Questioning the baby route as 50 approaches
A friend dropped by last night around 10PM thinking that my housewarming party was that Saturday night and not late July. She’s a sharp cookie and we got to talking about life in its larger scope. A few years back, she was adopting a baby girl – 20 months old – and had the girl for three weeks when a series of Visa issues blocked the adoption and she had to give her up. “A couple ended up adopting her,” she said. And maybe that was best because the child will grow up in a family and not with a single woman. Maybe it was selfish of me to want her.
It’s a very difficult decision to make alone and at 48. Realistically, as my friend said, “you suddenly can’t die” because you are in charge of this infant. I don’t have any backup – witness my mother’s self destruction and a sort of inattentiveness by the rest of the family. Could you depend on friends to pick up as parents of a small child? Come on, how do you realistically expect that would play out?
I told my friend that I wanted to adopt a child not for what the child could give to me, but for what I know I could give to a child. But yesterday, when I was sitting on the front porch with M, years younger, who has a 6 year old daughter, and she talked about day to day life and all I heard was her father who watches her daughter, the child’s father who watches his daughter, her mother and step father’s involvement with the girl, and on and on, I thought about how lucky that little girl is – having such a vast network of people who love her and could care for her in the absence of her mother.