Image Credit to Danny Q-DJah
The last night I spent in the hospital, I barely slept. It wasn’t for a lack of needing or wanting. Quite simply, as the time on the clock marched on, I felt the oxygen in my lungs get thinner, and I could feel myself panicking. Between berating myself for being selfish, and desperately clicking my internal camera, mercilessly, I just couldn’t seem to make peace with the idea that my time with The Kiddo was winding down. It had taken me almost nine months to get to that moment, and it was going to be gone, sooner than I could blink.
With the street lights pouring in the window, and one solitary, albeit blinding, overhead lamp, I sat in the uncomfortable hospital bed, with my son, and I talked to him as if he understood me. For an hour, I undressed, and dressed him, over and over again. Meticulously, slowly, I would unwrap his swaddling clothes, change his diaper, trace the tips of my fingers on his tiny, scrawny legs. I would put my thumbs on the bulge of his belly, and watch as he would flail. Every so often, he’d start to cry, and I would giggle, lovingly, as I wrapped him up, and told him he sounded like a car trying to start in the dead of winter. When he had calmed, I would pull him close to my chest, until he was completely asleep. When I was certain I could move him, I did. With my legs pulled up, I placed his tiny body on my thighs, and I watched him sleep.
Would he know? Would he know that all of these moments had happened? Would he know that as he slept, I wrestled desperately with my own inner turmoil? The kind that had me wrested between nature’s instinct, and what everyone else was demanding of me. Would he know how very in love with him I was? Or would he hate me?
That was the only looming thought that I had throughout my entire stay. Will he hate me? It was not, “Am I doing the right thing?” I knew I wasn’t, even though the words out of my mouth contradicted that. I was just so incredibly afraid that he would hate me for this action, this decision that was mine, but was not mine at all. I had sobbed early in the afternoon to a friend. I had sobbed in my dreams, and it was the reason, on this last night, that I refused to sleep. If I could, by the very action, of not sleeping prove to him that he didn’t need to hate me, all of it went into those last hours.
“Don’t hate me, please”, I whispered into his soft face.
Tears fell from my eyes, faster than a river rushes to meet the open sea. I was washed with the fear of never being able to explain to him that I had no choice, that I was never given an option to bring him home with me. I brought my hands to my face, and began to shake from the inside out.
“Please, please, don’t hate me.” I said it, over and over again, begging this innocent newborn, my own son, for forgiveness, before the transgression had even occurred. Everyone had been telling me I was being silly. They touted all the common lines that I’d come accustomed to knowing, and hearing – I was giving him a better life. I was doing the best thing for him. I loved him so much that I had to do what was best. All of it, I knew it, and I wanted to believe it. I even wrote it myself, in the journal I gave to him. But I never for one second actually believed it.
I knew, even as the young woman I was, that he had every right to be angry. I knew, without even really knowing it, that I was making a choice for him, that wasn’t my choice to make. I knew how it felt to have a choice made for me, one I didn’t want, and I knew how angry I was toward those who had cornered me. In the same fashion that I had been stripped of my right to choose, I knew I was doing the same to him.
“Please. I’m so sorry. Please. I don’t know what else to do. I just…don’t hate me. Please.“
As the hours passed, my pleas turned into begging. The beeps of the hospital were the soundtrack to my prayer to him. As he fed, I’d tell him how I loved him, and in the same breath, I told him that I would love him, even if he hated me. Because, I understood. I wanted him to love me, but I would hate me too. I did hate me.
I begged until I was exhausted, and the sun rose, and it was time. Time for me to carry out the sentence, the one I was told would right all my so-called sins. The one that made me feel as though I was doing something inexplicably, and inherently wrong.
Alone, moments before I was wheeled to the room where his adoptive parents would almost run out the door with him in their arms, I didn’t plea with The Kiddo any longer. My body swayed in the bathroom of that hospital room, the only place, I could find some private moments. He was dressed, and contentedly sleeping, his little arms placed right by his face, crossed as though he was praying.
” I like them. I think I like them. I hope they are what they make themselves to be. I won’t forgive myself if they aren’t. Maybe they’ll be what you need, and maybe I am just not enough for you. Maybe everyone is right. They have to be wrong, because, I think we could do this, together, you and me. We’d be good together.
I won’t be able to undo any of this. I just hope, I hope that this is going to work out for both of us, because none of it makes sense right now. If you grow up and want to hate me, I accept it. I hate that I am making this decision. This isn’t my place. This isn’t my choice. This isn’t the choice I want to make for us, but I have no other choice. What do I do, Kiddo? What do I do?…”
My voice wavered and I cried into this baby, my son, for the last time.
I love you…I love you. Oh, my sweet boy, I love you. I’m so sorry for doing this to you. I’m so sorry.”
