Finally Going Home
Almost time. My roommate had sat on my suitcase and wrestled with the clasps to force it shut. She found a rope and tied it around the suitcase for safety. Then she gave me a tote with a picture of horses on it, so I could carry on the plane my treasured cassettes of the most-well known arias of women opera stars, my idols.
After four months, I could hardly believe it was over. Just a week ago I’d had It. I tried to muster regret, sadness, something—but couldn’t.
So much had happened since Jude, the all-around handyman and chauffeur, had picked up my mother and me at the airport and driven us on that long lonely trip to this private hospital that took in a very few “girls” until their time was up and trained them as nurses aides in exchange for their “mistakes.” Now he would load my suitcase and cassette player into his station wagon and drive me back to the airport.
As I waited for him, questions snuck in, questions I didn’t want to ask. Had I done the right thing? Should I get in touch with the daughter of that couple I knew in town who’d also given up her child? Would she reassure me? Would she send me booklets on counseling and a letter that would start with “Dear Friend of Precious Infant Life”? Would the letter have the reassuring clichés? “You’re not abandoning your child, you’re caring for it.” “You’re not giving it up, you’re placing it.” “You’re putting the child’s welfare before your own.”
Achingly, I wanted to believe they were all true.
Going back to college, I’d steadfastly maintained, was the only thing I wanted, to resume my singing lessons and join the choir and even look forward to participating in recitals. I kept reminding myself of these goals.
Now though, as I waited for Jude, too many thoughts encroached, like both arms pulled in opposite directions by two impervious barrel-chested strongmen.
Was this distancing natural for a mother? An aberration of nature, cruel, barbaric, unnatural, like animals who eat their young? I suspected it went against all female instinct, programming built into the female DNA through eons for the survival of the human race.
Should I feel guilty for not having reacted like my former roommate did, sobbing and screaming and clinging to the bedpost when she had to leave without her child?
On that sole visit to the Nursery, instead of looking down stone-faced at the bassinette, should I instead have held on to a side, sobbing nonstop, bent over, falling to my knees, wailing “No no no”?
The decision had been easy when I first discovered the pregnancy, which seemed like decades ago—flat stomach, no nausea, questions, debates, or doubts. I’d been so sure for so long and had endured these last four months here, learning information I didn’t need about being a nurse’s aide, getting along with a small, idiosyncratic group of people in a close environment. But the tradeoff was worth it; my newly learned skills and working for a placement, after the birth, in the home of some unknown family, city, country.
And I’d developed many rationales, probably not unfamiliar to anyone who’s ever watched a weepy women’s movie on the subject. I knew them all from many repetitions, like a cushion you hug during thunderstorms or a comforting fairy tale when you’re alone at night in a dark house.
Waiting for Jude, I kept repeating the mantras to myself.
Yes, I’m doing good for people who can’t have children.
Yes, I’m not giving it (I swallowed hard: her) up.
Yes, she’ll have a better life.
Yes, she’ll have parents who want her and know how to take care of her.
Yes, they’ll give her material things—a room of her own, regular meals, a family life, an education. She may even have a sibling or two whom she can look up to, who teach her and fight with her, and eventually, as adults, who befriend her.
And yes, they’ll give her attention and affection, caring and instruction. They’ll marvel at her baby discoveries of the world and find adorable her tryings and tumblings. They’ll take a thousand photos of her and paste them into albums permanently parked on the living room coffee table and documenting her year-by-year and unbelievably fast evolution into a full human.
I knew, too, that I didn’t want that new thing called “open adoption”—having a say in what family was chosen and maintaining contact with them. I’d never be able to look at It, make It understand. Besides, none of that was an option now. Those papers I‘d signed in the manager’s office sternly affirmed no contact and no seeking knowledge of the adoptive parents.
I kept repeating to myself that I wasn’t a mother but a budding classical singer. A mother never stops thinking about and being concerned about the child. Never feels unencumbered again. Motherhood wasn’t in my plans. Motherhood wasn’t who I was.
Our next-door neighbor, Maggie, once told me that of course she loved her two daughters but remembered with longing the world-before-kids, where on a random weeknight she and Todd would jump into the car and speed away to some dive, stay up all night, and come home giggling uncontrollably. And then pursue their art on the weekends, with no feeding schedules or alternating diaper changes. Ah, she sighed—to have that life again. No one knows how good it is, she said, until the first child shows up. Motherhood was hard, she added, even with a nanny, whom she always had to supervise.
Whenever I heard of pregnancies, especially unplanned or unbidden ones, I thought, What a nightmare! Like Maggie said, to have your life completely disrupted, dictated to, demanded of, centered around the child’s wants and needs. I remembered the summer when her first daughter was an infant, how I could hear that high incessant crying through our open windows. In our kitchen, Maggie was usually having a cozy coffee conversation with my mother, but she’d jump up and rush out the door to see what travesty the nanny had managed this time.
No, despite thinking that I could outwit biology that once, I didn’t want a child, or a marriage, even if a candidate were on the horizon. Certainly didn’t want the father and, just as bad, didn’t want to lose autonomy, freedom, my interests. Just go back to college and pretend to resume normalcy. I wasn’t a mother.
I still couldn’t stop the questions. Was I being, I wondered in a buried whisper, selfish? Thinking only of myself and my plans? Was I taking the easy road? What if my mother, Maggie, and my college counselors delivered on their promises of help and resources to support me in finishing college, pursuing my dreams, and raising my daughter?
And what would I—my mother and I—have to do in the house? Make the den that looked out on the back yard into a nursery? Hardly, with its cold glass window-doors and no privacy. A crib in my bedroom? But my desk was where it would be. A cabinet for baby clothes and changing equipment? My books were there. And how could I study with her wailing?
Who would take care of her while I was at school? My mother worked at the real estate office. Thinking of Maggie and her nanny woes, I knew we couldn’t trust anyone else.
How would we ever explain to relatives and other neighbors? How would they look at me—us? How could I wheel her out onto the street?
But without her, how I would feel a month from now, a year? Twenty years, fifty years? Would I wonder at each of her birthdays? Would I read and tear up at all those stories of reunions decades later? Would I watch the mail and phone, comb the newspapers, usually the want ads, for a notice, a plea, for anything about a birth mother? And later, would I use the Internet, like so many, to track the source of those cries and pleas?
Trying to halt these hounding questions, I reminded myself, again, that I had things to do. College subjects to look forward to, homework projects to complete, friends to make, singing lessons to continue, a singing mark to make, and later, maybe and hopefully, a man I could respect and want to be with all the time.
Waiting for the car to take me to the airport, I had to remind myself I’d looked forward to this day. All papers signed, all arrangements made. Just waiting to get back home to my student life.
Why, then, couldn’t I stop weeping?
About the Author
Author, editor, writing coach, workshop leader, and academic mentor and nag (PhD, Columbia University), Noelle Sterne has published stories, essays, writing craft articles, spiritual pieces, and occasional poems in in writing, literary, educational, humor, women’s, and spiritual venues in print and online. She contributes a monthly column to Textbook and Academic Authors Association, “Dear. Dr. Noelle.” Selected journals she has published in: Author Magazine, BlackFox Literary Magazine, Bookends Review, Chicken Soup for the Soul (10 stories as of June 2025), Feed the Holy, Grande Dame Literary Journal, Inside Higher Ed, Inspire Me Today, LiveWriteThrive, MindBodySpirit, Journal of Expressive Writing Mused, New Age Journal, Oh Reader, Pen and Prosper, Romance Writers Report, Ruminate, Sasee, Sivana Spirit, The Soliloquist, Spiritual Media Blog, Spirituality and Health (print and online), Thesis Whisperer, Transformation Coaching, Unity Daily Word, Unity Magazine, Women in Higher Education, Women on Writing, The Write Place at the Write Time, Writing and Wellness, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. Eons ago, Noelle’s children’s book of original dinosaur riddles was published by HarperCollins; the book was in print for 18 years and featured on the first dinosaur show of PBS’s Reading Rainbow. More recently, her handbook to assist doctoral candidates is based on her professional academic practice: Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Psychological Struggles (Bloomsbury/Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2015). In her spiritual self-help book, Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books, 2011), Noelle draw examples from her academic consulting and other aspects of life to support readers in reaching their lifelong yearnings. Continuing with her own, she continues to write stories and essays and is draft-deep in her third novel, with more clogging her files. Website: http://www.
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