
‘I’d have to resign, of course. A newborn needs a lot of care.’
‘But I thought you liked working?’
‘I did. But you know this new job has been a struggle.’
‘So you’d leave your job just to look after this baby for a few weeks?’
‘I’ll find something else, or maybe we’ll be ready to adopt our own by then.’ There was a natural lull in the conversation, and when I glanced at him, I could see that he wasn’t convinced. ‘Please, Grae. I really want to do this.’
‘Can you even do that – just take a baby home? On a whim?’
‘I can arrange it.’ At least, I was pretty sure that I could. ‘A few weeks won’t make any difference at all. We’ll just postpone registering the birth until her parents are ready to take her back. It will mean her official birthdate is out a little but given the alternative they won’t mind.’
Grae shrugged and went back to his breakfast, while I drank my coffee in silence, thinking about how perfect this solution would be for absolutely everyone. There were still some hurdles, but they were minor – maybe Lilly and James would have to apply to the court for a marriage licence because of her age, but I’d be very happy to do a reference for them, and maybe I could even convince the Captain at the Salvation Army citadel to do one too.
My problems, and Lilly’s, seemed so very serious that I forgot that there was a third set of issues in play here. It was only when Grae looked up at me a few minutes later that I thought again about his part in all of this. There was a strange mistiness to his eyes and an intensity in his expression that I wasn’t sure how to interpret. He reached across the table and took my hand into his and said softly,
‘Meg, everything in our life seems perfect to me . . . except . . . there’s this gaping hole in our family where our kids should be. If you think this really is a step towards a family of our own, then go ahead and do it. I was hoping when we took this job . . . I mean, I just kind of knew that if you worked with adoption for a while you’d come around.’
I wish he could have seen the anguish in Lilly’s face when the nurse walked out of the room with her baby, or some of the other residents I’d heard about – young women who needed to be sedated because they screamed for their children and disrupted the whole ward, or the miserable cases where a birth mother returned begging for her child, weeks after it was placed.
I wish he’d been in the room when I presented new adoptive parents with their baby son, only to hear the father panic about the hint of darkness in the child’s skin. I wish he’d heard the sad police chief on the other end of the phone, ringing as a courtesy to advise us that a child we placed for adoption last year had passed away in suspicious circumstances.
I’d seen delighted parents too, and children who would no doubt go on to gloriously successful and contented futures. But the truth about our service was that our adoptive parents generally had to pass only two tests before we placed a child: were they white, and were they married? If the answer to both questions happened to be yes, then they could pretty much take their pick.
If Grae thought my experiences at the maternity home had warmed me at all towards the idea of adoption, then he could not have been more wrong.
I didn’t say any of that to him, though. I might have, at an earlier point in our marriage, before the doctor told us in those careful tones that we would probably never have a baby, and that the problems were all mine.
I’d likely have argued with Grae about every step in our married life that year – about the arrogance of planning a move without my input, or the insensitivity of lining me up a job that would involve dealing with pregnancy all day, every damned day. I might have resigned without his blessing for the sake of my own sanity, instead of questioning myself again and again because I felt so sure that he somehow knew better.
But I did not argue with him, and I did not correct him. Instead, I reminded myself as I always did that I was lucky that he was bearing with me, in spite of my barrenness, in spite of all of the pain of our losses.
A lesser man would have walked out long ago.
So I smiled and squeezed his hand, and went about tidying the kitchen so that I could bring the new baby home to a clean house.