losing Molly

Free Writing 12/18/06

The exercise is a story from childhood that made you laugh or made you cry. Tapping into strong emotions is the point. I’m not sure I have a good childhood story that I can dreg up here. Childhood feels so far away sometimes for me now and well my childhood was rather unremarkable. It was easy. It’s funny to look back at my life and determine that the things I felt emotional about were typically not connected to me. Strong emotion doesn’t always get all that close; I always cry when the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pronounces that Tiny Tim will die. Typically I don’t cry in the day to day operations of my life. But the exercise is the exercise. The last time I cried, really hard, emotional, couldn’t stop crying, cried was when we lost Molly. If Eric was sitting here he would correct me and say Marina. If we hadn’t truly settled on the name, that was only because she wasn’t home yet. In my heart and in my life she had already been ours. Her picture was all over the house, the count down calendar was on the refrigerator, the court date was set and we were moving forward. It was a plan; every detail of that adoption was under control and was going so smoothly. And then I got the phone call from Amy. Our coordinator’s name was Amy, she had guided us through the adoption of Henry and now was guiding us to Molly. She called, it was a Friday night, and I was at work. She wanted me to call her when I got home but I couldn’t. I knew something was wrong and I wasn’t going to let her off of the phone. So she told me. And the whole world crashed around me. Molly had been adopted by a Russian couple. They had precedence, if a Russian family wanted a child there was nothing that anyone could do. It didn’t matter how close you were to the adoption. I knew this. I knew it but hadn’t believed. Had pretended that it couldn’t happen that way. We were three weeks from Molly, just three weeks. And if it had been four weeks or two weeks I would be standing here railing those times. But it doesn’t matter how close or how far, the reality was that she was already my child and it felt like someone was ripping her from my arms. My head crashed down onto my desk and I squalled. I didn’t weep, I didn’t cry but I squalled like a child who hasn’t had a nap and just had her favorite toy taken away. My nose ran, my hands shook, and I cried. I honestly couldn’t put anything together. Even though I was supposed to pick up Henry and take him home I felt that I couldn’t move. I had never been frozen like that before. I don’t know that I have ever been like that since. It was frightening that I lost all my will. Will had always pushed me through every hardship in life but for those moments that day my will had deserted me.