Mama, I'm Coming Home

Synopsis: A woman realizes that her teenage son's adoption was botched and is determined to make things right by sending him back to his birthplace. Although, getting him there safely won't come easy.

heed: this is a freewriting

Tom and I got married in the death of winter of 2009, just a week before Christmas when it was snowing. We had a little ceremony in a chalet-like venue upstate New York. Everyone thought we were nuts for planning a wedding during one of the coldest months, but I was adamant about having snowfall on the day we tied the knot. I had to ensure that somehow I had good luck throughout our marriage since I didn't have anything old, borrowed, or blue.

I wore an off-the-shoulder mermaid dress with white gloves, a tiara, and a veil pinned so deep into my hair that it nearly penetrated my scalp. Both my parents walked me down the aisle, my father cried on one end while my mother beamed at me on the other. Fortunately, for my dad, he wasn't the only one tearing up. Tom's brother, Jake, also his best man, took a small handkerchief out of his coat pocket and wiped his older brother's tears. Just looking at my guy and observing his reaction to me walking down the aisle to say yes melted my heart because I knew that we would be together until death do us part.

A year had gone by when we moved in together and got our first house, we were drowning in debt with loans from grad school. I worked as a teacher at an elementary school while working towards my Doctorate and Tom was in his third year of medical school, studying to be a surgeon. He was also a resident at a hospital near our home. We had to piggyback off of each other's income just to make ends meet and keep our house. Then, the next best thing happened the year I graduated with my Doctorate in Education. I found a job teaching at a prestigious all-girls high school in Cold Spring Harbor that offered to pay me triple my salary, which meant I could finally take a breather about my finances.

While great things headed my way, I couldn't say the same for Tom. Two years after we married and after I got my job, he broke all the bones in his dominant hand after he tried protecting his face from a fall while fixing the window to the attic on the roof. Not only did his recovery take a toll on him, but sacrificing his dream of being a surgeon literally crushed his soul. There was nothing I could do to cheer him up and help him through that difficult time. He sunk into a pit of depression that he couldn't get out of. No matter how many times I tried to get him to talk about it, he'd shut me out. He'd tell me he was fine and there was nothing to worry about. That's one thing I hated about Tom or men, in general--how well they could mask their emotions and go about their lives and pretend as though their whole world didn't come falling down.

On the other hand, for that matter, I was grateful for how well Tom dealt with his depression and how he courageously pushed through this challenging stage in his life because he turned a bad situation into a positive life-changing solution. A year after his sustained injury, he applied to be a football coach at the high school he attended. It was evident that the universe wanted to give back to him after the loss he suffered because soon enough, he was hired. Some may agree that he only got the job because he was the school's former quarterback in the nineties but I believed everything was written in the stars for him all along. After all, Tom did always have a burning passion for football.

His passion for the sport burned throughout his life, especially during the holidays. That same year Tom started coaching was the same year we hosted Thanksgiving at our home for the first time as a married couple. We invited Tom's family and mine to celebrate the holiday and his new job at Wiley High. Everyone was elated to spend time with one another, but most importantly eat after waiting two hours after their arrival to eat. That's what happened when you let a woman who eats takeout every day cook an entire dinner for twelve people.

I damn near burnt the turkey during my bathroom break. I could've asked my husband to check on the main course of the meal, but then again, I didn't want him to think I couldn't handle cooking dinner for my family. The last thing I wanted was pity. I despised it, and I despised anyone who indulged in it like a mud bath. I thanked the heavens the evening was a success because I proved to myself that I could overcome any obstacle that stood in my way. It was a good thing I came out just in time to take the turkey out of the oven because it had an excellent golden brown appearance and the crispy skin along with the juicy white meat was just the cherry on top. Besides, I didn't regret going to the restroom because that was how I found out I was pregnant.

It was insane how science relied on peeing on a stick to determine whether a woman was carrying a fetus. But it was enough to convince me that I had a tiny bean growing inside me. When I shared the news with Tom, he was ecstatic. He always wanted to be a father, and I was giving him the chance to be one. A month hadn't even gone by and we were already talking about the gender of the baby and what we would call it. All in all, it came down to whether the baby was healthy or not, meaning we didn't care what the gender was.

If it was a boy, his name would be Parker, and if it was a girl, her name would be Channing. Either way, our baby's name was going to be unisex because if there was a slim chance that it was the opposite of the other, we wouldn't have to automatically start thinking of names of that specific gender. It would be convenient.

Sometimes, when I thought about my pregnancy in 2013, I recounted how much I hated myself for jinxing the life of my unborn child because not long after November I miscarried.