Forty

I did not expect to become a grandmother at 40.

Newly divorced, I was working two teaching jobs, struggling to pay for my 16 year-old daughter’s cello lessons. Child support was spotty, and all I could think about was keeping life as normal as possible for her.

While I immersed myself in work, my daughter worked in her little music studio, practicing the Popper etudes and her scales, well after I came home at night. I would collapse into bed, sometimes without washing off my mascara, hearing the cello’s muffled sound as I fell asleep, the dark tone a sort of balm for our hectic lives.

It is that time, the time in the middle of the rushing about, that life really happens. And real life usually has nothing at all to do with our expectations or our routines.

Near the end of that December I arrived home around 8 pm, my arms holding the day’s coffee gone cold and the end of term’s stack of papers. My daughter was in bed, recovering still from a flu that had lingered through November. I knew she had a concert the next day and that she should be practicing.

“You alright in there? I’m home. I brought cookies from school,” I called from the other room.

“Just taking a quick nap,” she said, her voice muffled under the covers.

I walked into her room, turning on the light by her bed. She was lightly asleep, her forehead warm. She had this flu for what seemed like a month. The previous weekend we had friends over for dinner, and she didn’t join us for pho, her favorite. She had asked for crackers around midnight, and I brought them in, a glass of wine in my hand, and sat on the edge of her bed as she nibbled, just to get sick moments later. I told her not to worry, that she’d feel better the next day. But I knew I would call her pediatrician in the morning to be sure.

The next day, we were driving home from a family event. “We need to call about getting you into the doctor,” I said.

She hesitated. “Can I talk to you about something?” Her voice was small.

“Sure,” I said, as I fidgeted in my purse for the phone. She put her hand on my arm to stop me. “It’s about… sex,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, my heart starting to beat faster.

“Well, I had it,” she said, looking out the window of the car. My God, do orchestra types have sex? I wondered.

“You did?” She nodded. “Well, did you use protection?” I couldn’t believe it. She still seemed so young to me.

“Protection, yes…”

And the next part came out in a rush. The condom, she said, had broken. And she was finally telling me after nearly two months, six pregnancy tests, many nights of crying with her boyfriend of the past year, and a failed Latin test due to a panic attack and “my God, mom I’m so sorry and scared.” Her mouth was moving and as all the words came out I felt my heart twisting from the inside. All the questions stuck in my throat. How could this happen? Why didn’t she tell me until two months in? How long had she known? Is she alright? Is she going to be alright? The guilt and worry clawed at me. I had been working too much, I should have been around more. She had been making her own dinners for Christ’s sake. I was driving down the highway, and all I could think to do was reach over and take her hand and tell her, “Everything will be okay. I promise.” And I think I saw, through all her tears, relief.

The next day was a blur. It began with easy things, which surprised me: a call to the doctor, prenatal vitamins, a sit down with her boyfriend and his mother, thankfully, everyone calm and rational. We decided to wait to tell anyone else. We had to get the kids taken care of first. On the couch that evening, a small pot of green tea between us, I presented Camille with her options. She knew she could terminate and had felt that pressure from some she had told before me, but she couldn’t bear that. The other two options, keep the baby or adoption, were what she was struggling with. I told her what I knew of open adoptions. Her eyes became wide, “You mean, I can give the baby up and still see it?”

At three months along, the baby had grown to the length of a peapod. We had heard the heartbeat at the doctor’s, my daughter and her boyfriend clasped hands on the table, their eyes frenzied with the hugeness of what was between them. After hearing that heartbeat and in between practicing Bach suites later that evening, she looked up from her cello and announced quite matter-of-factly, “Mom, I decided. I want to give the baby up for adoption.” My whole body ached for her. I knew what was in front of her. The world's eyes on her body, the judgement. But she had decided, and as her mother, I was determined to cushion what was coming to the best of my ability.

Allison’s daughter and granddaughter

That night we started looking for adoptive families. We found several websites listing people’s qualification to parent. So many people who had love to offer. They had drop-down menus listing the characteristics we could choose from: gender of the parents, location in the country, ethnicity, professions. Page after page of people. I saw a couple with dark hair smiling. The woman wore a doctor’s coat. IVF hadn’t worked for them. There was another family in New York City, a picture of them at the MoMA. They had lost a child. We clicked the box that said OPEN as opposed to CLOSED or SEMI-OPEN adoption and the families were reduced to less than a dozen. But there was the dark-haired couple that I had liked. San Francisco, Educated. Progressive. Seeking an open adoption. I clicked on their profile.

One step in the process of selecting an adoptive family is the interviews. We had several. It felt like dating but without the flowers and candy. There was the same battery of questions: Tell us about you. What are your interests? What kind of family do you imagine for yourself? And just like walking away from a romantic nonmatch, we walked away from family nonmatches, difficult as this was. All these people seemed good. All had love to give. One of the more heart-breaking interviews we had was with a woman in Texas, 40, who feared many potential birth mothers worried she was too old to be a mother. What about me, I thought. Am I not too young to be a grandmother? But there’s no luxuriating in your own concerns when your child is a pregnant junior in high school. My own baby, her color drained from morning sickness, her tiny belly swelling, was going through something I never had to understand, so the least I could be was strong.

Our phone interview with the dark-haired couple was set for the next day. They had grown up with siblings who were adopted, and the woman had been raised on a kibbutz. They spoke multiple languages in the home. While my daughter spoke with both of them, I stepped out of the room to give them space, and the weight of the past month hit me in the chest. I stopped, my hand on the wall to steady myself, grateful for the door blocking my daughter’s view of me. My God, I thought, this life. What am I going to do? But the dog was crying to go outside, and I had to check on dinner on the stove, and those small things made me take a deep breath and continue. One step at a time.

A teenage pregnancy proceeds much like an adult one but with small social differences. Camille’s growing belly on her too-young face was a concern. She switched schools for the spring semester, keeping her story quiet, but people still talked. She stayed quiet. She practiced her cello for hours a day, her belly alive under the Elgar, the Bach. The neighbors were protective of us. The dogs knew something was up. Our beagle slept on Camille’s body, cocking her head at the baby’s kicks, making us laugh.

We decided on the dark-haired family to raise Camille’s baby. Their names, Shahaf and Pnina, would become names we would speak in our home daily from then on, to one another, to Camille’s baby inside of her. Camille approached it like she would asking out her crush from English class in the high school cafeteria.

“Would you please be the adoptive parents of my baby?” (God, please stay close to us, I thought).

“Yes, it would be our honor,” they responded, their voices changed by the joy of it.

with Pnina

Camille and I visited Shahaf, Pnina, and their family that spring. Camille was very pregnant. People looked too long at her in the airport as she waddled to pick up her decaffinated coffee from Starbucks. Though healthy, she was clearly too young to be a mother. But when we arrived in San Francisco, this very beautiful, selfless, and grateful family quite normally took us into their home, and we toured the city as they demonstrated all the normal love that the baby would one day experience. One day, when parking outside a museum, Shahaf dropped us off so Camille wouldn’t have to walk too far. We spent the day in a fragrant garden, talking about classical music then waited outside in the sun while Shahaf fetched the car. Some time passed and Pnina got a call. “Shahaf is upset,” she said. “Traffic is terrible, and he’ll be a bit.” Camille shot me a glance, worried. We would see them navigate conflict. Would he holler, like Camille’s father did? Would he be silent? But he pulled up, and as we got settled in the car, Pnina put her hand on Shahaf’s shoulder. He said calmly, “that was frustrating. There was so much traffic!” And Camille started laughing in the backset, tears in her eyes, relieved.

Though the life I expected for myself and my daughter was broken apart that year, the pregnancy helped us recognize a strength I had no idea was inside of us. It was almost as I had to disappear completely in order to become the best, strongest version of a mother. And in the midst of the cracking apart of her expectations of what teenage life would be, my daughter became a more beautiful person. And a baby got to have a life. And a new family was born.

We all want our children to grow up to be successful. Though Camille’s path was suspended a bit that year, she became successful in a different way. She showed me her absolute selflessness. It took the breaking apart of our expectations of normalcy for that to happen. Thank God for the breaking apart.

On our last day in San Francisco, as Camille was seated between Pnina and Suzi, the baby’s other grandmother to be, the baby started kicking. The baby, a girl, who would be born two months later and be named Lyla Shelly, was quiet most of that visit, probably because of all of the walking. But as we parked, Camille felt her kicking. “Wait,” she said suddenly, and grabbing the hand of the woman on either side of her, pulled their hands to her moving belly, saying, “Here she is. Here’s your daughter.”

This essay is from the introduction to Allison’s book Just To See How It Feels.

"Window Seat View" by Grand Mookster is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.