This piece was printed in last year’s Central Oregon Writer’s Guild anthology, and I even had the honor of reading it at the book launch. This year, I was asked to be an editor for the anthology (created by an all-volunteer team, dedicated to advancing local writers - that’s a cause I’m happy to be a part of!)
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As I type this, my baby is chortling happily at the toys on his bouncer, specifically a plastic, wildly pleased-with-itself sunshine that mostly eludes his grasp. When he catches it finally, he thrusts it into his mouth with the fervor of a starving man at a buffet. I joke with my friends that he’s the kind of baby who makes you want to have ten more. He’s chubby and happy and giggles easily. He curls his little fingers around your hand in a way that makes you feel like the most important person in the entire world.
He has the chocolate skin and black-coffee eyes of Africa, while I bear the green-apple eyes and undercooked-pancake complexion of my Irish ancestors. I refer to us as food because that’s invariably what people say: “Oooooh, what a little chocolate chip!” An elderly Black woman in Target cooed at me with wonder.
“Oh, he’s your brownie bite!” said another in Safeway. “I just want to eat him up!”
Babies and puppies are the universal delicious things in the universe, I’ve decided. But my nuzzles into his yummy hair and the sweet compliments from passersby come at a cost – he was not always mine to savor.
I’m reminded of this occasionally by the bluntness of strangers – for every hungry grandma there is a skeptical, pickier one.
“How’d this happen?” asked one such onlooker, gesturing with a bony finger at the coffee-colored face peeking out of the baby carrier on my chest. I stammered what I hoped was a kind explanation, but it was an ugly reminder – color-blindness does not exist, especially here in not-exactly-diverse Central Oregon. As much as he is one of the essential tastes on my palate, to others he’s an anomaly, a new flavor they can’t quite explain or pinpoint.
Not everyone understands; this I know. But those who do feed us. When I arrived at the rural, understaffed, and out-of-date Southern hospital to meet the child I hoped would become mine, he was lying alone in a plastic crib that reminded me of a Tupperware container for last-night’s spaghetti. I’d driven several hours, flown all night, driven several more hours, and stumbled into the maternity ward with only the desperate love of a mother’s heart propelling me. Only after I sat down with this miracle of a person in my arms did I realize I was starving. I dug in my purse for a granola bar. A kind nurse saw me furtively chewing, sitting as displaced and unmoored as the child I held, on a stool between the nursery and nurse’s station.
“Honey, I can get you on the list for some food from the cafeteria,” she said. “But you don’t want it, our food is real bad. Why don’t you leave the baby with us and go get you somethin’.”
The maternity nurses were clearly stretched thin; the child I had come to rescue wasn’t the only one who needed it, so I was shy to avail myself of her kindness. But finally, the rumble in my gut became impossible to ignore, so I waited for the baby to fall asleep and then ventured out to find food.
I found a Chick-fil-A, relieved to see a brand I recognized, and then realized it was Sunday afternoon, and it would not be open. I drove across the street to the next available option, a small-town milkshake and burger joint with teenagers in paper hats joking behind the counter and flirting with one another as they spilled Coca-Cola out of paper cups in puppy-dog clumsiness.
I got chili-cheese fries because I hadn’t eaten anything more than a few pretzels and a granola bar in nearly 40 hours and felt daring. Belatedly, I added a milkshake too, which made the paper-hatted teenager grin at my hungry fervor.
By the time I made it back to the hospital with a greasy paper bag in my hand and a milkshake already half-finished, food was again forgotten, and all I could think about was the baby. What if he’d cried alone, with no one free to tend to him? What if someone from his biological family had arrived? What if he was never meant to be mine?
When I got back into the maternity ward, the charge nurse met me at the door and waved me past the imposing security guards. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
My milkshake threatened to turn around in my gut and come right back up. I squeezed my hands around the crinkled paper bag of my dinner to keep from trembling. Adoption is risky love. I always knew this might happen. He’s a child who needs love. I don’t have a right to keep him if there’s someone in his biological family who will care for him. These thoughts and more swirled around my mind as she pushed his crib into a small private room. I watched him glide in front of me, still asleep in his little Tupperware, like the most nourishing and soul-filling of meals, as I prepared my heart for hunger.
“Here,” she said, thrusting several gift cards into my hands. “There was a failed adoption earlier, and these are from the family. The nursing team all agreed they should go to you. Take care of yourself, and him.”
There is food that satisfies, like granola bars and chili-cheese fries, and then there is food that does more than ease temporary pain. It lingers on your palate and in your memory, like grandmother’s blueberry muffins or a warming holiday feast, tastes that nourish long after the meal is over. When I think of that overworked and sorrowful nurse, the way she met my eyes and gave me hope when she could have kept it for herself, I think of the latter. I picked up the baby, who still wasn’t mine, who’d been loved by another mother for months before I arrived, who was now supported by a maternity wing of kind professionals rooting for him. I held that precious, delicious life to my still-hungry-self, and I cried and cried.
Now that baby is cooing and cackling to himself, soon he will want another bottle because, as I joke, he eats like a linebacker. We’re home; home in every sense as he is ours now, legally and spiritually and completely. To celebrate, the day of his finalization hearing, my husband smoked a brisket, bursting with the legacy and flavor of a Texan upbringing, and I made roasted butternut squash topped with caramelized onions and bacon and goat cheese, sizzling in a cast-iron skillet. We popped locally grown sparkling wine and toasted to life and love and wholeness and satisfaction. We ate with the joyous gratitude of those who have known hunger.
“This is the body of Christ, broken for you,” the priest says gravely. “This is the blood of Christ, spilled for you.” In this faith, those who are hungry are fed, those who thirst drink from Living Water and thirst no more. This is sustenance that does not look away from pain and suffering. Indeed, it is the essential human experience of redemption and sorrow in one bite, the tension of sacrifice and love embodied.
It’s essential to my understanding of God that my faith is represented in spilled blood and broken body, in rumbling stomachs and parched throats, in feasting and gratitude.
When my son and I are out together, folks often say, “Oh he’s so yummy!” and I think about how we eat to celebrate, to survive, to grieve. My motherhood is a story of an empty belly, of yearning, of the deep ache that settles in our gut when hope is deferred. It is also the joy when it is finally, unctuously realized, the both/and of painful gratitude, of knowing that my fullness was paid for by the emptiness of another.
Sometimes at night, after a dinner of macaroni and cheese and “three more bites”, I read “Where the Wild Things Are”. On the couch, with my three miraculous and delicious children snuggled around me, I say with fervor, with deep, lived-in understanding: “I’ll eat you up, I love you so!”