Dear X,
Today Melly has us writing letters to our babies.
I’m not keeping you, so this felt like cruel and unusual punishment. There are fifty girls at this school, and only a few of us are choosing adoption, and most of those are open adoptions, where everyone knows each other’s names and you send emails back and forth to the new parents and get pictures and an update every month or something. But I’m not doing that, either.
So I said I’d like to opt out of this assignment.
Melly said fine, I could opt out if I wanted to, but then she said that there’s a program where you write a letter to your baby, which they can request when they turn eighteen. So if there’s something you want to say that can’t be done by checking a box or writing down your blood type, here’s your chance.
“You can write whatever you want,” Melly said. “Anything.”
“But it’s optional, right?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Which means I don’t have to do it.”
“Okay,” Melly said. “You just sit here and chill.”
Then she passed around some yellow notepads, like legal ones (which seems kind of old school if you ask me) and she gave one to me, too. “Just in case,” she said. Sneaky Melly.
The other girls started scribbling away. Apparently they all have important things to tell their babies.
Not me. No offense, but I don’t even know you that well.
To me, you’re still sort of intangible. I know you’re in there, but you’re not obvious yet.
You’re tight pants.
You’re heartburn.
You’re the space alien slowly taking over my body.
You’re X.
I can’t imagine you as an actual baby, let alone an eighteen-year-old person reading this letter. I’m not even eighteen yet myself.
So what could I possibly have to say to you? I don’t have any great wisdom to pass along that couldn’t be summed up by the words use birth control, girls. But that’s complicated, because if I’d done that, you wouldn’t exist. I’m sure you prefer existing.
Some things are better left unsaid, was my thinking. So I sat there, chilling. Not writing a letter.
But obviously I changed my mind.
I started to consider you, I guess. If I were an adopted kid, I’d want there to be a letter for me. Because I’d want to find out the things that aren’t in the paperwork. I’d be curious. I’d want to know.
So . . . hi. I’m your birth mother, aka the person who lugged you around inside of me for nine months.
I have blue eyes and brown hair and I’m a Libra, if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in signs. There’s not much more to tell about me, I’m afraid. I’m solidly average—sorry, I wish I could report that I’m a genius or gorgeous or spectacularly gifted at the piano or chess. But I’m just typical. My grades aren’t fantastic. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m not a cheerleader. I don’t do sports.
I am into music. I collect old vinyl records. I go to concerts, music festivals, that kind of thing. I follow some of the local bands.
Right now I’m living at Booth Memorial, a place where pregnant teens go to finish high school. It’s a school, but it’s also a group home—like in those days when girls used to disappear for months and their parents would tell everybody they were “visiting an aunt.” Most of the homes for unwed mothers around the country have closed, since having a baby out of wedlock isn’t the super shocking thing it used to be. This place is mainly a school now. A few of us live here, but the majority of the students live at home, and, like I said, they’re keeping their babies. There’s a daycare on campus where they can bring them after they give birth.
I guess you must be wondering why I’m not keeping you. The simplest answer is this: I’m not cut out to be a mother.
Not that I’m a terrible person. But I’m sixteen years old. I don’t think anybody is exactly qualified to be a mother at sixteen. I’m trying not to be judgmental, but the girls around here, the ones who are keeping their babies and who look at me like I’m some kind of monster because I’m not keeping mine, they think it’s going to be sharing clothes and braiding each other’s hair and being BFFs. But that’s not the real world.
The real world. God, I sound like my father. He would not approve of this letter-writing thing. Dad’s a believer in the clean-slate philosophy. “After this, you can start over,” he keeps telling me. “You can wipe the slate clean.”
What he doesn’t say, but I hear anyway, is, “And then nobody will have to know.”
So here I am, hiding out like it’s the fifties. At school—at my old school, I mean—nobody knows about my predicament except my best friend. I’m sure people are asking her where I am. I don’t know what she tells them. But maybe it’s easier being here than parading my pregnant belly through the halls of BHS. It’s less to deal with, anyway.
The point is, I hope you get it—the why of the whole thing. I hope you have a good life—a boring, no-drama, no-real-problems kind of life.
Good luck, X. I wish you the best.
Your host body,
S