…a nineteen-year-old girl named Kayla. She’s here tonight, in the maternity ward lobby. She came back for her baby.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The nurse, Joanne, sat beside me.
Three months before my son, Chris, announced his wife’s “pregnancy,” Kayla had given birth to a baby girl at this hospital. She was a college freshman with no money and no support. A man had approached her in the hospital waiting room. He told her he and his wife desperately wanted a child and offered to pay her medical bills and her tuition if she would sign the baby over to them privately. No agency. No lawyers. He put his own name on the birth certificate as the father.
That man was my son.
My daughter-in-law, Amanda, had pretended to be pregnant for six months, wearing padding under her clothes. After six years of failed fertility treatments, she couldn’t bear to tell anyone the truth. Chris went along with it because he loved her and he was desperate too.
They kept me away because I’d have noticed immediately that the baby was three months old, not three weeks.
“The arrangement wasn’t legal,” Joanne said. “A birth mother has rights. Kayla’s been calling the hospital for weeks asking where her baby is. Your son’s phone is switched off. You were the only contact we had.”
I went down to the lobby. Kayla was sitting alone, holding a little stuffed rabbit. She looked terrified.
I told her who I was. I told her I would make sure she saw her daughter. Then I called Chris and told him he had one hour to get to the hospital with Amanda and the baby.
They came. Amanda was hysterical. Chris looked like he hadn’t slept in months. Kayla held the baby for the first time since she was born.
It took a family lawyer and an adoption agency six months to sort everything out properly. Kayla chose to go ahead with a legal open adoption. She wanted to finish college. She also wanted to be in her daughter’s life. Chris and Amanda agreed to everything.
I hold my granddaughter every Sunday now. Kayla comes once a month and sits on my porch with us. The baby’s name is Hope. Kayla chose it.
