Chapter 5: Forty Minutes
I have my son.
Thirty-one years late, and we don’t get those years back, and I’ve stopped pretending we can. But we have now, and now turns out to be a great deal.
Nathan and I have dinner every Sunday. I know his coffee order and the sound of his laugh and the way he goes quiet before he says something that matters. I’m learning him at forty-nine the way I ached to learn him at eighteen. It’s not the same. It’s not nothing. It’s everything I have, and I hold it with both hands.
I met the Danvers. I was terrified to — what do you say to the woman who got the life with your son that you were denied? But Nathan’s adoptive mother, Carol, took both my hands at her front door and said, “I have thanked God for you every single day of his life. He’s ours. But he was yours first, and there was always room for you. Your parents are the only ones who ever said there wasn’t.” Two mothers, one son, and no war between us — only a strange, deep gratitude that surprised us both. She shows me his baby pictures. I give her the eighteen years of grief I never got to spend, and she just holds it with me.
