The child

I’ll assume it was a cold and dark stormy night when my mother was brought into the hospital. This event had been planned for months now, but I had come sooner than expected. My mother was screaming when I came into this world. Or at least I imagine her to be. I imagine her screaming not in pain, but because this was her body’s way of saying goodbye. I have to believe that in some way she said goodbye to me.

I figure then I am picked up from the heaving chest of my mother and carried into another room. A room where all the unwanted children go. A room with plain white walls, cribs lines up in rows, and endless crying. I imagine my cries join the others there and the symphony of the forgotten begins again.

That Monday a car would pull up and a tall lady would step out. She would briskly walk through the doors of this hospital and run to the room where I lay. I had fallen asleep by then. I imagine her crying as she looks at all of us: the forgotten and rejected, the lost and broken children. She starts to pick a child up and cradle her. She rocks her in her arms and starts to sing. I wake up to this unfamiliar sound and stare up at the ceiling as she continues. I am too young to tell her to come rescue me. I can only scream and hope she finds me. The women picks up a few more children to rock. She has tears running down her face. The orphanage only has room for one more child. 

Suddenly she turns, as if spun around by fate herself. She walks in solemn silence to my crib. She looks down at me and we lock eyes for a second. She looks into my eyes and picks me up. We both exit the room where I had lived for almost all my life and I bump around in her arms as leave the hospital.

In that moment how could I have known that two Americans would come get me from that orphanage and bring me to a better life? How could I have known that I when I grew up I would laugh and let people bring hope into my world? How could I have known that I would meet you and I would discover what it means to truly love someone?

But somehow as I left that hospital where I stayed my entire life, the smile on my small, scrunched-up face knew it all.