{Originally published on Is There Any Mommy Out There?}

We have started to talk about it recently and it inspires in me a dark, deep-down fear. Your brother looks at the picture on this blog and chirps brightly, with grave knowledge, “That Darrett. That’s Darrett in Momma’s tummy.”

“And Saige,” you chitter, “and Saige in your tummy.”

Garrett nods gravely. You do every thing together. It is all you know. You are far too innocent and unsullied by our boring world to look at each other’s skin and question that it was not always so. That the bond does not stretch back to that quiet water-filled place. Unlike those we meet every day, the jaded masses who know in a glance that you didn’t sip from the same uterine cup.

“No babies,” I correct again, “not Saige. Saige grew in her tummy mommy’s belly, in Haiti.” I wish to just say yes, to keep it simple for you for a short time, while you are simple, but I’ll never lie to you about this for my own comfort. Not even once. As I speak, my heart clenches in dread for the questions that will follow. Not today. Not yet. But someday. Soon.

Where is she now? I don’t know. Why did she take me to an orphanage? She didn’t have any way to feed you and she loved you beyond words and thought, way too much to let you starve.

It’s my birthday! Tell me my birth story. I don’t know your birth story, my daughter. I wish I had been there, holding your birth mother’s young hand. I can weave it for you, if you can understand the difference between lies and conjecture. If you will accept it as myth, born of love.

I think she could see the stars, as she tended the open fire in front of her parent’s shanty. She felt the first pains low in her back and she closed her eyes and whispered to patron saints in her lilting Creole tongue. Hours later, sweat drenched and immersed in pain, I think she clenched her teeth and remained silent, the neighbors too close for the luxury of screams, already alerted by the iron smell of blood as they tended their own small fires. Some gruff but kind older woman, a relative or neighbor mopped her brow and dribbled the dirty, disease-ridden water hauled from the nearest stream into her mouth. You arrived onto rags on a floor, my coddled love, a dirt floor. Don’t you fret, baby, there’s no shame in that. You were handled no less lovingly than any other newborn girl. Women in this silly, pampered country pay people to teach them to labor as your birth momma did, teeth clenched, thoughts focused inward and downward.

She named you, your tummy mommy. She gave you the name Mirlandy, your middle name. She held you, for a few days, and whispered her love into your ear. But, she knew. She’s never read a paper. She’s never watched CNN. Her knowledge is the worst kind, the knowledge of experience. She lives in Cite Soleil, one of the largest shanty towns in the world. One of the worst slums in the world. A place where babies die every single day. A world without the calories to produce breast milk, where formula costs more than a month’s wages.

Cite Soleil. The City of the Sun. A beautiful name for a terrible place. Here, in our world, a place with that name would conjure pleasant images. A resort beach town, surf and sand. There it means sun in its cruelest, harshest sense. Beating down on people without respite, without hope of respite, without running water or electricity. Punishing, scorching sun. Baking them. Sun that brings flies and disease and death. Unforgiving. Brutal.

She started to walk, with a male relative for safety. She made the long, dusty trek up the mountain to the little creche that women whisper from lip to lip in the City Soleil. Madam John’s. Allez Madam John. She reached it on your tenth day and that is when our story begins. That is the picture we received of you, ten days old, held in your birth mother’s arms. To be so happy in the face of another woman’s worst pain is a complicated gift.

There are things that I know too. I know you could have had a very different story, if your Haiti momma had less strength. An unknown story. A tragic story. Just another little soul among multitudes, born to destitution, who died too soon of dehydration and hunger. I can’t breathe when I consider your might have beens. Few women ever get the chance to be so brave as your tummy mommy was.

You are a gift. On your third birthday, you blow out the candles and wish for princess dolls and ponies, stickers and pretties for your hair. You wish for every single silly thing that American girls wish for. You earned that. Your birth mother earned that. Every child on this earth ought to have the right to have so few needs that they wish for silly things and dream about the stars.

I’ll take the hard wishes for now. I’ll wish for your Haiti momma. I wish her plenty.
Plenty of clean water.
Plentiful beans and rice.
Plenty of safety from gangs and violence and political turmoil and riots.
Plenty of health in a world without 911 or doctors.

Who knew plenty could be so little? I’m honored to have learned this from your tummy mommy.

Editor’s Pick by MommyTime at Mommy’s Martini. Stacey is a writer after my own heart. She writes long, introspective, beautiful posts and tackles topics that range all over the map. Her “forced twins,” as she calls them, are three years old, and with a two-year-old, and another child on the way, she more than has her hands full. And yet she finds time to think deeply and long, write profoundly, and still manage to make me laugh sometimes too. This post is to me such a wonderful mixture of hope and pain, honesty and love, that it really deserved republishing. That adherence to truth in all things is one of the reasons I am so impressed by Stacey’s writing. You may want to check out this post in its original form, with comments. You will also find in her sidebar links to others of her searing, honest posts about adoption, such as this one on bonding with an adopted child. I hope you surely will want to subscribe. You won’t regret it.