The Baby Wait

Joe had not filled me in on this little detail. I gripped my forehead with my free hand and pressed my thumb and middle finger to my temples. “What happened this time, Cherie?”

“That new shift manager made a pass at me. Not even Saint Sara would put up with sexual harassment, would you?”

I gritted my teeth in hopes steam—or worse, foul invectives—wouldn’t spew forth.

I was no saint. That was for sure. I wasn’t even a candidate. But Cherie liked to rattle my cage by telling me I was a Miss Goody Two-shoes. She somehow thought women who actually put on panty hose for work and drove a Volkswagen felt they were superior to the rest of the working-class world.

“No, but…did you talk to your restaurant manager?”

I knew the answer before she gave me a surly, “No. What good would that do? Besides, I told Dave I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to keep seeing each other.”

“Dave?” That would be the shift manager. Apparently, Cherie had left some large, highly incriminating pieces out of her version of the story. “Were you…seeing him before he made this pass at you?”

“Not exactly. I mean, yeah, we’d slept with each other a couple of times, but he’s got no call to—”

The rest of Cherie’s words escaped me. I worried about her enduring single motherhood, STDs, HIV. Cherie floated through life aimlessly, with the mating habits—and standards—of a guppy.

“Are you looking for something else, Cherie? Have you thought about going back to school, getting your GED?”

How was it possible my serious, responsible, dependable Joe had actually come out of the same womb as Cherie? I tempered my frustration with her by reminding myself of her very real losses in life.

She’d been almost nine when she and Joe had lost their parents in a freak auto accident. She’d lived with their aunt and uncle while Joe was in college. Once we got married, she’d begged Joe to let her stay with us—and I’d agreed. In all the years since, she’d never bothered with the tedious task of growing up, at least not emotionally.

“I’m doing the best I can!” she hollered. “Just because I’m not a nine-to-fiver like you, you look down your nose at me. Forget it! Just forget it! I’ll figure something out! You never listen, Sara! You never take my side of anything!” With that, she banged down the phone, leaving me listening to silence and then the beep beep beep of the disconnect.

I left for work thinking I’d made things worse, not better. When would I learn? Damn, what defect possessed me to insert myself into their no-man’s-land?

In our front office, Lucy, the board secretary, greeted me with a panicked look on her face and Mr. Eeyore by her side. “Uh, Sara. Mrs….South is holding on line one for you.”

I stifled another groan. Mrs. South was Lucy’s code name for my mother. I chickened out.

“Uh, take a message and tell her I’m returning calls in just a few minutes,” I suggested brightly.

Lucy crooked her eyes at dour Daryl, who stood hunched over with a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. The one thing sure to make Daryl glower even more were personal calls during business hours.

“Uh, no, don’t think that will work,” she said just as brightly. “You remember the last time you tried that, she parked herself on my couch until you had a free moment.”

I folded. It was unconscionable to let Lucy take the brunt of my mother on a tirade. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

“Sara, you think you can wrap that up pretty quickly? Don’t mean to take all of your morning, but you and I need to go over strategies to up attendance during the upcoming CRCT. Not that any of it will do any good,” Daryl said in his best Eeyore impersonation, referring to the standardized test the elementary schools gave.

“Right, right. Be with you in a sec,” I told him.

I wasn’t, of course. It took me fifteen minutes to get Ma settled down, and another five to part on good terms. My workday was toast in a blender from then on.

I met Maggie in the deserted office an hour after we could have gone home had we not been swamped with work.

“Well.” Maggie brimmed over with mock cheer. “This day was a total waste of makeup.”

“Amen, sister. Daryl’s war-room meeting about CRCT attendance chewed up my entire morning.”

“Heard anything about the referrals?” Maggie asked.

I shook my head. “Haven’t had a chance to check out the APC board. Maybe there’s good news. I could use it after today.”

I felt for the poor couples down to the last nail-biting days, only to have The Wait’s chasm yawn wide once again. Mostly, though, I’d absorbed myself with my own anxious thoughts.

Chinese adoptions were subject to the winds of bureaucratic fortune. Any number of things could cause a slowdown. It had happened before. Actually, we current adoptive parents could consider ourselves lucky. The Wait had crept up to more than a year just four or five years before, not including the paperwork. Now all we had to do was wade through The Paperchase—four to six months—and endure another six months of the official Wait.

But the CCAA’s dormant state had awakened all sorts of bad memories on the APC about how once before Chinese adoptions had been temporarily suspended. This was the true fear of all the people in the midst of the process: that the Chinese government would suddenly take offense to some event that took place either in our government or our media and turn off the spigot of adoptions.

The delay was because of the increasing strife with Taiwan, one school of thought went. Another opined it was the worrisome increase in numbers of children adopted by foreigners. Still another said, no, none of these. The Chinese government was actively rethinking their one-child policy, since demographics were dooming the country to a population heavily tilted toward males.

In truth, none of us knew anything beyond the fact that we wanted our babies. Or an explanation. Or preferably both. Give us our babies, please, then tack on the whys and the wherefores.

I’d tried to downplay all this to Joe. The last thing I wanted to do was give him any reason to doubt the outcome of the adoption.

WHAT I SAW when I logged onto the APC at home that afternoon left me reeling. Instead of finding the much-coveted referrals, I found the postings of mothers wearing sackcloth and ashes.

It was a reorganization of the CCAA, unexpected, unplanned, unheralded. A moratorium had been placed on all foreign adoptions until the new head of the CCAA could get up to speed. Sorry for all the trouble, we’ll get back on it as soon as possible, nothing to worry about.

Oh, but we did worry. Our worst fear had been realized. It didn’t help that all the major adoption agencies had been caught flat-footed by the news. This was a middle of the night head-rolling no one could have predicted. No one dared speculate when referrals would start flowing again.

It took all the guts I had to tell Joe. He stood on the back porch and just sagged with the news. The only other time I’d seen him go boneless was when I’d told him I had ovarian cancer.

He looked down at the work boots he hadn’t had a chance to pull off. “Do they…do they know how long?”

I blinked back tears and shook my head. “No. I called the agency, and they don’t really know any more than we do. They’re trying their best to be optimistic, but I could tell they were at their wit’s end. I just don’t know, Joe.”

“Anything like this ever happened before?”

“Yeah, a couple of times. One big time before, but usually it’s just a slowdown, you know, something that just gradually creeps up. This, this is kind of odd for the CCAA to do. And it came out of nowhere. No political incidents, no bad-mouthing in the media about Chinese adoptions…nothing.”

“Sounds like some head-honcho over there got in trouble with his higher-ups,” Joe mused.

“Maybe that’s all it is.”

Joe toed the rough boards of the porch. “I’m sorry, Sara. I wish…I wish…”

We ate our supper in silence, my throat closing up with so much grief I could barely swallow. Joe pushed his food around on his plate. He looked as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.

I needed space, time, to process it, to think. The supper dishes in the dishwasher, I climbed the stairs to the nursery.

I sat on the floor, the bifold closet doors wide open. Around me I spread the contents of a box I’d been collecting: vacuum packing bags, a soft yellow baby blanket, tiny packable baby toys and the one and only outfit I’d been able to bring myself to buy for Meredith.

In the solitude, I let tears course unashamedly down my face.

I hated this feeling, this awful, sick envy that gripped me whenever the door on the possibility of children seemed to slam shut. The feeling slept within me like an alien creature. Awakened, it devoured me at its leisure until I could finally loose myself from its grasp.