Three years later, when I turned 20, I moved cross-country, a thousand miles away from my friends and family — and Hanna. Leaving my hometown was another part of my letting go of my daughter, a process I began the day that I put her in the arms of her new parents. Seeing 6-month-old Hanna reach for her adoptive mother had helped to convince me that everything was as it should be — as it was supposed to be. Our connection had been severed. It was time for me to move on. We were now both free to live the rest of our lives.
I made my new home in Southern California, and within a month of moving there, I met my future husband at a punk concert when he protected me in the mosh pit. Two years later, we were planning our wedding when we were surprised to find I was pregnant.
This time I felt I was ready for a baby, but I also felt an unthinkable amount of guilt about having a baby less than six years after giving my first one up for adoption.
I had never stopped thinking about Hanna — never. But the adoption had forced me to grow up quickly, and I did. I had come out stronger. Sturdier. Wiser. I continued to feel so many emotions, but now I was able to handle most of them. The guilt was a different story.
It was difficult to explain to the people in my life, including my husband and my mother, exactly what I was feeling. Everyone was supportive, but I couldn’t expect them to understand the enormity or complexity of how having another baby made me feel.
At one point, I reached out to Hanna’s birth father. We were best friends at first, and then dated until that fateful visit with 6-month-old Hanna. It had been difficult for both of us, but that day had hit him harder than I realized. He couldn’t separate Hanna from me and, wanting a clean slate, he broke up with me right after we saw her.
I was destroyed, but I finally realized he had done the right thing. Still, occasionally, on a hard day, I’d leave my husband home with our brand new baby, go get a coffee, and then sit outside and dial my ex’s number. I hoped he might be able to tell me what I needed to hear — even if it was just that he understood what I was feeling — but we would only speak for a couple of minutes before he said he had to go, and eventually he stopped answering my calls all together.
The only other person who I thought might have some understanding of the specific and inexplicable ache I felt was Hanna herself, and she was in elementary school hundreds of miles away. Later, I would learn that she had sought support by befriending the only other adoptee in her school.
Unsure of what to do with my emotions — the guilt, the yearning, these things I wasn’t supposed to feel — I just kept the image of baby Hanna sitting on my lap in my mind. I would think of her when I put my other daughter to bed at night, almost like I was tucking them both in with a kiss.
No one really talks about what follows you through life after adoption. There is no such thing as a clean break. I knew my little girl might never know me, yet I saw her face everywhere — in the photographs her adoptive parents continued to send me, but also in other children’s faces at the grocery store, at library story time, and even in my own daughter as I fed her smashed avocados. I often wondered if Hanna ever thought she saw my face in a crowd.
Those photos and letters from Hanna’s adoptive parents had arrived every month or two when she was a baby, but by the time she was a toddler, I received an update only once or twice a year. I would open each envelope hastily and read the letter twice, my eyes lingering over every word. I smiled as I thumbed through the photos and loved that she looked so much like I did when I was her age.
I had proof that Hanna was living an amazing life. Her parents took her to a petting zoo and built her a tree house. They threw big birthday parties and her family, which now included a brother who had also been adopted, went to church every week. Who would I be to even try to compare to that? I thought. So I carried on and did my best with my own daughter, but I never stopped thinking about the little girl I had given up.
When Hanna turned 6, my husband, daughter, and I flew back to my home state to see my family for Christmas. Hanna’s family lived an hour away from mine, and they invited me to visit them. We made arrangements for this meetup through the mail, instead of using the adoption agency, as we had done when I met 6-month-old Hanna. I was thrilled to get to see her, but also cautious. It felt risky, as this kind of visit had not been part of our contract. I was anxious and I ran through a long list of questions in my head. Would she recognize me? Would she approve of my husband and daughter? Would she look like me? Would she hate me?
I worried until our first moment alone, on the front steps of her home, when she poked me in the stomach and said, “Mommy said God put me in your belly because she couldn’t have me in hers.” I was caught off-guard by how sweetly she said it, with her eyes so much like mine focused on my face. I felt the air rush out of me.
It also stung. How could I have ever let this child go? It would take years for me to fully understand how that single little belly poke changed me — to digest all the emotions conjured by that one jab with her tiny finger — I know now that was the moment when the connection I had tried so hard to sever was restored.
