Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

by Vanessa McGrady

One summer day, I was lolling around in the bath, and, inexplicably, with no apparent trigger, I wanted a baby. I was nearing thirty. I felt an allover tug in my body, a missing of someone I didn’t know. Every single cell in me ached. The tears started dripping down my face, slipping into the bathwater.

But Dad was chronically late for everything, except for airplanes. (Airplanes don’t love you. They are immune to your Irish charms and do not care a whit about why you are late. Your emergency is not their problem; your anger will not keep them grounded.)

My parents taught me how to create a tribe. Some of my blood-related family is in my tribe, to be sure, but most of its members I’ve picked up along the

way,

My tribe is hilarious and loyal and helpful and made up of fragile souls and supersonic minds and great, big, fat beating hearts, and I wouldn’t be who I am without them.

felt like standing on the precipice of a new universe full of love and adventure, a club where others had gone before yet couldn’t quite fully convey the experience to those on the other side.

I would be uniquely positioned to give and receive quantum amounts of love, and it would be unlike anything I’d ever known. I would be more whole and join a legion of humanity that had gone before me.

I knew that little baby spirit was out there. It didn’t matter if she came to me through my body, was left on my doorstep, or was handed to me by a stranger. If it took adoption for us to find each other, so be it.

For birth parents, the sadness is most obviously the loss of the child and, maybe for some, a shattering reality check about their capabilities and choices. For the adoptee, it’s relinquishing the mother you knew from the inside out as you formed into a person and then, later, whatever ideas you may have had about your original family. There are many, many shades of loss in between those major hues.

An indelible yearning for knowledge eclipses the positive, protective intentions of closed adoptions. Adoptees need to know their story and that they weren’t “given away” because of something they were or did; birth parents need to fully grieve and know their children are OK; adoptive parents need to fill in the blanks about their child’s prehistory and help answer their questions. Secrecy equals shame. Illumination is powerful medicine.