Chapter 10 – Mother and Child Reunion

The dog days of August were upon us and I was devoting every waking minute to her. Even my dreams were filled with anticipation and dread of what was going to be. I had all but given up on selling typewriter ribbons and lift off tape with David and my music was all but forgotten. I knew I was storing it up for a future time when I would be able to write all of this craziness down, but for now I was concentrating on her and her needs. While my friends were going on about their daily business, Chas was making a name for himself as a producer and songwriter, Larry was off in stockbroker land concentrating on the almighty dollar and writing instrumental “mood pieces”, Stephen was living in Venice with his new love, Portia while keeping a vigil on his all but forgotten goddess of love, Renee Russo. I couldn’t talk to any of them without receiving some kind of lecture about the misbegotten waif that I was spending way too much time and energy on. They all said I was going to be hurt and left without a pot to piss in, but I knew I had gone too far to turn back.

By September, when the Santa Ana winds were blowing hot and strong— the winds of change gusting. We would meet with the adopting couple, the Jewish film director (let’s call him Will) and his matronly wife (let’s call her Jennifer) from time to time and each meeting was getting stranger and stranger. I was starting to have my doubts about them. They were acting more and more disinterested in the well being of their surrogate mother to be—all they seemed to do was talk about themselves and their own lives. I don’t know how it happens, but I have heard tales that when a woman who is barren in the womb and told that she would never be able to conceive a child of her own can get pregnant when all the pressure is off. Sometimes a vacation to a warm and tropical place, or an unexpected windfall, maybe winning the lottery or the jackpot in Vegas or Monte Carlo, but for Jennifer it was when she found out that she was chosen by us to be the mother of Maria’s child—she was now pregnant. Maybe that was the justification for the decision that we made, the hardest decision I ever had to make in my thirty-one years of life so far.

By the middle of September, Maria was looking like and over-inflated balloon and we knew it was going to be soon. On the night of the twenty-fourth her water had broken and I rushed her to Cedars of Lebanon hospital in my Porsche. Fortunately I had the foresight to take Bridget over to my parents Leave it to Beaver house on canton Drive the night before. Even though the wanted no part of my life with the Nazi-girl, they did love me and my dog, and couldn’t see having the poor dog suffer being locked up in an apartment for hours, even days if Maria were to go into labor. Maria was in terrible pain and wasn’t one of those women who gave a shit about natural child birth or anything like that especially if it was a child that she would be giving up—so she got the epidural and was feeling a lot better in less than twenty minutes. By midnight the contractions were getting closer—about two minutes apart and we knew it was going to be soon. I was staying awake on coffee and nervous energy and at four AM on September 25, 1984, Maria gave birth to a beautiful ginger-haired little girl—she was perfect.

Maria tried to hold back her tears as the baby was taken from the delivery room to the room where they kept the other newborns, but as soon as her little girl had left the room the river of tears flowed like a fountain. I tried my best to console her, and told her it was for the best and how her baby was going to have a great life, go to the best schools and be well taken care of, but deep down I felt that we were making a mistake. My feelings were intensified when I called Will and Jennifer at four-thirty.

“Hello, is this Will?”

“Yeah, who is it?”

“It’s James.”

“James who?”

“Maria’s boyfriend, you know— the mother of your soon to be adopted child.”

He sounded like he couldn’t care less who I was and acted irritated by be awakened before the crack of dawn. “Oh yeah. What do you want?”

“I’m sorry to call you so late but I wanted to let you know that Maria had the baby. It’s a lovely little girl.”

“Oh yeah, that’s great. Goodbye.”

He hung up the phone without any further questions. I was shocked. You would think that he would want to know more about the baby, what she looked like, if she had all of her fingers and toes and so on, but nothing. I felt confused and a little pissed off, but I thought I should probably keep these feelings to myself and not let on to Maria how insensitive Will was on the phone.

I went back to Maria’s room in the maternity ward and fell asleep on the lounge chair next to her. Around ten o’clock in the morning a nurse had come by the room with the baby in her arms. She probably wasn’t told that the baby was going to be put up for adoption, some kind of communication breakdown, but she handed the baby to Maria to try and get her to nurse the infant. I thought it was a terrible mistake. She was going to bond with the baby and it was going to be next to impossible for Maria to let go after that. A few minutes later the head nurse came in and took the baby away from Maria and most likely read the other nurse the riot act for what she had done. But the damage was done, and the connection already made and the mother and child connection is the strongest bind there is on the planet. Nobody could argue with that.

I felt like I was being torn apart at the seams, and I could only imagine how Maria was feeling when the next morning they had the baby all bundled up in a pink blanket and handed her over to Jennifer and Will and we both watched in silence as they rounded the corner and left with the two day old Janelle. Later that day Maria was released from the hospital and we drove back to the apartment on Fuller without uttering a word. There was a cloud of doom and depression so thick you could cut it with a paper knife. I thought after a day or two things would begin to lighten up, but they only got worse. I thought she was going to jump out of the window or slit her wrists in the bathtub. I couldn’t take it anymore so I said, “Why don’t you call your mother in Germany.”

“What good is that going to do?” she asked knowing that it had been almost a year since she had spoken to Suzanne and they didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms.

“Just call her.” I said.

After a few minutes of silence she called. When Suzanne heard what had happened she was shocked and appalled that she could do such a thing.

“Is there any way you can get the baby back?” she asked her adopted daughter.

Maria was aware of the California law that the birth mother had three months, maybe longer, to reverse her decision and have the baby returned to her, and she told Suzanne this.

“You call those lawyers and get that baby back. I will fly out in a week or two with Anna and you will all come back to Germany. Is that understood?”

“Are you sure?” Maria asked, having doubts that her step-mother would take such a proactive stance in the matter.

“Of course I am sure. This is your child we are talking about.”

She hung up the phone and I was about to make the hardest phone call I ever had to make.

“Hello, is this Will?”

“Yes. Who’s calling?”

“It’s James. I don’t know how to tell you this but let me get right to the point. Maria has decided to get her baby back.”

“What! You’re kidding right?”

“No. I’m sorry. Roger will be in touch with you. I am really sorry.”

I hung up the phone with a lump in my throat as big as the Holland Tunnel. What had I just done? The only saving grace was knowing that Jennifer was pregnant and was most likely, if everything went well, she and Will were going to be parents of their own little boy or girl.

A week later I was in the waiting room of Roger’s law office while Maria was signing papers. Will and Jennifer had just come by and dropped off Janelle. It would have been more than awkward if we had bumped into them so they made sure not to call us in to the office until they knew the adopting couple was long gone. After the ink was dry, the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted we entered Roger’s office. There, lying down between two leather office chairs that were pushed together and barricaded by stacks of law books on each side, was little Janelle. Maria picked her up and smiled for the first time in months. I felt like I had done the right thing. There was a circle of events in her life that had to be broken. Her mother had abandoned her and she had abandoned her baby. It had to stop, I and was going to do something about it, or so I thought.

Two weeks later, in the middle of October, Maria, Suzanne, Anna and Janelle were boarding a plane bound for Frankfurt, Germany. I had some loose ends to tie up, one of them being selling my beautiful Porsche, and as soon as I could, I would be joining them. I asked my mom and dad if they could take care of Bridget and they agreed. They thought I was insane to go, but they knew I was, or thought I was in love, and tried to be understanding. In mid December I was on a plane heading east to their Fatherland.