By Louise Browne
The world suddenly made sense. Everything was as it should be. My son was born. We named him Jack. It was a strong name we agreed upon and a name that fits his strength today. All paths in life led to this exact moment. The moment he was in my arms. I could no longer hear the whirring of the machines that had been putting the necessary fluids into my body while the surgeon worked. The beeping of the monitors was silenced, and all of the excitement and conversation around us became muted. His father was crying, and I could hear his voice but not make out his words. I looked into those eyes. Chocolate pools my father had later called them. He looked into mine. He no longer cried, and I no longer had a hole in my heart. I somehow knew him before. We knew each other. It wasn’t only the months of being connected through blood, emotion, sound, and touch. It was somehow from another plane, another time, and maybe not of this world. For a brief second, I could grasp what that was but I couldn’t hold on to the thought—it wasn’t really for me to understand. It was a knowledge that will come again. In a future time. A quarter century later and in a blink of an eye, we are still connected. My heart walks around on this beautiful earth having to learn life, to negotiate the ins and outs of love, friendship, heartbreak, joy, sorrow, loss, and success. A moment ago I was doing the same. Life is as it should be. This is what matters. A river with a strong current flows between mothers and their children. The feeling of floating in that river and being gently carried is what we search for throughout our lives.
Louise Browne is an adoptee and co-host and co-creator of Adoption: The Making of Me Podcast, along with Sarah Reinhardt. This piece was written for her son, the first blood relative she met. She felt she knew him instantly, as if maybe from another time. It struck her years later when she found out that her birthmother, Linda, had passed when Louise was still a little girl, that maybe there was some symbolism or truth to that. Like many adoptees, she had a hole that was filled with the birth of her son in a way she could never explain at the time and a curiosity that became instantly more clear. Now, after coming out of the fog and discovering more about herself and what that longing and hole meant and means, it takes a new shape, and is more prominent than ever. It captures the feeling that all adoptees want to feel—that moment of connection that even in reunion they may never get to feel and can’t recreate—the search for that current in the river. Find her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
