July 24, 1977 was a day everything changed for the better in my life. But actually we didn’t get to see Christy until the 26th, when she came to the front door in the arms of Charlotte Mary, a dear friend who had done all the legal work for the adoption.
At the time Dollie and I lived in California, where I was midway through graduate school. No idea where we were really headed in life, or how dicey an academic career could be, but we knew we wanted a family, and when the chance came for a private newborn adoption – pretty much the equivalent of winning the lottery, in that world – we jumped. Said yes about twenty seconds into the phone call and for 2-3 days, feet not touching the ground, believed we were going to be a mixed-race family. Charlotte Mary’s sister, a social worker in Albuquerque, had made the contact, and it was her recommendation that persuaded the birth parents to accept us. To this day I wonder what On Earth made Carmie Lynn think that I had it in me to be a dad, hobo academic that I was, still playing at life.
Details quickly fell into place. We pushed a pencil and figured out how to beg, borrow, and squeeze enough loot to pay the birth mother’s medical expenses. Pushed it some more and figured we could afford to leave for six weeks to come to Albuquerque, stay with my folks through the due date and the first couple weeks, then recross the Mojave with Christine Elizabeth in a carseat between us in Dollie’s beater truck. Just neat as hell: instant baby, all done within four months of first hearing about it.
But for about the first and last time in her life, Christy turned out to be a procrastinator. The due date came and went, then another week and another. The budget had to be recalculated. I got pissy, as I always did staying under my parents’ roof, and Dollie got pissy right back. Things got tense. Was any of this even going to happen? The birth mother had a perfect right to change her mind.
On the 25th we were in a bookstore, half-heartedly comparing baby-food cookbooks. No cell phones in those days, but Dollie had to call home for some reason, and next thing I knew I was on a payphone hearing my dad say congratulations. She was here, she was healthy, everything was fine. Dollie and I kept staring and hugging. The bad mood we’d been nursing rolled back like it had been hit with a shot of Valium.
When the bell rang the next day, Dollie and I raced to the front door together, but for once in her life her nerve failed for an instant. So she shrank back, and I got to hold Christy first. Tiny face, tiny fingers, and half-crossed blue-gray eyes that were already astonishingly alert, peering this way and that. She didn’t seem surprised by anything. A little later my physician father would tell me, “Yeah, less birth trauma when they’re born Caesarean, they’re often very lively.” What I always see, though actually it’s impossible, is her lifting her head to peer around the blanket for a better view. And memory writes the speech balloon for what I swear she was thinking: “Hi Mom. Hi Dad. Love you guys. But whatever you thought this was going to be, it’s actually going to be different.” Boy was she right about that.
It was exactly the same way with Christy’s brother Jay, 22 months later. He popped into the world with his mellow, slightly whimsical personality firmly in place. Lay there calmly on the table staring at the umbilical cord as if he had an idea or two about what he might do with it. You can influence kids of course, teach them, and it all matters; but from the first instant you see them, they are already somehow exactly who they are.
This made me cry. So sweet.
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