“A mother’s breaking heart.” Remembering Shannon, the daughter I lost long ago | Opinion

We loved her.

It started with a phone call from my younger brother. “I know you and Doug have wanted a daughter. Diana just delivered a baby girl, and she is giving her up for adoption. If you’re interested, I’ll give you Diana’s phone number.”

Diana was my brother’s ex-wife with whom he shared two beautiful children who were a treasured part of our family.

Opinion

He was right. Doug and I wanted a daughter. The year was 1974. Our boys were five and three. The timing was perfect. Diana’s baby was a ready-made answer to our dilemma: Should we try one more time? This seemed like the perfect solution.

I called Diana. She had already relinquished the tiny newborn to an agency, but Diana knew us well and was immediately responsive to our proposal that we adopt her baby.

We drove from our home in Prunedale to San Jose later that same afternoon. We brought Shannon home.

I contacted Andy Church, an attorney for whom I had worked a few years earlier. Adoption proceedings were initiated. During the ensuing months, we were scrutinized by the county, and, after multiple impromptu home visits, we were approved as a fitting home for the baby girl in our care.

Shannon settled in. She teethed, she smiled, she giggled at her older brothers, she ate cereal. She blossomed. Our family was complete. She was born in February. She would be all ours in August. We began to plan a celebration.

Then came the phone call. Not from Diana. She had receded from our consciousness — never inquired about the baby, was just happy that her “problem” had been solved amicably for all concerned. On the phone was the man to whom Diana had been married when Shannon was conceived. We had never met him, and his name was never mentioned as an interested party. Diana had, in fact, confided to us from the first that he was not the father of our baby.

The man on the phone asked how Shannon was doing. Smiling, I answered happily that she was a joyful, healthy, contented baby who had wriggled herself effortlessly into our hearts. After a long pause, the man on the phone cleared his throat and, without preamble, said, “I want my daughter.”

What? Out of nowhere? Lose our girl? No. Please no. I felt a stab of abject fear. Could this happen?

In shock, choking back sobs, I called our attorney. A meeting was set up with a juvenile court judge presiding in our attorney’s chambers. Andy never said it was hopeless. Ever a good friend, he did everything he could. But Shannon’s “father” had appeared two weeks before the adoption would have been final.

Before the judge, evidence was presented by the social workers who had monitored us, our home, our sons and every detail of Shannon’s well-being during those months in which we became that sweet complication called a family. Their recommendation was, “The interests of the child are best served by her remaining with the only family she has ever known, the home where she has been welcomed, nourished, loved, protected and provided for since four days after her birth.”

That did not matter. Nothing mattered. Not a mother’s breaking heart. Not tears freely flowing.

Because the man to whom Diana had been married insisted on his “parental rights,” the judge said there was no legal precedent except to honor this man’s demand for “his” daughter.

Later that day, I handed the only daughter I would ever have to an attorney I had never met and watched as a car I did not recognize disappeared around the bend in the road. She was my baby. How could she live without me? I was her mother. How would I live without her? I was standing on the front porch of my home — which was, until that very moment, Shannon’s home. A part of me had been brutally ripped out. I stood there, eviscerated, bleeding profusely and in exquisite pain that no one could see or hear.

We lost so much that day.

Not just our baby. We lost the essence of all the dreams and hopes and rites of passage.

Her first steps. Her first day of school. Her love for the two older brothers who adored her. Her part in the youth group Christmas pageant. Shopping for her prom dress. The friends who would gather at our house for slumber parties and all-nighters before exams.

Then too, there were her dresses. What does one do with 22 adorable little dresses she will never wear? We had already lost her; it was hard to let them go, too. Eventually, I did give them away. But I kept one. Just one. As a little reminder. She wore that one. And she was beautiful.

Each Christmas, a tiny pair of baby shoes, stored among the baubles and glittering decorations, finds its special place on the tree. Little pink memories. Honoring the pain of loss? Perhaps. But more than that, honoring the capacity of a mother’s heart to remember love, despite loss.

Was the pain less because she was “not our real daughter?” Once, I might have wondered that myself. But I learned the answer. Desperately wishing that I had no reason to know.

Bunny Stevens lives in Modesto, her hometown, and has served on The Modesto Bee Community Advisory Board. She is the opening courtesy clerk at the Safeway supermarket on McHenry Avenue and an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church. She has also been known to represent the Easter Bunny and Santa’s Elf for children of all ages. Reach her at BunnyinModesto@gmail.com