Placing My Baby for Adoption--Telling Grandma
Watching them carry her out, I remember telling her about placing my baby for adoption.
The pallbearers lift the coffin, and my breath catches. Grandma. The woman who sat across from me at that yellow Formica table twenty years ago, when I was eighteen and pregnant and terrified.
I remember sliding the ultrasound across to her, hands shaking. She picked it up, traced the tiny profile with her finger.
“A great-grandbaby,” she whispered. “I always told everyone I was great. Now it’s official.”
The silence felt endless. But then she started talking about birth—hers, my mother’s, mine. How they put women to sleep in 1967, strapped their legs up, kept husbands out. How by 1985, when Mom had me, Dad could be in the room. “I watched you come into this world, purple and screaming with a full head of black hair.”
Then she looked at me hard. “And now you’re going to go through that, and then hand that baby to someone else.”
Then she looked at me hard. “And now you’re going to go through that, and then hand that baby to someone else.”
“Yes.”
“Do you love her?”
“So much it’s killing me.”
“Then you’re doing the right thing.”
Just like that. No lecture. Just support.
The coffin moves out the front doors. She was there when it mattered most.
March nineteenth, early morning. Nineteen hours of labor, snow falling outside. Grandma beside me the whole time. When the baby came at 6:47 a.m.—six pounds, three ounces, auburn hair—they put her on my chest.
Grandma started crying. "Can I hold her?"
Twenty minutes. Then she kissed that tiny forehead, gave the baby back to me, and then I did what I knew was right and placed my baby for adoption. We all hugged. The adoptive mother, my grandma, and I.
For twenty years after, Grandma loved reading the letters and seeing the pictures the adoptive family sent.
When the cancer got bad last year, she made me promise I’d keep in touch with my little girl, who was now grown. Let her know that I love her.
Goodbye, Grandma. Thank you for loving us both.
Thank you for suppporting me in the hardest decision I’ve ever made, placing my baby for adoption.
