“I think this is going to be a great life!”
I wrote that beneath a photograph of my son Miller asleep.
I had made a little book about his birth, told in his voice even though he had only been alive a few days and had not authorized any of this.
The first page was precise.
His name. His birth date and time. His weight and length.
There were ultrasound pictures. Pictures of the birth. The weighing. The crying. Miller in a little cap with his hands beside his face.
Yellow pages. Purple elephants.
I wrote captions for him.
“First the doctors had to get me out.”
“Then they had to weigh me.”
“I wasn’t exactly happy with all of this.”
I gave him some complaints right away. Seemed fair.
Then he met us.
His grandparents appeared. Aunts and uncles. Cousins. His great-grandmother Frances. His godfather Jimmy. Gregg and Mary Leslie.
I labeled everybody.
I explained how they belonged to him.
He had a HUGE family.
I put that in capital letters.
There are pictures of me feeding him.
“Dad got to feed me.”
“He took it very seriously.”
Then I am kissing him.
“Because he loved me very much!!!”
Three exclamation points.
Apparently one would not have covered it.
Eventually I reached that photograph of him asleep and put the prediction underneath it.
“I think this is going to be a great life!”
It is a very cleaned-up version of a birth.
But the love in it is real.
The people are real.
I really was sitting there feeding my son and apparently taking the assignment very seriously.
And if Miller ever wants to know who came to see him when he was born, I can show him.
That is you.
That is me holding you.
That is your mother.
That person came to the hospital to meet you.
This is what I wrote while it was happening.
My own beginning reaches me differently.
As a child, I had questions about my adoption that I was afraid to ask. I wanted Mom and Dad’s help understanding how I had become their son. I didn’t want them to hear that as wanting a different family.
I did not have to choose between loving Mom and Dad and wondering about the people I came from. I know that now.
The boy with the books did not know it.
He thought a question might sound like an accusation.
Decades later, Mom gave me a letter my birth mother, Debbie, had written the night I was born.
Mom had kept it.
So for years I had questions about the night I entered the world while a letter written that night already existed somewhere else.
There is also a photograph Debbie says she took.
I have never seen it.
Debbie told me she took it before they came and got me.
In the scene she described, we were outside. I was lying on a blanket in a field. I had on, I think, a yellow outfit.
I do not remember the field.
Of course I don’t.
I have her memory of it.
Then I have my memory of her telling me about it.
The field reaches me through her.
So does the blanket.
So does the yellow outfit.
That does not mean nobody was there for me.
It does not mean nobody loved me.
It means my beginning came to me differently.
Miller has a little book with yellow pages and purple elephants.
I have a letter I received decades later, a photograph I have never seen, stories told by other people, and then, eventually, memories of my own.
Those memories begin at a house on Fairview.
And somewhere near the beginning of them, there is a boy in the yard.
Keep exploring: Read The Two Books, step into another childhood memory in In My Room, or visit the Fragments Explorer for more connected stories.
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