When I was 20 and living in Port Hardy, British Columbia, on the northeastern tip of Vancouver Island, I found myself pregnant. Back then I relied on my employment-insurance check, roughly $400 a month, which didn’t even cover my rent. And my mother, who has a disability, was in no position to help me with babysitting.
So in the den of my parents’ house (my own apartment had no couch, internet or computer), I sat down and searched for adoption agencies. Three months later, 24 hours after my son was born, I handed him to two strangers who would become his parents.
Recently that same son called me on his lunch break, as he often does. He’s 23 now and a caller; he probably gets that from his parents. My phone is on perma-silent — I’m avoidant to a fault — but I pick up for him.
“My buddy’s going to get me a job at his work,” he said. “Better pay. So, I’m not going to trade school.”
“Do you have the job yet?” I asked, worried.
“Well, no. But I can get it.”
“Shouldn’t you maybe take the schooling in case?” I said. The trade school opportunity would set him up for a decent progression and faster promotion. And he was giving that up for a job that wasn’t even in the bag?
“No, it’s all good,” he said.
After hanging up, I called his parents.
I know he’s at the age where parents don’t get much of a say anyway. And even if they did, I’m not sure I qualify as his parent at all. Even though I’m a grown woman who helped raise two now-adult stepdaughters and have a teenage daughter of my own, I still don’t feel the part. Especially for him.
I chose to dial his father this time. Of the two of them, this new-job-no-school plan felt like his to field. No point in two mothers fussing over the same opinion. These are the decisions I make now — which of them to call, and how carefully to parent from the sidelines.
“Hey, have you talked to our boy today?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why, what’s up?”
“Did you hear he might not go to school?”
“Oh, when’s school supposed to start?”
“Next week, I thought — ”
We cross-checked our stories. We’ve done this before, his father or his mother and I comparing the versions our now-grown boy handed each of us, working out how worried we’re allowed to be, how much we’re allowed to butt into his adult life. Normal parent stuff. Just with an extra wheel: me. A welcome one, I hope.
My relationship with his parents used to be different.
For the first 24 hours of his life, he was wholly mine. Then he was theirs. They were still strangers; I knew them only through paperwork and a single photo of the family, their oldest boy at Disneyland, taken before they welcomed my son.
The agency encouraged a new kind of adoption, an open one. It sounded a bit like having a pen pal, or more truthfully, some masochistic parenting edge game — close, but not too close. The counselor reminded me the openness wasn’t legally binding the way the adoption was; they could close it whenever they liked, and I had 30 days to change my mind before the adoption itself was final. I didn’t get my hopes up.
After he was born and I was back home with my parents, I got my first email from his mother. Polite, careful and seemingly willing to keep the openness they had promised. They had gotten him home. He had done well. They were so thankful for me.
I typed a careful reply. I didn’t want to scare them off. Those 30 days weren’t up yet — legally, I could still change my mind — and I used that time, while his new mother still had a vested interest in keeping me happy, to prove I was worthy of at least a photo of him now and then. I didn’t want to push too hard or let on that I wanted him back.
“I miss him so much,” I wrote, “but I’m glad he’s with you.”
Then I pressed send while adjusting the cabbage stuffed into my bra to keep the pain away — it didn’t. I went back to my parents’ room and sank, for days, into the depths of their water bed: body depressed, drowning, smelling of milk and cabbage.
Eventually, the 30 days passed, and he officially became theirs. I learned to teeter on the edges of their lives, terrified that a single misplaced exclamation mark might cost me an invitation back.
Over time, the emails went from guarded pleasantries to invitations to meet — to him toddling between his mother and me in a rented summer home that stood on neutral ground. Whoever I was to him then. His “tummy mommy.” His “birth mother” to the adults. They took him on family trips to Disneyland and sent photos. I sent off university applications, hoping one would land me nearer to him.
By the time he was 7, I had moved closer, and I got used to reading him bedtime stories on Sunday nights after dinner — in his home, not mine. I read him “Love You Forever,” hiding my tears, then crying the whole way home, restraining myself from crawling back in through his window at the end of the night. I wouldn’t be there to watch him climb out of bed in his blue dinosaur pajamas, messy haired, for a morning hug. That was for them.
That same year, I got pregnant again — on purpose, this time. I was more scared to tell him than my own parents. More scared, even, to tell his. There was no way to make it sound good. Yes, I’m keeping her. Sorry I didn’t keep you.
It took me months to find the courage. I braved telling his mother — by then one of my closest friends — in a spill of words. With grace and kindness, she faced what I didn’t have to. It was her job, as a parent, to decide what was best for him.
Turns out, our boy only wanted to know if my belly would get as big as Kung Fu Panda’s. It did. He was disappointed she was a girl, but he loved her anyway. The two of them grew up closer than I ever expected, his parents babysitting her while I traveled for work, and my daughter treating their house like a second home. But I took her home each time, and never him. Neither of them asked about it. It was all they had ever known.
I had not considered what it would mean to know him as an adult.
But I did learn. The first jabs came when he was a teenager, the way they do for most parents.
One evening when my daughter and I were over at his house for dinner, he said to her with a grin (while looking at me), “She just popped me and dropped me.” His mother admonished him, aghast. He was clearly pleased with his joke, but it shot through to my core.
I found some comfort in the thought that maybe he got his dark humor from me, which almost made it worth the hurt. And I recognized the vulnerability in him letting me see, up close, the pain I had caused.
As he grew, what had started as a delicate dance with his parents over my role became a new dance with him, one I still sometimes need their help with. They know him best, even if I wish I did. But they call me, too.
“Hey, if you hear from him — ” they say.
I’m learning who he is as a young man as he makes decisions in the thick of prefrontal-lobe development, the same phase I was in when I chose to place him for adoption. Given that, who am I to question his choices when a choice I made in that same unfinished state shaped his whole life? And mine?
I know parents tend to choose their words carefully as their children become adults. I think I do more than most, seeking to preserve the thread that keeps us connected. I have always felt a little dishonest or presumptuous laying claim to him. But I take more chances now, too. Because the choices have been his for years, and he still calls to tell me about them, even the ones I don’t love.
Twenty years ago, I chose a life I thought was better for him. I hope he keeps choosing a life with me in it.
Jennifer Greenhorn is a writer and designer in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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