Placing both of my hands around his face and wiping his tears with my thumb, I looked deeply into his eyes. “I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, Landon, that your birth mother may have given you up, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love you. She just truly believed that you were better off without her. And I want you to know that I fully understand if you can’t accept the fact that I made the very same mistake that she did. I don’t want you to look at me and see all of the resentment that you have for her. So, I’m going to ask of you the very same favor you asked of me back in California. If you can’t see past this, if you can’t be with me without being ashamed, then I would rather you not pretend.”
He wiped his eyes. “Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know about you?”
“No.”
“What’s her name?”
Here it comes.
That was the other part of the story. Perhaps, the biggest part.
“Her name is Lilith.”SAY SOMETHINGIt took a while for the name to register in his mind.
“Lilith…isn’t that the name of the—”
“Yes. The girl I visit every week. Yes.”
“It’s her? Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
Landon got up from the bed and walked toward the window.
He paced for a bit before turning to me. “She has no clue?”
“No.”
He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m confused. Explain it to me.”
“Alright.” I stood up from the bed and walked toward him. “You remember how you said you woke up one day and realized the life you were living wasn’t the one you wanted? Well, that sort of happened to me around the age of twenty-one. I had worked really hard to turn my life around somewhat, repair my relationship with my father and grandparents. But the one thing I couldn’t seem to get over was the lingering need for the baby I had given away. It was like I finally woke up and saw what I had done. But it was too late. It just hit me that there was a part of me out there somewhere and that I hadn’t so much as seen her once. My giving her away was never about not loving my unborn child. In a sense, I didn’t even allow myself to feel things long enough at the time of the birth to even realize that I loved her. I was in this perpetually numb state the whole time I was pregnant and after. It had nothing to do with a conscious lack of love. It was about hating myself and not wanting her to hate me like I hated my mother. I didn’t want to be the kind of mother mine was. I wanted better for her, but at fifteen I wasn’t smart enough to realize that as long as I loved her, I could’ve made it work somehow. I may not have had money, but I would’ve given her an abundance of love. My mother never had that in her. But I did. I realized my mistake too late. That didn’t change how I felt, though.”
“How did you end up finding her?”
“It wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t a closed adoption per se. I always had the name and the address of the family. The adoptive parents didn’t think I wanted to be involved, so there wasn’t anything put in place to prevent me from going back to find her. Perhaps they never insisted on anonymity because they suspected I might change my mind someday and would want to know her. I always had their names, address, everything. It seemed ironic and a little fateful that they lived not far from where we grew up. It was the reason I moved back to this part of the state.”
“So…what did you do…go to their house?”
“No. I never wanted to drop any kind of bomb on them. I handled it very carefully. When she was about seven, I called her mother privately and asked if there was any way I could get to know Lilith. Beth is a prominent attorney who works a lot. I assured her that I respected the fact that she’s Lilith’s mother. Like it or not, I gave up my rights—as painful as that is. I understand that.”
“What did she say?”
“For many years, she refused to let me see her. Beth thought it was too soon. But I persisted. When Lilith got to be around nine, her mother finally agreed. We came up with a plan for me to volunteer once a week. Lilith is under the impression that her mother just brought me in to pass the time with her after school. We even set it up through the Big Sister Program of Michigan. She also has a nanny who watches her while her parents work. They both work a lot of hours. So, for the past year, I’ve been getting to know her in the only way that I can—as her Big Sister.”