Mom for Week, Memories for Life

I was a mother once.

How could I have grown so attached in only one week?

After all, as one person told me, “A newborn is like a loaf of bread.”

Not to me. Just dressing his tiny body made me melt. I loved watching his perfect little lips sucking the formula bottle with gusto, while gazing at me intently.

He took an interest in everything. He stretched his neck to stare at the pictures on the wall and the animal shapes dangling from the mobile. He quietly listened as I read “Good Night Moon.” He was lulled to sleep by the wind chimes outside his bedroom window.

The day Nathan’s birth mother called, I literally fell off the pink, antique easy chair where I was sitting and watching him peacefully sleep in a bassinet.

“I want him back,” she sobbed.

For me, Nathan was everything. Like a lot of women, I had put motherhood aside in pursuit of a career. Then, also like a lot of other women, I hit my mid-30s and realized time was running out. I had refused to have a baby out of wedlock. I could barely write the words “sperm bank” without feeling weird and uncomfortable, much less go to one. I had a good career and lived in a wonderful community. I decided adoption was the answer. After spending a few more years waiting, then several weeks getting to know Cheryl, the perfect child was delivered to me. Now she wanted him back.

She had it all figured out. Although Cheryl was living in a motel room with her three children, an uncle had agreed to take the family in, she told me.

There was absolute panic and urgency in her voice. She was in agony.

So was I. But I also knew reasoning with her would be futile. This was the woman who carried Nathan for nine months and gave birth to him. She had the legal right to take the baby back.

“Where do you want me to bring him?” I asked numbly. I felt sick to my stomach.

An older German woman who lived next door tried to console me. “But honey, this is a blessing,” she said. “Do you really want to raise someone else’s child?”

Sounding like a self-appointed master of morality, a sister angrily denounced me. Returning him was for the baby’s own good, she said. “I mean, how could you do that to an innocent little baby? Raise him without a father!”

None of it consoled me.

The morning I was to return him, I took Nathan out on the balcony of my apartment. Looking out over the ocean, I told him that I loved him. I told him his birth mother also loved him and wanted him back. I didn’t expect a reaction. I was just saying good-bye.

But, for the first time since I brought him home from the hospital, he got fussy and started to cry. The folks at the adoption center said that was probably because he sensed how upset I was.

In one of our many phone conversations before Nathan’s birth, I recited Cheryl a poem by William Blake.

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Cheryl liked the poem and said it was a comfort. I had no idea it would be I who would seek refuge in Blake’s beautiful though difficult-to-live-by words.

That was a year ago. Now, nearly 40, I’m still trying to let go.

I read “The Art of Letting Go,” “The Language of Letting Go” and “The Power of Letting Go.”

“Remember, it’s only a feeling,” said one book. I say to myself, I know it’s only a feeling and the feeling is like someone ripping my heart out.

Nevertheless, grudgingly, half-heartedly, I’m coming to terms with this. I still sometimes picture Nathan, who is now probably chubby-legged and cherub-faced. But I am learning to move on.

Surprisingly, the best advice didn’t come from a book, but from my own mother. Surprisingly, because she was against the whole adoption idea in the first place. She thought I should be married first. But now, she offered kind words and a hug. “The good Lord works in mysterious ways,” she told me.

A platitude, maybe, but from her it had more meaning.

Because if there is anyone who understands loss, it is my mother. She began learning how to let go at age 7, when her father died of food poisoning. At 18, she left her home in Ecuador and moved to the United States with her mother and four sisters. One of her sisters ultimately moved back to South America and my mother never saw her again.

For me, letting go has always been hard. As a child, I remember wrapping my arms around my mother’s waist and burying my face in her stomach, as if holding onto a great oak during a storm. As the seventh of eight children, it’s fair to say I was a tad clingy.

I clearly recall wailing in protest when my mother went grocery shopping.

One night recently, still troubled by Nathan’s loss but not knowing how to express it, I sat down and started writing about my mother. I wrote about all the losses she had experienced.

I thought about her journey to the United States, and then I pictured her walking behind my beat-up yellow Bug the day I moved from home. Her children had been her life, and I knew it killed her each time one of us moved out.

It was hard, but she let us go. She kissed her joy and watched it fly not once or twice, but eight times.

As I wrote, a calmness came over me. I realized I am blessed to have my mother. And I was blessed to have shared Nathan’s first week of life. Nathan taught me how abruptly time can end with a loved one.

Now I try harder to live in the moment. I’m quicker to express myself. If I didn’t before, I jump at the chance to remind my mother how much she means to me.

I haven’t completely gotten over Nathan’s loss, but I’ve come a long way.

And I have this incredible memory of a beautiful baby in my arms. That’s something I’ll hold onto for the rest of my life.

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Pamela J. Johnson can be reached by e-mail at pamela.johnson@latimes.com.