Going Back to the Place You Were Left

We took our sons back to the place where they were abandoned as babies. In their late teens, they had no memory of anything in Nicaragua much less the place where they had last seen their birth mothers. It seemed graceless and unfeeling to get out of the car and say to them, “This is where you were left,” but that’s what I said, eloquence only occasionally coming to me on paper and almost never when I speak.

I didn’t have a lovely way to describe Bertha Calderon Hospital except that their adoption documents both named it as the place where they were abandoned, one son after being sick for months, and the other just hours after he was born. In neither case was an official reason given. Our choice was to create a story or say we didn’t know.

I’d like to say that we handled this well. We didn’t. Like so much else in our lives, their father and I were inconsistent. Sometimes, we’d be compassionate and understanding, constructing possible scenarios, explanations of why their mothers would have walked out the door of the hospital and not returned for them. Often, we said we didn’t know. It wasn’t a constant topic of conversation, often years would pass between questions and the opportunity to explain. Bottom line, I said to them, “Hey, your mothers left you in a hospital, probably the safest place anywhere in the country.  They cared about you.  They didn’t leave you under a tree somewhere.” Remember, I lack eloquence and maybe tact as well.

So when I read the story in this week’s Washington Post about Koregan Quintanilla, the Arlington, Texas, boy who, for his tenth birthday, wanted to visit the firestation where he was abandoned as an infant and meet the fireman who first picked him up, I thought, “Damn, that is a wonderful story.”

I loved the photo of Koregan getting an enormous bear hug from Wesley Keck, the fireman, and the shot of the two of them in the fire truck. They looked so happy, both of them – the boy and the man.  And, of course, because I am pulled to the sad and the unanswerable, I wonder right away, has his birth mother seen this?  How is she feeling? Is she glad? She must be.  Does she miss him?

Our sons’ return to Bertha Calderon was nothing like Koregan’s triumphant return to the firestation.

Wisely, or boneheadedly depending on your level of skill and arrogance as an adoptive parent, we scheduled the stop at the abandonment site right after the stop at the orphanage on the first day of our 8-day ‘adoption tour’ of Nicaragua.  We sat in the wet, permanent heat that is Nicaragua on a bench circling a big leafy tree and wondered what to do with ourselves.  Seeing a Pepsi vendor, I asked my husband to get us sodas which gave him and a couple of our kids something to do.  Waiting, I sat with my younger son under the tree next to a very young girl – maybe 14 or 15? – holding the smallest infant I had ever seen. Only a tiny bit bigger than her hand, almost too small to hold in her arms, I wondered how the baby could possibly survive.

In her conversation with the woman next to her, the girl explained that her baby had been born just two days before and she was bringing her to the hospital for a check-up.  We looked at her baby and smiled at her. In the States, this baby would be in a web of tubes and monitors and here she was in a little blanket in the arms of her child mother under a tree in the yard of the hospital, waiting for a check-up.  And then what? What would happen next?

So it flashed on me – this was maybe the story.  This is what had happened to my boys and their first mothers.  Their mothers were sitting under this tree and they knew they couldn’t do it, couldn’t save them, couldn’t take care of them.  Maybe they were young or older, but they knew that it would be better to leave them than to keep them.  For whatever reason, they made this decision.  And maybe it happened under this very tree. And because I am drawn to the sad and unanswerable, I contemplate this while I’m sitting there while my sons talk about the next stop on the tour which was lunch, of course, and is the object of great interest, and my daughter is taking pictures.  I’m the only one even thinking about this, I decide.  And we leave.

Riding away in the van with the driver we hired to squire us around the places of my babies’ lives, my younger son leaned over to me and said,  “That’s probably what happened, don’t you think, ma? That’s probably what happened with me.”

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/10-year-old-texas-boy-abandoned-as-infant-gets-birthday-wish-meeting-fireman-who-rescued-him/2012/11/15/b53709be-2f92-11e2-af17-67abba0676e2_story.html